Linwood Barclay - Trust Your Eyes

“You go,” he said. “I’ll be down in a little while. You pick a movie and we’ll watch it.”

I went downstairs and turned on the television, then hit the right buttons on the collection of remotes so I could connect to a movie service.

I came across a film, only a couple of years old, made in New Zealand, called The Map Reader.

“Son of a bitch,” I said. “Hey, Thomas! There’s a movie here you’ll love. About a kid who loves maps!”

“Sure thing,” he said. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

He didn’t come down. After waiting fifteen minutes, I turned off the TV without watching anything, went into the kitchen, and drank Dad’s very last beer.

Nine months earlier, Allison Fitch lifts her head an inch off the pillow on her pullout couch and looks at the digital clock readout on the DVD player on the other side of the small living room. Nearly noon. She tries to remember to close the blinds when she gets home from a late shift so the sun won’t wake her in the morning, but unless you tape black paper to the entire window, or got some of those heavy curtains that block out everything, you really can’t keep the rays out.

God, it’s a sunny day out there today. She pulls the covers up over her head.

She’s pretty sure she’s alone right now in the apartment she shares with Courtney Walmers, who has the bedroom. Unless you found some place that was rent-controlled, there was no way you could live in this city by yourself, certainly not on what a waitress made. Courtney has an office job, down on Wall Street, so she’s out of the apartment by eight. Allison usually starts her shift around five. Sometimes, if Courtney’s able to sneak home from work early, they’ll actually see each other for five minutes.

Allison hopes this isn’t one of those days. Seeing Courtney is not something she looks forward to. She knows Courtney wants to have a talk with her-a real, serious talk-and it is a conversation Allison does not want to have. Because she knows exactly what it’s about.

Money.

It’s always about money. At least, that’s all Courtney has wanted to talk about for the last couple of months. Ever since Allison hasn’t been meeting her share of the rent, and other expenses, like the cable and Internet. Courtney is threatening to cancel the service altogether, although Allison is sure she’d never follow through. Courtney lives on Facebook when she’s home. When she’s at work, too, from what Allison gathers. Why that trading company hasn’t fired her ass, Allison has no idea. At least when she goes to the bar, she works. She works her ass right off, that’s what she does, waiting tables, dealing with asshole customers, taking abuse from the kitchen who can’t get a single fucking order straight to save their lives.

Oh, she earns her money, Allison does. She just doesn’t have enough of it. She’s paid only half her share of the rent the last three months. Hasn’t replaced anything in the fridge. Tells Courtney she’ll pay her back when she can.

Courtney is all, Yeah, well, I’ll believe it when I see it.

The bitch.

She makes way more money than Allison, and for what? Sitting on her butt in a nice cushy chair in front of a computer all day, doing trades, making money for other people. Allison doesn’t even understand half of what it is her roommate does.

Things really escalated after Allison’s call home a couple of months ago. Allison, talking to her mom back in Dayton, telling her the Big Apple wasn’t quite everything she’d hoped it would be.

“Oh, sweetheart, you should come home,” her mother said.

“Mom, I’m not coming back.”

“Well, they need people at Target. There was a thing in the paper that they’re hiring.”

“I’m not coming back to Dayton to work in Target,” Allison said.

“Have you met anyone?”

“Mom.”

“I figured, you working in a restaurant, there’d be lots of opportunities to meet some young man.”

“Please, Mom.” Why does she always come around to this? Why the hell does her mom think she left Dayton in the first place? To get away from questions like this, that’s why.

“You can’t blame me for hoping my little girl will find a guy who’ll make her happy. Your father and I were very happy, you know. We had a good life together. You’re thirty-one, you know. You’re not getting any younger.”

She needed to throw her mother a bone. “I have met someone,” Allison said. It helped that it was actually true. It’s always easier to spin out a story when there’s a grain of truth in it, especially when it’s a story for her mother. She has met someone, and they’ve spent some time together. Some pretty hot times. The whole thing started with a single glance.

Sometimes two people looked at each other and they just knew.

Allison sensed her mother brightening on the other end of the line. “Who?” she asked excitedly. “Tell me all about him.”

“It’s too early,” Allison said. “I’m just going to see how it plays out. If this is the one, I’ll let you know. Okay? No third degree. Right now, I’ve got more serious things to worry about.” Setting the hook.

“Like what?”

“Well, the customers, they’re just not tipping the way they used to. And business is down. People are eating and drinking at home. And there was the whole thing with the chipped tooth.”

“Chipped tooth? What are you talking about?”

“Didn’t I tell you about that?” Of course she hadn’t. She’d only just thought of it now. There was no chipped tooth.

“You never said a word. When did you chip your tooth? How’d that happen?”

“Okay, so, there’s this girl I work with, her name is Elaine? And she’s a total idiot. She’s coming through the crowd with a full tray of drinks, right? And she’s weaving in between these banker shitheads who-”

“Ally.”

“Sorry. These banker numbnuts, and she raises her tray up just as I’m coming from the other direction, and the edge of it smacks right into my mouth and the drinks go all over the place and when I go into the ladies’ room to look in the mirror I’ve got this little chip in my front tooth.”

“Oh my God,” Allison’s mother said. “That’s just awful.”

“It wasn’t huge, but every time I ran my tongue over it, it was like this sharp point, you know? So, anyway, I went to this dentist up on Madison and he fixed it and I swear, if you looked at it with a magnifying glass you’d never be able to tell.”

Of that, Allison was certain.

“That must have cost you a fortune,” her mother said.

“Yeah, well, it’s not like the waitstaff have a dental plan,” she said, and laughed. “But don’t worry about it. I’ll manage somehow. Courtney’ll understand, you know, if she has to wait a while for my share.”

“Oh, honey, you can’t do that to your roommate. That’s just not fair. I’m getting out my checkbook right now.”

She put a thousand dollars in the mail that day.

When the check arrived Allison immediately deposited it in her checking, bringing the balance to $1,421.87. Not enough to pay Courtney back everything Allison owed her, but at least she could make a start at it. But the longer Allison looked at the balance on her ATM slip, the less certain she was that she wanted to give any of that money to Courtney.

That “someone” she had mentioned to her mother was going to Barbados in two weeks, and had invited Allison to come along. Nothing had been said about paying her way, however, so Allison had said sorry, can’t afford it.

All that had changed with the money to fix her chipped tooth.

So she booked a week in Barbados.

That’s when the shit really hit the fan.