Whistle

by Linwood Barclay

Genres: Horror; Ghost; Thrillers

Synopsis

“Terrific.”— Stephen King on Whistle

New York Times bestselling author Linwood Barclay enters new territory with a supernatural chiller in which a woman and her young son move to a small town looking for a fresh start, only to be haunted by disturbing events and strange visions when they find a mysterious train set in a storage shed.

Annie Blunt has had an unimaginably terrible year. First, her husband was killed in a tragic hit-and-run accident, then one of the children’s books she’s built her writing and illustrating career on ignited a major scandal. Desperate for a fresh start, she moves with her son Charlie to a charming small town in upstate New York where they can begin to heal.

But Annie’s year is about to get worse.

Bored and lonely in their isolated new surroundings, Charlie is thrilled when he finds a forgotten train set in a locked shed on their property. Annie is glad to see Charlie happy, but there’s something unsettling about his new toy. Strange sounds wake Annie in the night—she could swear she hears a train, but there isn’t an active track for miles—and bizarre things begin happening in the neighborhood. Worse, Annie can’t seem to stop drawing a disturbing new character that has no place in a children’s book.

Grief can do strange things to the mind, but Annie is beginning to think she’s walked out of one nightmare straight into another, only this one is far more terrifying…

Release date: June 10, 2025

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 352

Sample

Prologue

Christmas 2001

It was starting to look like Santa hadn’t come through for Jeremy. All the presents that had been placed under the tree had been unwrapped and there was no PlayStation.

Goddamn, he thought.

Jeremy was only seven and shouldn’t have been using words like that, even when it was only in his head and not out loud, but his older sister, Glynis, who was nine, had brought him up to speed on forbidden vocabulary. Not that he didn’t already know most of the words. He’d heard kids using them on the school grounds. He could have thought something much worse than goddamn.

He also knew it wasn’t Santa Claus who’d failed him; it was Mom and Dad. Glynis had set him straight on this score, too. “There is no Santa,” she’d told him while he was sitting in the basement watching an episode of Bob the Builder. “There’s no guy at the North Pole who’s going around on a magic sleigh to every house in the world, in one night, delivering presents. What kind of baby believes in stuff like that? And while we’re on the subject, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny are bullshit, too.”

Glynis not only knew all the swear words, she knew how to use them effectively. And she knew other stuff, mostly from watching Sex and the City at her friend Sally’s house because they had it on VHS. Sally’s aunt lived in Boston and had HBO and taped the episodes for Sally’s mom. If Jeremy’s parents knew Glynis was up to speed on the sexual antics of Carrie Bradshaw and her friends, they’d have a double stroke.

Jeremy knew his sister was less interested in his knowing the truth than she was delighted to shatter his most treasured illusions. If there was something she relished more than tormenting her little brother, he couldn’t think what it was.

This particular Christmas morning, in a year when it was hard to imagine that anything good could happen, Glynis had done quite well. New clothes, new shoes, and one of those Bratz dolls, kind of like if Barbie went full Goth. And, sure, Jeremy got a Lego set based on Harry Potter stuff, and he supposed that was okay, but it sure was no PlayStation.

But then Jeremy’s father said, “Wait right there. There’s one more thing. Didn’t have a chance to wrap it.”

Oh yes! This had to be it. Dad was saving the PlayStation for last. Well played, Father. Just when Jeremy thought it was game over, no pun intended, Dad was coming through.

Jeremy’s father slipped out of the living room, went out the front door without bothering to close it, allowing a wintry wind to blow into the house. There was the sound of a car trunk slamming shut, and seconds later, Dad was back, nudging the door shut with his body because his arms were full.

He was carrying a cardboard box large enough that his chin was resting on the top. Printed boldly on the side of the box was the word tide.

Was this some sort of joke?

Had Dad bought him a year’s supply of detergent? This was no PlayStation box, that was for sure. But Jeremy continued to hold out hope that there might be such a box within the Tide box. Dad was trying to fake him out here.

His father leaned over, set the box on the floor, and let out a long, exhausted breath. “Lotta stuff in there.” He got down to unfold the cardboard flaps, but then motioned for Jeremy to scoot over and do it himself.

“Go for it,” Dad said. 

as inside said, “I knew you’d get it! I knew you’d get me the Play—”

He stopped.

There was no video game system in this box. What would Glynis say right about now if she were him? What the fuck? The box was filled with . . .

Trains. Stupid, dumb toy trains.

Jeremy looked into his father’s face, unable to disguise his disappointment.

“No, no, you’re gonna love this,” his father said quickly because the kid looked like he was on the verge of tears. “This is way better than some stupid video game system. Tons more fun, believe me. I had trains when I was a kid, Lionel and American Flyer, and they’re still making this stuff, and—”

“Trains are lame,” Jeremy said.

The words were a dagger to his father’s heart. “Give it a chance. Look what we’ve got here.”

He pulled out a boxcar and then a caboose and then a heavy black metal steam locomotive. None of the pieces was in its original packaging, but carefully wrapped in newspaper. One shred of masthead—showing the Burlington Free Pr—offered a hint of where these trains had come from.

“It’s all used stuff,” Glynis said derisively.

“Where did you get all this?” Jeremy’s mother asked her husband.

As Jeremy continued to bring out more cars and accessories—a tanker car, a flatcar with a helicopter perched on it, a train station, a water tower—his father said, “You know that new guy at work? Wendell? Wendell Comstock? Met him the other day at the Tops?”

She tried to remember, and when she did, her face fell. “Is that the poor man who just moved here? Where was he from?”

“Just across the border into Vermont.” He paused, lowered his voice. “Lucknow.”

“Oh God, Lucknow. He sure got out of that town just in time.”

“Yeah, moved away before it happened.”

“His wife was one of the vic—”

“No,” he said, lowering his voice to a whisper so the kids wouldn’t hear. “She got electrocuted a week or two before. But he grew up around here. Got a sister in Fenelon. Decided to sell the house, move back. Hell of a thing, what happened back there.”

He gave his head a sorrowful shake. “Anyway, he brought this box in, and I thought he was selling it, but he was giving it away to the first person what wanted it, he had no need for it, said the movers packed it without him realizing. And I said, hey, I know just the boy who’d love this.” At this point, he gave Jeremy a big smile. “Give it a chance, won’t you, sport?”

He reached into the box, pulled out several sections of track, then a heavy black boxy item about half the size of a loaf of bread.

“This here’s the transformer, brand-new,” he said. “Wendell didn’t have the original one that came with the set, so I picked this one up at a hobby shop in Binghamton.” He grinned. “Train won’t run without it.”

He set down the transformer and brought out from the box a shiny red boxcar with the santa fe logo printed on the side. He held out the car, about a foot long, to his son. “Just ’cause it says santa on the side doesn’t mean it has anything to do with Santa Claus. Santa Fe is a very important railway in the history of America. And check this out. The doors open and close and the couplers work and it looks like the real thing.”

With limited enthusiasm, Jeremy allowed his father to place it in his outstretched hands for a closer examination.

And something happened.

Jeremy felt a . . . what, exactly? A shock? No, couldn’t be a shock. The transformer wasn’t even plugged in. But there was something . . . like a tingle. He could feel it running all the way up his arms, if only for a millisecond.

He brought the toy boxcar close to his face, studying it. Ran his fingers along the sides, feeling the raised bumps meant to replicate rivets. Opened and closed the side doors, spun the thick metal wheels with his finger.

“Pretty neat, huh?” said his father.

Jeremy, feeling his earlier indifference shifting into something approaching enthusiasm, said, “Can we make it go?”

“Let’s make a circle of track around the bottom of the tree.”

Each track piece had a third rail that ran down the middle. “That carries the electric power and the outer rails are the ground,” his father

said. “Keeps it from short-circuiting. But don’t worry, it can’t shock you.”

Once the track sections had been made into a continuous loop, Jeremy pulled out more items from the Tide box and started to carefully place them onto the track, making sure the wheels’ flanges were set within the rail edges. All that remained to make the train operational was the engine.

Jeremy picked up the weighty locomotive and the attached tender with pennsylvania emblazoned on the side.

“The tender’s where they kept all the coal that they had to keep feeding into the engine to keep it going,” his father said. “You don’t see anything like that these days.”

Inside the locomotive cab, sitting at the controls, was a tiny engineer, dressed in overalls and a striped cap, his head no larger than a pea. Jeremy leaned in for a closer look.

“Pretty realistic, huh?” his father said.

“He winked at me,” Jeremy said, and his father laughed. He turned the engine around, grasping it with both hands, and looked straight into the headlight mounted on the front.

“The light’ll come on when we get it on the track and turn the throttle,” his father said, which struck Jeremy as an odd thing to say, given that he could already see a faint glimmer in the bulb.

Glynis, stroking the hair on her Bratz doll, bored and annoyed that this dumbass train set was getting so much attention, asked, “Are we gonna have breakfast or what?”

As Jeremy set the locomotive onto the track, there was that tingle again. It was hard to describe, but it felt a little like that old gag gift his friend Ricky had tried on him. A joy buzzer he’d found in his own father’s box of mementos. You slipped it into your palm and when you shook hands with someone they got a zap. But this was like a tenth of that. Subtle, pleasing almost.

Jeremy’s father ran two wires from the underside of the track to the two terminals on the transformer, screwed down the threaded connectors to ensure good electrical conduction, then plugged it into the wall. There was a handle on the top of it, which he explained was the throttle.

“Crank ’er up!”

g sound, the headlight illuminated, and as he moved the handle farther to the right, the wheels began to turn. Feathery wisps of smoke puffed out of the steam engine’s smokestack. And what a glorious sound it made.

Chuff. Chuff. Chuff.

Jeremy gave the throttle another turn. The wheels spun more furiously.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

Jeremy’s father pressed a red button on the transformer to activate a whistle on the engine. “There’s so much more stuff you can get. Buildings and trees and little people. One boxcar has a trapdoor on the top and a giraffe sticks its head out and then drops it back just in time, and . . .”

Jeremy wasn’t listening.

He lay down on his side, ear to the floor, the train’s vibrations reverberating through the tracks and into the hardwood, buzzing their way into his skull. Every few seconds the train raced past, the engine chuffing furiously, the various cars in tow, the red caboose trailing, the glorious chorus of metal spinning on metal, the smell of ozone in the air.

Jeremy was mesmerized. He could lie here like this for hours, imagining himself in the cab of that locomotive, shoveling coal from the tender into the firebox, elbow on the window ledge, head poked out to view the track ahead, a red kerchief tied around his neck blowing in the wind, the world flying past.

It felt . . . magical. As though he and the engine had somehow become one and the same, fused together. He remembered that book his mother read to him when he was two or three, about that little engine that could. Jeremy was that engine now, and he could do anything.

“Have fun,” his father said, and went to the kitchen with Jeremy’s mom.

Jeremy tentatively touched his finger to the track, pulling it away a millisecond before the train swept past on its latest loop. He felt a small charge, that tingle again. He knew that wasn’t supposed to happen, but he definitely felt something. Maybe this train was different. Special, even—

“Oops,” said Glynis, kicking over the red boxcar and sending the entire train off the tracks.

Jeremy was so transfixed that the derailment hit him as though he’d been awakened from a dream. He looked first at the fallen train, then slowly turned his head to look up at his sister.

She said, “You got a used secondhand gift. Somebody’s old junk. My Bratz doll is new. I’m gonna eat your Cinnabon.” She set her doll on the living room couch and disappeared into the kitchen.

Jeremy pondered his sister’s history of villainy as he looked at the devastation she had wrought, this scale train wreck. Telling him the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny. The time she put rabbit turds in his ice cream. Stuffed a dead toad into the toe of his runners. Told everyone at school he’d wet the bed. That time she stole three dollars from their mother’s purse and, when it looked as though she might be found out, slipped the bills under Jeremy’s pillow. Their mother found them when she was changing the sheets. Jeremy’s protestations of innocence were to no avail.

Glynis was a very, very bad sister.

She was his tormentor. He was her victim. It had always been this way. He’d considered retaliation before, but anything he attempted would bring serious blowback from his parents. He couldn’t just hit her or pull her hair or put a snake in her underwear drawer. He wished he were more creative, that he could find a way to teach her a lesson without anyone tracing it back to him.

Then he rolled over and eyed the Bratz doll Glynis had left sitting on the couch, staring into the room with its dead eyes. And there, on the floor, were discarded strands of green ribbon that had secured some of the now-unwrapped presents.

An idea was forming.

One day, his father had shared some old tapes of cartoons he’d loved as a kid. One was about a dumb Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman named Dudley Do-Right who was forever saving a girlfriend when she got tied to the railroad tracks by the nasty Snidely Whiplash.

Jeremy took the Bratz doll from the couch. Placed it across the track and secured it with the green ribbon. Then he put the locomotive and cars back onto the track.

See how Glynis liked it when her new toy got run

over by his used train.

He cranked the throttle so hard the engine’s wheels spun as they sought purchase on the track. Only half a loop to go to make contact. There was no Dudley Do-Right coming to rescue Glynis’s Christmas present.

For a second there, as Jeremy looked into the face of the doll, he thought he saw the face of his sister.

That was not possible, of course. He blinked, and the doll went back to being a doll.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

Jeremy hit the whistle button.

Woo-woo!

Rounding the turn. Almost there. The moment of impact a millisecond away.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

And then, whomp.

What wonderful chaos. The doll was catapulted across the room, the flimsy ribbon cut by the loco’s wheels before the engine bounced off the track and landed on its side, taking the attached cars with it. It was, Jeremy thought, an epic derailment as good as any he had ever seen in a movie.

And then, from the kitchen, the sound of something shattering.

Followed by a bone-chilling scream.

Jeremy sprang to his feet and went to the kitchen doorway to investigate.

His mother, father, and sister were crowded around the sink, Glynis in the middle, holding her hand over some dishes that had been left there to soak.

On the floor by their feet, the shattered remains of a glass.

Blood was dripping furiously from Glynis’s hand.

“My God!” Jeremy’s mother shrieked. “Call an ambulance!”

Jeremy’s father said there was no time for that, he would wrap the detached finger in a cloth with ice cubes around it and drive Glynis to the hospital and maybe they could reattach it and how in the hell did this happen anyway and then Jeremy’s parents were yelling at each other while Glynis continued to wail.

Jeremy went back into the living room.

He found the Bratz doll. The right hand was missing, as if neatly cut off with a pair of shears. After a brief search, he found the hand between

between two of the metal ties that supported the train. He tucked the tiny hand deep into the pocket of his jeans.

Once the locomotive and cars were back on the track, Jeremy set the throttle to a nice, steady speed, got on the floor again, propped up on his elbows, head resting in his hands, and watched the train go around and around and around and around.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff 

 

Part I

ANNIE

 

One

“I think I need to get out of the city for a while,” Annie Blunt said, taking a long sip of her cocktail.

“Like, what, a vacation?” asked Finnegan Sproule, glancing about for a waiter. He could see that Annie was nearly ready for another drink.

Annie shook her head, her long, frizzy, weeping-willow hair swaying across her shoulders. “A change of scene. A month, two months, maybe. Part of the summer, for sure. I’d pack us up and go today, but I don’t want to pull Charlie out of school before the end of the year. Someplace out in the country. A small town, I don’t know.”

“But you’d come back, in September.”

She shrugged. “We find someplace we like, we could stay there.”

“You’ve always lived in New York.” Finnegan smiled. “You’ll go nuts in a small town. Where will you get bagels?”

“We’ll eat Wonder Bread. It’s wonderful with peanut butter. There’s a world beyond Manhattan, you know.”

Finnegan appeared thoughtful. “Actually, I’m not sure there is. Sure, it can get so hot in the summer your shoes stick to the pavement. But come fall, when the leaves in Central Park start to change?”

“A reporter was waiting for me when I came out of my building this morning.”

He frowned. “Shit.”

“Said she was from Vanity Fair. She’d emailed me a few times and I hadn’t answered, so she decided on the personal ambush. Wanted to know if there’d ever be another book.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her fuck off, that’s what I told her.”

“There’ve been some stories in the trades, speculating,” Finnegan said.

“Let them speculate. It’s nobody’s business.”

“Well,” he said hesitantly, “that’s not exactly true.”

Annie gave him a look. “I know. I owe you one more book.”

Finnegan raised his palms. “All I’m saying is, a lot rides on your decision. You’ve sold nearly fifteen million books and have an ever-growing fan base. One generation gets followed by another and then another. Those Sandra Boynton board books never go out of print. Look at Love You Forever by Robert Munsch. Came out in the eighties, continues to sell a shitload every year, and still will long after we’re dead and gone.”

He inwardly winced at his choice of words. Not the kind of phrase you wanted to use with someone who’d had the kind of year Annie Blunt had had. If she’d taken offense at his language, she did not show it.

Finnegan pushed on. “You’re in that league. Your books are timeless. There’s no reason people will stop buying them.”

“They’ll have to be content with the backlist,” she said. “There just won’t be any new ones.”

The next Pierce the Penguin book was in the spring catalogue. The division’s entire budget had been built around it. But Annie had not delivered, hadn’t so much as sketched out a single page. To be out by May, the book would already have to be in-house.

Finnegan leaned back in his chair and took in the room around him. “This was where we had our first meeting, when I acquired Pierce Goes to Paris. Nine years ago.”

The Gramercy Tavern was barely a thirty-minute walk from Annie’s place on Bank Street in the West Village. More convenient for her than for Finnegan, whose Langley House Books office was way up Broadway near 60th.

Langley, a division of one of the biggest publishing conglomerates in the world, had the better part of the twenty-third floor.

Annie wasn’t about to admit her editor might be right about going mad in some small town. She’d never lived anywhere but New York, unless you counted that month she’d spent in Paris when she was twenty, doing the whole becoming-an-artist thing. She’d grown up in Brooklyn, had first lived on her own in a dingy apartment not far from the Guggenheim, then a slightly less rat-infested place in SoHo while she attended the School of Visual Arts on 23rd Street in Manhattan where, in an animation class, she met John.

John.

Fellow nerd, best friend, around-the-clock support system, love of her life.

When unimaginable success hit, she and John and, before long, Charlie, moved into their Bank Street brownstone. John Lennon and Yoko had lived on that street once. Sid Vicious even died there. Talk about a neighborhood with character.

Yeah, New York was in her blood, its taxi fumes in her lungs, even if more of them were going electric. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t capable of change.

Picking up on Finnegan’s observation that they were back where it all began, she said, “And I probably don’t look much different than I did that day.” She half raised her arms, showing off her shapeless knit sweater. She glanced down. “These might be the same jeans.”

“It’s one of your charms. You’ve never let success go to your head. You almost bailed on the Newbery Awards because you didn’t want to get glammed up. I almost wish you had skipped it. I could have accepted the award on your behalf.”

“John talked me into it,” she said, smiling sadly at the memory. “When I came out of the bedroom in that Dior gown he asked who I was and what I’d done with his wife.”

Her eyes wandered the room.

“You’re not liking the halibut?” Finnegan asked. He pointed to the mostly untouched piece of fish on her plate. “Send it back. Get something else.”

“It’s fine.”

“Really. You were going to get the chicken. Send it

back and get the chicken.”

“I don’t want the chicken. But I wouldn’t say no to another one of these Garden Gimlets.”

She indicated her cocktail glass. She’d already had two. Finnegan waved a hand in the air, caught the eye of a waiter, pointed to Annie’s empty glass, and nodded. The waiter nodded in return. Message received.

“There are two women at that table over there who’ve been looking this way,” she said. “Christ, don’t turn around.”

“I wasn’t going to.”

“This is what I’m talking about,” Annie said. “People sneaking glances, whispering. Even Charlie’s dealing with it at school. Kids teasing. Asking him if he’s taking flying lessons.”

Finnegan grimaced.

“I’m no A-list celeb,” Annie conceded. “Not even C-list. But I do get recognized occasionally. I want to go where no one knows me.”

“So take a break. Three months, six. A year. Whatever. Whenever you’re ready, we’re here. No pressure.”

“I can pay back the advance for the next one.”

His palms went up again. “There’s no need for talk like that.”

The waiter arrived with her cocktail, took the empty glass away. Rather than pick it up and have a sip, she simply stared at it.

“I see him every night,” she whispered.

Finnegan waited.

“I’m afraid to go to sleep because he always visits me.”

“John,” Finnegan said.

Annie bit her lower lip. “Him, too. But I welcome those visits.”

Stupid me, Finnegan thought. Of course she was talking about Evan.

“Every time, I try to talk him back inside. He’s on the ledge and I’m doing everything I can to persuade him that his goddamn cardboard wings won’t hold him aloft. He won’t listen. He looks so happy.”

Annie’s eyes misted. She looked away again, trying to hold it together. She picked up her drink and took a sip, felt its warmth work its way

through her body.

“I know you’ve heard this a hundred times, but it wasn’t your fault,” he said. “No more than if some kid thought he was Superman. Did you know there were actually incidents related to Peter Pan? When it was first published, kids got hurt trying to fly, jumping off their beds and worse. Originally, J. M. Barrie had Peter and the Lost Boys flying without any kind of help, but when he heard about kids injuring themselves, he amended the story, that you could only fly if you had pixie dust blown on you. Trying to make the point that the flying was magical, that regular kids couldn’t do it.”

She still couldn’t look at him as he continued.

“Look, we’ve reached this point where you can’t do anything without legal stepping in and saying, well, that warrants some sort of caution. You want to reprint Goldilocks and the Three Bears? Maybe we need a disclaimer, that in the real world bears should not be approached because they can be very dangerous. If creative people hold back because there’s one chance in a million someone will interpret their work in a totally irrational way, what will we end up with?”

Annie slowly fixed her eyes on her editor. “He wasn’t some nut with a gun who went on a rampage because of social media. He was six, Finnegan. He was six years old.”

“And where were his parents? Why hadn’t they explained that not everything in a book is real? That just because a penguin in a book can learn to fly, it doesn’t mean a kid can jump out an apartment building? Why’d they leave that balcony door unlocked? Who was supervising? Annie, you can’t beat yourself up forever.”

“You sound like John,” Annie said faintly. “He said all the same things. I feel like . . . I can’t shake the idea that what happened to John was some kind of karma. The universe trying to even the score.”

“Annie.”

“I killed that boy, and then someone killed John.” She forced a sardonic smile. “Maybe I should let it go. My punishment has been meted out. The gods have spoken.”

Finnegan couldn’t think of anything to say to that. He scanned the room again for the waiter, wondering whether he should just ask for the check, if they should get out of here.

“Oh shit,” Annie said.

“What?”

“One of them’s coming over here.”

aylor catalogue, approached, looking apologetic.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, smiling awkwardly. “I don’t do usually do this. I really don’t. I was here one day and Al Pacino was sitting at that table and I was dying to say hello but I didn’t, but you’re Annie Blunt and I just had to tell you how much our family has enjoyed your books.”

Annie forced a smile onto her lips. “That’s kind of you to say.”

“We got your books when our daughter was little and read them to her every night and even though she’s older now we always get the new one and she has them all on the shelf in her room. I so wish I had one of them with me that you could sign for her. Her name is Emily.”

Annie continued to smile but said nothing, thinking that maybe if she didn’t speak, the woman would go away.

“We think Pierce would make a great animated series. Do you think they’ll ever do something like that?”

Finnegan stepped in. “There have been offers, of course, but, and I think I can speak for Ms. Blunt here, we think Pierce works best on the page and in the reader’s imagination. But rest assured, you’re not the only one who’s mentioned it.”

“Well, anyway, that’s all I wanted to say,” the woman said. “Enjoy your lunch!”

Annie heaved a quiet sigh of relief as their visitor returned to her table.

“Thank you,” she said quietly to her editor. “I’m just not up—”

The woman had stopped, as if forgetting something. She turned and came back to the table, looking directly at Annie.

“I just wanted to add—I didn’t know whether to bring it up a moment ago—but I just have to say that, of all your books, our favorite has to be Pierce Takes Flight. It’s simply wonderful, and I’m here to tell you, our Emily was certainly smart enough not to go jumping off a balcony.” She smiled broadly. “You have a wonderful day.”

Two

When John Traynor landed his first real live job at an animation studio in New York after graduating from art school, he decided to mark the occasion by getting himself a Mickey Mouse watch. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

“No, no,” said Annie. “Not Mickey. Too cliché. I’ll bet half the people who work there have a Mickey Mouse watch. Go for something a little different.”

They wandered in and out of shops in SoHo and Greenwich Village, including a stop at an animation gallery—not because it sold watches, but because it carried framed, original animation cels from early Warner Bros. cartoons and more recent shows, like The Simpsons, all out of their price range. As a couple in their mid-twenties, they squandered any money they had left over after paying the rent on pot and lattes.

But now that John had the prospect of a regular income, a minor splurge did not seem inappropriate. They were at that age when they felt they had everything they could ever want because they had each other. Who cared about fancy cars and penthouse apartments and dinner at the Rainbow Room?

They’d finished school and were trying this whole being-an-adult thing, even if their take on being grown-ups involved creating entertainment for children. At least, that was John’s goal. Annie was less sure where she was headed.

Her dream had always been to write and illustrate books for young readers, but what chance did she have against the millions of others pursuing the same dream? So she’d put her résumé into several web and graphic design places. Being creative with a screen, a mouse, and a keypad was not her first choice, but you had to make a living, right? It beat waiting tables or being one of those poor bastards hawking umbrellas on a street corner when it started raining.

“This one,” Annie said, pointing into a display case.

They’d found their way to a comic book store that sold much more than adventures of Aquaman and Wolverine. It carried action figures, models of ships from Star Wars and Star Trek, and every version of the Batmobile Bruce Wayne had raced through Gotham City in pursuit of the Joker.

And it had watches.

“Let’s have a look,” John said.

The kid behind the counter unlocked the cabinet and placed the watch in John’s hand. On its face was not Mickey Mouse, but that oddball character whose goal of blowing up the earth was thwarted at every turn by Bugs Bunny.

Marvin the Martian.

He had his arms folded across his chest and an annoyed expression on his face, like, Every time I want to kill all of humanity I can’t, and I am soooo angry.

John hooked it around his wrist and admired it. “What do you think?”

“What do you think?” Annie replied.

“I think it’s perfect. Quirky.”

He didn’t bother to take it off so that it could be placed in its factory packaging. Paid for it and wore it home, where they dined on macaroni and cheese made from a box, killed off a bottle of the cheapest sparkling bubbly the local wine shop carried, then screwed their brains out before watching Letterman.

God, it was a great life.

One day, the two of them sitting at the breakfast table, John said, “You wanna get married this week?”

Annie took a sip of coffee. “I got nothin’ planned. 

How’s Friday?”

They called family and friends, keeping the number to under twenty, since that was the number of guests you could invite to a city hall ceremony, then invited everyone back to their place for wings and beer.

They weren’t the kind of couple to get all corny about it, but they truly believed they’d been destined to find one another. They’d met in the art school’s animation class, Annie doodling oddball creations more than she took notes, John leaning in, whispering how much he liked them. Not the most gorgeous guy Annie had ever dated. Already, in his twenties, starting to lose his hair. Had a little roll of fat over his belt, looked at the world through thick glasses, but, hey, this was art school, with a heavy nerd enrollment and light on jocks, and if she were honest with herself, she was no pinup model. Big frizzy hair, heavy through the hips, bought most of her clothes at “vintage” shops, which was a nice way of saying someone else had had the pleasure of wearing them before she did, and she didn’t spend a lot of time, or money, at the makeup counter.

Fuck all that. She wasn’t put on this planet to have others gawk at her. She wanted to create. She wanted to make art. Even as she sat at her workstation picking out fonts and background colors and creating links, there was always a fine-point Sharpie and a sketch pad on the desk next to the mouse pad.

She filled one entire notebook with sketches of an adorable polar bear she christened Barry. Barry traveled the world to warn people about the melting polar ice caps. She moved on from sketches to put together a prototype book. Twenty pages, words and illustrations on every one of them. Annie also, as was her custom, created a six-inch-tall, three-dimensional model of Barry so that she could picture what he looked like from any angle. She started with a wire armature, bulked up the body with crumpled tinfoil, then used plasticine to make his body, limbs, and head.

Annie sent the book off to multiple publishers. ...