The Chain(15)

She sits at the living-room table.

Now to the task at hand.

She has to kidnap a child? She laughs bitterly. How on earth is anything like that possible? It’s madness. Complete and utter madness.

How can she do a thing like that?

Again she wonders why they picked her. What did they see in her that made them think she would be able to do something as utterly evil as kidnapping a child? She has always been the good girl. Straight-A student at Hunter College High School. She aced her SATs and nailed the Harvard interview. She never speeds; she pays her taxes; she’s never late for anything; she agonizes when she gets a parking ticket. And now she’s supposed to do one of the worst things anyone could ever do to a family?

She looks through the window. A beautiful, clear fall day. The tidal basin filled with birds and a few fishermen digging for bait on the mudflats. This part of Plum Island is a microcosm of this part of Massachusetts. On this side of the tidal basin, you have the smaller houses on the marsh; on the east side, you find the big empty summer houses that face the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean. The west side of the basin is all blue-collar firefighters, teachers, and crab men who live here year-round. The east side begins to fill up with the wealthy summer folk in May or June. Marty and she had thought they’d be safe out here. Safer than Boston. Safe—what a joke. Nobody’s safe. Why were they naive enough to think that you could live anywhere in America and be safe?

Marty. Why doesn’t he call her back? What the hell is he doing in Augusta?

She gets the list of names that she culled from Facebook and begins scrolling through them again.

All those happy, smiling faces.

A grinning little boy or little girl that she is going to point a gun at and drag into her car. And where in the name of God is she going to hold this poor soul? Her house is out of the question. The walls are made of wood, and there’s no soundproofing. If someone starts screaming, half a dozen neighbors will hear. And she doesn’t have a proper basement or an attic. As Colin Temple had said, this house really is little more than a glorified beach shack. Perhaps she could check into a motel? No. That’s nuts. Too many questions.

She looks through the window at the big houses on the far side of the basin and suddenly a much better plan occurs to her.





14

Thursday, 12:41 p.m.



She runs to her bedroom, pulls off her skirt, and slips on a pair of jeans and sneakers. She puts on her red sweater, Kylie’s Red Sox cap, and a zip-up hoodie; she opens the French doors and goes out onto the deck.

She walks to the little sandy path that runs along the side of the basin between the reeds.

Cold wind, rotting kelp. TV and radio noise drifting down from waterfront homes.

She keeps close to the shore until she’s halfway up the basin on the ocean side. Then she slips over onto Northern Boulevard and, trying to look as inconspicuous as possible, begins exploring the big beachfront houses that face the Atlantic.

All the summer people are gone, but which of these homes belong to summer folk and which belong to year-round residents? There are more year-rounders now that PI has its own water and sewage but the old-money types are creatures of habit, arriving on Memorial Day and flying off again on Labor Day like plovers.

Determining that a house is occupied is the work of a moment: lights on, a car in the driveway, voices. Determining that a house is empty but only temporarily is also fairly easy: no lights on, no car in the driveway, but mail piling up in the mailbox, and the gas is still on.

Determining that a house is empty and likely to stay empty for a while is a little trickier, but not as tricky as you might think. Lights off, electricity off, wireless off, no mail in the mailbox, gas lines turned off. But those could still be the homes of weekenders who worked in Boston or New York from Monday to Friday and showed up Saturday morning in their L. L. Bean boots and coats, somewhat surprised to find a stranger standing in the kitchen next to a kid tied to a chair.

What she’s looking for is a house that’s weatherproofed for the winter. Nor’easters this time of year are particularly severe, and although most of the homes facing the ocean are up on dunes above the sea, if there’s a high tide and a bad storm, waves could come lashing over their decks and smash their expensive plate-glass windows. So if a house’s owners weren’t going to be back until Christmas or spring, they’d hammer boards over all the east-facing windows.

This had been done in several of the bigger houses, and there is one up near the point that she particularly likes. It’s made of brick, which is rare around here; almost all the other houses on the island are timber-construction jobs. Even better than the brick walls is the fact that it has an actual basement belowground. This tells her that it was built before 1990, which was when bylaws had been introduced requiring all new houses on Plum Island to be floodproofed—meaning that they had to be on stilts above the ground.

Rachel walks around this promising house, investigating. The sea-facing windows are boarded up and the side ones are too. She hops over the fence and checks the fuse boxes and the lines. The gas and electricity are off and there’s nothing in the mailbox at all; clearly, all the mail is being forwarded or held at the post office. A sign on the mailbox says that the house belongs to the Appenzellers. She knows these people a little bit. An older couple. He’s in his late sixties, originally from Boston, a retired chemistry professor at Emory. The wife, Elaine, is a little younger, late fifties. Second marriage for both of them. If Rachel is remembering correctly, they go to Tampa in the winter.