The Chain(27)

Just after dark, the man had brought her a hot dog and a glass of milk. He set the tray on the floor next to her. The gun was in a pocket in his sweatshirt. The woman had come down to take the tray away with the gun in her right hand. They’re always armed. She’s a thirteen-year-old chained to a two-hundred-pound stove but they aren’t taking any chances. They always come down here with a gun.

And that, Kylie realized, was what was going to help her.

She had spotted it earlier this afternoon. As the sun moved slowly across the sky, she had seen a glint in a corner of the basement. Moving as close as she could, she saw that the glint was a wrench just barely visible against the wall under the boiler. A wrench that had been dropped there and forgotten about, maybe years earlier. They had obviously prepped this basement, but to see the wrench you’d have to be lying on the floor looking directly at the boiler as the sun streamed through the window in the afternoon.

The wrench is the key.

She waits. And waits.

In what are, perhaps, the wee hours, the traffic seems to slow on the road and the planes grow less frequent.

She keeps thinking about that state trooper. Had they killed him? They must have killed him. That means she is being held by two murderers. They don’t seem like murderers, but they are. She tries to fight the terror of that thought but wherever she goes in her mind, it’s lurking there…

She thinks about her mom.

Her mom will be worried sick. She’ll go to pieces. She isn’t as strong as she pretends to be. It hasn’t even been a year since she finished her chemo. And her dad—her dad’s awesome but maybe not the most dependable guy in the world.

She looks at the camera by the stairs again. How late is it now? Will they sleep at all tonight? They have to get some sleep.

Still she waits.

It’s maybe two in the morning now. OK, here goes, she thinks.

She stands, takes the slack out of the chain, and with all her might begins tugging at the stove. It’s enormously heavy, of course, but the floor is smooth concrete without much friction. Earlier, she poured water under the stove’s cast-iron feet and sloshed it around, hoping that might help too.

She pulls at the chain with everything she has, leaning back like a tug-of-war competitor. She’s sweating and her muscles ache and it’s seemingly impossible for a little girl to—

The oven jolts. Her feet give way and she falls to the floor, landing on her tailbone with a thwack.

She bites her lip and has to stop herself from yelling.

She rolls around on the ground. Damn, damn, damn.

The pain starts to subside and she examines herself as best she can. Nothing seems broken. She has never broken a bone before, but she imagines the pain would be a lot worse than this. When Stuart broke his wrist ice-skating on the frozen pond at Newbury Common, he had howled and howled.

But then again, that’s Stuart.

She stands up and shakes the pain out of her limbs. Pain is weakness leaving the body, her crazy uncle Pete had once said. So I’m way stronger now, she tells herself, but she doesn’t really believe it.

She grabs hold of the chain and pulls hard, and again the oven jolts, and this time it keeps moving ever so slowly as she keeps pulling. It is, she remembers from science class, all about friction and momentum. The oven is huge but the wet floor is smooth.

It’s heavy, so very heavy, but it’s moving. The noise is ugly, a high-pitched screeching and scraping that is, hopefully, not quite loud enough to be heard outside the basement, never mind in the house.

She sweats and pulls for two minutes and then stops, utterly exhausted. She sits down on the edge of her mattress and breathes hard.

Self-consciously, she looks back at the camera, but that isn’t going to tell her anything. There’s no light above it showing when it’s on. You have to assume that it’s always on.

She crawls toward the wrench under the boiler. The chain on her left wrist tightens and when she stretches herself like Mister Fantastic, she is about three feet away. She climbs back into the sleeping bag and does some calculating. She can maybe move the oven another foot tonight. It will probably take another full night to get the wrench, but get it she will.

She’s elated. She has a plan, and now she has a way to implement it. It might get her killed. But doing nothing might get her killed too.





23

Friday, 4:20 a.m.



Poseidon Street is a little bit outside Beverly Town Center and close to the water. It’s a typical New England tree-lined suburban road, a neighborhood of small two-story colonials with tiny windows and steep roofs sitting uneasily beside newer houses with larger footprints and bigger windows. Number 14 Poseidon Street, where the Dunleavy family lives, is one of the newer homes, a three-floor faux-Georgian oak-frame job painted a retro mustardy brown. In the front yard, there’s a beautiful red maple tree to which a swing has been attached. In the ambient street light, you can see children’s toys, a football, and a catcher’s mitt lying on the grass.

Rachel and Pete have parked on the far side of the street in the shadow of a big drooping willow tree that still has some of its leaves.

They can’t help looking slightly suspicious. Fortunately, although this isn’t the kind of neighborhood where people sleep in their cars, it is the kind of neighborhood where people pretend not to see someone half asleep in a car at four in the morning.