The Chain(40)

That’s when Kylie is going to hit him or her with the wrench.

A blow as hard as she can on the top of the head. A two-handed blow that will render him or her unconscious.

That person will then be on the ground and down for the count. If she gets lucky, he or she will have the handcuff key. Kylie will uncuff herself, run up the steps, and head for the nearest road. If, however, there is no handcuff key, the gun will come into play. The gun is the crucial part of it. Without fail, every time they have come down here, they have been armed.

If there’s no key, Kylie will take the gun and wait until the man or woman wakes up and then she’ll point the gun at that person’s head and call for the other one and tell them both to give her the handcuff key or she’ll shoot.

If they don’t believe she’ll shoot, she’ll plug whoever she’s got in the kneecap. She’s gone shooting in the woods with her uncle Pete a couple of times. She knows how to fire a revolver. Safety off, check the chamber, pull the trigger. The partner will get the key and give it to her, but if either of them balks, she’ll make a deal with them: after she gets home to her mom, she’ll claim she can’t remember where she was held. She won’t remember for a full day. That will give them twenty-four hours to get out of the country.

Kylie is pleased with the plan. It’s logical and rational and she can’t see any reason why it won’t work. The hardest part will be the first step, and that will be over in a second. You can do it, Kyles, you really can do it, she tells herself. But she’s shaking with fear in the sleeping bag.

Shaking isn’t the right word. Convulsing might be closer to what’s going on. But courage runs in the family. She thinks about her mom going through all those chemo treatments. She thinks about her grandmother fighting NYU for all those years to stay in faculty housing after Grandpa ran off with one of his students. And she thinks about her great-grandmother Irina, the determined little girl who browbeat and bullied her family onto a donkey cart and drove them east with the retreating Red Army to a train that transported them to a strange domed city called Tashkent. Four years they’d spent there as penniless outcasts, and when they got back to the shtetl in Belarus in the fall of 1945, they discovered, of course, that every single person who had stayed there had been murdered by the Germans. But for her great-grandmother’s courage, Kylie wouldn’t be here today.

That’s what she needs now, the courage and determination of little Irina and her mom and her grandma. All the women, all the way back. She examines the wrench again. Heavy. Seven inches long. Someone probably left it there after fixing the boiler. More likely a workman than one of the house’s owners. They don’t seem like the boiler-fixing types. It isn’t the sort of wrench that will help break a chain, but it’s maybe big enough to break someone’s head.

She’ll soon find out.





30

Saturday, 6:11 a.m.



Rachel checks for Amber Alerts and police reports and breaking news about a missing child, and she keeps one eye always on the mirror of the Dunleavys’ home PC.

Wee hours. Robert Lowell’s Skunk Hour. So late. So tired.

Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep…

She closes her eyes for the briefest of moments.

Void.

Sunlight.

Birdsong.

Shit.

What day is it?

The hours are like years and the days are decades. How many millennia into this goddamn nightmare is she?

Another morning. That feeling in her stomach, those butterflies of terror, of gut-churning horror. You’ve never experienced fear until something or someone puts your child in danger. Dying is not the worst thing that can happen to you. The worst thing that can happen to you is for something to happen to your kid. Having a child instantly turns you into a grown-up. Absurdity is the ontological mismatch between the desire for meaning and the inability to find meaning in this world. Absurdity is a luxury parents of missing children can’t afford.

She sits at the living-room table. Eli the cat meows next to her. He hasn’t been fed in almost two days.

She fills his bowl, drinks a mug of cold coffee, and steps out onto the deck. Then she puts on a coat and walks along the basin trail to the Appenzellers’ house.

The sun comes up over the Atlantic and the big houses on the eastern side of the island. Her iPhone rings. Unknown Caller. Her stomach lurches. What now? “Hello?”

“I need you! Get over here!” Pete yells.

“I’m two minutes away.”

“Run! I need help.”

She sprints along the basin trail and onto Northern Boulevard. Heart pounding, she runs down the path onto the beach and up the back steps of the Appenzellers’.

Worryingly, the door is open.

She goes inside.

On the kitchen table there’s Pete’s .45 and a bag of what looks like drugs. What the hell? Is Pete a user? Her mind races.

Can he be trusted? Jesus, is he part of all this?

Rachel thinks she knows Pete, but can you ever really know anybody? He’s crazy about Kylie but there were those arrests a while back, and what has he been doing all these years since getting out of the Corps?

She shakes her head. No, it’s Pete, for heaven’s sake. This is the paranoia talking. The Chain has nothing to do with Tammy and it has nothing to do with Pete.