The Chain(66)

Blank page on the screen. Flashing cursor.

Rachel feeds the cat and decides to straighten up the house. Who can work in a dirty house?

She goes upstairs to Kylie’s room and lifts the duvet from the bed. The sheets are soaking and the mattress is damp. She should have changed the bed this morning. This is now a nightly occurrence. No one sleeps. Everyone has bad dreams. Kylie goes to bed on two beach towels at her father’s house so he won’t find out.

Rachel sits on the edge of Kylie’s mattress and puts her head in her hands. On the floor next to her feet, she sees Kylie’s Moleskine notebook. She picks it up and fights the urge to look inside. This is Kylie’s sacred, private space.

Don’t open it, don’t open it, don’t—

She opens it and begins flipping the pages. There are drawings, journal entries, lists of favorite songs and movies, names for potential dogs, and so on, starting at the beginning of the year. All that stopped the day she was kidnapped. After that, the notebook has increasingly random violent scrawls, pages colored all black, a drawing of the basement where Kylie was held, and information on her kidnappers: Man was possibly a teacher. Woman named Heather. Boy named Jared. A reference to the Ultimate Houdini Magic Kit she had gotten as an early Christmas present and its tips on escaping from handcuffs. More black pages and spirals so heavily drawn that the page is torn. One of the last diary entries, from just two days ago, is an address for a website that discusses painless ways to kill yourself. Pills? Drowning? Kylie scrawled in the margin.

Rachel gasps.

“This is never going to end,” she says to herself.

She goes downstairs to her computer and texts Kylie to ask how she’s doing. Half an hour later, Kylie texts back that she’s fine. They are all watching The Maze Runner.

Rachel closes her laptop and stares out at the dark.

“I’m going to do this,” she whispers to the night.

Even though it had been thoroughly scrubbed clean of worms and spyware, she decides to get Pete’s computer instead. She checks that the antivirus and antimalware programs are all running smoothly. They are. She runs a program that hides her IP address. She logs in to Tor. From Tor, she goes to Google and creates a fake identity—[email protected], because all the other versions of the name Ariadne are already taken.

She finds Google’s blogger platform and logs in with her new fake e-mail address. She creates a blog with a minimalist template. She calls the blog Information on The Chain.

Its web address is simple: TheChainInformation.blogspot.com.

For the blog description, she writes: This is a blog for anyone to leave anonymous tips or information on the entity known as The Chain. The comments section is open below. Please be careful. Anonymous comments only.

Is there a way The Chain can track her down? She doesn’t think so. They’ll only uncover a fake person she has just made up. Even Google doesn’t know who she is. Create blog now? Google asks her.

She clicks Yes.





48



It’s moving day again. The year is 1997. The twins have a little brother now, Anthony. This time they’re moving to a place called Anaheim. Tom has gotten a promotion. He’s in charge of something. Something to do with drugs. It’s going to be a high-stress job, he says, but he doesn’t appear to be worried about it.

Oliver and Margaret have grown up to be normal-looking kids. Margaret has freckles and striking orangey-red hair like her grandfather but also like the man her mother was sleeping with at the commune. Oliver is plump with very pale skin and darker red hair. He still has the same unblinking intensity of eye that has unnerved people since he was a baby.

Their new street in Anaheim is almost a carbon copy of their street in Bethesda.

Little Anthony plays on the sidewalk with a whole bunch of new friends.

Oliver and Margaret watch from the upstairs window. They don’t spend a lot of time with kids their age. Margaret is the more social of the two, but she doesn’t want to abandon her twin brother.

Cheryl finds them in their bedroom.

“Come on, now, go outside like your little brother,” she says.

The twins don’t move.

Cheryl wants the house to herself so she can take a couple of diazepam and have a vodka tonic.

“Don’t want to go outside,” Oliver says.

“Do you want to go to Disneyland or not?” she asks.

“Yes,” Oliver says.

“Then get the hell outside now and play like normal kids!” she says.

Their first day playing on the new street does not go well.

A little girl from across the road, the alpha girl, Jennifer Grant, bullies Margaret and makes her cry. She calls Margaret ugly and laughs at her because she doesn’t know any of the skipping rhymes.

Oliver knows that he can’t hit a girl, but he hits her anyway. Jennifer runs inside, and her older brother comes out of the house. He grabs Oliver by the throat and lifts him off the ground, shaking him and choking him at the same time. Oliver can’t breathe, can’t cry out. The older boy throws him to the asphalt, and Jennifer comes out of the house and crosses her arms and laughs, and so do some of the other kids. Even little Anthony, but you can’t blame him for siding with the majority.

It’s the kind of scene you’d see in an after-school special. It doesn’t feel real. But it is real. And it’s only a moment. Bored, the kids drift off to other diversions.