The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  “All this,” he says, loading the gear into two plastic bags. “It looks like a Fifty Shades of Grey starter kit, but I’m sure there’s a more innocent explanation.”

  The real explanation is much more terrifying. “Nope, that’s exactly what it is,” Rachel says and hurries out of the store.

  12

  Thursday, 11:59 a.m.

  Kylie has no phone, so she has no idea what time it is, but she thinks it might still be morning. She can’t hear anything, but she can see light through the basement window.

  She sits up in the sleeping bag. It’s so cold down there that frost has formed on the sides of the windows. Maybe running in place will help?

  Kylie worms her way out of the sleeping bag and stands in her socks on the freezing concrete floor. She walks as far as the chain will let her, which isn’t very far. A small circle around the bed and back to the big old cast-iron stove. Is that thing as heavy as it looks? She goes to it and, with her back to the camera, gives it a shove. It doesn’t move. Not an inch. She scurries back to the sleeping bag and waits under the covers, straining to hear if the basement door is being opened, but no one comes.

  They’re busy. They aren’t watching her through the camera. Or at least not continually. They’ve probably connected it to a laptop and occasionally check in on her. If she could move the stove, then what? She’d still be chained to the stupid thing and standing there at the bottom of the stairs with no way out.

  Under the sleeping bag, she examines the handcuff on her wrist. Almost no space at all between metal and skin. Maybe a couple of millimeters. Could she slide the handcuff off her wrist with that tiny amount of space? It seems unlikely. How had Houdini done it? Her friend Stuart had been into that Houdini miniseries and encouraged her to watch it. She certainly doesn’t remember Houdini ever sliding a handcuff off his wrist in any of his escapes. He had always picked the locks with a hidden key. If she ever gets out of this, she’ll have to learn some survival skills like that. Self-defense, handcuff-lock picking. She examines the handcuff closely. The words PEERLESS HANDCUFF COMPANY are stamped into the metal just below a little keyhole. What you do is put your key in the lock and turn it either clockwise or counterclockwise and the handcuff opens. What she needs is something that will do the job of the key and spring the mechanism. The sleeping-bag zip is no good. The pencil they’d given her for drawing is no good. Nothing in the cardboard box is any good, except maybe the…

  She looks at the tube of toothpaste. What’s it made of? Metal? Plastic? She knows that oil paints are kept in metal tubes, but toothpaste? She examines it carefully but can’t figure it out. It’s Colgate Cavity Protection. It looks like an old tube they’ve kept in their spare bathroom for years. Could you possibly use the pointy bit at the bottom to pick the handcuff lock?

  She pokes it into the keyhole and it doesn’t seem impossible. She’ll have to carefully rip the bottom off the tube and attempt to fashion it into a key. The woman will kill her if she finds her trying to escape. Trying to escape is a dangerous long shot, but it’s better than no shot at all.

  13

  Thursday, 12:15 p.m.

  There’s a short man standing in front of her house. The shotgun is in the passenger seat. As Rachel pulls into the parking spot, she reaches for it. She rolls the window down and puts the shotgun across her lap. “Hello?” she says inquiringly.

  The man turns. It’s old Dr. Havercamp from two houses down on the tidal basin.

  “Hello, Rachel,” he replies cheerfully in his rural Maine accent.

  Rachel puts the shotgun back in the passenger seat and gets out of the car. Dr. Havercamp is holding something.

  “I think this is Kylie’s,” he says. “Her name is on the case.”

  Rachel’s heart leaps. Yes, it’s Kylie’s iPhone—maybe that will give her some clue as to where Kylie is. She snatches the phone out of his hands and turns it on but the only thing that appears is the lock screen: a picture of Ed Sheeran playing guitar and the space to enter the four-digit code. Rachel doesn’t know the code and she’s sure she won’t be able to guess it. If you guess wrong three times, the phone locks itself for twenty-four hours.

  “It is Kylie’s phone. Where did you find it?” Rachel asks, trying to sound casual.

  “It was at the bus stop. I was walking Chester and I thought, That’s a phone, and I picked it up and saw Kylie’s name on the back. She must have dropped it when she was waiting for the school bus.”

  “She’ll be so relieved. Thank you.”

  Rachel does not invite him in or offer him coffee. In this part of Massachusetts that’s almost a capital offense, but she has no time.

  “Um, I guess I better go. I have bilge to pump. Take care,” he says. She watches him go down through the reeds to his boat.

  When he’s gone, she brings the shotgun and other supplies into the house, gets a drink of water, and turns on her Mac. The computer flares to life and she looks at it with a jaundiced eye for a moment. Are they watching her through the Mac’s camera and her iPhone camera? She read somewhere that Mark Zuckerberg put a piece of masking tape over the camera on all his electronic devices as a security precaution. She gets tape from the kitchen drawer and does exactly that, covering the camera on her phone, her Mac, and her iPad.

  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 nois
e 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.

  Rachel goes up onto the east-facing rear deck. The deck has privacy walls, which means that you can sit there without being seen except by the people walking past directly ahead of you on the beach. At this time of year, there aren’t many of those people.

  The back entrance leads straight into the kitchen. There’s a locked screen door that opens when she gives it a good tug. The kitchen door has an ordinary doorknob.

  She examines it closely and takes a picture of it with her phone. She spends ten minutes Googling the image and discovers that it is a Schlage faux-Georgian F40 doorknob that, according to several locksmith sites, can be disabled with a hammer and a chisel straight down the mechanism.

  What’s worrying, though, is the sign on the kitchen window that says that the house is protected by Atomic Alarms. If she does open the back door, she might have thirty seconds to find the alarm’s code box, and if she doesn’t put the code in fast enough, all hell will break loose, won’t it? The Atomic Alarms sign, however, looks very old. It was once a bright blue and it has now faded to a light gray. Will the alarm still work with the electricity turned off?

  There’s one other huge problem with the house. The Appenzellers are right next to one of the many paths cutting through the dunes that lead to the Plum Island beach. At this time of day no one is using the path, but in the mornings she imagines that it’s busy with dog-walkers and residents taking their daily constitutionals. If a kid is screaming his head off, he will be heard unless she can soundproof the basement. A big board over the basement window might do the trick, but it won’t be foolproof. Hmmm. She remembers Voltaire’s warning about the perfect being the enemy of the good. She could spend a week looking for the best available empty house, a week in which Kylie will be suffering in a homemade dungeon. Apart from the alarm sticker and the dune path, the Appenzeller house is pretty close to ideal. It’s a little removed from the other dwellings on this strip and partially isolated by dunes. It’s off the road by about fifteen yards and the Appenzellers have planted cypress trees as further shielding from the setting western sun.

  She sits in one of the Adirondack chairs on the Appenzellers’ back porch and dials the number for Newbury Home Security.

  “NHS, this is Jackson, how can I help you?” a man answers in a Revere accent so strong it could strip paint.

  “Oh, hi. Can you help me with an alarm question?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “My name’s Peggy Monroe. I live out on the island. My daughter’s supposed to walk Elsie Tanner’s Neapolitan mastiff while she’s away, and Elsie gave her the key but there’s an old Atomic Alarms sticker in the window and my daughter’s worried that if she opens the door, the alarm will go off. Any suggestions?”

  Rachel’s new to the lying game. She isn’t sure if it’s better to say as little as possible or to be chatty and give names and details in order to assuage suspicion. She went with the latter plan, and now she worries that she’s messed up.

  Jackson yawns. “Well, ma’am, I guess I could come out there and take a look if you want, but it’s a fifty-dollar minimum.”

  “Fifty dollars? That’s more than she’s getting paid to walk the dog.”

  “Yeah, I figured. Look, I think your daughter should be OK. Atomic Alarms went out of business in the nineties. Breeze Security took over most of their operation, but the Breeze guys made sure they took all the old Atomic signs off the windowpanes, so chances are if there’s an old Atomic Alarms sign up there, the alarm isn’t connected to anything. Did she see any newer alarm signs?”

  “No.”

  “I’d say she’s going to be OK. If she does get in trouble, call me back and I’ll come out there and see if there’s anything I can do.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  She walks back to her house on the other side of Plum Island and finds a chisel and hammer in Marty’s old toolbox. A toolbox he had never really used for anything. His brother, Pete, was the engineer, car expert, and fixer, not Marty. When they’d first moved up here, it had been Pete who had made the house livable when he was home from one of his tours.

  Her heart drops. If anything happens to Kylie, it will kill Pete. Uncle and niece dote on each other. Rachel feels the tears welling up again and forces them back down. Sobbing won’t get Kylie back.

  She puts the hammer and chisel in a gym bag and grabs a flashlight. In case of trouble, she gets the shotgun too. It just about fits in the bag.

  It begins to drizzle as she walks along the basin trail. The sky is gray now and there are ominous black clouds to the west. Rain would be good. It’d deter dog-walkers and busybodies.

  She wonders if the kidnappers have Kylie somewhere warm and safe. She’s a sensitive girl. She needs looking after. Rachel makes a fist and slams it into her thigh. I’m coming, Kylie, I’m coming, I’m coming. She puts her hood up and walks along Northern Boulevard to the Appenzellers’. Yeah, those cypress trees out front will do a pretty decent job at hiding nefarious goings-on inside. She cuts down the sandy path and hops the fence again. She examines the rectangular basement window that’s six inches above the ground. It’s three feet long and a foot tal
l. She taps the glass—it doesn’t look too thick but if you covered the glass with an acrylic sheet or a thick wooden board, you could, perhaps, effectively muffle sounds.

  She walks to the back porch and opens the screen door. Her heart is beating fast. It seems nuts to be doing this in broad daylight, but she has to get a move on.

  She takes the chisel out of the bag and positions it in the center of the lock at the keyhole. Then she raises the hammer and hits the chisel hard. There’s a metallic thud but when she tries the handle, it doesn’t turn. She positions the chisel again and hits much harder. This time it’s a swing and a miss, and the hammer plows into the wooden door.

  Jesus, Rachel.

  She lifts the hammer back and strikes a third time. The entire center mechanism collapses and bits come flying out. Rachel puts down the chisel and hammer and gingerly tries the door.

  The handle turns, and when she pushes, the door creaks open.

  She takes out the shotgun and the flashlight and, shaking all over, goes inside.

  15

  Thursday, 1:24 p.m.

  She stands in the house she’s just broken into. Thirty seconds of fear.

  No dogs come at her. No alarm sounds. No one yells.

  It isn’t just luck. She has scouted it well.

  The house is musty and empty. A thin layer of dust coats the kitchen surfaces. No one has been in here since early September. She closes the kitchen door behind her and explores the home.

  Three uninteresting levels and a very interesting basement with brick walls and a concrete floor and nothing in it but a washing machine, a dryer, and a boiler. The house is held up by a series of concrete pillars and she could, she thinks in disgust, chain someone to one of those pillars. She checks out the little window above the dryer. She’ll cover that with a board she’ll get from the hardware store in town.