The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  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.

  Pete is looking at the Dunleavys’ social media activity on his laptop. “Nobody’s awake yet,” he says.

  “Mike will be up in about an hour, then Helen, then the kids. Mike sometimes catches the six o’clock train to South Station, sometimes the six thirty,” Rachel tells him.

  “He should drive, there’s no traffic at this hour,” Pete says. “Hey, you know what we have to watch out for?”

  “What?”

  “GPS tags in the shoes. A lot of helicopter parents put GPS tags in their kids’ backpacks and shoes. That way if they go missing, the parents can find them with an app in a few seconds.”

  “Is that for real?” Rachel says, aghast.

  “Oh yeah, grab a kid with one of those little buggers, and the FBI will be up our ass before we know what hit us.”

  “How do we stop that?”

  “I can scan the kid to see if he’s transmitting. And then toss his iPhone and GPS shoes, and we should be OK.”

  “Helen seems the type to brag about using that system to find her kids, but she hasn’t mentioned it,” Rachel says, surprising herself with the bitterness of this observation. She remembers that Tacitus line about how you always hate those you have wronged. Or those you are about to wrong in this case.

  “Maybe you’re right,” Pete says. “But we’ll check the shoes anyway.”

  They watch the house and sip coffee and wait.

  No life at all on the street. The days of the milkman are long over. The first dog-walker doesn’t appear until 5:30 a.m.

  The earliest indication that anybody is up in the Dunleavy house comes at 6:01 a.m., when Mike retweets a tweet from Tom Brady. Then Helen wakes and begins Facebooking. She Likes a dozen posts from her friends and shares a video about women soldiers fighting Isis in Syria. Helen is a moderate Democrat. Her husband seems to be a moderate Republican. They care about the world, the environment, and their kids. They are harmless, and in completely different circumstances, Rachel could imagine being their friend.

  The kids are lovely too. Not spoiled, not bratty, just great little kids.

  “Look at this,” Pete says. “Helen has just Instagrammed a picture of the Seafarer Restaurant on Webb Street in Salem.”

  “It’s on Facebook now too,” Rachel says.

  “She says she’s having breakfast there with her friend Debbie. How far is Salem from here?”

  “Not that far. Five minutes, maybe ten if there’s traffic.”

  “Not ideal. But a breakfast with an old friend has gotta take a minimum of forty-five minutes, right?”

  Rachel shakes her head. “I don’t know. If it’s only coffee and muffins, it could be less. But then again, they’d go to Starbucks if they were just getting coffee and muffins. Why, what are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that once Mike’s gone and the kids are safely at school and Helen is safely at her breakfast, the house will be empty.”

  “And then what?”

  “I go in the back door. Scout the place. Maybe upload a little spyware bug of our own onto the family desktop.”

  “You can do that?”

  “Oh yes.”

  “How?”

  “The B-and-E stuff is pretty easy, as you found out at the Appenzellers’. The bugging tech I learned from my buddy Stan when I worked for him after the Corps.”

  Rachel shakes her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Gives us an advantage. We’ll know what they’re thinking. The shit’s going to get real when we take Toby.”

  “Is it safe?”

  “Is anything we’re doing safe?”

  Mike Dunleavy finally leaves for work at 7:15. He drives himself to the Beverly train station and leaves his BMW in the lot. Helen gets her kids outside at 8:01. It’s not really cold enough for winter coats but Helen has bundled them up anyway. Rachel thinks they look adorable in their oversize parkas and their hats and scarves.

  “Do you want to follow them?” Pete asks.

  Rachel shakes her head. “No point. Helen will let us know when she drops them off at school and gets to the restaurant.”

  They sit in the Volvo and wait, and, sure enough, at 8:15, Helen Facebooks a selfie taken inside the Seafarer.

  Pete scans the street. A college-age kid is shooting hoops down the block, and across the street, a little girl comes out of her house and starts jumping up and down on an enc
losed trampoline. “Look over there—front door’s closed, kid’s on that trampoline by herself. She’d be perfect,” Pete says.

  “Yes,” Rachel agrees. “But that’s not the plan.”

  “No? OK, I’m going in.”

  Rachel grabs his hand. “Are you sure about this, Pete?”

  “We need all the information we can get about these people. In a raid, you gather all the intel you can for days, sometimes weeks, before you move. But we don’t have days or weeks, so we gotta get as much info as quickly as possible.”

  Rachel can see the sense of that.

  “Which is why I’m going in now while the house is, presumably, empty. If crazy old Uncle Kevin’s in there with a shotgun, I guess I’m screwed. If I’m not back in fifteen minutes or so, you should go.”

  “What are you actually going to do?”

  “Whatever I can in fifteen minutes.”

  “OK, so that would be eight thirty.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What does it mean if you’re not back by eight thirty?”

  “It means I’m compromised somehow. I won’t talk, of course, but you should move on to target B or, better yet, make a completely new target list that I don’t know anything about.”

  “I’ll call you if there’s trouble in the street.”

  “OK, but if things are looking hairy, just get out of here.”

  Pete puts his backpack over his shoulder, checks to see that no one is looking, and runs to the fence between the Dunleavy house and a little patch of wood sandwiched between the beach and the road. Rachel sees him climb over the fence into the Dunleavys’ backyard.

  She listens for the sound of screaming or crazy Uncle Kevin firing his shotgun, but there’s nothing like that.

  In the rearview, she watches the little girl across the street play on her trampoline. There doesn’t seem to be anyone supervising her. The front door of her house is firmly closed. It would, in fact, be easy to walk over there and take the child.

  Jesus Christ, who thinks things like this? What the hell have you become, Rachel?

  She turns on her phone and looks at the time: 8:22.

  She closes her eyes and thinks about Kylie. Has she been able to sleep? Knowing Kylie, she was probably thinking about her mom and dad the whole night, worrying about them.

  Oh God, Kylie, I’m coming for you. I’ll get you back. Never let you out of my sight. Be a better mom. Keep you safe. Kill social media. Trust nobody. Full tinfoil hat.

  She looks at the phone again: 8:23.

  A white van drives slowly along the street, the kind of beat-up white van that’s always up to no damn good. The driver, however, pays no attention to her, and the van keeps going.

  She rummages in her coat pocket for Marty’s cigarettes, but she can’t find them. A dog is barking like crazy somewhere.

  Barking where? The Dunleavys do not have a dog. Rachel would know.

  Maybe their neighbors? Maybe a dog next door saw Pete go into the house and recognized him as a stranger?

  The phone reads 8:28.

  She puts on the radio. It’s one of those endless reruns of Car Talk. One of the two brothers is ranting about the VW microbus.

  Now it’s 8:31.

  Where’s Pete?

  The dog is barking louder now.

  The little girl gets off the trampoline, picks up what seems to be a can of soda, and gets back on the trampoline.

  Not a good idea, sweetie. Not in your nice dress, Rachel thinks.

  It’s 8:34.

  A black-and-white from the Beverly Police Department appears in her rearview mirror. “Oh no,” Rachel mutters. She turns the key in the Volvo’s ignition and the reliable old engine roars to life.

  The police car starts driving slowly down the street. There are two officers inside. They’re coming right toward her.

  And now it’s 8:37.

  The dog’s barking gets louder still.

  The police car gets closer.

  She slips the Volvo into first gear, her left foot on the clutch, her right ready on the gas.

  The little girl on the trampoline does the inevitable and manages to upend the soda all over herself. She starts screaming. The two cops turn to look at her.

  Pete appears on top of the Dunleavys’ fence. He drops down to the little patch of woods, runs to the Volvo, and gets in the back seat, panting heavily. “Go!” he says.

  “Everything OK?” Rachel asks, alarmed.

  “Yeah. Fine. Go!”

  Rachel lets the clutch out and drives away. She heads east toward Manchester and then north to Ipswich and Route 1A. The cops are not following her. Pete is in the back, fiddling with his phone.

  “Is everything all right?” she asks again.

  “Yes, fine.”

  “What happened in there?”

  “Nothing. It was a breeze. The back window was open, so I was in in two seconds. I found a desktop PC in a downstairs study that was still on. I loaded a worm on that. I couldn’t find the home phone, so I couldn’t load a bug there, unfortunately. Lot of people don’t have a landline anymore. But as soon as they fire up the desktop, I’ll be able to read their e-mail, Skype, FaceTime, and iMessage passwords.”

  “Holy crap,” Rachel says, impressed.

  “Yeah,” Pete replies.

  “Your buddy Stan taught you all of that?”

  “Most of it. I always had a bit of an outlaw mind-set.”

  “Yes, Marty told me about you stealing a car and driving to Canada when you were eleven.”

  “Nah, I didn’t make it to Canada. And I was twelve,” Pete says with false modesty.

  “You went past the fifteen-minute time limit in there.”

  “I know. I found Toby’s room. I did a little investigating. Normal kid. No health issues that I can see. Likes the Red Sox, the X-Men, and a TV show called Stranger Things. Totally normal kid.”

  “So he’ll do?” Rachel asks miserably.

  “Yeah, he’ll do.”

  They drive over the bridge and onto Plum Island.

  Rachel yawns when they arrive at the house.

  “When was the last time you slept?” Pete asks her with concern.

  She brushes off the question. “I’ll make some more coffee. We’ve got work to do.”

  Rachel goes upstairs to get the whiteboard from Kylie’s room. She opens the door, half expecting Kylie to be hiding in there, for this to be some cruel, crazy prank.

  It’s empty, but the room smells of her little girl. That cheap Forever 21 perfume she loves. The seashell collection, the clothes overflowing the laundry bin, the books on astronomy and Egypt. A box that holds every birthday card she’s ever gotten. The posters of Brockhampton and the Keira Knightley version of Pride and Prejudice. Her neatly arranged homework binders. Her photo montage of friends and family.

  Rachel feels herself begin to sway. She grabs the whiteboard and steps into the hall and gently closes the door.

  Downstairs they plot little Toby’s life on a flow chart. He has archery tonight and Sunday night. Archery finishes at seven and he walks home. That’s the window of opportunity. “The archery club meets at something called the Old Customs Hall near the water in Beverly. It’s a little less than a one-klick walk from there to the Dunleavys’ house,” Pete says, looking at Google Maps.

  “What’s a klick?”

  “Sorry—one kilometer. I’ve been over the route on Google street view a few times now. He walks from the Old Customs Hall up Revenue Street, then he turns left on Standore Street, right on Poseidon Street, and he’s at his house. It should take him no more than seven or eight minutes. Maybe ten at the most.”

  It’s a pretty tight schedule and they know it.

  “We have to hit him between seven o’clock and seven ten. In fact, if this is going to work, we have to get him when he’s on Standore Street, since there will be too many people milling about on Revenue Street and we can’t grab him right in front of his house on Poseidon because his mom might be waiti
ng for him,” Rachel says.

  Pete rubs his chin. It’s a very narrow window indeed, both temporally and geographically, but he doesn’t bring that up. This is the kid they have done the planning for. Rachel stifles a yawn. “Why don’t you take a nap and I’ll drive down there again and check the entire route this time,” Pete suggests.

  “No nap necessary. Let’s go.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes.”

  They go outside, get in the Volvo, and reach Beverly in a mere fifteen minutes. The town is maybe a little too close to Rachel’s town for comfort, but that can’t be helped.

  It’s busier now. There are, Rachel thinks, a worrying number of assholes walking their dogs or out for a stroll. Assholes, because why should they be so unconcerned and happy when the sky is falling? Has fallen. The Old Customs Hall is near the water, and this too is a popular dog-walking and hangout locale.

  “Updated weather forecast,” Pete says, looking at his laptop. “Drizzle tonight, not rain. Hopefully that’ll be enough moisture to deter casual foot traffic but not so much that his mom comes to pick him up.”

  “When I get Kylie back, I’m not letting her walk anywhere by herself until she’s fifty,” Rachel mutters, knowing this is a pitiful horse/barn-door statement.

  They drive from the Old Customs Hall along Revenue Street and Standore Street and up Poseidon Street, about a three-minute run through unremarkable suburban New England. Standore Street is lined with big old-growth oak trees that still have leaves. “Excellent cover,” Pete notes.

  They turn and head back to the center of town.

  “All right, this is the plan,” Rachel announces. “One, we drive to the Old Customs Hall. Two, we wait for the kids to come out. Three, we follow Toby home along Revenue and Standore Streets. Please, God, let Toby be by himself. Four, we pull up the car next to him. Five, we grab him and throw him inside. Six, we drive off.”

  “Do you want me to grab him?”

  She nods. “And I’ll drive.”

  “OK, then.”

  She looks at him. “There are so many things that can go wrong, Pete. I’m glad you’re with me.”