The Chain

by Adrian McKinty

  “We probably shouldn’t be late,” Kylie replies.

  “If he says five minutes, he means five minutes,” Rachel says. On a planet filled with unreliable men—fathers who desert their families, husbands who run off with younger women—Pete is someone who won’t let you down. Still, she isn’t going to allow an addict to share a house with her daughter, so she makes sure that Pete is religiously following his methadone program. He is, and shoring up his responsible-provider street cred, he has taken a security-guard gig to pay off his sudden massive credit-card debt.

  Exactly five minutes later they are in the Volvo traveling into town. They park at the Starbucks, and Rachel hugs a hot tea in a window seat while Kylie and Pete go off to get a few things.

  It’s a busy Saturday morning, and Newburyport is full of locals and tourists. Marty is picking them up soon with his new girlfriend. Of course he has a new girlfriend. The plan B at last. But rather than rendezvousing on Plum Island, they are meeting in the safer, more neutral Starbucks in Newburyport.

  As soon as Kylie is out of sight, Rachel takes her phone and checks the app for the GPS tracker in Kylie’s shoes. Yup, there she is, walking up High Street and turning left to go into the Tannery. Every child of every parent is a hostage to fortune, but not every parent has been reminded of this so vividly.

  She sees Pete across the street carrying a whole bunch of shopping bags. She waves to him and he enters the Starbucks and kisses her on the cheek.

  “What did you get?” she asks.

  “A few things for Kyles.”

  “I hope you didn’t spend too much money, you’ve already done more than—”

  “Shhh,” Pete says. “One of my great frickin’ joys in this life is getting presents for my niece.”

  They sit there and talk and wait for Marty. He’s late, as usual.

  “Finally, here’s the man himself,” Pete says, tapping his watch and getting to his feet. “Of course this new girl is a beauty. And, oh my God, even younger than the last one, by the looks of it.”

  Marty comes in all smiles. He’s wearing faded jeans, a V-necked gray T-shirt, and an Armani leather jacket. His hair is cut short and he’s acquired a tan somewhere.

  The girl is a spiky-blond-haired little thing. Shorter than Marty, unlike Tammy, but still gorgeous. Adorable upturned nose, dark blue eyes, dimples. She looks as if she’s barely out of high school.

  Introductions are made. Hands are shaken. Rachel deliberately doesn’t bother to catch the name because she knows that this one is probably going to be succeeded by another one just like her a few weeks from now.

  Kylie comes in and hugs her dad and shakes the new girlfriend’s hand.

  The new girlfriend says that Kylie looks very snuggly and hip in her red wool coat, which pleases Kylie.

  They talk briefly and Rachel smiles and fades slowly into the background. How easy it is to fade when you are so light. When the only thing giving you substance is the poison in your veins.

  “It’s time to go,” Marty says, and it’s all hugs and kisses again and then they’re off in Marty’s white Mercedes.

  “Kylie will be fine,” Pete says over dinner that night. “She likes the new girlfriend.”

  “She shouldn’t get too used to that one; there will probably be another even younger one next week,” Rachel replies with a touch of bitterness, surprising herself a little.

  After dinner, they check Kylie’s location on the GPS (she’s at Marty’s house) and they FaceTime her.

  Later, Pete goes to the bathroom to take his methadone. He has started mixing a little Mexican brown-tar heroin back into the methadone program, just to help get through the night.

  Rachel doesn’t know that but she has to take two Ambien and two fingers of Scotch to get any sleep these days. She sits down at the computer and tries to get back to the lecture she’s writing but it isn’t going anywhere. She watches YouTube, but even Ella Fitzgerald singing Cole Porter can’t lift her spirits.

  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—TheGirlCalledAriadne@gmail.com, 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 br
other.

  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.

  The twins slip back inside the house, hide in the garage, and wait for their father to get home.

  He gets home late. He works in the FBI field office on Wilshire Boulevard, which is a hell of a commute.

  At dinner that night, the twins don’t mention the incident, and Anthony has actually forgotten about it. Tom is full of chat. He talks about his new job and new opportunities. Cheryl reminds him that he wanted to tell the kids something. Tom grins and asks the kids if they want to go to Disneyland this very Saturday. They all say yes.

  When Saturday comes, however, Tom has to work, but he tells them they’ll do it the following weekend.

  “I bet we never end up going,” Margaret says prophetically to Oliver that night in their bedroom.

  “I bet we don’t,” Oliver agrees.

  “Does your neck still hurt?” Margaret asks.

  “No,” Oliver says, but she can tell that he’s lying.

  Margaret sits in bed reading one of the Baby-Sitters Club books. It’s the one where Mary Anne gets one of those chain letters, and it really upsets her. Her friends tell her to rip up the chain letter and nothing bad will happen.

  Mary Anne rips up the letter. Nothing bad happens. That’s the problem with chain letters.

  An idea occurs to Margaret.

  The bad thing has to happen first.

  The following Tuesday, Jennifer Grant’s rabbit escapes from its hutch and runs away.

  The next day at school, Jennifer finds a note in her lunch box: Spill grape juice on yourself at lunchtime or your rabbit will die.

  In the cafeteria, in front of everyone, Jennifer spills grape juice on herself.

  The notes continue.

  The demands escalate.

  Jennifer stands up and says “Shit” in class. She asks to go to the bathroom five times in one lesson.

  The most disturbing one orders Jennifer to go outside naked at six in the morning and stand in front of her house for ten seconds. If she does that, her rabbit will be returned.

  Jennifer stands outside the house naked for ten seconds, and a note in her cubby that day tells her where to find her dead rabbit.

  Margaret and Oliver put the Polaroid they took of Jennifer naked under the chest of drawers in their room. No doubt it will come in useful later.

  Life rolls on as normal. Little Anthony is adjusting well to his new school and his new friends. The twins finally seem to be settling in.

  Cheryl is lonely and bored. She calls her mother, and her mother tells her to suck it up. Plenty of people have it worse. Cheryl continues to self-medicate with diazepam, vodka tonics, and Cuba libres.

  Two months into the LA gig, Tom comes home drunk. He has dinged the car and is furious about it. Cheryl and he get into a big argument. Tom smacks her and she goes down like a ton of bricks.

  Little Anthony starts to wail but Oliver and Margaret watch with cool indifference.

  49

  The therapist is in Brookline in a new office building over a store that sells bespoke umbrellas. Très hipster.

  Rachel waits in a plush reception area and skims nervously through copies of British Vogue.

  Rain lashes the windows, and the minute hand on the refurbished antique clock moves slowly. She stares at a reproduction of Manet’s Devant la glace. A woman is looking in a mirror but you can’t see her face, which Rachel thinks is somehow appropriate considering her own looking-glass phobia. The music being piped in is from one of the later Miles Davis albums. You’re Under Arrest, she thinks, which is also some kind of ironic commentary on her situation.

  Rachel wonders what Kylie is talking about. She’s told Kylie that she can’t mention The Chain or what happened to her, but she hopes that the therapist will give her strategies to cope with her suicidal thoughts, bed-wetting, and anxiety.

  She and Kylie both know that it won’t work but they still have to try. What else can they do?

  Fifty minutes later, the therapist comes out and gives Rachel a little encouraging nod. The therapist seems to be in her midtwenties. What does someone in her twenties know about the human heart or, indeed, anything? Rachel thinks and smiles back.

  During the car ride home, Kylie doesn’t speak.

  They drive over the PI bridge and along the turnpike and up the lane to the house. Rachel doesn’t want to press her daughter, but Kylie has given her nothing.

  “Well?” Rachel says at last.

  “She asked if I was being sexually abused. I said no. She asked if I was being bullied at school. I said no. She asked if I was having boyfriend trouble. I said no. She says that I’m exhibiting the signs of someone who has gone through a physical trauma.”

  “Well, that’s true. They did actually hit you.”

  “Yes. But I can’t tell her that, can I? I can’t tell anyone about that. I just had to sit there and lie about teenage problems and stress and worries about starting high school. I can’t tell her that a policeman got murdered in front of me or that people put a gun in my face and threatened to kill me and my mom. I can’t tell her that I had to lie on the floor with a little girl who had been kidnapped by my mom. And I can’t tell her that they still might come back for us if we ever breathe a word of this,” Kylie says and begins to cry.

  Rachel reaches out to her as the rain hammers on the roof and pours down the windshield of the Volvo.

  “We’re trapped, aren’t we, Mom? If we go to the police, you and Pete will go to prison for kidnapping. And they’ll still try to kill us, won’t they?”

  There’s nothing Rachel can say.

  When they go inside, the house is cold and Pete is trying to fix the woodstove. “How did it go?” he asks.

  She shakes her head. Don’t bring it up, she mouths.

  A silent dinner. Kylie moves the food around her plate. Rachel’s unable to eat. Pete’s worried sick about both of them.

  When Pete and Kylie go to bed, Rachel logs on to her blog. There is a new notification in the comments section. From Anonymous. She scrolls down the screen and reads the comment.

  It says, Delete blog now before they see it. Keep eye on personal column of Boston Globe.

  She doesn’t need to be told twice. She logs in to Blogger and clicks Delete blog.

  Are you sure you wish to erase this blog and all of its contents? Blogger asks her.

  She clicks Yes and logs out.

  50

  Wednesday, 5:00 a.m. Rachel can’t sleep.

  She gets up, puts on her comfy red sweater and her robe, and makes some coffee. She sits in the dark living room for a while looking at the light
s of the houses on the far side of the tidal basin.

  Then she goes outside and waits. She plucks at that loose thread on her sweater. Eli the cat comes to investigate, and after accepting a few strokes, he slips off into the sand and reeds to war with the possums.

  A bristle of alertness lights the nerve endings on the nape of her neck. This is an eons-deep response. Humans are both predators and prey.

  The insistent pounding of her heart. The talismanic trembling of her limbs.

  Today is going to be important.

  The curtains are opening on the third act.

  The morning sun is low and dim, and the air is cold but not bitingly so.

  The smell of the marsh.

  The sound of birds.

  The yellow of a bicycle headlight on Old Point Road.

  Little Paul Weston makes more or less directly for her house. Almost no one now gets home delivery of the Globe. Paul cycles down the lane. She waves from the stoop so as not to freak him out, but he’s spooked anyway.

  “Jesus, Mrs. O’Neill! You scared the life out of me,” he says.

  “Sorry, Paul. I couldn’t sleep. Thought I’d wait for the paper.”

  Instead of throwing the Globe vaguely in the direction of the house he cycles up to her and puts it in her hand.

  “Have a nice day,” he says and bikes off.

  She goes in, unfolds the paper on the living-room table, and turns on the main light.

  She ignores the headlines and goes straight to the personal columns and the small ads. Despite Craigslist and eBay, the Boston Globe still has dozens of small ads every day.

  She skims through the obits and love connections and car ads and finally finds what she’s looking for under the heading Miscellaneous:

  Chains bought and sold: 1-202-965-9970.

  She wakes Pete and shows him the ad.

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “We are going to do this,” Rachel insists.

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s never going to end unless we do something. It’s killing Kylie and it’s out there right now, stalking us, remembering us, and drawing in other families, other moms, other kids.”