Page 150 of The Chain

She grins and kisses him.

“One more thing,” he says, but his voice dies in his throat.

“Me too,” she agrees and kisses him again.

77

No one is going to play Pete in the movie version of this. Pete is far too controversial a figure for a movie. After their confessions, Pete and Rachel are charged with felony kidnapping, false imprisonment, and child endangerment. For that alone it’s fifty years in prison.

And then there’s the little expedition to Innsmouth. Was that a vigilante rescue attempt or a home invasion?

It has taken a long time to sort everything out.

It has taken a team of federal agents weeks to fully analyze The Chain documents they found on Ginger’s hard drive.

It has taken the Dunleavy family to heroically step forward and tell the police that Rachel took Amelia with their consent because she told them that she was going to break The Chain. That explains the money too. The cops don’t believe a word of it, but it’s clear that the Dunleavys are going to be hostile witnesses for any prosecution.

By this time, the tide of compassion is fully with Rachel and Pete and all the victims of The Chain. The public is overwhelmingly behind them; Rachel and Pete are sympathetic defendants, and there’s a high probability of jury nullification. The Massachusetts Attorney General’s office can see which way the wind is blowing. Rachel and Pete are released from custody pending further inquiries. And without the Dunleavy family testifying against them, with the public on their side, and with Ginger’s career of evil becoming more and more apparent, Rachel’s lawyers tell her that an expensive, unpopular trial now looks very unlikely indeed. Rachel has killed the monster. The Chain has been stopped forever and everyone who was a link in that chain has been freed.

The history of The Chain itself is being investigated by dozens of reporters. A journalist from theBoston Globediscovers its roots in a substitute-kidnapping scheme that began in Mexico.

There are hundreds of victims of The Chain but the fear of retaliation and the occasional brutal, bloody reprisal were enough to keep almost all of them quiet over the years.

That, anyway, is what Rachel has read in the press. That’s theGlobesummary. There are more sensational accounts in the tabloids and on the internet. But for self-preservation, Rachel doesn’t read the tabloids and she hasn’t really gone on the internet since she’s been released from custody.

Rachel doesn’t give interviews; she avoids the limelight; she doesn’t do anything much but pick up her daughter from school and write her community-college philosophy lectures, and eventually, through these prudent un-twenty-first-century measures, she becomes old news.

Gradually she’s no longer a trending topic on Twitter or Instagram. Some other poor devil has come along to take her place. And then another one will come along after that. And then another. It’s all very familiar…

In Newburyport she’s still recognized—how could she not be?—but when she drives up to the malls in New Hampshire or into the Boston suburbs, she’s anonymous again and that’s the way she likes it.

A sunny morning in late March.

Rachel is in bed with her laptop. She deletes the twenty new requests from her e-mail inbox asking for interviews and closes the computer. Pete is next door in the shower. Singing. Badly.

She smiles. Pete is doing really great now on his methadone program and at his brand-new job as a security consultant for a high-tech firm in Cambridge. She walks barefoot into the kitchen, lights the stove, fills the kettle, and puts the water on to boil.

Upstairs, she can hear the occasional ping of Kylie’s iPad. Kylie’s awake and hunkered under the sheets, chatting with her friends. Kylie is also doing amazingly well. They always say that kids are resilient and can bounce back from trauma, but it’s still incredible to see how high she is bouncing back.

At eight o’clock, Stuart comes by and she gives him a hug and he sits there petting the cat, waiting patiently for Kylie to be ready. Stuart also is doing great, and out of all of them he seems to be the one digging the fame the most. Although Marty also appears to be enjoying all the attention. He has popped up on the TV several times to talk about his experiences. And with each telling, his own role in the rescue has become a little bit more extravagant. Marty is all right and his new,veryyoung girlfriend, Julie, seems to believe that they are all in some kind of romcom together in which Rachel, the gloomy first wife, will eventually be won over by her effervescent charms.

Rachel sits down at the dining-room table and opens her laptop again. Her thoughts drift. She thumbs through Sarah Bakewell’sAt the Existentialist Caféand is momentarily taken aback by a striking picture of Simone de Beauvoir wearing a brooch in the shape of a labyrinth.

She shuts the book and waves at Dr. Havercamp as he walks through the reeds to pump the bilge from his boat.

“Trying to start this lecture with a joke, Stuart. How does this sound? ‘My friend is opening a bookstore to sell German philosophy texts. I told him it wouldn’t work—it’s too much of a Nietzsche market,’” Rachel says with a look of triumph.

Stuart grimaces.

“Not good?” Rachel asks.

“I’m not really qualified to judge the, uh…”

“What he’s trying to say, Mother, is that your comedy stylings skew to an older demographic,” Kylie says, leaning over the balcony rail.

Pete comes out of the shower and shakes his head. “I hope your plan B isn’t a career in stand-up,” he says.

“To hell with all of you!” Rachel says and shuts the laptop.

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