Page 19 of The Chain

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 wordsPEERLESS HANDCUFF COMPANYare 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.

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