Page 20 of The Chain

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 noise 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.

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