“Oh, dear. I’m sorry to hear that. Hopefully we’ll see her tomorrow. Rumor has it she’s cooking up a great presentation on King Tut.”
“Tomorrow, um, I don’t know. We’ll see. These things are unpredictable. Listen, I better go, I’m getting some medicine for her right now.”
“How long is she going to be out?”
“I don’t know. I have to go.” Another call is coming in, from an Unknown Caller. “’Bye, Jenny, sick daughter, have to run,” Rachel says and answers the incoming call.
“I hope you’re working hard, Rachel. I’m relying on you. My boy won’t get released until you get someone to take his place,” the woman holding Kylie says.
“I’m doing my best,” Rachel tells her.
“They said they sent you a message and told you about the Williams family?”
“They did.”
“If you get out of this, you have to keep quiet or the blowback will get you like it got them.”
“I’ll keep quiet. I’m cooperating. I’m doing the best I can.”
“Keep going, Rachel. Remember, if they tell me you’re trouble, I won’t hesitate to kill Kylie!”
“Please don’t say that. I’m—”
But the woman has hung up.
Rachel looks at the phone. Her hands are shaking. The woman is clearly on edge. Kylie is in the hands of someone who sounds like she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
A young man gets out of a car in the row opposite. He looks at her strangely for a moment and then nods grimly at her.
Is he another one of The Chain’s agents?
Are they everywhere?
Suppressing a whimper, she puts the phone in her bag and hurries through the double doors of the mall.
The Safeway is open and already filled with people. She grabs a shopping basket, speeds past the displays of Thanksgiving merchandise, and finds the rack selling those inexpensive cell phones. She picks up one that looks good, an AT&T cheapo that can still do photos and video. It’s $14.95. She puts a dozen of them in the basket and then throws in two more. Fourteen. Will that be enough? There are only six phones left on the rack. Hell with it. She takes those too.
She turns to see Veronica Hart, her eccentric neighbor who lives five houses down from her on Plum Island. Oh God. The very reason she’d come up here was to get away from anybody who might possibly know her. If Veronica sees the phones, she’ll ask her if she’s prepping for the end of the world and then she’ll point out that come the apocalypse, zombies will tear down the cell-phone towers. It’ll be a whole thing. Rachel lurks behind the unsold Halloween merchandise until Veronica pays and leaves.
She scans the phones at the self-serve checkout counter. After that, she goes down to the Ace Hardware and buys rope, chains, a padlock, and two rolls of duct tape.
The cashier is a hipster with long Elvis sideburns and sunglasses. “Thirty-seven fifty,” he says.
She hands over two twenties.
“You’re supposed to say ‘It’s not what you think,’” the cashier says.
Rachel has no idea what he’s talking about. “What?”
“All this,” he says, loading the gear into two plastic bags. “It looks like a Fifty Shades of Grey starter kit, but I’m sure there’s a more innocent explanation.”
The real explanation is much more terrifying. “Nope, that’s exactly what it is,” Rachel says and hurries out of the store.
12
Thursday, 11:59 a.m.
Kylie has no phone, so she has no idea what time it is, but she thinks it might still be morning. She can’t hear anything, but she can see light through the basement window.
She sits up in the sleeping bag. It’s so cold down there that frost has formed on the sides of the windows. Maybe running in place will help?
Kylie worms her way out of the sleeping bag and stands in her socks on the freezing concrete floor. She walks as far as the chain will let her, which isn’t very far. A small circle around the bed and back to the big old cast-iron stove. Is that thing as heavy as it looks? She goes to it and, with her back to the camera, gives it a shove. It doesn’t move. Not an inch. She scurries back to the sleeping bag and waits under the covers, straining to hear if the basement door is being opened, but no one comes.
They’re busy. They aren’t watching her through the camera. Or at least not continually. They’ve probably connected it to a laptop and occasionally check in on her. If she could move the stove, then what? She’d still be chained to the stupid thing and standing there at the bottom of the stairs with no way out.
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 words PEERLESS HANDCUFF COMPANY are 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.