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—[email protected], 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 brother.
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.