“OK.”
“You’ve got a sleeping bag and a pillow. In that box there are toiletries and more toilet paper and graham crackers and books. Do you like the Harry Potter books?”
“Yes.”
“The whole series is in there. And some old stuff. Good stuff for girls your age. I know what I’m talking about. I’m an en…good stuff,” he says.
“I’m an English teacher”? Was that what he was going to say? Kylie wonders. “Thank you,” she says. Be polite, Kylie, she tells herself. Be the good, scared, frightened girl who won’t cause them any trouble.
The man squats down next to her, still keeping the gun pointed at her.
“We’re in the woods here. At the end of our own dirt road. If you start screaming, no one will hear you. We’re on a big lot and the woods are all around. But if you do start yelling, I’ll see and hear you on the camera and I won’t be able to take any chances. I’ll have to come down and gag you. And so you can’t remove the gag, we’ll have to cuff your hands behind your back. Do you understand?”
Kylie nods.
“Now, turn out your pockets and give me your shoes.”
She turns out her pockets. She only has money in them anyway. No penknife or phone. The phone’s back there on the dirt road on Plum Island.
The man stands and sways a little. “Sweet Jesus,” he says to himself and swallows hard. He goes up the stairs shaking his head, apparently in disbelief and amazement at what he has wrought.
When the basement door closes, Kylie leans back on the mattress and exhales.
She starts to cry again. She cries herself dry and then sits up and looks at the two bottles of water. Would they poison her? The seals on the water are intact and it’s Poland Spring. She drinks greedily and then stops herself.
What if he doesn’t come back? What if she has to make this water last for several days or weeks?
She looks in the big cardboard box. Two boxes of graham crackers, a Snickers bar, and a can of Pringles. Toothbrush, toothpaste, toilet paper, wipes, and about fifteen books. There’s also a drawing pad, two pencils, and playing cards. With her back to the camera she tries to use the pencil to pick the lock on the handcuff, but after ten seconds she gives up. You’d need a paper clip or something. She looks through the books. Harry Potter, J. D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Herman Melville, Jane Austen. Yeah, probably an English teacher.
She takes another sip of water and unspools some of the toilet paper and dries the tears from her face.
She lies down on the mattress. It’s cold. She gets into the sleeping bag and hunkers down under it where the camera can’t see her.
She feels safer here.
If they can’t see her, that’s something. That’s a Daffy Duck trick. If I can’t see you, you don’t exist.
Were they telling the truth about not wanting to harm her? You believed people until they showed you how bad they really were.
But they’d already done that, hadn’t they?
That policeman. He was probably dead or dying. Oh God.
Remembering that gunshot, she wants to scream now. To scream and get someone to come and help her.
Help me, help me, help me! She mouths but doesn’t say the words.
Oh my God, Kylie, how could this have happened? The thing that you were warned about: Don’t get into a stranger’s car. Never get into a stranger’s car. Girls go missing all the time and when they go missing, they almost never come back.
But sometimes they did come back. There were many who disappeared forever but not all the lost girls stayed lost. Sometimes they came home again.
Elizabeth Smart—that was the Mormon girl’s name. In that interview, she had been dignified and calm. She had said that there was always hope in these situations. Her faith had always given her hope.
But Kylie doesn’t have any faith, which is obviously her stupid parents’ fault.
So claustrophobic in here.
She pulls the sleeping bag down and takes a few panicky breaths and looks around the room again.
Are they really watching her?
Certainly at first they will be. But at three in the morning? Maybe she can move that stove. Maybe there’s an old nail she can use to pick the lock. She’ll wait. She’ll keep cool and wait. She looks in the box and pulls out the pad and paper.
Help me, I’m a prisoner in this basement, she writes, but there’s no one to give the note to.
She rips out the page and crumples it up.
She starts drawing instead. She draws the ceiling of the tomb of Senenmut from her Egypt book. This begins to calm her. She draws the moon and stars. The Egyptians thought the afterlife was located in the stars. But there is no afterlife, is there? Grandma believes in the afterlife but nobody else does. It doesn’t make any sense, does it? If they kill you, you’re just dead and that’s that. And maybe a hundred years from now, they find your body in the woods and nobody even remembers who you were or that you’d gone missing.
You’re erased from history like a shaken Etch A Sketch.
“Mommy,” she whispers. “Help me. Please help me. Mommy!”
But she knows that there’s no help coming.
6
Thursday, 9:16 a.m.
When Rachel gets back to her house on Plum Island she walks into the kitchen and falls to the floor. It isn’t a swoon. She’s not fainting. She just can no longer remain vertical. She lies there on the linoleum like a disheveled question mark. Her pulse is racing, her throat constricting. She feels like she’s having a heart attack.
But she can’t have a heart attack. She has to save her daughter.
She sits up and tries to breathe and think.
They’d said don’t call the police. They are probably afraid of the police.
The police will know what to do. Won’t they?
She reaches for the phone but stops herself. No. She dare not risk it.
Don’t call the cops. Never call the cops. If they find out she has called the cops, they’ll kill Kylie immediately. There was something about that woman’s voice. The desperation in it. The determination. She’ll do it and she’ll move on to another victim. The whole thing about The Chain is incredible and crazy and yet…that woman’s voice…it had the ring of truth. The woman had clearly been terrified of The Chain and its power and she believed in it.
And I believe too, Rachel thinks.
But she doesn’t have to be alone. She needs help.
Marty. He’ll know what to do.
She speed-dials Marty’s number but it goes straight to voice mail. She tries again but again gets voice mail. She looks down her list of contacts and calls his new house in Brookline.
“Hellooo,” Tammy answers in that singsongy voice of hers.
“Tammy?” Rachel asks.
“Yeah, who’s this?”
“This is Rachel. I’ve been trying to contact Marty.”
“He’s out of town.”
“Oh? Where is he?”
“He’s in, um, oh, what’s that place…”
“Work?”
“No. You know…the place where they play golf.”
“Scotland?”
“No! Where everybody goes. He was so excited.”
“Golfing, when did he start…never mind. Look, Tammy, I’m trying to reach him and it’s an emergency and I can’t get through on his phone.”