“What do we do?” Pete asks.
“We just wait, I guess,” Rachel replies. But something terrible has happened, she knows it.
Pete knows it too. It’s that feeling you get a minute before the alarms go off and the ordnance comes raining down.
Eleven fifteen.
Eleven thirty.
A thick sea fog is rolling in from the Atlantic. Ominous pathetic-fallacy weather.
At eleven forty-five, a text comes through to Rachel’s burner phone.
If you are receiving this text, it means I have been compromised or incapacitated. Most likely I am dead. I am sending you a link to a place where you can anonymously download the hunter-killer app for phone communications and text messages. A reminder: The longer you are in direct communication, the closer you will get to finding who you are talking to, so if you choose to use it, keep them talking as long as you can. I was not able to get the app to work properly with Wickr or Kik or other encrypted apps. If they communicate with you that way, it will not work properly. Maybe version 2.0 if I’m still alive. Good luck.
The next text is a link to a site where they can download Erik’s application.
She shows the message to Pete and turns on the TV news.
It takes another forty-five minutes for the news to hit WBZ Boston.
“An MIT professor was murdered this morning. Erik Lonnrott was shot three times at his home…”
The report goes on to say that there were no witnesses to the incident. The police’s working theory is that this was a robbery gone wrong, as the house appeared to have been ransacked and various items were apparently stolen.
“He wrote my name in his notebook,” Rachel says.
63
A few weeks after Cheryl’s death, Tom promises the kids a new start. He’s a changed man and a better man, he says. He’s going to book that trip to Disneyland. He’s going to work less. He’s going to make them the focus of his life.
The better-man shtick is convincing for about ten days. Then something at work annoys him and he stops at a bar on the way home.
The bar becomes a regular watering hole on his drive back from the FBI.
One night he meets someone at the bar and doesn’t come home at all.
Oliver and Margaret don’t mind.
They’re self-reliant. Oliver spends much of his time on his home computer. Margaret is still reading a lot. Detective novels and romances are her favorites. She’s writing too. Anonymous letters.
A boy she liked asked another girl to the school disco.
The girl got a letter that convinced her not to go to the disco.
The teacher who gave her an F got a letter threatening to expose his secret. It was an old trick she’d read in a Mark Twain book, but the teacher came in the next day as pale as a ghost.
Margaret has another project she’s working on. She spends a lot of time copying and perfecting her father’s handwriting.
On the one-year anniversary of Cheryl’s death, Tom comes home drunk.
The kids can hear him downstairs in a royal rage about something.
They wait trembling in their bedroom for Tom to come crashing up the stairs.
They don’t have to wait long.
Stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp.
The bedroom door is kicked open.
“Where’s the meat loaf?” he says, which is such a silly line that Margaret almost giggles.
He turns the light on and the laughs evaporate. Tom has taken off his belt.
Tom had asked Margaret to save him some of the meat loaf, but she and Oliver finished it. There was nothing else in the refrigerator.
“Do you ever listen, you stupid little shit?” Tom says and he pulls her from the bed so hard that he dislocates her shoulder.
He slaps her twice with the double-folded belt and then he tells her to stop crying because he barely touched her.
He storms back downstairs.
Margaret is in agony all night and it’s the school nurse who finally sends her to the hospital the following day. Tom is guilty and remorseful. He stops drinking. He starts going to church and to Promise Keepers.
Margaret and Oliver bide their time.
Church doesn’t last.
A couple of months later, the drinking begins again in earnest.
One night when Tom is blind-drunk on the sofa, Margaret removes the revolver from his shoulder holster. She and Oliver gently open Tom’s mouth and put the barrel of the revolver between his lips, and together they pull the trigger. Then they wipe their fingerprints off the gun and place it in Tom’s right hand.
They put the suicide note they’ve written on the coffee table.
They work themselves up into fake tears and dial 911.
After being taken into foster care, the kids are dumped with their grandfather Daniel at his fly-ridden tumbledown house by the Inn River in a swampy part of Massachusetts.
Grandfather Daniel is retired Boston PD.
They haven’t seen a lot of him but he sure as hell remembers them. He remembers them when they were only so high and living on a commune in upstate New York.
Daniel doesn’t go into the city much anymore. He lives by fishing, hunting, and trapping, and his house is decorated with the skulls of many different animals.
Daniel meets the woman from social services with a broken-open shotgun over his shoulder. Margaret and Oliver give their grandfather a hug.
The woman from social services is relieved that the kids seem to know and like the old man.
“Their stepmom wasn’t too fond of me or this place, but I seen the kids a couple of times,” Daniel explains.
When the social services woman has gone, Daniel takes them into the kitchen and gives them each a can of Budweiser, which they accept nervously. A butchered hog is hanging upside down over the large kitchen sink. Its white skin is black with flies.
Daniel shows the kids how to open the beer cans. It’s just like with a Coke. He tells them they can call him Red or Grandpa. He asks them what they want to do with their lives. Oliver says he wants to make a lot of money, maybe in computers, and Margaret says she wants to be an FBI agent like her dad.
Daniel considers that. “We’ll see,” he says. “First thing we have to do is fix them names.” He looks at the boy. “We’ll call you Olly. You like that?”
“Yes, sir,” Olly says.
He examines the girl. “And with you, it’s obvious. That mop of yours. We’re going to call you Ginger.”
64
The monster is out there, right out there through the glass in the fog.
It killed Erik and when it finds the name Rachel in the notebook, it will kill her too. Her and Kylie and Pete and Marty and Ginger and everybody connected with her.
There’s no choice now. Choice was always an illusion.
There’s only one thing to do.
Her hand is trembling.
Pete is looking at her expectantly.
She knows what she is going to do next.
First of all, she calls Marty to check that Kylie is safe and sound. Kylie isn’t answering her phone, as usual, but the GPS locator has them at the mall at Copley Place.
Marty answers immediately. “Yeah, she’s fine, we’re just finishing up at the mall,” he says.
“You have her in your line of sight?”
“Yeah, of course. She’s at the Adidas store with Stuart.”
“And then you’re going to Ginger’s dad’s house?”