Rachel’s heart sinks.
Erik’s plan had been what, exactly? What did he expect them to do after they found the cell-phone tower closest to where The Chain’s calls had come from?
“Now what?” she asks Pete.
Pete looks at the clouds and checks his watch. It’s five. They’ve been hiking all day. They’re cold and very wet and he doesn’t want Rachel to be in the swamps at night. Not without proper equipment and with a snowstorm coming.
And he has other issues. He messed up this morning with that two-thirds-dose bullshit. His skin is starting to crawl. His eyes are dry. He’s getting the sweats real bad. It hasn’t fully hit yet, but it will.
He needs the fix.
Soon.
“Do you think we should call it a day?” he asks.
Rachel shakes her head. They’re so close. She has to find them before they come back for her. They won’t get another chance at this. It has to be now.
“Call it a day?” Pete asks again.
“And then what?” Rachel asks.
“Go to the feds? Tell them everything. Let them search for the house.”
“We’ll go to jail.”
“The Dunleavys might not cooperate with the cops,” Pete says.
Rachel shakes her head again. “They’ll help us only if they know The Chain is finished.”
Pete nods.
“What’s that over there by the river to the north?” Rachel asks, taking Pete’s binoculars. “Is that a cabin?”
She scans the structure.
It’s about three-quarters of a mile ahead. A big old house with a deck that goes all the way around the outside. And it’s on a direct vector with the cell-phone tower.
“It’s definitely worth a closer look,” Pete says. “But we’re going to have to wade another stream or two. It’s actually over on the mainland, I think.”
They hike through an icy stream that comes up to their thighs and then up through a sparse little wood to within a few hundred yards of the cabin.
It’s a large dwelling built partially on stilts near a river. It’s next to a couple of derelict farm buildings sinking back into the marsh to the east. Several vehicles are parked under the veranda on the north side of the structure.
The hairs on the back of Rachel’s neck are standing up.
Something about this place screams denouement.
“What do you want to do, Rach?” Pete asks.
“Let’s try to go a little closer. If we can get a look at those license plates…”
“We’ll have to crawl. Nice and low to the ground. The cover’s not so dense here; we could be seen,” Pete says.
Rachel shoulders her shotgun on its strap, drinks the last of her water, and follows Pete as they crawl toward the cabin.
The terrain is boggy and damp with brambles, thistles, and beach-plum bushes.
Within thirty seconds they are scratched, cut, bleeding.
Snow begins to fall.
They’re a hundred yards away now.
It’s an ugly property, all angles and ungainly additions from different eras with different timbers. It has been expanded very recently to accommodate what appear to be a couple of extra bedrooms on the upper story.
Pete takes out the binoculars and tries to read the plates on the vehicles under the house, but he can’t quite make them out. “Rachel, you’ve got good eyes, do you want to try?”
She scans the cars. A Mercedes, a couple of pickup trucks, a Toyota.
She sees someone stepping onto the wraparound balcony.
“Kylie! Oh my God!” she screams. She scrambles to her feet and begins running toward the house.
“What the hell?” Pete yells, momentarily stunned.
She has twenty yards on him, but Pete catches her in seven seconds. He tackles her and she goes down just in front of an old tree stump.
“What the hell are you doing?” Pete says, turning her to face him.
She struggles violently to break free of his grip. “They’ve got Kylie! They’ve got her! I saw her on the balcony,” Rachel says breathlessly.
Pete looks up over the tree stump toward the balcony. There’s no one there. “You’re mistaken.”
“It was her! I saw her!”
Pete shakes his head. There’s no way they’ve gotten Kylie. She’s with Marty and they’ve been careful.
Rachel is hyperventilating.
“It’s not Kylie,” Pete whispers. “And I can prove it. We put the GPS tracker in her shoes, remember? I can show you exactly where she is, and I promise you it’s not here.”
“Show me on the GPS,” Rachel demands. “I know what I saw.”
Pete opens the GPS app and shows Rachel that Kylie is nowhere near them. “She’s in Boston.”
Rachel looks at the phone. Sure enough, Kylie’s GPS is beeping from downtown Boston, not here. “I was sure that was her,” she says, confused.
“Come on, let’s get back to the cover of those bushes before we’re seen,” Pete says.
65
Innsmouth High. Ginger at her tenth-grade career day.
“So what do you want to do with your life, Margaret?”
“I want to be an FBI agent like my father.”
“This is very laudable, sweetie, but you’ll need to improve some of your grades.”
“Which ones?”
“Your English is great, but your math and science need a little work. Your brother can help you, I’m sure.”
“Yeah, he loves that stuff.”
Oliver helping Ginger with her homework in their grandfather’s big ramshackle house by the Inn River. Screens and ant traps and bugs in the summer. Woodstoves and cold and kerosene heaters in the winter.
Daniel teaching the twins how to hunt in the dark places of the Miskatonic Valley. Daniel teaching the twins how to skin and smoke and preserve the meat.
Daniel telling the kids old cop stories. Old war stories.
Ginger and Oliver work hard and they both get into BU, which makes Daniel proud. Olly studies software engineering. Ginger studies psychology.
Both of them do very well indeed. The only fly in the ointment is the amount of money they have to borrow for student loans. Daniel is not a wealthy man and they have grown up poor.
But after graduation, Oliver is headhunted by half a dozen Silicon Valley start-ups and Ginger is headhunted by the FBI, the CIA, and the ATF.
Ginger joins the Bureau.
There’s a lot of affection in the FBI for Ginger and her father. Shame what happened to your pop, real shame…
Ginger works hard and gets fast-tracked. She makes connections. I knew your old man. He was a hell of an agent. He and me, we used to—
Ginger burning the midnight oil.
Ginger slowly rising up the chain of command.
Sometimes she wonders if she’s doing this for herself or to please her grandfather or maybe to one-up her father. Is Ginger’s life a result of or a reaction to her relationship with her dad?
She takes classes at the Behavioral Analysis Unit in Quantico, where they have all sorts of shrinks and investigators who can help her explore these questions if she wants. One of her instructors quotes the German poet Novalis: “Inward goes the way full of mystery.” She likes that and she’d like to someday go on that inward journey to get at the root of why she’s the way she is, but it’s a journey she’ll make by herself. She’ll never trust any shrink with her past history and the thoughts in her head.