The Chain Read online

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.”

  “He’s down there with the firm. They’re on a retreat so they had to hand in their phones.”

  “But where is it, Tammy? Please, think.”

  “Augusta! He’s in Augusta. I think I have a contact number somewhere if you need it.”

  “I need it.”

  “Yeah, hold on, lemme see, here it is, OK.” She reads out a number.

  “Thanks, Tammy. I better call him.”

  “Wait, what’s the emergency?”

  “Oh, it’s nothing, a problem with the roof, it’s leaking, that’s all. No big deal. Thank you,” she says and hangs up.

  She dials the number Tammy gave her.

  “Gleneagle Augusta Hotel,” the receptionist says.

  “I’d like to speak to Marty O’Neill, please. I’m his, er, wife, and I’ve forgotten what room he’s in.”

  “Um, let me see…seventy-four. I’ll put you through.”

  She puts Rachel through to the room, but he isn’t there. She calls the front desk again and asks the receptionist to tell Marty to call her as soon as he gets back in.

  She hangs up and sits down on the floor again.

  She’s dazed, speechless, horrified.

  Given all the evil people in the world with unbalanced karmic checkbooks, why has this happened to her, especially after everything she’s been through the past couple of years? It isn’t fair. And poor Kylie’s just a little girl, she—

  The phone rings next to her. She picks it up and looks at the ID: Unknown Caller again.

  Oh no.

  “Calling your ex-husband?” the scary, distorted voice says. “Is that really what you want to do now? Can you trust him? Can you trust him with your life and the life of your child? You’re going to need to because if he says anything to anybody, Kylie’s dead, and I think we’ll have to kill you too. The Chain always protects itself. Maybe have a think about that before your next phone call.”

  “I’m sorry. I…I didn’t get through to him. I left a message. It’s just…I don’t know if I can do this by myself, I—”

  “We might allow you to get help later. We will send you a way to contact us and you can ask us for permission. But for now, if you know what’s good for you, don’t talk to anyone. Just get the money and start thinking about a target. You can do this, Rachel. You did well getting rid of that cop back there on the highway. Yes, that’s right, we saw. And we’ll be watching you closely until this is all over. Now get on with it,” the voice says.

  “I can’t,” Rachel protests meekly.

  The voice sighs. “We don’t select people who require continuous coaching. That’s way too exhausting for us. We pick self-starters. Bootstrappers. That’s you, Rachel. Now, get up off the goddamn floor and get moving!”

  The line goes dead.

  Rachel looks at the phone in horror. They are watching her. They know who she’s calling and everything she’s doing.

  She pushes the phone away, gets to her feet, and staggers to the bathroom like she’s walking from a car accident.

  She runs the faucet and splashes water on her face. There’s no mirror in here or anywhere in the house except for Kylie’s room. She’d gotten rid of all the mirrors because of the visual horror of the whole hair-falling-out routine. Of course no one in her family had ever allowed her to think that she might die. Her mother, the nurse, had explained right from the get-go that it was a treatable stage 2A breast cancer that would respond well to an aggressive precision surgical intervention followed by radiation and chemotherapy. But in those first few weeks, looking in the bathroom mirror, she saw herself diminishing, hollowing out, wasting away.

  Getting rid of all the mirrors had been an important step in her recovery. She didn’t have to see herself become the terrible, pale skeletal spider of the dark days of the
chemo. Her recovery wasn’t exactly a miracle—the stage 2A five-year survival rate was 90 percent—but still, you could always be one of the 10 percent, couldn’t you?

  She turns the faucet off.

  Good thing there’s no goddamn mirror, because Mirror Rachel would be looking back at her with dead, accusing eyes. Letting a thirteen-year-old girl wait by herself at a bus stop? You think this would have happened if Kylie were with Marty?

  No. It wouldn’t have. Not on his watch. On yours, Rachel. Because, let’s face it, you’re a loser. They’re completely wrong about you. Tragically mistaken. Thirty-five and you’re starting your first real job? What have you been doing all this time? All that potential wasted. The Peace Corps? Nobody joins the Peace Corps. Those years drifting with Marty after Guatemala. You working after he finally decided he wanted to go to law school?

  You’ve been faking it. But you’re just a loser and now your poor daughter has gotten sucked into your loser web.

  Rachel points a finger at the place where the mirror used to be. You dumb bitch. I wish you had died. I wish you had been one of the 10 percent who’d died!

  She closes her eyes, breathes, counts down from ten, opens them again. She runs to the bedroom and changes into the black skirt and white blouse she bought for teaching. She puts on her expensive-looking leather jacket, finds a respectable pair of heels, runs a hand through her hair, and grabs her shoulder bag. She gathers her financial documents, her laptop, and the employment contract from Newburyport Community College. She gets Marty’s stash of bar-exam cigarettes and the sealed bag of flood money. She runs to the kitchen, slips in the heels, almost smashes her face into the range hood, rights herself, grabs her phone, and tears out to the car.

  7

  Thursday, 9:26 a.m.

  The First National Bank on State Street in downtown Newburyport opens at 9:30 a.m. Rachel paces the sidewalk near the bank entrance and puffs on her Marlboro.

  State Street is deserted except for a very pale, nervous, older man wearing a heavy coat and a Red Sox cap who is walking toward her.

  Their eyes meet as he stops in front of her.

  “Are you Rachel O’Neill?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she replies.

  The man swallows hard and pulls his cap lower. “I’m supposed to tell you that I’ve been off The Chain for a year now. I’m supposed to tell you that because I did as I was told, my family is safe. I’m supposed to tell you that there are hundreds of people like me who can be recruited to bring you a message if The Chain thinks you or anyone in your family needs a message.”

  “I get it.”

  “You’re—you’re not pregnant, are you?” the man asks hesitantly, seemingly going off script for a moment.

  “No,” Rachel replies.

  “Then this is your message,” he says and, without warning, punches her in the stomach.

  The air is knocked out of her and Rachel crumples to the ground. He is surprisingly strong, and the pain is terrible. It takes her ten seconds to get her breath back. She looks up at the man in incomprehension and fear.

  “I’m supposed to tell you that if you need further proof of our reach, you should Google the Williams family of Dover, New Hampshire. You won’t see me again but there are many others out there like me. Do not attempt to follow me,” the man says and with tears of shame running down his cheeks, he turns and walks quickly back down the street.

  Just then the bank door opens and the security guard sees her sprawled on the ground. He looks at the man hurrying away from her; his fists clench and it’s clear that he senses something has just happened.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?” he asks.

  Rachel coughs and pulls herself together. “I’m fine, I guess. I, uh, took a spill.”

  The security guard offers her his hand and helps her to her feet.

  “Thank you,” she says and winces in pain.

  “Are you sure you’re OK, ma’am?” he asks.

  “Yes, fine!”

  The security guard looks at her oddly for a moment and again at the man hurrying away. She can tell that he’s wondering if she’s some kind of shill in a bank-robbery attempt. His hand drifts toward his gun.

  “Thank you so much,” she says. She lowers her voice to a whisper. “I’m not used to heels. So much for making a good impression at the bank!”

  The guard relaxes. “No one saw you but me,” he says. “I don’t know how you walk in those things.”

  “This is a joke I tell my daughter: ‘What do you call a dinosaur in high heels?’”

  “What?”

  “‘My-feet-are-saurus.’ She never laughs. She never laughs at my dumb jokes.”

  The guard smiles. “Well, I think it’s funny.”

  “Thank you again,” Rachel says. She fixes her hair, goes inside the bank, and asks to see Colin Temple, the manager.

  Temple’s an older guy who used to live out on the island before moving into town. He and Rachel had attended each other’s barbecues, and Marty had gone fishing with him on his boat. Colin hadn’t screwed her over the couple of times she had missed mortgage payments since the divorce.

  “Rachel O’Neill, as I live and breathe,” he says with a grin. “Oh, Rachel, why do birds suddenly appear every time that you’re near?”

  Because they’re actually carrion crows and I’m one of the goddamn undead, she thinks but doesn’t say. “Good morning, Colin, how are you?”

  “I’m fine. What can I do for you, Rachel?”

  She swallows the pain of the gut punch and forces a half smile onto her lips. “I’m in a bit of trouble, and I wonder if we can have a talk.”

  They repair to the manager’s office, which is decorated with yacht pictures and tiny intricate model boats that Colin has made himself. There are several photos of a snot-nosed King Charles spaniel that she can’t for the life of her remember the name of. Colin leaves the door a little bit ajar and sits behind his desk. Rachel sits opposite and tries to put a pleasant expression on her face.

  “What can I do to help?” Colin asks, still pretty cheery but with suspicion creeping into his eyes.

  “Well, it’s the house, Colin. That roof above the kitchen is leaking and I had a contractor in yesterday and he said the whole thing will have to be replaced before it snows or it all might come down.”

  “Really? It looked OK last time I was out there.”

  “I know. But it’s the original roof. From the 1930s. And it leaks every winter. And now it’s just a danger. To us, I mean. To me and Kylie. And also, you know, to the house. You guys have the mortgage and if the house was destroyed, your asset wouldn’t be worth anything,” she says and even manages a little fake laugh.

  “How much does your contractor say he’ll need?”

  Rachel had thought about asking for the full twenty-five thousand but that seems ridiculous for a roof job. She has nothing in her savings account, but she can charge ten grand on her Visa. She’ll worry about paying off the bill when Kylie is home safe.

  “Fifteen thousand. But it’s fine, Colin, I’m good for it. I’m starting a new job in January,” she says.

  “Oh?”

  “I’ve been hired to teach some classes at Newburyport Community College. Introduction to Modern Philosophy. Existentialism, Schopenhauer, Wittgenstein, all that good stuff.”

  “Finally using that degree, eh?”

  “Yeah. Look, I’ve brought the employment contract and the full salary details. It’s not much but it’s a steady paycheck and it’s more than I was getting as an Uber driver. Things are really going great for us now, Colin—just, you know, apart from the roof,” she says as she hands over the documents.

  Colin examines the paperwork and then looks up and examines her. He knows something is wrong. She probably looks awful. Wizened, thin, worried. Like someone whose breast cancer has returned or who is in the final stages of a methamphetamine death spiral.

  His eyes narrow. His mood changes. He shakes his head. “I’m afraid we can’
t defer any more payments and we can’t add anything to the original loan. I wouldn’t be allowed to do that. I have very little discretion in these matters.”

  “A second mortgage, then,” she says.

  He shakes his head again. “I’m sorry, Rachel, but your house isn’t a safe enough asset for that. To be brutally honest, it’s just a glorified beach shack, isn’t it? And you’re not even really on the beach.”

  “We’re on the tidal basin. It’s waterfront property, Colin.”

  “I’m very sorry. I know you and Marty talked for years about remodeling it, but you never did, did you? It’s not properly winterized, there’s no central air.”

  “The land itself, then. Property prices have been going up around here.”

  “You’re on the unfashionable western side of Plum Island, not the Atlantic side. You face the marshes and you’re in the flood zone. I’m sorry, Rachel, there’s nothing I can do for you.”

  “But, but…I have this new job.”

  “This employment contract at the community college is only for one semester. You’re a bad risk for the bank—you can see that, can’t you?”

  “You know I’m good for it,” she insists. “You know me, Colin. I’m almost always on time. I pay my debts. I work hard.”

  “Yes. But that’s not the issue.”

  “And what about Marty? He’s a junior partner now. I’ve been letting him slide on the child-support payments because of Tammy’s bankruptcy, but—”

  “Tammy?”

  “His new girlfriend.”

  “She went bankrupt?”

  Crap, Rachel thinks. She knows this information will not help her case, so she tries to rush through it.

  “Oh, it’s nothing. She had a chocolate store in Harvard Square, and it went under. She’s not a businesswoman. I think she’s only about twenty-five or—”

  “How do you lose money selling chocolate in the munchies capital of New England?”

  “I don’t know. Look, Colin. We’re old friends. And I…I need this. I need it as soon as possible. It’s an emergency.”

  Colin leans back in his chair.

  Rachel sees him turning all this over. He’s probably learned how to spot a liar…