Page 100 of The Chain

“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 tostraighten 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 watchingThe 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 blogInformation onThe 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 clicksYes.

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.