Page 122 of The Chain

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

Afew 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.