Page 34 of The Chain

“She’s a resilient kid. She’s a tough little cookie.”Maybe too tough,Pete thinks.I hope she doesn’t try anything stupid.

22

Friday, 1:11 a.m.

Kylie waits until she thinks it’s very late, but naturally she has no way of telling the time. No iPhone, no iPad, no Mac. No watch, of course, but who wears a watch these days?

As she lies on the mattress, she can hear traffic on a distant road, and she can occasionally hear planes change the thrust of their engines as they descend toward Logan. Very distant planes going to a very distant Logan Airport.

She sits on the mattress with her back to the eye of the camera and nibbles at a graham cracker. Her first plan has failed. The toothpaste tube cannot be used to open the handcuffs. She tried for hours, but it was a total bust. Her second plan, however, might work a little better.

Just after dark, the man had brought her a hot dog and a glass of milk. He set the tray on the floor next to her. The gun was in a pocket in his sweatshirt. The woman had come down to take the tray away with the gun in her right hand. They’re always armed. She’s a thirteen-year-old chained to a two-hundred-pound stove but they aren’t taking any chances. They always come down here with a gun.

And that, Kylie realized, was what was going to help her.

She had spotted it earlier this afternoon. As the sun moved slowly across the sky, she had seen a glint in a corner of the basement. Moving as close as she could, she saw that the glint was a wrench just barely visible against the wall under the boiler. A wrench that had been dropped there and forgotten about, maybe years earlier. They had obviously prepped this basement, but to see the wrench you’d have to be lying on the floor looking directly at the boiler as the sun streamed through the window in the afternoon.

The wrench is the key.

She waits. And waits.

In what are, perhaps, the wee hours, the traffic seems to slow on the road and the planes grow less frequent.

She keeps thinking about that state trooper. Had they killed him? They must have killed him. That means she is being held by two murderers. They don’t seem like murderers, but they are. She tries to fight the terror of that thought but wherever she goes in her mind, it’s lurking there…

She thinks about her mom.

Her mom will be worried sick. She’ll go to pieces. She isn’t as strong as she pretends to be. It hasn’t even been a year since she finished her chemo. And her dad—her dad’s awesome but maybe not the most dependable guy in the world.

She looks at the camera by the stairs again. How late is it now? Will they sleep at all tonight? They have to get some sleep.

Still she waits.

It’s maybe two in the morning now.OK, here goes,she thinks.

She stands, takes the slack out of the chain, and with all her might begins tugging at the stove. It’s enormously heavy, of course, but the floor is smooth concrete without much friction. Earlier, she poured water under the stove’s cast-iron feet and sloshed it around, hoping that might help too.

She pulls at the chain with everything she has, leaning back like a tug-of-war competitor. She’s sweating and her muscles ache and it’s seemingly impossible for a little girl to—

The oven jolts. Her feet give way and she falls to the floor, landing on her tailbone with athwack.

She bites her lip and has to stop herself from yelling.

She rolls around on the ground.Damn, damn, damn.

The pain starts to subside and she examines herself as best she can. Nothing seems broken. She has never broken a bone before, but she imagines the pain would be a lot worse than this. When Stuart broke his wrist ice-skating on the frozen pond at Newbury Common, he had howled and howled.

But then again, that’s Stuart.

She stands up and shakes the pain out of her limbs. Pain is weakness leaving the body, her crazy uncle Pete had once said.So I’m way stronger now,she tells herself, but she doesn’t really believe it.

She grabs hold of the chain and pulls hard, and again the oven jolts, and this time it keeps moving ever so slowly as she keeps pulling. It is, she remembers from science class, all about friction and momentum. The oven is huge but the wet floor is smooth.

It’s heavy, so very heavy, but it’s moving. The noise is ugly, a high-pitched screeching and scraping that is, hopefully, not quite loud enough to be heard outside the basement, never mind in the house.

She sweats and pulls for two minutes and then stops, utterly exhausted. She sits down on the edge of her mattress and breathes hard.

Self-consciously, she looks back at the camera, but that isn’t going to tell her anything. There’s no light above it showing when it’s on. You have to assume that it’salwayson.