Held (3 page)

I didn’t respond. Instead, I took another bite of sandwich as he grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator. He opened it and
set it on the table in front of me.

Returning to his seat, he asked, “You like it?”

“I’d like it more if I were somewhere else eating something else with someone else.”

He nodded. “It’s going to be fun having you here. You’re so unlike the others.”

There were so many things wrong with that sentence, I didn’t even know where to begin. First of all, it sounded like he planned to keep me around for a while. I suppose it was good that he didn’t plan to kill me. At least not yet, but I didn’t want to be here. And for him to compare me to ‘the others’ frightened me. How many others had there been?

He must’ve seen the look on my face. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of you.” He leaned forward over the table and added, “I like you.”

Somehow, that didn’t make me feel better.

“Would you like to play a game
of Gin Rummy?” he asked after we’d finished eating.

“Yeah. At home, without you.”

“How about here, now, with me? You’re going to be here a while, so you might as well get used to the idea and have a little fun.” He stood and walked across the room to a drawer, from which he produced a deck of playing cards. He returned to the table, sat, opened the box and began to shuffle the cards.

“How long do you think I’m going to be here?” I asked. “You certainly seem to have some sort of plan.”

He shrugged. “You’ll be here as long it takes.”

“As long as what takes?”

“As long as it takes for me to do my research.” He began dealing the cards.

I sighed in frustration. I wasn’t getting much from him and it was pissing me off. I needed answers.

He had already picked up his cards and organized them. With his elbow on the table and the cards fanned in his hand, he looked at me. “Are you going to pick up your cards and play with me?”

“Why would I want to play with you? Why would I want to do anything with you? You brought me here against my will and handcuffed me to your table. What makes you think I’m even in the mood to play?”

“It’s true that I brought you here against your will, but you have to admit that I’ve been nothing but nice to you. Isn’t that right?” He waited patiently for me to answer.

Though
I hated to admit it, he was right. I nodded.

“So why wouldn’t you want to play with me? Am I not good company?”

He actually had been decent to me so far. But who knew what lay ahead? I was still being held hostage in his house. I really didn’t know what to think. Even if I did know what to think, I doubted that I could’ve thought it because my head was spinning.

I picked up the cards in my left hand and brought them down to my lap, placing them in my right hand. I straightened them out and arranged them. This was the weirdest thing that had ever happened to me.
It even trumped the time at the supermarket when someone’s kid tripped and fell, grabbing my elastic-waist Capri pants on the way down. I’d stood there in the crowded store, arms loaded with bags, while my pants slid to my ankles. And that wasn’t even the weird part. The weird part came when some guy behind me bent down, grabbed my pants, and pulled them up. Then patted my ass. Compared to this, that was nothing.

As we played, I had questions I needed answered and I wasn’t going to let him slip out of answering them.

“What’s your name?” I asked.

“Why do you want to know?”

“So I’ll know what to call you.”

“Well, it would be nice to hear you call me something other than asshole.” He smiled at me over his cards. “My name is
Ron.”

I waited for him to ask
my name, but he didn’t. “Don’t you want to know my name?”

“I know your name,
Nicole.”

“How do you know
that?”

“Are you surprised?”

“A little.”

He chuckled. “It’s nothing spectacular, though it would be nice to be able to shock and awe you with some fabulous story of how I studied you for quite some time, took notes of your movements, did a historical report on your family and such. But I’m afraid it’s much
simpler than that. I looked in your wallet while you were in the bathroom. Saw your name plastered throughout on checks, credit cards, and your driver’s license.”

I relaxed a little with relief knowing that he hadn’t been following me and planning this.
I mean, I knew he had planned to kidnap someone; it was just a relief to know it was happenstance that it ended up being me.

“Did you think I’d been stalking you? Hunting you perhaps?”

I shrugged. “I didn’t know. You’re a psychopath and I can’t guess what you do in your spare time.”

“A psychopath? Well, that’s a step up from asshole, I suppose.” He smiled. “I planned to bring someone home with me today. I wasn’t sure who until I saw you.”

I watched him pick up some cards from the discard pile, and couldn’t help but ask, “What about me?”

“Look at you. You’re a young adult. You’re beautiful. You have gorgeous brown hair, which has always been my preferred color. Your smile is enchanting. Your teeth are bright and straight. Your skin is clear and just the right shade of tan. You’re fit. When I brought you here, I had no idea just how much fun you were as a person. So as it turns out, not only do you have the looks, but you also have the personality. You’re the whole package.”

I watched him sort through cards, and I thought about what he’d said. Clearly, he didn’t know how to read a person. He called me a young adult, but I was twenty-eight. My smile was enchanting because I had a dentist who worked magic with teeth whitener and veneers. My skin was the right shade of tan because my best friend owned a salon and was an expert at spray tans. Had her salon not also contained a gym, I wouldn’t be fit either. And as for my personality, well, I couldn’t argue with him there.

Continuing both the game
and the interrogation, I asked, “So what do you do, Ron, since you don’t work at an asylum?”

He smiled. “Don’t you recognize me?”

I looked at him, studying his face. “You mean from the Wanted posters hanging in the Post Office? Sure.”

He laughed. “Your charm just grows on me,
Nicole. I thought maybe you would’ve recognized me from the back of my book.”

“What book?”

“I’m not surprised that you don’t recognize me. My first novel was the farthest thing from a success. But it’s okay, because my next novel,
Held
, is going to be a bestseller.”

“You sound pretty confident about that for a guy who failed so miserably
the first time,” I taunted him. I was aware that it wasn’t a good idea to poke the bear, but I couldn’t help it. The guy got to me.

“Oh I am certain that the second time will be a success.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“You’re going to help me.”

I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. First he tells me he’s a horrible writer, and now he tells me I’m going to help him. I’m not a writer, and I never claimed to be. I didn’t know what kind of help I could offer him.

“How could I possibly help you?” I asked, laying d
own the last card from my hand.

“Well played,” he said. We added up our points and he wrote them down on a small notepad. He then shuffled the cards and resumed our conversation. “I mentioned earlier that you were going to help me with my research.”

“Yeah, you said that, but you never explained it.”

As he dealt, he said, “I need someone to study while I write the book.”

“What do you mean, study?” I was as lost now as I was five minutes ago.

He rested his hands on the table and thought of a better way to phrase his words. “The book is about a girl who’s held captive, and I’m going to hold you captive until I’m done writing it. That way, I can base what I write on real experiences. I will base my character on you, and if you cry about certain things, the character will cry. Make sense now?”

I shuddered at the thought of the things he would do to me just to gauge my response. “That sounds retarded.”

He sat back and looked as though I’d slapped him. “What do you mean it sounds retarded?” He looked as if those words tasted bad in his mouth.
His face scrunched up as he said them.

“I mean it sounds stupid. No one wants to read something like that even if you could write it well, which based on the sales of your last book, you can’t. It’s never going to work.”

He pounded his fist on the table, knocking a couple of his cards to the floor. His eyes were wide with anger. His nostrils flared. His chest heaved with his heavy breathing. I quickly thought of a way to calm him. I didn’t like him when he was calm, but I certainly didn’t like him when he was angry.

I quickly added, “Then again,
Ron, with me here to add the realism that you need, you might just pull it off. Who knows?”

This seemed to satisfy him. It took a full minute, but he calmed down and regained his composure. He picked
up his cards from the floor and set about arranging them in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing.

We played that hand in silence. I won again, and he wrote down our scores. As he shuffled the cards, I wondered if my husband had begun to worry yet. Looking at my watch, I saw that it was almost four o’clock. I’d been gone from home since eleven thirty, and had been officially missing since one o’clock. It was nearly dinner time, and I never failed to be home for dinner with my husband and son.
If he hadn’t started worrying yet, he soon would.

“Sometimes I get...angry.” After a moment, he added, “I don’t suppose there’s a need to apologize. After all, you’ll learn soon enough about my anger.”

“What does that mean?” I was afraid it meant he was going to take his anger out on me.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said. “Let’s just play. No need to ruin a perfectly good evening
with talk of anger. Now what do you like to do in your spare time?”

I opened my mouth to smart off to him, but before I could, a clatter came from the hallway.
Ron jumped up from his chair and I spun around. I didn’t know what had caused the sound, but I had a feeling he knew.

At first I saw nothing, as there was nothing to see. But then, the first door on the right
in the hallway burst open and what emerged was beyond my imagination.

It was a woman, I could tell that much because she was naked. But I couldn’t have
given her description to the police because she was covered in blood and filth. Her hair was long and stringy and caked with both wet and dry dirt. Her eyes were wide, and even from this distance, I could see the fear. And I could smell her. It was a combination of body odor, fecal matter, and piss.

I wasn’t sure whether she saw me, but I knew she saw
Ron. When her eyes found him, she screamed. Then, she turned and ran into what I assumed was the living room. Ron bolted after her. I listened to the sounds coming from the next room and tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

Something crashed to the floor, probably a lamp, and then there were sounds that could only be
Ron hitting her. Some were slaps, others sounded more like punches. She yelled and screamed. He told her to shut up. Then, Ron came out of the living room backward. He was dragging the woman, who was on the floor kicking and screaming. Ron’s hands were wound around clumps of her hair. She tried to move his hands, tried to scratch him, tried to hit him, but managed to do nothing except make him angry. And what I’d seen at the table just minutes earlier was nothing compared to this.

He slammed her head to the floor and pivoted on his left foot. He sat on her belly, one leg on each side of her. As she continued to kick and scream and thrash around, trying to get in some good blows, he got in a few of his own. He punched her in the face repeatedly. He slapped her. At one point, he choked her.

I looked away. I couldn’t watch any longer.

When the slapping stopped, I looked ba
ck and saw him dragging her now limp body through the open doorway, back to where she’d been.

I was left sitting in the kitchen wondering who she was and what was going on.

Suddenly, everything was real. I was being held in a house with a madman who had been torturing a woman for no telling how long. I didn’t dare ponder how long she might’ve been here. He had two sides of which I was now aware. He had a calm side, which allowed him to seem friendly and normal. Then, he had a dark side, full of anger. He was capable of anything.

I was scared for my life. Fearing I’d never see my husband and son again, I pulled on my hand, willing the damn thing to slide out of the handcuff. I put my left hand on the chain between the cuffs and pulled. I even put my feet on the edge of the table and pushed against it as I pulled. This resulted in nothing but pain.