Time's Hostage: The dangers of love, loss, and lus (Time Series Book 1)

by Brenda Kuchinsky

  She sang Violetta, the doomed heroine of Verdi’s La Traviata—specifically, the aria from the first act, “Sempre Libera.” Her soprano, ranging effortlessly from softly limpid sweetness to dusky, dramatic climaxes, filled the room. She swelled and receded, receded and swelled, taking everyone in that miserable death house with her on a ride of pure power and beauty.

  Her pristinely white-clad lover with his sooty black heart, his possessive eyes gazing at her, was preening like a proud white cockatiel, his coxcomb expanding. She was not one of the worthless swarming kike rats destined to be exterminated for the good of mankind.

  Superhumanly talented, extraordinarily beautiful, and sexually inventive, she was a goddess to him. She fulfilled his every need, introducing him to new needs that he did not know he held within him. Fecund, too, he had discovered today, in a hungry world gone sterile with death’s murderous grip. The intermingling of their genes would produce a prodigy. He was sure of it. A paragon like his lover. He would wax poetic on the subject when deep in his cups, on his fourth mug of Bavarian dark or his third shot of schnapps.

  His potato dumpling of a wife paled by comparison. She was an ordinary, stolid soul with straw-blond hair and cornflower-blue eyes—pasty faced, weak chinned, squarely built, and flat-chested. Obedient to a fault, climaxing when the Führer marched through town, she waved a scarf ferociously, affirming her oath to the obligatory Kinder, Küche, und Kirche.

  Sophia’s mother consumed all those taking in her stellar performance. When one poor soul in the audience fell over, having made that slight transition from cadaverous to cadaver, his cooling corpse was whisked from the assembly room. Death was a constant companion in this time and place.

  Afterward, the couple toasted each other with the finest champagne. Her magnetic mother took him in her arms and dazzled him with her primitive sexuality. Her reptilian brain had kicked in long ago. She showed no compassion, no feeling for her fellow Jews. She was numb to all that. Survival was the primal need. If she were gifted and brave enough to master that for now, then she reigned supreme in their boudoir and in the camp.

  The camp, permeated with the stench of burning bodies, the air hazy with perpetual floating ashes, a miasma of extermination, moved with a rhythm of its own. What did she care? She lived, and she had created life.

  The scene dissolved as Sophia mentally returned to her bedroom. Barth was staring into her wide-eyed gaze, which had been vacant for several moments as she stared off into space.

  “Are you okay?” Barth asked, his hand resting gently on her shoulder. “I tried calling you for coffee, and I thought you had fallen asleep. But it was a hallucination, right? You had that spaced-out look.”

  “I’m fine now. Yes, you’re right. It was like the photo came to life but with lots more details and lots of ugly bits. My mother singing in a concentration camp. Entertaining the near dead and their tormentors. Oh, and her knight in shining armor. The dandy in white from the picture,” Sophia said.

  “My mother was a gifted lirico-spinto soprano. The war killed her prospects. And that lifelong frustration showed. She would have been a brilliant opera singer under other circumstances. When she was a child, she had singing lessons weekly. Not because her parents were thinking of opera then but because she already had a remarkable voice and sang all the time to amuse herself.

  “Later she got into opera. She ended up subbing as a cantor on the local shul circuit and as an understudy at the local opera house. People would flock to services if she were singing. That’s as far as she got. Another woman might have picked up the pieces and resumed her interrupted musical life. But not my mother. She must have given up.

  “There was always a disconnection between us. I never realized how much of it was her looking backward. Empty eyes. I always thought more of it was due to my shortcomings. That she just didn’t like me. That I was somehow lacking. That I disappointed her. Sad.”

  Sophia was pensive as she thought about her unfulfilled mother and the effect her mother’s unhappiness had had on her own self-esteem.

  With a few shakes of her head, she changed the subject. “Would you be a darling and bring me the coffee? I don’t feel like moving. I’m drained from hallucinating. I’m just going to check my messages. I’ll Skype Lili later on.”

  “Sure, darling. I’ll be right back,” Barth said, squeezing her hand.

  Barth returned with the rich, creamy coffee and a cinnamon biscotti on a tray.

  “Don’t get angry. You know I was thinking about a painting of that photo again. I just put the finishing touches on Metamorphosis. It’s truly done. And I can’t think of anything I’d rather paint than your mother in that photo. It’s knocked everything else out of my thoughts. Maybe it’ll be cathartic for you. Therapeutic,” Barth urged.

  “I don’t want to keep shooting you down, but it’s overwhelming. The picture, the letter, and now the vision. I know you mean well. But now is not the time to push your agenda. I’m rethinking the whole past. This is more of a window into it than either of my parents ever volunteered. Give me some time,” Sophia pleaded.

  “You’re right. I’m being selfish. You know how I get when I have an idea. Take all the time in the world,” Barth said.

  “You? Selfish? Impossible,” she joked.

  “Sophia, you need to see Clyde. This situation is way out of hand. Who knows if these fits or hallucinations or whatever they are might be doing damage to your brain. Or maybe they’re a result of some damage. They’re not doing your psyche any good. Promise me you’ll call him soon,” he said.

  “I promise. You’re absolutely spot-on about that one. I keep putting it off. Things keep popping up and getting in the way. You didn’t help with your craziness. After that, everything took a turn. Not always for the worse. But a turn,” she said as she contemplated the phantasmagoria of images and events, past and present, that had intruded into her life.

  “You’re not saying I started this whole catastrophe?” he asked, looking at her in astonishment.

  “I don’t know what I’m saying. But yes. If I think about it, you set Keith in motion, which set Amanda in motion. And I never would have—” She stopped herself from blurting out Dirk’s name, which had popped into her thoughts.

  “If I remember correctly, you set Amanda in motion by getting jealous when she mentioned Keith’s trip to Key West because you thought I was hooking up with him there. It was all a grand plan to deceive Sophia,” he said. “And stop pulling your ear off.”

  She hadn’t noticed that she had reverted to her customary ear yanking. She stopped.

  “By the way, you didn’t finish your sentence. You never would have what?” he challenged.

  “Nothing,” she replied. Her backside, as if on cue, started throbbing.

  “Okay. Truce. Peace. It’s the holidays. I’m going to the museum for a while. I’ll keep my cell on and with me in case you need me. I’ll leave you to your coffee and messages. What are you going to do?” he asked.

  “I told you. You don’t listen. I’m going to reach out to Amanda. Maybe go over there,” she said, exasperated at Barth’s habitual lack of listening skills.

  “Oh. Right,” he said. He kissed her on the cheek and left.

  Sophia rose and began rummaging in the closet for an inflatable donut pillow she had used when she had injured her tailbone in yoga. She had always considered yoga wimpy until she started practicing it. Then she realized it was anything but wimpy. She had endured shoulder injuries, hamstring injuries, and all sorts of soreness.

  She was triumphant when she located the pillow. She blew it up and sat on it with a sigh of relief.

  When she checked her phone, she found several messages from Amanda, all from last night. She listened to the last one.

  “Sophia, I do need your help. Things are out of hand here. I can’t handle Keith anymore, or, I admit, myself. I’m sorry about the knife and barging in on you. That was ridiculous. Please call me. Please come over. I know it’s getting lat
e. Tomorrow?”

  A cry for help. That was always a clarion call for her intervention. That’s how she grew up. That characterized her first marriage. Her present marriage. Her profession. Ever the parentified child. Ever the helper.

  CHAPTER 30

  Like the sterling savior that she was, Sophia sprang into action. Showering quickly, her love wounds forgotten, she dressed at warp speed and jumped into the Uber as soon as it arrived.

  It was a short ride to Amanda’s special haven just north on the beach. It might as well have been miles and miles away from SoBe. A much more ordered, homogeneous world, beach town though it was.

  Sophia rushed into the lobby, a tastefully understated space with two tall blue-and-white Chinese vases flanking the inner doors and mirroring the deep-pile blue-and-white carpet leading to the doorman’s oversized station, complete with a mahogany desk and fresh flowers—roses and lilies—in a crystal vase.

  She hastily informed Frank, who knew her, she was going up and noticed he was buzzing Amanda as she waited for an elevator. The doors opened onto Amanda’s floor, the eleventh.

  I forgot to bring my donut pillow, Sophia thought as she clipped along on the slate-blue-and-white carpeting, which maintained the lobby color scheme.

  Amanda’s was the first door, 11A, the last down the hall. She had the ocean as her backyard—a lovely daytime view, a black hole at night.

  Sophia’s concern transmuted into alarm when she saw that the door was ajar. Careful, meticulous, compulsive Amanda would never be so careless. She wanted things impenetrable. She abhorred easy access.

  Sophia tried to calm herself down as her heart rate accelerated. She could feel the blood pulsing in her ears like the roiling surf pounding on the shore.

  “Don’t overreact,” she told herself. “It could be insignificant. She’s become careless because she’s under the influence. We’ll work together and get her over this.” Her pumping heart wasn’t buying it. She felt it flip-flopping in her chest.

  Sophia pushed the heavy white lacquered door open.

  “Amanda?” she called out as she walked into Amanda’s immaculate Art Deco living room. “Amanda, it’s me.”

  Nothing.

  Even with her hackles rising, the enormous window looking out on the steel blue stormy ocean below drew her to the other end of the room for a glimpse. That ocean light, with its promise of a dramatic panoramic scene, exerted an irresistible pull.

  Funny, she mused, I hadn’t even realized it was storming. Maybe it just started.

  Get a hold of yourself, Sophia. You’re sauntering over to the window as if you’re here for afternoon tea and your frightened heart isn’t threatening to jump right out of your chest.

  The unmistakable metallic smell of blood invaded her nostrils. For a second, she thought she was going into another hallucination. Then she realized she was entering a nightmare. A waking nightmare.

  Amanda’s bedroom door was wide open revealing her whimsical décor—colonial India meets Tommy Bahamas—complete with a king-size white-on-white bed festooned with yards upon fluffy yards of white mosquito netting.

  This once-spotless centerpiece, the airy, webby throwback to another time and place drawing the eye, was now splattered with Amanda’s blood. Amanda lay inert, blank eyes wide open above a mean, deep gash across her throat that had nearly decapitated her, her carotid artery having pumped out her life’s blood, indiscriminately tainting the virginal white of her bed. Sophia felt as if the blood had drained out of her. Her heartbeat slowed to a sluggish throb as shock set in. She stared dumbly at her mutilated friend’s corpse—tiny, lost, amid the enormous mounds of bloody bedding. The bed looked like an abattoir.

  She could not have been more rooted to the spot if she had been encased in cement. She couldn’t think, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t feel. Her storied sixth sense, her razor-sharp intuition, had deserted her.

  Keith, ice-cold stubby fingers snaking around her wrist and holding it in his tightening grip, startled her. As if a bucket of frigid water had been poured over her head, she snapped back to her senses. She had not so much as sensed a living, breathing human being in the room, so transfixed had she been by the scene. Now his electrifying madness filled the air, threatening to suffocate her.

  Keith whipped her around to face him. The thunderbolt crackling across the sky outside the window was mirrored in his angry gaze. His lips, rouged blood red, were rendered lopsided by a nasty sneer. His curls, illuminated by sporadic lightning flashes, assumed a life of their own, appearing to writhe and squirm, animated by the tempestuous backlighting.

  “How nice of you to come, Dr. Sophia. I can kill two birds with one stone,” he cackled. His lunatic laugh began as a suppressed titter and rose by increments to a hysterical, girlish outburst. “Barth let me down. We made a bargain. But he chose to ignore me, and I had to handle Mummy myself. It won’t be crisscross like we planned. More like crosscross. As usual, I have to do all the work. He double-crossed me, and I have to cross you both off my list,” he said, releasing her hand to trace two crosses in the air.

  Her entire being thrummed with fear as she absorbed his words. She was next. Barth had let him down, and he was going to kill her too. When she was babbling about the Hitchcock plot of Strangers on a Train, predicting Keith’s desire to kill her while Barth killed Amanda, it hadn’t seemed real. Like a fool, she had walked right into the asylum, thinking only of Amanda. Keith, the harmless man-child with his infantile features, had graduated from stalker to killer.

  She wasn’t going to give up so easily. Barth always castigated her for giving up right away. She had to engage Keith in conversation. So far she hadn’t said a word. She was struck dumb. Her alarmed eyes stared into his baby blues.

  Before she could muster up the energy to speak, he thrust into her hands a piece of yellow paper, its jagged top edge indicating it had been hastily ripped out of a legal pad.

  “Here. Read this. My masterpiece. I’ve been formulating it for years. I kept wanting to leave. But I couldn’t. She had to go. Then I could stay. My farewell note to Poopy Pants. That’s what I called Mummy. In my head of course.” He sniggered.

  The Sturm und Drang of the thunder and lightning had evolved into a raucous rainstorm. Great torrents of water pelted the window, their terrific tattoo echoing her terror. She had to get out of this room, this slaughterhouse.

  “Keith, I really want to read your farewell note, but we need to get out of this room,” she said, shocked at how strong she sounded.

  “Okay. Let’s go into my special room. I padlocked it so Mummy couldn’t snoop. You’ll love it. No one else has ever seen it.” He smirked, leading the way.

  She almost wished they had remained in that horror of a bedroom when she saw his special room. He carefully removed the padlock from the door of a room adjoining his bedroom. It opened into an extremely large closet that he had converted into a knife room. More like a knife museum. The walls were covered with knives, knives, knives. Short, long, tiny, enormous. All shapes and sizes. Historic, new, old. Different materials. A variety of colors. There were some sabers and swords. Wicked-looking machetes. There were several glass cases with Swiss Army knives and novelty knives. Obsidian knives with fancy wooden handles and a couple of tomahawks as well. One knife sported gleaming brass knuckles on the handle.

  Where was the bloody knife he had used to do the deed? Maybe he had cleaned it already, and it was back in its rightful place, looking innocent and unused. Or it could still be in the bedroom near the body. She shivered.

  “What a visual ode to phallicism. A priapic museum,” she blurted out.

  “Are you saying I worship the penis? Well, maybe I do, Doctor. But look at the bleeding obvious. I worship knives. It started when I was ten when one of Mummy’s momentary boyfriends gave me a beauty of a Swiss Army knife. Of course he was gone in the blink of an eye, but my fondness for knives was born. Don’t you love this room?” he asked.

  “I love it,” she answere
d obediently.

  “Now read the note. You’ll love that too,” he declared, leading her to a small red leather sofa in the center of the room.

  He probably sits here many an evening admiring his knives, caressing them, she thought, as she sat, the leather sofa supporting her trembling body. How was she going to read anything in this state? She forced herself to concentrate on the words on the page, which was shaking in her unsteady grasp.

  “Read it out loud,” he urged, sitting down beside her. “I’d like to hear it read aloud.”

  Dear Poopy Pants,

  Sorry I had to do this, but Barth stood me up. I couldn’t be your slave for another minute. You’re supposed to change MY poopy pants and take care of ME. Why was I always taking care of you? Making your lunch, helping you with your bath, entertaining you, keeping you company. Living for you. You. You. You. Was I going to wait until you got old and I really had to change YOUR poopy pants? When you started shitting yourself? No fucking way! I had to escape. I had to be with Barth. You were keeping me from everything. I couldn’t tell you I wanted a dad. I couldn’t tell you that you were smothering me. I couldn’t tell you I liked cock. I couldn’t tell you anything. You never listened. It was all about you! With you and Sophia out of the way, Barth and I can live our life.

  Sophia’s voice cracked at that point.

  “Go on. Go on,” Keith said, leaning forward, sporting a nasty smile.

  Sophia croaked out the rest of the note’s contents.

  Barth says he just wants to be a father figure to me. Which I like. But I want more, and I got it once. I think I can get him to be with me once YOU are gone!

  Good-bye, my Poopy Pants. Now I can live.

  Your slave no more,

  Your fun son,

  Keith

  “Barth was going to meet you,” Sophia stammered. “He was held up at work. I know. I spoke to him right before I came here. He wants to see you.”