At a table near the door, the road workers chatted casually as they ate their meal. Both were burly men with big hands and feet, faces covered in bristly hair, both wearing utility belts and neon orange vests. They were more interesting to watch than the old man, but still not too suspicious.
The middle-aged men in flannel said virtually nothing to each other. They gobbled down their eggs and left, throwing a few dollars on the table before heading out the door. With them gone, the only other people to watch were the pregnant woman and the tattooed man who accompanied her.
Sitting in front of the large window at the front of the building, the two were almost nothing more than black silhouettes against the bright sunlight. They seemed to be angry with one another. Though they tried to speak in low tones, their voices sometimes rose to a pitch loud enough to be heard throughout the diner. They realized what happened each time and quickly lowered their voices again, but the anger was still there.
I watched as the man leaned in to be better heard by the pregnant woman. He held a fork in one hand and a knife in the other, waving them around animatedly as he talked.
I glanced at the woman and saw that she had her head held low as she pushed the food around on her plate. I then turned my attention back to the man, whose hands had stopped moving now. His wrists rested on the edge of the table, silverware clenched in his fists. The sunlight gleamed off the blade of the butter knife, glaring into my eyes.
Mesmerized, I could only stare. I no longer saw the arguing couple. Instead I saw the inside of a dank basement. I saw the light of a dim bulb shining off the blade of an ax that was raised high above the head of a madman. I knew what was coming, what was about to happen. I knew that he was going to swing that ax. There would be a whack as the thick metal blade tore through flesh and bone. It would be immediately followed by the sound of metal striking the concrete beneath the woman who now lay dead and bleeding at his feet. I’d heard it before. I’d hear it again. And maybe the next time I heard it, or perhaps the time after that, it’d be the sound of the ax slicing through my body as he chopped me into pieces.
The clatter of a dropped plate suddenly rang out through the small diner.
I jumped and nearly screamed, but at the last second, just before the sound erupted from my mouth, I clenched my throat and bit my lower lip, cutting it off before it escaped.
When the waitress brought my omelet, I was still tense and sweating, heart racing as I struggled to remain focused on the present.
“Are you okay?” she asked as she set the plate on the table.
Unable to speak for fear that if I opened my mouth that scream would escape, I nodded.
“Well if you need anything else, let me know.”
She placed the ticket face-down on the edge of the table and walked away, leaving me to wrestle with my demons on my own.
My appetite was all but gone but I ate anyway, choking down what would’ve ordinarily been a delicious omelet and toast. Instead, in my present condition, it was tasteless and weighed heavy on my stomach.
I kept my eyes on my plate, blinking rapidly to clear away the image of the rotting finger that lay amidst my food. I knew it wasn’t really there. It had been there once, not that long ago when I was trapped in a house with a monster who saw fit to punish me by placing a severed digit on each plate of food he brought me until I’d learned my lesson. But it wasn’t there now. I told myself this, though it was hard to believe that the gray-skinned appendage wasn’t really laying there in the middle of the plate, nestled among the gooey eggs and cheese.
Somehow I managed to force down the omelet, pay for the food and a copy of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and leave the diner without making a scene or getting killed.
I considered that progress.
Since I had nowhere else to be or nothing else to do, I went back to the motel. At the front desk, I paid for the rest of the week using the fake name I’d given when I checked in the night before, and then I went back to my room.
After wedging the chair under the door knob, I checked the bathroom to make sure no one was hiding in there, maybe having slipped inside while I was out having breakfast.
The room was empty.
Satisfied that I was alone, I kicked off my shoes and sat on the bed, where I read the newspaper.
Until a month ago, I’d refrained from watching or reading any sort of news. I knew deep down that Ron was still out there and still killing women, but I didn’t want to know about it. I didn’t want to see or hear the details of his crimes. There was nothing I could do to help, so knowing for sure what was happening would only make things worse for me. It would probably be the end of the two hours of sleep a night I managed to get.
Then one day I realized that I didn’t need the news to tell me what was happening. I didn’t need to see it in print or hear a news anchor relay the story. I knew it was happening because I knew Ron. I knew he’d never stop. He enjoyed what he did too much to ever quit.
Since there was no way to avoid seeing the damage done by that psychopath, I decided to embrace it. I began to watch the news and read the papers. It was difficult at best, but I kept watching and reading, searching for signs that he was still killing women.
Know your enemy.
So far during the month I’d once again been submersed in the news, I’d found only two reports of missing women that I thought to be the work of Ron Redwine.
In the first case, Rosie Menendez, a forty-nine year-old divorcee and mother of four grown children, had gone drinking with her friends at a local bar and never returned home. Police assumed she’d simply run off with a man since she’d done that very thing on two other occasions. Authorities weren’t taking the matter seriously because she was an adult and had every right to disappear if she wanted to.
I didn’t get the feeling that she’d wanted to disappear.
In the other case, a twenty year-old woman named Carly Brenner had vanished from the local laundromat. When she didn’t come home, her roommate went to the laundromat and found her clothes still in the washer, her car still in the parking lot. She hadn’t been seen or heard from since.
To me, both stories smelled of Ron. I knew he was still out there, still kidnapping and killing women. I had no doubts that these two women were dead. Or at the very least, they were tied up in a dark basement wishing they were.
The day I’d escaped from Ron’s house, I ran to the nearest of his neighbors and called the police. By the time they arrived, he was gone. I’d expected them to launch a manhunt, put out an APB, set up roadblocks, and not stop scouring the area until they’d found him. I’d held nothing back when telling them what had gone on inside that house, and I thought that would’ve been enough to set the wheels of justice in motion, to drive the police to not stop until he was behind bars.
Yet none of that happened.
They searched the house, but little else. The recovered fingerprints didn’t return a match in their database. The only Ron Redwine in the St. Louis area was an elderly man living in a nursing home, and clearly he was not the man they were looking for.
Even though I called every day to see what progress had been made in the case, it wasn’t long until it was moved to the back burner. A serial arsonist had the city on edge and all their resources went toward finding him.
When Ron mailed me a copy of Held, the book he’d written while keeping me hostage in his house, I read it. When I was finished, I took it to the police station thinking maybe there was some sort of clue in it that could help them catch him. But when none of the officers recognized me or remembered anything about the case, I knew I was in it alone.
I was devastated. More than ever, I felt abandoned. If the police didn’t care enough about my case to put forth an effort to find my kidnapper, then what did that mean? It meant it was all for nothing. Everything I’d gone through, everything I’d seen and survived was all for nothing. I might as well have died in that house alongside Stephanie, Melinda, Crystal, and all the other
women Ron had murdered. My survival didn’t help anything. In fact, it made everything worse. I’d lost all I held dear and Ron was still walking around a free man, continuing to perform his horrible deeds without fear of being caught.
I may as well be dead. I was serving no purpose being alive. At least if I was dead, the pain would end.
Rubbing my hands over my face, I pushed those thoughts as far from my mind as I possibly could. Thinking things like that was exactly what had led me to Alpine Grove, and I had no plans of going back there.
Perusing the newspaper, I saw nothing of particular interest to me. It was the same old news, but that was a good thing. No missing women were reported, and no bodies had been found.
At least not today.
I tossed the newspaper onto the nightstand and stretched out on the bed, staring at the smoke-stained ceiling. For a moment, the ceiling changed, becoming floor joists and a bare bulb hanging in the center of the room. The smell of damp concrete filled my nostrils. My body shuddered as a chill passed through me, a chill caused by the cold air against my naked skin.
Then, as soon as it came, the vision was gone and the ceiling was once again the cheap Styrofoam tiles of the motel covered in years of nicotine stains and dust. I was fully clothed, and the smell of the basement was gone, replaced by the musty scent of the room.
Squeezing my eyes closed in an attempt to shut out the memories, I rolled onto my side and wished it all away.
As soon as I began to think about how differently my life would’ve been if only I hadn’t left the house that fateful Tuesday, I tried to think of something else. There was nothing to be gained from going over the what-ifs for the billionth time. It would only make me crazy.
For more than an hour, I fought my thoughts, my memories, until finally I couldn’t take it any longer. When the suicidal thoughts began to creep in on me, I jumped up, grabbed my purse and keys, and I left the motel room.
Half an hour later, I returned.
After locking the door, wedging the chair underneath the knob, and checking the bathroom, I plopped onto the bed, turned on the television, pulled the newly purchased item from the brown paper bag, and twisted off the cap. With the cool glass bottle pressed tightly against my lips, I tilted my head back and drank, trying my damndest to guzzle away my agony.
5
Her name was Bethany, and she was beautiful. In another place, another time, perhaps the two would’ve made a great couple. Ron could easily envision the two dancing at their wedding, her looking radiant in a white gown, him dapper in a tuxedo while their guests looked on with smiles on their faces.
It was so easy to get lost in the fantasy of a life with such a gorgeous specimen.
The fantasy would never become reality however.
Soon, the drugs would wear off and Bethany would wake to find Ron standing beside the metal table. The screaming would begin, erasing the peaceful daydream of the two living happily ever after.
The longer he stared at her naked body, the sadder he became. He realized that her breasts were indeed perfect, but they were too perfect. They were too large and round, the nipples too small. Her hips—while gracefully curved—were too wide. Though her legs were toned to perfection, they were too long. Her lips were too full. Her cheekbones were too high. Her chin was too sharp. Her hair was too dark. Everything about her was wrong. Sure, it was all beautiful. Men all over the world lusted after and longed for a woman that looked like this. But it was all wrong.
She looked nothing like Nicole.
“Who are you?”
Bethany was awake. Though he’d expected her immediate reaction to be screams, she was calm, and oddly so.
Looking down into her dark brown eyes, Ron smiled.
“I’m the man you’ve spent your life praying to never meet.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’ll see soon enough.”
Ron unbuttoned the cuffs of his white button-down shirt and began to roll up his sleeves. “So tell me, Bethany. What made you approach me in the supermarket this morning?”
Shyly, she answered, “I thought you were cute.”
“Did you?”
She nodded.
She was sexy lying on the table, wrists and ankles strapped down firmly with the leather restraints, head held to the table by a similar strap that was wrapped around her throat. The cold steel of the table made her nipples hard, which made Ron hard too.
“I’m flattered. Were you surprised when I invited you to come back to my place?”
Still unsure of what was happening, she slowly nodded again. Her mind was still cloudy, fighting through the foggy effect of the drug in order to make sense of it all. The confusion was written on her face.
Ron chuckled. “I bet you were even more surprised when you woke up just now. You should never, ever go home with a stranger. Didn’t your mother teach you that?”
“My mother died when I was little.” There was a sadness in her voice that might’ve softened someone else. It didn’t soften Ron.
“Well then your father should’ve taught you that.”
“My father was too busy touching me.” The sadness in her voice was replaced with bitterness.
Ron’s eyebrows rose with his interest. “Oh? Is that so?”
“Yeah. He was an asshole too.”
“Too? Are you saying you think I’m an asshole?”
She fell silent and glared at him.
He shrugged. “Well, maybe I am. But what kind of woman are you to come home with a complete stranger in the middle of the day? I mean for crying out loud, Bethany. You only just met me.” He bent at the waist, leaned closer to her face, and whispered, “For all you know, I could be a psychopath.” He smiled broadly, flashing his perfect, white teeth.
“Please let me go.”
Ron straightened up and finished rolling his sleeves.
“Sorry. I can’t do that.”
“Why not? You haven’t done anything. You could just let me go and I’d never say a word to anyone about any of this.”
“True. Or, and this is the option I much prefer, I could keep you here, do whatever I like with you—to you—and you’ll still never say a word to anyone about any of this. Now doesn’t that seem like the more fun way to go about it?”
“Please. I have a family.”
“Really? Is that what you were thinking when you approached me at the supermarket today? Is that what you were thinking when I asked if you wanted to come back to my place? You certainly couldn’t seem to say yes fast enough. It sure didn’t seem to me that you were thinking of your family then.”
“So you’ve never done anything stupid in your life?” She began to cry as she realized what a horrible mistake she’d made.
“Oh yes. I’ve done something stupid. I once allowed a woman to escape from my house. Once,” he held up his index finger and stressed the word so she’d understand just how slim her chances of getting free really were. “And I learned from it. It won’t happen again.”
“Please.”
“Let me save you some trouble, Bethany. All the begging in the world won’t stop what’s about to happen to you. It won’t even slow it down. Believe me when I say I’ve heard it all before. Offers to give me anything I want if I’ll only stop. Promises of never alerting the authorities. Even offers of sexual gratification if I’ll only undo those restraints. But you know something? This is what I want. You’ll never alert the authorities when I’m done with you. And as for sexual gratification, well, I’m going to get that anyway. So there’s nothing you can say that’ll stop this. There’s no offer you can make.”
Ron walked around the metal table where Bethany lay, pulling against the restraints. He turned his back to her and slowly ran his eyes across the vast array of tools, some old, others new, trying to decide which he should use first.
“My advice? Just lie there and enjoy it. It shouldn’t be difficult to enjoy the sex. I’m really quite good. And as for the pain, I think it’s
best if you focus on it. Some women try to ignore it. They try to fight it and pretend it isn’t happening. But I think that just makes it worse. You can’t trick your mind into thinking you aren’t in pain. So you might as well focus on it and think about it. Really feel it. Sometimes, there’s pleasure to be had in pain.”
He settled on a pair of locking pliers. He picked them up, felt the weight in his hand, the cool metal clutched in his palm.
Behind him, Bethany whimpered, “Please don’t hurt me.”
Ron smiled.
Slowly, he began to circle her, walking around the table, pliers in one hand, the fingers of the other lightly tracing the hills and valleys of her naked body, a body now covered with gooseflesh.
Normally, he had a plan. He brought women to his home with a purpose. Once the purpose was served, he discarded of them. The truth in Bethany’s case was that he didn’t have a plan. He’d only yesterday discarded the last woman, Candy, and hadn’t intended to bring another here so soon. However, the sight of Bethany’s twinkling eyes and charming smile had stirred something deep within him, something he’d been too busy to notice.
He was lonely. Having spent his life as a loner, he’d been surprised at how much he’d enjoyed Nicole’s company. Every card game, every conversation, every exchange between them had given him the warmth that came with human interaction. He hadn’t known he’d been lonely. He hadn’t known that he wanted someone to talk to, someone with whom to share his thoughts and ideas. But he’d genuinely enjoyed it, and now was surprised to find that he missed it. He missed the companionship of having a woman in the house. Not just a victim (for lack of a better word), but a woman with whom he could do things like play cards, eat dinner, discuss his plans. He hadn’t realized just how lonely he was until he saw Nicole on the news. Now it was all he could think about.
Bethany could be the one. She could be Nicole’s replacement, though it would take some getting used to the idea of having someone other than Nicole around. Again, this woman was beautiful but she was no Nicole.
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