Held (13 page)

Ron
laid an old leather tool belt on the floor beside him. From it, he pulled a hammer and a chisel. Still squatted, he moved toward her left hand.

“Nicole, make sure you watch this. Melinda, this is going to hurt a bit, I’m afraid.”

Situating himself so that I could see his every move, he put one foot on her forearm and pressed down, paralyzing the muscles and tendons in her forearm and hand, making it impossible for her to move her fingers. He put the chisel against her skin and beat it one hard time with the hammer. That’s all it took to cut off her finger.

As she screamed and howled through a hoarse throat,
Ron picked up the finger and showed me. Her thin gold wedding band was still attached. He laid it on the tool belt and returned the tools to their place.

“Tell Nicole how much you enjoy taking her punishment,” he told Melinda.

In between screams, she shouted, “I hate you, bitch!”

Through my tears, I said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Go to hell,” she screamed to me. To Ron, she begged, “Please stop. Pleasepleaseplease stop.”

Of course he didn’t.

He pulled a knife from the tool belt. I guessed the blade to be about eight inches long. It was big. He put it to Melinda’s belly, and I could only watch as she began to thrash around as much as possible while alternately begging him to stop and screaming.

“Since this is for Nicole, I thought we’d carve her name onto your flesh. What do you think of that, Melinda?”

“No,” she screamed. “Please no! Please!”

As
Ron began to carve into Melinda’s skin, making a large N as slowly as he could, I began to beg him to stop. Melinda’s and my pleas mingled together.

“I guess you should just be happy that her name isn’t Margu
erite,” he joked as he continued slicing her.

As the blood spilled off her belly and slowly ran across the floor toward the drain, I cried harder than I had since he’d brought me here. Her pain was because of me. And if I’d been a stronger person, a better person, I would’ve switched places with her. But I couldn’t. All I could do was watch and cry and beg him to stop.

“There,” he said when he’d spelled out my name in big letters across her stretch marked belly. “Now you can always remember this day, and your good friend Nicole.”

She continued to scream, though her voice was going.
It broke often, cutting out completely at times.

Ron
stood with his tools and turned to walk away from her. But he quickly turned back and stuck the cattle prod to one of the open cuts on her belly. She howled and screamed through clenched teeth as her body spasmed, and then suddenly, there was nothing else.

Afraid she was dead
, I focused on her face and chest. She was still very much alive. But her voice was gone. She was still screaming her head off, but no sound came from her.

Ron
chuckled and walked away. He returned everything to its place and walked over to me.

“I’m going upstairs. I’ll come retrieve you later. Enjoy your time with Melinda. Had her voice not given out on her, I’m sure she would’ve had plenty to say to you.” He smiled and walked up the stairs, leaving me in the basement, crying and laden with guilt.

I cried nearly the entire time I was in the basement. I couldn’t help it. The guilt was heavy, though I tried to tell myself that he was torturing her anyway, and he would’ve surely done those things to her even without me as a reason. The only reason he said it was my fault was to torture me too. He liked me enough to not want to torture me physically, but not enough keep him from torturing me mentally, emotionally, and psychologically. I knew this really wasn’t my fault, but I still felt horrible.

Some
time later, Ron returned. As he removed the cuff from my left wrist and helped me to my feet, he asked, “Are you glad to see me?”

“Yes,” I said, though the answer was both yes and no. I was glad to be leaving the basement, but I was never glad to see him.

“Good. I thought you might be.” He kissed my cheek softly and led me up the stairs. “I made you some scrambled eggs and bacon and toast.”

Confused, I asked, “It’s morning?”

“Of course.”

“You left me down there all night?”

“Yes. It doesn’t seem like it, does it? Time flies when you’re having fun.”

The son of a bitch had left me down
there all night. No wonder I was tired and my back was stiff.

Even though he sometimes slipped something into my food to knock me out so he could take me to the basement, I was looking forward to eating a good breakfast. He’d only done it a couple times so far
, and only after I’d angered him. I was starving and he was a good cook. As I’d done nothing wrong, I didn’t think he’d drug me again so soon.

I sat in the usual chair as he locked the cuff to the underside of the table. I yawned, and immediately felt guilty about doing so. Melinda had gone through all that, and I was yawning and upset because he’d left me in the basement all night.
I was selfish.

I was wiping my
swollen eyes with my hand when he brought my plate. He set it down in front of me, went to the other side of the table, and took his seat.

With the spoon in my hand, I scooped up a wad of scrambled eggs and put them in my mouth. As always, they were delicious. I put another scoop in my mouth and looked around at the other food on my plate. The bacon looked perfect. The toast had the right amount of butter melted into it. But then I saw something else, something that nearly made me vomit.

I stopped chewing immediately and stared at it. Ron must’ve been watching me.

“I think that’s appropriate, don’t you?”

I shook my head, afraid that if I opened my mouth to speak, I’d puke.

“You don’t have to eat it. It’s just a little reminder.”

Forcing myself to swallow the mouthful of eggs, I said, “What’s it supposed to remind me of, Ron? The kind of person you are?”

“No. It’s to remind you to be a good girl.”

“How can I eat with that on my plate?”

“It’s not touching any food. It’s just there for you to see. You don’t have to touch it or eat it. Just see it.”

“I don’t know if I can eat with it there. It’s gross. Can’t you just put it on the table or something? Does it have to be on my plate?”

“Yes, Nicole. It does,” he said sharply. “How else will you learn?” He softened his voice and said, “Think of it as Melinda giving you the finger.” He laughed.

I didn’t.

How the hell was I supposed to eat with a severed finger on my plate, nestled between the eggs and the bacon? How could I even have an appetite when she’d lost that finger because of me?
I hated him and I hated myself.

I dropped the spoon
. It fell to the plate, clanking against the wedding band on the finger.

“You’re not finished, are you? You’ve hardly eaten anything?”

“I’m not very hungry.”

“You were until you saw the reminder. Is that what’s wrong?”

“Yeah. It’s disgusting. I can’t eat with that there, especially knowing it’s my fault.”

He smiled and nodded. “Then it’s working perfectly. I want you to eat, don’t get me wrong. But I want you to learn. Yes, this lesson has already taught you so much more than just being left on an old mattress did.
I don’t see that we’ll have any more problems, do you?”

I shook my head.

I didn’t eat anymore at breakfast. I just couldn’t. But at lunch, it was on the plate. At supper, it was on the plate. The next morning, there it was, sitting beside my waffles. At lunch, it was lying beside my sandwich. At dinner, it was beside the pot roast on my plate. Every meal for the next few days was garnished with Melinda’s severed finger. It was starting to smell. Even over the mouth-watering aromas of the food, I could detect the stench of decay rising from the plate. Just as my stomach growled from the anticipation of the food, it flip-flopped at the smell and sight of the finger.

This went on for days. Ron brought me a hearty plate of food containing a rotting finger, and each time, he took it away untouched.
By the seventh day, I was absolutely starving. I had to eat something. As Ron sat across from me eating as if nothing was wrong, I managed to talk myself into eating without looking at the finger or eating anything on the same side of the plate as the finger. If I only ate the food on the opposite side of the plate, that would be okay. Well, not okay, but better than eating the food near the rotting digit, and certainly better than starving.

That
method worked for a couple of days, but Ron soon caught on to what I was doing. Then, he started serving my plates to me with the finger in the middle of the food. For a few days, I didn’t eat. But when the hunger pains returned, I started eating the food from the edges of the plate. Anything that wasn’t close to the finger, I ate.

Finally, sometime after my next
menstrual cycle, Ron quit putting the finger on my plate altogether. When I first didn’t see the appendage among my food, I worried that he’d cooked it and was serving it to me. I hesitated at dinner the first night without it, afraid to eat the food. I couldn’t shake the thought that chopped up inside the meat loaf was what was left of the flesh from the finger.

Ron saw my hesitation and explained himself.
“The skin was rotting off the bone, and I don’t want you to accidentally eat any of it and get sick. When the skin is completely rotted away, I may return the bones to your plate, but I don’t think that’ll be necessary. I truly believe you’ve learned your lesson. Am I wrong, Nicole?”

I shook my head
, disgusted that he still had the finger. I briefly wondered where he was keeping it. Up until now, he’d kept it in a bag in the freezer, taking it out for each meal, returning it when the meal was done. I had no doubt that it was there now, as he spoke, and I wondered how long he would leave it in there.

It wasn’t long after he stopped putting her finger
on my plate that Melinda died.

Ron
had came to my room that night and asked me if I was ready to have him. I told him I still wasn’t ready, which of course made him angry. I heard him storm down the steps to the basement, and I didn’t hear him return until the sun shone through the windows the next morning. He dragged himself into my room to tell me that she’d died. Judging by the way he looked that morning as he stood beside the bed, hair disheveled, eyes wild, clothes filthy and bloody, I had no doubt that he’d raped her and killed her, just as he had Stephanie. And just as with Stephanie, it was all because I wouldn’t have sex with him.

The guilt was heavi
er after that. It was my fault. Everything that had happened to her was my fault. It was even my fault that she was here. Had I not made him angry, he might not have killed Stephanie. Then, he wouldn’t have been at the bar the night he ran into Melinda. He wouldn’t have brought her home with him, and she wouldn’t have been here to endure the torture that he inflicted upon her in my name. All. My. Fault.

As I watched him bring Melinda out of the basement one bag at a time, I knew what I had to do.

I spent a few days trying to talk myself into letting him have me in the way that he wanted, hoping that maybe he wouldn’t bring another girl to this house and torture her the way he had the others. But it was too late. By the time I worked up the nerve to tell him that he could have me in that way, he had already brought another girl to the house.

He woke me one morning, rushing me to hurry and get ready. I quickly worked through my morning routine wondering what had him in such a fuss.

When he led me down the basement steps I started to think I didn’t want to know. And when I saw her lying there where the others had been, naked and spread open for all to see, I wished I didn’t know.

I gasped. If Ron heard, he ignored it.

“Nicole, this is
Crystal. Crystal, Nicole.” As he pushed me into the chair and pulled my arms behind me, cuffing me to the vertical beam, I took a good look at Crystal. I knew she’d never look this way again.

If she was twenty years old, I’d be surprised. My guess was more like eighteen
, maybe even younger than that. She had black hair with white streaks bleached into it. She had many piercings. I saw two in her lower lip, two in one eyebrow and four in the other, and several in her right ear. I couldn’t see her left ear, but I assumed it contained as many or more. Her belly button was pierced, as well as her nipples and her crotch.

She had several tattoos here and there on her body. Each ankle had something on it, but I couldn’t make out what either was because the restraints covered most of them. Above her privates where her pubic hair would’ve been if she’d had any was the face of a black cat. It could’ve been a panther. It was hard to tell in the dim lighting, but I knew for sure it was a black cat.
Above each of her breasts was a black paw print, probably in keeping with the cat theme. On the side of her neck was what looked like a name. From this distance and angle, I couldn’t read it. Though I couldn’t see her back side, I was sure she had a tramp stamp, a tattoo above her butt. Oddly and inappropriately, I wondered what it was.