The Bone Parade (16 page)

When she was a kid, she did that stuff for fun. She’d had no idea how much those skills would pay off once she’d started racing mountain bikes over boulders, stream beds, and up steeply sloping canyon walls that looked too crazy to even crawl.

She’d also learned about Jared. Definitely from money. Lots of it. He’d grown up in a place called Palos Verde in L.A. She’d emailed Lauren, casually asking about it, never mentioning a guy, and Lauren had said Palos Verde had some of the most expensive real estate in southern California. Which was about what Kerry had figured all along: Jared had that Expedition, two-hundred-dollar sunglasses, and never sweated the small stuff. The rich kids she’d met were relaxed, never worried about things that drove her crazy, like how she’d pay the rent, or next year’s tuition. But most rich guys were assholes too, used to having everything they wanted, and kind of assuming that everything included you as soon as they met you. But Jared was different. Plus his ego could take the fact that she really could outride him. Better tricks, stronger legs.

They’d gotten close, but she still wasn’t sleeping with him. The feeling she’d had that first afternoon when the whole experience was too good to screw up with sex had evolved into something a
little
bit different. It now felt so good that she wanted sex to come at the perfect time, not just because she was feeling itchy, or worse, because he “had to have it.” How many times had she heard that line? Guys who made their sex drive sound like pure viper venom, and she was the only antitoxin.

She and Jared had played around, enough to know that she loved the feel of his body, his scent, the taste of his skin, his sweat even, but not enough to know much more.

Thank God for Jared, though, because the other man in her life was El Creepo. She shook her head and wondered where the hell Stassler was anyway. It was already seven-thirty, and usually they’d be working in the foundry by now.

Screw it. She threw open the front door and walked directly past his Jeep to the guest quarters. Time to take the initiative. She’d tried the nice little intern routine, and he’d treated her like a dishrag. Maybe she’d get some respect if she was more like her real self, a riot grrl on a mission.

She knocked. No answer.

That’s weird. She looked at his Jeep again. Definitely there. She knocked harder, and still no answer. She wondered if he was all right. She’d heard of guys his age suddenly dying of a heart attack, or something like that. She checked the handle.

The door opened to stairs that led her up to the guest quarters. She spoke his name softly, using it to try to ease her way into the one place he’d told her not to go.

Nothing. But he must be up and about; she could see his coffee mug and an empty bowl stacked neatly in the sink.

She turned around, eyes filling with the beauty of the wood-beamed room. But where’s the sculpture he said he was working on,
Family Planning #9?

Down there? She glanced at the hallway that led away from the main room. She dared not go any farther. As long as he wasn’t stretched out on the floor, she thought she’d better get the hell out of there and never mention this morning’s escapade.

She hurried down the steps, and was about to make her exit when she noticed a second door behind the one she’d left open. It looked like it went to the barn. She wasn’t sure she’d actually go in there, but tested the handle anyway and peeked in. What she saw puzzled her. The horse stall where she’d flopped on to the straw had a wood floor. She could see this because all the straw had bunched up in the back of the stall. A wood floor? In a barn? She looked around. No wood on the floor anywhere else. Concrete. Strange, very very strange. And it had felt odd when she’d landed on it too. Hollow. Like a door.

Now she found herself creeping toward the stall, and that’s when she spotted an O-ring. At first she simply touched it softly, silently. Then she lifted it up, feeling little resistance. As it rose, she understood that the straw had slid toward the rear of the stall when someone had opened the door. Stassler, right? Who else?

Lights were on down there. She thought she heard someone, then she was sure she heard a moan. Oh God, he’s in trouble! All of her ill feeling toward him vanished when she realized that he must have hurt himself.

She raced down the stairs calling his name. As she neared the bottom, her eyes took in the cellar, and she lost her breath so quickly it was as if all the air in her body had been sucked out by an approaching storm. A line of skeletons, posed just like his
Family Planning
series, stood before her, a long parade of bones garbed in pants and skirts, blouses and shirts, even eyeglasses and shoes, boots and belts. They stared at her, as if positioned to welcome the unwary.

A woman in a ghastly cage screamed at her to go, leave, now! Run! Get help! But in the confusion of the moment, Kerry stood at the bottom of the stairs glancing everywhere at once, at the skeletons and barbells and weight bench, and at the man, woman, and boy clinging desperately to the bars. She halted only at the sight of Stassler rising naked from behind a girl who was crouching on the dirt floor and chained at the neck to one of the support beams.

The woman in the cage gestured frantically and screamed again, “Run. Go. Get help! Please,” as Stassler started sprinting toward Kerry.

She scaled the steps two, three at a time, his feet thundering right behind her. She stumbled as she climbed up into the barn, bolted right, saw the big doors, knew they’d be locked—they were always locked—and spun back toward the door through which she’d entered. As she ran past the stall, he was climbing out. He lunged for her feet, and almost grabbed an ankle. The touch of his fingers made her howl. Her heart surged so violently that it felt as if it would break apart the bones in her chest.

In seconds she made it through the doors and raced into the open area between the barn and the house. She ran toward her bike on the veranda, scaled the railing, and jumped on it. She pedaled madly for the stairs, determined to plunge right down them and straight into the desert—let him try to catch her out there—when she saw him running almost even with her down on the lawn, in a direct line to intercept her. She never descended, riding right past the stairs, and a second later, surely no more, again heard his footsteps pounding after her.

The railing on the far end of the veranda stood no more than thirty feet away. She raced toward it. He might have assumed that he had her trapped. Any reasonable person would have, but Kerry hung a wheelie and executed a jump that landed the rear tire on the edge of the wooden railing, pumped furiously on her pedals, and launched herself right into the air.

The ground lay a good six feet below her. She spotted her shadow streaking over the dry grass, and then tried to land on both wheels, crouching to absorb the impact; but her takeoff was unbalanced, and she suffered a vicious tumble that peeled the skin off her shoulder and elbow. She’d taken falls like this before, and though shaken from the impact, from Stassler, from all she had seen, she was back on her feet with surprising speed, grabbing her bike as she had in any number of races where she’d had to get started with other mountain bikers ripping past her like furious darts. But this time as she powered the pedal down with all the force she could muster, she found that the crash had knocked the chain off the front ring and jammed it between the crank and frame. It was frozen.

As soon as she grabbed the greasy chain to try to yank it free, Stassler slammed into her from behind, knocked the air right out of her, and ground her face into the earth. With her mouth mugged by dust and dirt, she couldn’t even scream, though the pain demanded a swift response. Hers came in an uncharacteristic flood of tears.

He wrapped her in a choke hold and dragged her to her feet. He was naked, and she could feel his limp penis pressing into her bottom.

She thought she’d pass out from the struggle to breathe. Even so, she tried to fight him by grabbing at his testicles, but as soon as she did this he drove his bony knee up into her coccyx, stunning her.

“Stop, or I’ll kill you.”

He spoke with unnerving calm. She nodded as best she could. He gave her only enough slack for short breaths as he dragged her back to the barn and upstairs to the guest quarters.

“You wanted to see, right? Couldn’t stay out, right?”

“I thought you were hurt,” she gasped. “I was coming to help you.”

“Your problem, Kerry, is you’re not a very original thinker. The fact is, you’re not smart enough to think. You’re like all the rest of the world. You just drift from one stupid concern to another.”

He pulled a pair of handcuffs out from a kitchen drawer and cuffed her wrists tightly behind her back. Then he reached back in the drawer for a two-foot length of copper wire.

When she started to plead for her freedom, he grabbed a fistful of her hair so tightly that she thought the roots would explode. He twisted her toward him and said,

“You got to be kidding. Let you go?” This made him smile. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, but the one thing you can count on is that I’m not letting you go.”

He snapped her head back and forth. The roots of her hair screamed and her eyes teared. Then he yanked her back down both flights of stairs to the cellar, forcing her past the girl chained to the beam. She was also naked, and still on her knees.

Kerry’s vision was blurred, and she almost twisted an ankle when he shoved her to the floor. Stassler appeared above her as a dark, shadowy, indistinct figure. She couldn’t make out what he was doing, but felt all too acutely the sharp point of his hip slamming into her shoulder, and a horrible stinging pain when he crushed her against the cage. She cried out, and tried to blink away the gathering tears, but seeing clearly wouldn’t have helped: he was already bent over her back, threading the copper wire through the cuffs, binding her to the metal and bone prison. Then, just as the blurriness finally faded, he gripped her jaw and forced her to look up at him.

“Don’t even think about trying to move. You hear me?”

Before she could make sense of his words, he pushed her head away and turned to the naked girl.

“All right now,” he said cheerfully, “where were we?”

C
ONTROL
. A
LWAYS IN CONTROL
. N
ONE
of them answer me. But it’s not as if after saying, “All right now, where were we?” that I really expect June to pipe up with, “Oh, you were having sex with my daughter. You know, the one over there in the dog collar and chain,” although just once in my life I’d like my guests to show a little humor. Is that asking too much?

And to think the morning had started off so well. I had shaved and showered, breakfasted, and strolled down to the cellar with the “rugged but elegant” dog collar I’d bought from that S&M outfit in Iowa. Black, with steel studs on it. Really, those S&M freaks have no imagination when it comes to color. Their palette runs the spectrum from black to really black.

But they do sell a strong collar; one glance and you can tell it’s for people who are really serious about their bondage games. You could restrain a mastiff with one of these, and the chain itself has outlandishly heavy links, sufficient to cause considerable damage if you weren’t concerned with skin abrasions and broken bones. But I am, so I used the chain strictly to secure Diamond Girl, first to the collar, which has a delightful silver heart-shaped lock that snaps together along the vertical axis (a jagged affair no doubt meant to suggest that the heart had been broken but now, thanks to the benefits of bondage, is healed), and then to one of the cellar’s structural beams.

Diamond Girl’s smile didn’t fade even after I’d ordered her down on all fours.

“You are a real son of a bitch,” June snarled, which pleased me immensely. She’d been treating me like an ally, as if I had done
her
some great big favor by not having sex with her daughter during the time that I’d allotted strictly for working out. That’s a thoroughly repulsive notion, bearing any kind of moral kinship with June
the
Cleaver, as I now think of her, so her opprobrium pleased me to no end. And to think I hadn’t even really started yet. If it’s true that you can tell a lot about a man by the enemies he makes, then it’s even more important to watch who you end up with as friends.

“I beg of you, don’t do it,” Jolly Roger said with absolutely no conviction. He might as well have been reading from a teleprompter: “I … beg … of … you … blah, blah, blah.” Have I ever met anyone so tiresome as these two?

Sonny-boy appeared as interested as ever in his big sister, especially as a certain sexual tension knotted the air, and threw a temper tantrum of a highly convincing nature when his mother snapped at him to “turn around.”

The only one who seemed genuinely unflustered, other than me, of course, was Diamond Girl. She was down on all fours stretching her ass into the air like a cat rising from a warm cuddly nap.

Why was I doing this? I mean, besides the obvious pleasure? To anger them. To make them absolutely furious. To raise their rage to levels they haven’t known since the day of their abduction. I’ve had to do this with every family to one degree or another. Raise the ante, their ire, and you build their fury, their hate because there’s only one thing they get to do with it: work out even harder.
I’ll show him!
It’s almost hilarious to see how easy they are to manipulate, but you don’t have to be a shrink to understand the response. The only power I’ve given them is the power to get stronger physically, which they equate, consciously or unconsciously, with the power to kill me. I do believe that some of the men have actually seen themselves as gladiators whose only hope is to grow so strong that they can bust out of their chains. And that is how I bet they see it too,
busting
out of their chains, like Russell Crowe, that pint-sized pudge boy who played the part in that awful movie everybody loved. You think they would have cast someone with at least a modicum of muscle tone.