Held (25 page)

One Year Later

I
walk out of the store with a bag of groceries in each hand and head for my SUV. I’m halfway down the row of cars when a van pulls into the spot beside my vehicle. I freeze. I wait a moment, but no one emerges from the van. I turn around and go back to the front of the store where I sit on a bench and wait forty-five minutes for the van to leave.

Seeing no vehicle parked around mine
now, I walk all the way down the row of cars until I reach my SUV. I put the sacks of groceries in the backseat, looking around to make sure no one is close to me. I then get behind the wheel and immediately lock the doors. Only then can I breathe a sigh of relief.

I drive straight home, checking my mirrors to verify no one’s following me. Our new house is only a few blocks from the grocery store, so I’m home in minutes. Before getting out of my SUV, I look around to see if anyone is
nearby. Seeing no one other than the elderly gentleman next door sitting on his porch, I get out and quickly grab the groceries and head inside the house, immediately locking the front door behind me.

Putting the groceries away, I realize the milk is warm and the butter is soft. It’s not the first time I’
ve had groceries go bad while waiting for a vehicle to pull away from mine. But I can’t help it. I’d rather have food ruin than risk being kidnapped again.

***

I stand at the side of the baby bed looking down at my son. He’s a beautiful baby. He lies there, wiggling and cooing, and he reminds me of Mason at that age.

As if he can hear me thinking of him, Mason giggles in his bed. I turn around and smile at him and he closes his eyes, finally submitting himself to sleep.

I look back at my new son, Austin, and I can see no traces of Ron. At least not yet. I’m hoping I never do. I’m hoping against hope that he’ll have all of my features and habits, and that he won’t grow up to be a serial killer. I’m not sure that’s how it works, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Taking the baby monitor with me, I leave their room and walk into the family room. The drawer in the entertainment center catches my attention, calling out to me as it always does. This time, I give in and walk over to it.

As I watch
my hand reach out for the handle, I ask myself if I’m ready. Is Dr. Brown right? Is it time to face it so I can move on?

I pull open the drawer and there it sits, staring up at me just as it has for the last three weeks, waiting patiently for the day I can finally bring myself to read it. Apparently, that day is today.

Reaching in and picking up the book, I tremble. Not just my hand, but my whole body shudders slightly. I close my eyes and tell myself it’s over, even though I know it isn’t. How can it be over when he knows where I live? We’ve moved four times in the past year, and yet Ron still knew where to send the book. I don’t think it’ll ever be over. As long as he’s out there, it won’t be over. And he is out there, somewhere, managing to evade police.

The book feels heavy in my hand.

I carry it with me as I perform my nightly routine of checking the alarm and every window and door lock in the house. Satisfied that the house is a fortress, I walk into my bedroom, where Wade is already in bed reading a magazine.

He smiles at me
and I smile back.

I carry the book with me as I walk around the bed. Wade sees i
t. His smile fades a little, but he says nothing. I can feel him watching me as I crawl into bed beside him and turn on the lamp on my nightstand.

I smile at him and kiss him on the cheek to let him know it’s okay. We’ve been talking about this for three weeks. We both knew I was going to read it. We just didn’t know when.

Once I’ve settled in, I grasp the book firmly in both hands, trying to hide the trembling.

Wade places his magazine on his nightstand and scoots closer to me, putting his arm around my shoulders for support.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, hold it, and let it out slowly. I open my eyes and look at the book.

Across the top of the cover in
big, bold white letters is the word HELD. Across the bottom, also in big white letters, was his name, R.D. Redwine. Between the title and the author’s name, is a picture that turns my stomach. It’s a basement. A mattress lies on the floor, a pair of handcuffs dangling off the edge. I know this place well. I hid rotten dog food under that mattress. I spent a lot of time wearing those handcuffs. And the things I saw in that basement…

I shudder and fight away the tears that want to come.

I run my fingers across the raised letters of the title and take a deep breath. Unsure I’m ready, I open the book.

Th
e dedication page reads simply: To Nicole.

At the bottom of the page, Ron has handwrit
ten a message to me in red ink.

The tie that binds us. Forever.

My eyes fill with tears, but I blink them away. I have no doubt that I’ll cry more than enough when I’m finished reading this horrible book, this masterpiece of a madman.

I turn the page and begin reading.

‘
She squinted as she stepped out of the store and into the glare of the bright sunlight…’

The End

I hope you enjoyed Nicole’s plight. That Ron is one cracked nut, isn’t he? I know you may feel as though I’ve left you hanging, what with Ron still running around evading capture and Nicole left to raise the child of a serial killer alongside her beloved Mason. But never fear, Dear Reader. I assure you, you haven’t seen the last of them.

At this time, I’m planning
a sequel to
Held
in which Ron comes for his son. I wanted to let you in on this before you began to write angry emails and tweet vicious comments about my ‘noose books’ in which I leave the reader hanging.

So stay tuned and keep your eyes peeled like ripe bananas, for Ron and Nicole
will
meet again. [Insert evil laugh here]

Kim

BONUS MATERIAL

Chapter 1

My eyes opened when I sensed that something was wrong. Maybe not wrong, but something was definitely different. I lifted my head from my shoulder, wincing at the stiffness in my neck from having fallen asleep in such an awkward position. My right leg was numb below the knee because it had been folded underneath me while I dozed. I slowly slid it from beneath my left leg, and placed my bare foot on the floor of the porch.

As the pins and needles pricked at the nerves in my legs, the blessed sign of renewed circulation, I realized what was wrong. The crickets were no longer chirping. Their loud symphony was half of what had lulled me to sleep, the glass of wine being the other half. The glass now stood empty on the table beside the rocking chair, and the night around me was eerily silent.

I was no entomologist. I knew very little about bugs, other than they gave me the heebie-jeebies. It wasn’t a phobia, but it was getting there. What I knew about crickets boiled down to two things. One, only the males chirped. And two, they stopped chirping when there was movement nearby. Given that I had been dozing, I knew I hadn’t moved, but something had caused them to fall silent.

I glanced out to the driveway, confirming that Tim’s truck was still gone. He hadn’t yet returned from town, where he was no doubt sitting at the bar, drinking a beer to calm his nerves. This hadn’t been the worst argument we’d ever had, but it had certainly been among the top ten. We didn’t argue often, but when we did, he always went out for three beers - no more, no less - and I opted for a single glass of red wine.

Since Tim was still in town, it was obvious that he hadn’t startled the crickets. Yet something had, of that I was certain. The silence around me was spooky. In the five months we’d lived on the farm, I’d never heard it this quiet. There was always an animal or bug making some sort of noise; coyotes yipping, owls hooting, frogs croaking, and of course crickets chirping. But now the night was filled with silence, and it was unnerving.

After rubbing the sleep from my eyes and the stiffness from my neck, I yawned and surveyed the yard in search of a small animal that could be blamed for the sudden stillness, but saw none. I sat up straighter in the rocking chair, making the pins and needles prick even harder at my leg. Wiggling my numb toes, I squinted, peering into the darkness that surrounded the farmhouse.

I was looking to the left when I heard a rustle in the corn to my right. I quickly turned my head toward the sound and waited, breath caught in my lungs. The clouds slid across the sky, revealing the bright light of the full moon, and that’s when I saw movement from the cornfield.

He emerged from between the rows, knife in hand. With a painfully tingling leg, I leaned forward in the rocking chair, trying to make out his face. I was unable to tell anything about him from this distance, other than he wore all black. I didn’t make a sound, and he didn’t seem to notice me as he walked, almost stomping his way across the yard, toward the back of the house and the barn.

The two-story farmhouse and barn, both built in the late 1800s but holding up very well, set on eight cleared acres of land in the middle of 1,200 acres of corn fields. A gravel driveway led from the house to the main road, which was nearly a mile away. All this was too far for a man to walk in the middle of the night, some would think. Yet one had. And at the moment, he was walking purposefully across the yard, toward the barn, as if he not only knew his way around this property, but had some business being on it. When we’d leased the property, the owners hadn’t mentioned that someone would appear in the middle of the night to traipse around the yard. That would’ve been a deal breaker.

I wondered who he was and why he was on our property. I thought of the suddenly silent crickets, and thought that perhaps this was a neighbor who had lost an animal, a dog perhaps, and was out searching for it. The dog had probably run through the yard, scaring the crickets into silence, and had headed toward the barn. The man was just following his dog. That would explain everything. After all, we’d lived on this farm for only a few months. The man could’ve been a neighbor that we just hadn’t met yet. Of course that didn’t give him the right to wander around our property like he owned it, but I reminded myself that this was the country. We weren’t in St. Louis any more. Rules - and people - were much more relaxed here.

I sat there for moment, trying to rationalize the situation. A gentle breeze blew my hair and I welcomed it. It was warm out, especially for the first of October, but not a sticky warm. I was in no danger of sweating, but the breeze felt good all the same.

The night remained eerily silent around me, and soon my skin began to crawl. A feeling of wrongness was sinking in on me, making me feel more than just a little uneasy. Then suddenly, I got the feeling that I was being watched.

That feeling grew more intense by the second until I was positive that someone was standing behind me. If the hairs on the back of my neck tingling wasn’t enough warning, the chill that ran down my spine was. On the verge of full-blown paranoia, I spun around in the rocking chair to face whoever was there, which turned out to be no one. I was thankful for that, but I was aware that something still wasn’t right. What had started as an uneasy feeling moments earlier was stronger and more intense now, bordering on panic.

I’d seen more than my fair share of horror movies in my life so I was aware of my situation. A woman, alone at night in an isolated farmhouse, dressed only in a t-shirt and panties, with a sleeping child upstairs and a strange man wielding a knife that came from the corn field to roam the property. It seemed the only thing missing was a director’s call for action. These were the basic elements in every horror movie I’d ever seen, and each had elicited from me eye rolls and head shakes as I watched the victim make a string of mistakes. I always thought that I’d be smarter in a similar situation, and it was starting to feel as though I just may find out if I was right.

When I could no longer ignore the nagging in my mind, that small voice that was screaming at me that something was wrong, I stood and walked across the porch. The last of the tingling in my leg was fading, and I was glad to see it go. I leaned against the railing at the far end of the porch, leaned as far out over it as I possibly could, and tried to see around the corner of the house, all the way across the dark yard, and into the barn. As if a glass of red wine gave me super vision.

The door, large enough to accommodate all the farm machinery, stood ajar, but I couldn’t see inside. It was too dark. Any other night, Tim would’ve still been in the barn, lights on, working on the combine. In fact, that’s where he had been earlier. Then we argued about how much time he spent out there working on that old machinery, and he left for town and his three beers, while I poured my single glass of red wine and went to the porch.

As I leaned out over the railing and tried to see into the darkness of the barn, I told myself there was nothing to worry about, but the little voice in my head was persistent in saying otherwise. That voice was annoying, causing me to wonder if that was what it was like to have a nagging wife. Finally giving in to the voice with the hope that action would silence it and prove that nothing was wrong, I turned and walked across the porch and down the steps.