And There He Kept Her (Ben Packard #1)(24)

“But how?” she said.

“Missed the last step,” he said. His flat feet scuffed across the floor as he made the round trip for a second case. He handed her his wallet and asked her to take out enough money to cover the cost. She whispered his name to herself after seeing it on the driver’s license in his wallet. She took out a twenty and made change.

“Can you carry one of these for me?” he asked.

“I can carry both,” she said, coming around the wooden counter. “When I worked at the sawmill, I had to grab sheets of plywood off the conveyor belt and stack them on pallets. Grab, turn, stack, turn, grab. That’s how fast they came off the line. Two cases of beer is nothing.”

He led the way, pushing open the door with his hip, careful not to touch anything.

“Did you break it?” she asked.

“Break what?”

“Your arm?”

It’s in a sling, not a cast, he thought, but he kept quiet as they walked to his car. He opened the back door and stood behind her, looking up and down the road as she bent over to put the beer in the back seat.

When she stood up again, he was holding a gun.

“Get behind the wheel. You’re going to drive,” he said.

He sat in the back seat, and they drove in silence except for when he told her to turn. He kept the gun pressed to the back of her neck. She didn’t fight and she didn’t ask any questions, as if lacking the ability to imagine what was coming next. She wasn’t the only one.

He led her back to his house. Inside the room he’d built in the basement, now in the presence of an actual woman, he realized for the first time how bad the pink paint he’d chosen was. It wasn’t the pink of a woman’s bedroom, like he’d intended. It was hot pink. Vulgar. No woman was going to like that color.

There was a cot pushed into one corner with new sheets that still had fold lines from the packaging. On the floor next to it were some magazines he thought she might like to read. The restraints—bolted to a boat chain that went through an iron ring on the wall—were heavy manacles he’d rolled and welded himself at his shop because he couldn’t buy the things he’d imagined.

“Put those on,” he said. “I’ll kill you if you don’t.”

Once she was secure, he left her in the room and locked the door. He tried to keep his hands from shaking as he lit a cigarette. He’d done it. He had a woman in his room. She was perfect. He liked everything about her. Her face, her body, her name.

Wanda.

Invisible fingers played piano keys in his belly. His thudding heart pushed heat to his face. Was this what it felt like to fall in love?

***

He had none of the same excitement when it came to the new girl. He felt dread, and it felt like cold skin touching his skin.

He sat in his rocker and smoked a cigarette. He could hear the girl moaning through the door. It was midday and still he hadn’t gone in to look at her. She’d been alone in the dark since Carl locked her up yesterday morning.

Emmett hadn’t slept most of the night. After lying in bed for a while, he’d gone back to his recliner and watched the channel that showed reruns of shows he remembered as a kid—Gunsmoke, The Rifleman, and McHale’s Navy. Flickering light from the television had animated the gauzy cigarette smoke that swirled in the darkness around him. He watched I Dream of Jeannie through heavy-lidded eyes and remembered when he saw the show in color for the first time. He was thirteen. He’d seen Barbara Eden plenty in black and white, but his first time seeing her pink bra and red panties broke something loose inside him. It changed him, kept him up at night, breathless and sweaty, rubbing a stuffed teddy bear against his erection.

A genie in a pink bottle who called him master and made all his wishes come true.

A woman who would do whatever he wanted.

It was the fantasy that gave root to the hundreds that followed and led him to build the pink room.

He felt no sympathy for the moaning girl, only a growing unease that climbed his insides. Finally, he got up and found a large, square flashlight on the shelves behind his chair. The batteries were weak but good enough. He slid back the bolt and let the steel door swing on its hinges. The room was pitch-dark. Light from the basement stretched across the floor in a golden rectangle with his shadow a dark silhouette at the center.

He found the girl with the flashlight. She was flat on her back with her hands shackled over her head. A gag made from one of Emmett’s old Tshirts ran across her mouth.

She turned toward him, and light shone back from a pair of animal eyes in a face shiny with sweat. She growled through the gag. Emmett smelled piss.

This was no genie’s bottle. It was an animal cage at the zoo.

He suddenly remembered the last time he’d been in this room. A decade ago, with a power washer to clean the blood and shit off the walls from the jogger. The room had filled with steam that dripped down on him from above. The pink paint came off the wall like strips of torn skin. That was supposed to be the end of things.

Emmett left and came back a minute later carrying a white five-gallon bucket. The flashlight was pinned under his arm. In his other hand was the jackknife he always carried, its four-inch blade locked into place.

He saw the girl imagine the worst possibilities. She bucked her hips and dug her heels into the mattress.

Emmett dropped the bucket and held the flashlight close to her face. “You want to keep wearing those bloody, pissed clothes?”