Chapter 4
Ellen Porter had tried to sleep several times and had finally abandoned all hope of slumber. She sat in a corner of the room with her legs curled beneath her, her arms folded beneath her breasts, her head lowered, her chin resting on her chest. She was a tall woman with wide hips and long sturdy legs. When she moved, she usually moved with the feline grace of a lioness and now, resting, she rested with the semi-awareness of a lioness at rest in a jungle-all her muscles totally lax, her eyes closed, her breathing smooth and unhurried, her mind turned off except for an instinctive part that listened for a wrong sound.
Janie and Emma were on the bed and made odd noises that Ellen had gradually become accustomed to, odd noises that were somewhere between a moan and a sob. Jane and Emma had kept her awake all night. They had cried and screamed and although Irene and she had tried to calm them, their efforts had had little effect. Eventually it had been physical fatigue that had calmed them to something less than hysteria.
Irene had spent the night pacing the floor and pounding on the door. To Ellen it seemed that Irene was not exactly frightened-she was, more precisely, indignant. Irene had come from a wealthy family and was a private secretary for the president of the Advance Electronics Corporation. Ellen knew Irene, knew enough about her to understand that Irene's indignation would turn to fear only later, perhaps moments before Stanley Scott began to rape them.
Ellen drifted in a world of half-sleep and half-conscious thoughts. She had abandoned all hope of escaping from the room. There were no windows. The one door was too solid to break. The hinges were on the other side or else she could have showed the other girls how to remove the hinge pins.
She had seen her mother do it one time when she was a small girl-one time when a wind had slammed a door and they had been locked in a bedroom on a third floor. The room was small, no more than ten by ten. There was nothing in it except the bed-no object of any size that could be used to fight Stanley Scott.
The air had become heavy and almost suffocating, permeated with the heat and odor of their bodies. They could suffocate, she realized.
Perhaps there was fresh air entering from the slender cracks at the bottom and the top of the door, but perhaps, after all the fresh air in the room had been consumed, the air would not be replenished as quickly as it was consumed. If they suffocated, it would be a slow and painful process. And wouldn't that surprise Mr. Stanley Scott? He'd open the door and find four beautiful corpses..
She thought of her husband. Poor Frank! He would be a nervous wreck by now. Frank would surely think she had been raped, tortured and killed. Frank's mother might not be so upset. Maybe she would be glad Ellen was gone.
Would Stanley Scott rape them? Remembering the way he'd looked at their legs, it seemed-likely he would. He certainly didn't want their money. If he'd wanted their money he could have easily taken it.
She tried to imagine how it would feel to be raped by Stanley Scott. She couldn't imagine, but the very thought warmed her loins and quickened her breath. The idea didn't frighten her. She had been raped at the age of fifteen by two boys only slightly older than herself. The attack had left her with only a small amount of pain but a large amount of curiosity concerning sex. She'd had lovers and then, five years ago, she'd married Frank Porter.
Marriage to Frank had become a kind of torture, a kind of numbing dullness. Frank was attractive physically, but in every other way he was the dullest man she'd ever encountered. He was a CPA for one of the largest accounting firms in Delaware. Quite frequently his work took him away from home for days at a time, but there was little difference between the times he was home and the times he wasn't. His hobby was television. He could sit for hours every evening, staring at the black-and-white figures as they moved across the twenty-one-inch screen.
When he made love, it was a mechanical thing, so mechanical she'd never had a climax in all the five years they'd been married. She'd had climaxes before-in the arms of her lovers during the years before she met and married Frank. They lived with his invalid mother in an old house north of Trenton. Someday she'd divorce Frank, she knew. Someday, when the dullness and the monotony became too crushing. Someday....
She heard the door open. Irene had been banging on it with one of her shoes and she stepped back as Stanley Scott came into the room.
Ellen Porter looked up at her captor and found him looking directly at her. She could tell from the expression on his face that she had been chosen to be the first. He pointed the gun at her and she knew he would take her to some other part of the house and use her body....
"Take off your clothes."
He had locked both doors to the house. If she managed to run out of the bedroom, she wouldn't be able to run outside. He knew that before he raped her he'd have to put the gun somewhere he could get it in a hurry if he needed it. She might struggle-or scream-or try to escape. If she did, he'd need the gun and need it in a hurry. He'd have to be careful about the gun-be sure she didn't grab it when he was off-guard.
He watched as Ellen Porter undressed. She seemed calm, a lot calmer than he'd expected. She looked around the bedroom as she unbuttoned her blouse and he noticed her hands were not shaking. For a moment her fingers hesitated on a button of her blouse as she studied the room.
In a way he felt ashamed of the room. It was too small, too poorly furnished. It contained only the bed and the bureau and the chair. Although they had been painted, it must be obvious to her that they had not been purchased in a store. His father had made them from scraps of wood and now, suddenly, they appeared crude. The window drapes were of a heavy material with a floral design that had long since faded almost beyond recognition. The linoleum on the floor had dried and cracked in places.
The most modern item in the room was the lamp on the bureau-Stan had bought it two years ago on one of his rare trips to Trenton. But although it looked modern, it was plastic and had a cheap gaudy appearance. He had built bookcases that entirely covered two walls from floor to ceiling. The bookcases were filled with the hundreds of books he had read, but he had never painted the shelves and they too had a crude appearance. The books were covered with a layer of dust and in places there were cobwebs.
With her back toward him, Ellen removed her blouse and her skirt. She removed her half-slip and then her bra. When she was entirely naked she went to the bed and lay down. He removed his clothes, placed the gun on the floor by the bed where he could easily reach it and then climbed on the bed.
She was a tall woman, as tall as himself. Her legs were strong but well-shaped, her thighs were thick white columns that melted into wide hips. Her stomach was flat above her loins, rising smoothly and softly to the bottom of the rib cage. Her breasts were twin peaks of soft coral-tipped flesh that stabbed upward toward the ceiling. There was no flabbiness about her, no weakness to her body. When she stirred on the bed, muscles rippled beneath the soft flesh. He smelled the musky woman-odor of her and slid above her.
She spread her legs. Her arms were at her sides, her eyes closed, her long dark hair splayed across the pillow. Her breasts rose and fell rapidly but-she had spread her legs to welcome him.
It all seemed too easy ... too damned easy. He had expected her to fight, to scream, to offer some sort of struggle, but she was letting him take her without any resistance.
He lowered himself against her. He fought the impulse to kiss her lips and her breasts, the impulse to massage her body. He moved between her thighs, felt the warm soft depth of her and then moved with a quick and purposeful rhythm.
She was good-better than any woman he'd ever had before-a sweet soft tight tunnel. But she did not move, or show any emotion. Her body was a vessel. Because he had the gun, because she was trapped in his house, she was allowing him to use the vessel without a fight. He felt cheated.
Once he had made love to a girl on the back seat of a car, a tiny wisp of a girl who had writhed and moaned, scratched his back and bit his ear. She had shuddered while he made love to her-shuddered as if he had given her the greatest joy in the world. Now, when he finished with the body of Ellen Porter, when he felt the flooding release of his lust, when he stopped moving and saw that Ellen Porter had felt no emotion at all-he felt cheated.
He dressed again and watched from the corners of his eyes as Ellen dressed.
"I have to go to the bathroom," she said.
He had the gun in his hand. He waved it toward the door and followed her. While she was in the bathroom, he kept the door slightly ajar and stood just outside. When she came out, she said, "Can I have something to eat?"
Her lips were a firm line, her eyes still cold and emotionless.
"Okay."
"The others will need something to eat. And they'll have to go to the bathroom."
"They can go to the bathroom-one at a time-after we fix something for them to eat."
As they went to the kitchen, as he followed her and held the Luger aimed at a point between her shoulder blades, he began to feel foolish. He had planned to rape them. At the time of the planning, it had all been stimulating, the thought of raping them sending a surge of excitement through his loins.
Now-he had raped one of them and it had been disappointing, less exciting, than girls he'd made love to in the past. Now-he would have the task of feeding them, the task of allowing them to go to the bathroom....
Later-they'd probably want to take baths....
And what else?
When they reached the kitchen, Ellen stood by the table as if wondering what she should do next. Stanley sat in the chair next to the table and, when Ellen turned to face him, he held the gun aimed at her head. She looked at the gun, frowning.
"Can I have a cigarette?" she asked.
He took his pack of cigarettes and his lighter, and slid them across the table toward her. When she lit her cigarette he noticed her hand did not shake.
"What are you smiling at?" she asked. She replaced the pack of cigarettes and the lighter on the table.
"You. You're so goddamned calm!"
"What did you expect? Did you expect me to fight and scream? Did I disappoint you? I can tell you one thing ... the others won't be as calm as me. If you try to rape Irene, you'll have a hell of a fight on your hands. Shall I get something for us to eat? I can probably do it faster."
Without waiting for an answer, she went to the refrigerator and opened it, studying its contents. In a few moments she carried a carton of eggs to the stove and searched in one of the cabinets until she found a frying pan. He watched as she moved about the kitchen-soon she began to move with an air of efficiency as if she had been in the kitchen all her life. She did not look at him and did not speak to him. When she finished her cigarette, she went to the kitchen sink and ran water over it, tossing the butt in the trash-can by the stove.
He watched as she scrambled eggs and fried strips of bacon. She heated the pot of coffee and poured four cups. When the eggs and the strips of bacon were done, she divided them into equal portions on four plates.
"How are we going to carry them?" she asked.
He got the metal tray from the cabinet beneath the sink and gave it to her. She carefully placed the four plates and the four cups of coffee on the tray. At the last moment before they left the kitchen, with him walking behind her and still holding the gun aimed at her back, she glanced over her shoulder.
"You have a lot of dirty dishes and your kitchen is like a pig-pen. Later, if you'll let me out of that little rat-hole, I'll wash the dishes and clean up some."
He could think of no answer. He spent the next half hour walking back and forth to the bathroom-once with Emma, once with Irene, and once with Janie. His nerves drew taut-he hadn't keep the Luger aimed at each one constantly, and he knew, if one of them tried to escape or tried to attack him, it would be enough to send his finger jerking against the trigger. A wrong move and he would kill.
He would have to kill any one of them who made a try at escaping. He had committed the crime of kidnapping. He had not demanded a ransom and he had held them prisoners for less than a day, but he had still committed the crime of kidnapping. It would be enough to send him to prison for the rest of his life. Killing one of them would be easier than spending the rest of his life in prison.
He realized he would have to change his daily routines. He would have to allow them to go to the bathroom at least twice a day. He would have to feed them-and already he was faced with the task of buying more food. The refrigerator was almost empty.