Punishment with Kisses (10 page)

I could hardly believe that it had only been a year since Ash was murdered. Well, in some ways. In other ways it was hard to believe it had already been a year. Those first few weeks after her death went by in a blur while I walked around in a daze, barely even aware of the flurry of activities around me, as Tabitha made funeral arrangements, the police detectives traipsed in and out of the house, crime scene investigators swarmed around the pool house, and reporters skulked outside the gates of the estate like vultures waiting to pick over the remains of my family. With Mother and Ash gone, all there was left was not much more than bones.

The case made headlines that first month: pretty society girl killed on family estate, a string of casual acquaintances and even a couple of family friends were investigated, but there simply wasn’t enough hard evidence to link anyone to the crime. We did learn a lot about our neighbors, including who was on the sex offender registry and whose kid had previous burglary convictions. Unfortunately, our neighbors learned equally disturbing things about us.

Both the local newspapers and the tabloids covered Ash’s death, often with ridiculous claims like Father or I killed Ash or that Ash was still alive.
The Globe
went so far as to run an “Ash Sighting” column for three solid months.

I didn’t know if the police ever took those leads seriously. I do know that Ash was the apple of Father’s eye. I had never seen him raise a hand to her, no matter how much she thumbed her nose at him. I couldn’t imagine he’d ever harm her. Plus, he and Tabitha were together, the maid was on the phone, and seemingly, I was the only one in the house without a solid alibi.

A few months later, Ash was in the ground and all the activity stopped. The house seemed deathly still in the absence of all that buzz. I had no idea what happened, where the detectives all went and why they seemed to lose interest in the case. I wondered if Father brought pressure to bear on them. Maybe the detectives were taking a hard look at our family and it made him nervous. Maybe he made a few calls to his cronies and suddenly the police were more interested in a different case, one that didn’t involve a wealthy family. Maybe careful persuasion from the district attorney—a longtime family friend—kept the police from doing anything that would upset Father. A couple of the cops who were initially on the case left the department, and depending on which news account you believe, it was either over the intense criticism they had gotten in the press or over their conflicts with the higher-ups in actually attempting to solve Ash’s murder.

Murder investigations of the rich or famous were often bungled because the cops were being careful not to offend and upset leading citizens. Maybe that was the case here. But could Father have been that selfish that he’d rather keep whatever dirty laundry he had secret than find the person who killed his beloved Daddy’s girl? I don’t know. No arrests had ever been made. The lead detective assured me the case was still open and would remain that way until they brought charges. But there was something about the way the guy said it—his eyes cast downward and his mustache twitching a bit—that told me he had little hope it would be solved.

I blamed Tabitha for that. I couldn’t blame our loyal maid Maria, who compulsively cleaned up the scene before the police arrived. Or Father, who insisted on covering Ash with a sheet and wouldn’t let the crime scene photographers do their job. But Tabitha knew better. She was enough of a
CSI
buff to know better than to go traipsing right through the scene, stepping in blood, pressing Ash against her chest, contaminating all the physical evidence. I hadn’t helped the situation by adding my DNA to the pot. I didn’t know they could get DNA from vomit.

But still, I blamed Tabitha. Because of her they’d probably never find my sister’s killer. I feared he could be out there right now watching me. I could be next. I’ve heard enough crime shows to recognize that most murders are committed by someone close to the victim. But that wasn’t who I imagined killed Ash. I pictured a strange man whose face was forever in the shadows and who, for some reason, would attack me next. It made me a little paranoid, always wondering if someone was following me, stalking me, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. I’d constantly look behind myself when walking, or stare in the rearview while driving, trying to determine if I was being followed.

It’s hard to find a silver lining in a loved one’s murder, even when that loved one was someone like Ash, who I hated to love and loved to hate. But if there
was
one good thing, it was that her death served as the impetus I needed to strike out on my own. And leaving home was the best decision I could have made—even if I didn’t go far. In fact, I ended up moving into my sister’s secret life. She apparently had bought an apartment, a clandestine apartment that must have been where she always disappeared to. I didn’t even know she owned any property until that day, a few months after her death when her attorney placed the silver key in the palm of my hand.

The key was so cold against my skin, it provided no foreshadowing to what I would discover within the apartment’s walls, no hint of the steamy double life Ash lived there. Why Ash had kept the place a secret, why she sent the key to her attorney directing him to pass it to me in the event of her death—those were just more mysteries to unfurl.

But before I could even begin to unravel those enigmas, I found my attention diverted by the other inheritance Ash left me: a box of her diaries.

Of course I started reading them. I had always wanted to get inside Ash’s head, to understand who she was, and that impetus was all the stronger with her murder. After all, these private journals could provide a clue to uncovering her killer.

As much as I wanted to plow through them in a single sitting, I could only handle a page or two at a time because of the intensity of Ash’s emotions—and the feelings they raised for me. It was sort of like she was still alive, just off in Europe or something, and she was writing me letters, finally wanting to get closer to me and divulging her secrets one by one. Sometimes her words would make me smile, and I could swear she was there in the room with me, watching me, laughing along with me.

There was a lot of seriousness too, a great deal of sadness—not just at the reminder of her absence, but about the things her diaries were revealing. But every page that I devoured put me one step closer to knowing my sister, my real sister, not the caricature she became in my eyes, especially over that last summer of her life.

I secretly hoped that these diaries wouldn’t simply reveal who Ash was, but that they would expose her killer and help me uncover the truth about her death.

I flipped to a random page.

June 27

I know my sister looks down at me. That poor girl all alone in her room, reading her novels one after another, but watching me from the balcony. I don’t know why she watches, why she’s so repressed she just stares at me and every woman I bring home. Does she masturbate when she spies on us? Does she see us making love in the pool and fantasize about being with these women herself? I feel like a misfit in this family. My sister is prim and proper, every hair in its place, every word a calculated one. I wouldn’t be surprised if she never had an orgasm. And Father, the uber-WASP, is even worse. Everything he does is controlled, designed to manipulate people into doing what he wants when he wants, and when he gets his way he doesn’t care how you feel. I don’t know how Tabitha puts up with it.

I don’t care what my sister thinks of me, but it does hurt, the way she looks down her nose at me. I’m trash, I know, pure trash out here, banished to the pool house because I can’t play by the rules, can’t stay in school, can’t keep a job, can’t keep my legs closed. I know I can’t keep on this way. Something’s got to give in my life. I know danger is out there, lurking in the shadows, stalking me at every turn, but I don’t know what to do about it. I know I’m pushing it way too far. I just wish I could have said no when it counted. But I can’t, I never can, never have.

I saw a woman today. A tall blonde with long hair and green eyes who I had years ago at the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. Just a one-week-long fling of sex and music and mud, where tofu seemed romantic fare and moonlight and folk music was enough to get me there. It seems so long ago. I don’t remember her name, though I can picture her pussy, perfectly pink and puckered, quite well. I saw her, the woman from Michigan, today and I thought about the woman I was then. So filled with hope and brightness and a chance to be someone or something other than what I have become. But she knew me when I was something other than what I am now. What I am now is a shell, lost to frivolities like romance and moonlight and folk music. I considered saying hello, but instead I watched her get lost in the crowd. I’ve become an empty shell while all the women I’ve fucked have been swallowed up in the crowd, forever faceless and nameless.

*

I was lucky to live alone. I had made a few friends through work and they all had roommates, but they didn’t come with a trust fund, and none of them were left property by their dead siblings. I didn’t tell them about mine, but I was certain they had seen enough in the papers to deduce a thing or two about how I could afford to live where I did on my journalist’s salary. Being alone worked for me. It was a relief.

While I hadn’t become the person I swore I’d be after Shane—free of all emotional attachments—I had managed to avoid any serious relationships. In the year since, I had never once let someone in the way I did with Shane. But I hadn’t been able to block her out entirely. I still thought of her often. Shane tried to talk to me after Ash’s murder, first the day of the funeral, after we’d lowered her casket into the ground and tossed dirt in afterward. Even in the final days of summer it seemed such a cold and ignoble end. I decided right there that I wanted to be cremated when it was my time.

I was walking back to the limousine, trailing behind Father, who was half carrying, half dragging Tabitha, who was mute and ashen like a porcelain doll after she collapsed during the service, crumpling to the ground. Only Father’s strong arms prevented her from falling right into the grave.

I was lost in my head, dreaming of what-ifs, when Shane stepped out from behind a tree, scaring me half to death.

“Megan,” Shane said, her face drawn into a stern grimace. “We have to talk.”

I just stared at her. It was like her words had been spoken in a foreign language I couldn’t understand. I shook my head. I looked back at my feet and urged them to move. I stepped forward.

Shane moved in front of me, blocking my path. “Megan,” she pleaded. “
Please.
”

I looked up again and caught her eyes. They burned into my own. I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could I heard my name being called again. This time it was Father’s bellowing baritone and it pulled me back to reality and my desire to avoid speaking to Shane ever again. I tried to move on, but Shane grabbed my arm.

That was a mistake.

“Get your hands off my daughter!” Father roared. He had shuffled Tabitha into the limo and was thundering toward us.

“You’d better go,” I hissed the warning.

She must have realized the danger she was in because she took off running.

Father missed tackling her by a few yards. “God damn paparazzi!” he spat.

I didn’t correct his misassumption. If he’d realized who it was things would have been worse for Shane, and me. Father despised all of Ash’s ex-lovers, but he seemed to hold a special hatred for the “biker dyke,” speaking as though Shane was somehow more emblematic of Ash’s Caligula-style descent into debauchery. Plus, he clearly thought Shane made an excellent suspect in her murder.

Although I knew better I harbored my own ill will toward the woman who broke my heart.

Shane approached me again and again at the bar until I finally stopped going to the E-room entirely.

By the time a year had passed, I was no longer too hostile to listen when Shane showed up once more. But I did figure anything Shane had to say was probably all bullshit anyway. Then again, maybe she just wanted to soothe her guilty conscience and who was I to prevent her from apologizing to me? It was the kind of thing I secretly longed for—that all those who’d done me wrong in the past would be driven by remorse to seek me out and express their deepest regret. It could happen. Couldn’t it? “I spent all those days at the pool trying to get a chance to talk to you,” Shane insisted the last time we spoke. Oh please, that’s on par with “she fell on my dick” as an excuse for infidelity. I wanted to hear her admit her wrongdoing and take responsibility for the pain she’d caused me.

And I wanted to confront her again about the engine I’d heard the night Ash died, the engine I’d never told the police about because I’d always secretly feared it had been Shane’s motorcycle, and I didn’t want to be the one placing her at the scene of Ash’s murder. During my previous attempt to get the truth, Shane had been adamant that she was nowhere near the estate that night, that she was at home alone, with no one around to corroborate her story. I didn’t believe her. I thought she just wasn’t ready to be honest with herself or me. I hadn’t seen her since.

I had moved on. I moved into Portland, and now my days were filled with work at the
Willamette Week,
a local alternative newspaper.

Then one night I finally relented and went out with a group of friends, celebrating my recent promotion from flunky to editorial assistant. We were drinking microbrews at a lesbian bar called the Mint, laughing and passing gossip around the table like salt, and up walks Shane, cool as Ocean’s Eleven, asking if anyone would mind her joining our group. What balls! I had forgotten the impact the mere sight of Shane had on me, on my body. I hated her, but just having her in proximity to me was like a magnet pulling me to her, a palsy forcing my knees apart, a flood soaking my panties.