Punishment with Kisses (15 page)

Never in a million years would I have pegged Cynthia as the kind of woman willing to do her own dirty work and household maintenance. Maybe it was the help’s day off. I couldn’t have misjudged her that completely, could I?

“Well, you look great, Megan. Please come in. My girlfriend and I were out gardening, so excuse the mess.”

After a few requisite pleasantries, I just blurted it out. “I’m trying to figure out what happened to Ash, and since you were her best friend…and lover, I thought you might be able to tell me something I didn’t know.”

Cynthia looked more perplexed than resolute. “I’m not sure I have anything that could help you. I already told the police everything relevant. I mean, they interviewed me three times.”

I heard her words and the inference behind them. Cynthia didn’t know Ash had left me her diaries. She probably thought there was so much I didn’t know about Ash that she didn’t know where to begin. That’s why she hedged her responses. “You never know,” I said, repeating lines I’d drifted to sleep to. “Even the smallest thing could help.” TV detectives and criminologists always seemed to say that, as though random, irrelevant information was the most likely to solve a case.
She washed her hands after going to the bathroom? Oh my God, I know who killed her!

Cynthia shook her head and shrugged. “Sorry.”

Why had she wanted to see me if she was just going to blow me off? She knew Ash better than almost anyone. Did she think there was nothing, not a single bit of information that could be useful? I tried a different tactic. “What did you tell the police?”

“Just that I knew she had dated a bunch of people but no one serious. She was, um, sort of detached with her lovers. But like I told them, I couldn’t imagine any one of them going so far as killing her.” Cynthia paused.

“Cynthia, you and I have never had a serious conversation, so why don’t you start off by telling me about how you and Ash got together?”

“Okay.” Cynthia acquiesced, and the story began to spill out of her, first in single words and then in a rush of sentences and paragraphs, recalling their first months as friends in high school, bonding in the backseat over boys, and later, bonding even tighter with the boys out of the picture. Their relationship quickly crossed the boundary between friend and lovers. “She was my first,” Cynthia admitted.

“First sex? First love?” I wanted clarification.

Cynthia chuckled at the naiveté of her youth. “Both really.”

“You both took boys to prom. It wasn’t mutual?”

“That I don’t know.” Cynthia shook her head and was silent for a moment, musing. “But yeah, we dated boys throughout college, always keeping our own relationship under wraps. It killed me to see her date those guys. I never knew if she was fucking someone else or not, and she always kept me in the dark. Still, I had a pretty good guess. And high school was excruciating because of it. But I didn’t dare tell anyone for fear my parents would find out, we’d be separated, and I’d get shipped off to boarding school.”

After high school the duo went to the same college, but instead of coming out together, Cynthia stayed closeted, still pining for my sister, while Ash bedded half the cheerleading squad and gained a reputation as a one-woman recruiting dynamo for the gay-straight alliance.

“Ash loved to turn women, and she was good at it too—always beat her quota and took home the best prizes,” Cynthia joked, trying to deny her true feelings about Ash’s philandering, but you could see them in the frown lines around her eyes. It was the first time I noticed how much older than Ash Cynthia had seemed. Had loving my sister prematurely aged this woman?

“And where were you with all this?” I prodded. Then I wondered why. Why was I making her relive these painful memories? Did I really think they would help find Ash’s killer, or did I have some ulterior motive? Did I think Cynthia deserved to be punished? Hadn’t she been through enough?

“Waiting mostly,” Cynthia said. “And doing whatever Ash wanted me to do.”

This apparently involved Cynthia having a lot of sex, just not always with Ash. Cynthia said she loved Ash but that my sister used her as bait for other sexual conquests—with women and men, though Cynthia preferred the former—and rewarded Cynthia with the occasional hump to keep her in line.

“Ash was a very damaged human being,” Cynthia whispered conspiratorially. “I realized long ago that she was completely ignorant of the pain she caused other people. It was like she had been hurt so bad that she no longer felt emotional pain and she forgot that other people weren’t numb like her. Maybe she did push someone too far one day and she got what she deserved.”

I was mortified that anyone would say something like that out loud. Cynthia must have seen my stunned face, because she sat back and corrected herself. “Oh, that sounded horrible. I don’t think she deserved to die, I just mean, she sure pissed off a lot of people.”

I tried volleying a few more questions at Cynthia but didn’t get anywhere and was starting to believe that my sister wasn’t too far off the mark when she’d implied Cynthia wasn’t very bright. Clearly, she was hiding something, she was a world-class liar, or she was rather dumb. What could she stand to gain by not telling me all that she knew? Or was it that she was afraid of the truth?

I felt like she was holding back, the way Shane did whenever the subject of my sister came up. It was making me angry. “Look, Cynthia, I know more about Ash’s secret life than you might think. I’ve seen the DVDs, I’ve read the journal, and I know where the bodies are buried, okay? So why don’t we drop the charades?”

“You’ve seen it?” Cynthia looked around nervously. My God, who did she think was watching us now? She leaned in and whispered in my ear, “Her sex diary?”

“Yeah. Like I said, I’ve read her diaries. I found them when I cleaned her apartment.”

“No.” Cynthia shook her head insistently. “Not those. She has another one. A secret one that nobody knew about but me. It was small.” She illustrated its dimensions with her hands. “Ash carried it with her everywhere. She liked to record gossip, you know, about other people that nobody else knew? I don’t think she was blackmailing anyone, or anything like that, she just liked to have information other people didn’t. She told me one time it gave her this sense of power, being privy to other people’s secrets.”

What was the point of Cynthia describing the alleged book when she could just be telling me where it was?

“Where did she keep it?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Cynthia shook her head again. I wondered if she would tell me if she had it. “Ash kept it somewhere under lock and key, but not at the apartment. That’s all I know,” she added, lying again.

If I ever wanted the truth, I’d have to come up with another way to entice it from Cynthia. Or Shane. Were they keeping her secrets, or their own?

I was beginning to feel like I missed so much of my sister’s life I was unraveling more than just the mystery of her death. But what was I looking for now? And if I found that journal, would it hold the clue to who killed Ash? Or just open up another Pandora’s box?

June 30

It’s not bad enough that kiddo watches me through the blinds, spying on me like a jealous lover, but now I’m quite certain someone is following me at the oddest times and places. I don’t know if I’m crazy or if it’s true, but I feel like I should hire a private investigator to follow me around and find out if he’s the only shadow I have. Maybe an ex is stalking me. Or maybe The One has people following me. I can’t tell what’s real and what’s not real anymore. I go off to the parties and can be there at all hours, but when I leave I always feel another set of headlights behind me. I’ve hidden my real journal, the one that unlocks everything, so that nobody can find it without me wanting them to. I’ll never give it up either. It’s the key to my power, my control over the situation.

I think the real problem is, I don’t know if I deserve to be safe or not. Surely if I cared about my future, I might take different actions with my life, might do something different with the information I’ve been given, with the power that I can master. But I don’t see a future for myself, not really, not the way I feel now. I have no one I can trust. Not even Megan, I know, because I see the way she looks at me, like I’m some treacherous tramp she wants to spit on in the street. I’m not the sister she once loved. I’m just a whore, the harlot of Lake Oswego.

So if someone is stalking me, I just hope they don’t get in the way of the truth. I know I’ll end up in an early grave, but as long as the truth comes out, I’ll die a vindicated woman.

*

I stood in the kitchen with the smoke detector blaring, one of my tits hanging in the sink under a stream of cold water. I was making chicken for dinner and burned my boob on the oven. Hard to believe, I know, but somehow I decided it would be a smart thing to cook oven fried chicken and sweet potato fries in a low-cut shirt on a summer day. The house was steaming, my shirt popped open, and out plopped the boob and, well, there I was at the sink just as Shane raged through the front door, slamming it behind her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as gently as I could. Shane had been under a shit storm at work lately, and every day her mood was worse than the one before.

“I got canned.”

“What? Why?” Shane loved that lit journal, and she’d been working sixty hours a week to help keep the thing afloat. Why would they just fire her?

Before she even registered the question, I knew the answer. The publicity around Shane’s possible involvement in Ash’s murder had been fierce, although no law enforcement agency had gone on record to link her to it. Her firing was just another link in the chain of events that was colluding to shove our relationship onto the wrong track.
We
were fine, but all this external pressure was too much.

Between the media, our jobs, Father, the bloggers, and Cynthia, well, there didn’t seem to be a soul alive who thought Shane and I should stay together. I thought this pressure could explain why so many celebrities broke up in the face of constant media scrutiny.

“What are you going to do?” I asked quietly, hoping to coax Shane into talking.

“What do you mean, what am I gonna do? What can I fucking do? I can’t take this, I really can’t, Megan.” Shane broke down crying then, a touching sign of her humanity I so rarely saw these days. Long gone was the girl who played connect the dots on my skin. Shane was a changed woman. Harder, bitter, indifferent.

More like Ash. More like me. I had changed too. I was no longer the sweet, inexperienced girl I was when that summer began. I spent my days hiding who I was and my nights trying to reenact things my sister had done. I’d watched Ash’s sex DVDs obsessively, spending dozens of hours in front of the screen, always worried the next scene would co-star my current girlfriend making nice with my sister.

Video quality being what it was, I could rarely tell faces, masked and covered as they were. Occasionally I recognized someone I knew. I swear the players included a classmate, a friend’s mother, a teacher, and the girl down the block who never said boo to me. I didn’t know what to make of the silent videos, each one with the sound intentionally recorded over with dark concertos. If there were secrets on those videos, I’d never decipher them, not orally at least. Well, aurally, that was.

My mind wandered so much I forgot about my boob, the chicken, Shane’s pain. I put it all away and led her to bed, where she cried in my arms until we both fell asleep.

The next morning, I broached a subject that had been nagging at me for weeks. “Ash had another journal. A secret one she hid somewhere.”

I hoped it might draw Shane into conversation, but I was not expecting the outburst that followed.

“Oh for fuck sake, Megan, your sister is dead and buried. Can you please fucking let it go?”

“I can’t believe you could say that to me! This is my sister we’re talking about. I owe it to her to uncover everything I can about who she was and what she was going through, and maybe, if I’m lucky, figure out who killed her.”

“That’s the police’s job, Megan. Let them do it!”

“How can you sit there and say that? When letting the police do its thing is why you’re being reviled in the press. If we’re ever going to clear our names, we have to figure out who killed Ash!” I was yelling now, trying hard to get through to her.

“I hate to break it to you, honey,” Shane drawled. “Ashley was most likely killed by some enraged lover, or someone’s jealous husband or girlfriend. Your sister was a tramp and she pissed off a lot of people and clearly one of them killed her. End of story!”

“How dare you!” I shouted at the jab, aghast at what Shane had the nerve to say to me. I was sincerely shocked. This was the woman I’d professed my love to, and here she was suggesting my sister deserved to be brutalized.

“Megan, it’s just that you’re obsessed with Ash. You’re reading her journals, acting out scenes from her films. It’s not right.”

“Gee, you never complained earlier when I was acting out scenes from her home movies. Was it only good if I’m acting them out for you, then? Or are you worried I’m getting too close to the truth, Shane?”

Now it was her turn to be shocked or act it. Well, fuck her, then. I’d go find that sex diary myself. I’d find my sister’s killer myself. I didn’t need her or her bullshit any more. I grabbed my purse and my keys and headed toward the door. Shane had other ideas.