Punishment with Kisses (23 page)

The image of Father catching Tabitha and Ash together
in flagrante
would be funny under any other circumstance. I nodded for her to continue. Tabitha was clearly relieved to be able to tell her story.

“He called us deviants and whores, and even though I was pleading with him to understand I did care about him, I just didn’t know I was gay when we got married, he wouldn’t listen. He just kept yelling over me.”

Father was notorious for talking over people. I once tried to win an argument as a little girl, before I realized what a powerful orator he was, and left the room in tears. I tried explaining my chagrin to Ash that night, but all she did was nod in agreement.

“Why didn’t you just leave that night, that moment?” It seemed so irrational that they’d stay.

“Bradford said he’d kill us. He was completely enraged. I was terrified. I never thought he’d go through with it. I thought that me calling it off with her would be enough to calm him down. But it wasn’t. And I didn’t realize until after her murder that it wasn’t that he was jealous because I had fallen in love with his daughter.”

Oh my God, I realized it as soon as Tabitha said it out loud. Father killed Ash. But not because he had molested her. Because he didn’t want anyone else to have her. His warped sense of love meant that Ash was all his, even all these years later.

“He was jealous of me for being able to love Ash in this way.” The sick irony of it was that I had this all pegged wrong in my mind.

Ash never planned to tell anyone about Father’s abuse. She was savvy enough to realize that, nearly two decades after the fact, and with no physical evidence, it would come down to a “he said/she said” situation, and who would believe a crazy, slutty, society girl raving about some “punishment with kisses” game? Especially when the person she was accusing of these awful things was none other than the highly respected Bradford Caulfield?

“Megan? Are you okay?” Tabitha woke me from my horrible reverie.

“Sorry, it’s a lot to take in.” I didn’t reach out to touch her. I was stunned. “He molested her.” I said it like a statement but it was a question.

Tabitha looked down. “Yes. I didn’t know until years after I married him. She told me that she let it go on so long, so that you were protected from him. She didn’t feel guilt about it. She felt like she saved you from it.”

“She saved me…” I trailed off and teared up again. Thinking something and having it confirmed, especially something so heartbreaking as sexual violence, were different demons. Ash had replicated her punishment with dozens of strangers in an effort to exorcise those demons, but that didn’t threaten Father until she found true love in the arms of another woman,
his
woman. Tabitha was my sister’s one shining beacon of light, and loving her was the ultimate act of betrayal to Father. He would never let the two women in his life usurp him like that. No doubt in Father’s mind he owned Tabitha and Ash and even me.

“Do you regret not running off with Ash while you had the chance?”

“Yes. Since she died, I’ve played out every what-if scenario possible, over and over. I’ve thought about taking my own life just to get away from all this.”

So where did I fit into this whole equation?

“He never would have let her go, Megan. He would have chased us to the ends of the earth. Your father sealed Ash’s fate decades ago when he stole her innocence. Since then, she’s always belonged to him.”

“And me?” I looked her straight in the eyes. “Am I just a cheap replacement for my sister?”

She grabbed me, pulled me close. “God no! Megan, if anything good came out of Ashley’s death, it was us, this, that I got a chance to fall in love with you.”

“You’re in love with me?”

“Yes.”

I was silent, studying her eyes, then kissing her lips, then moving down her shoulders to her décolletage. I kissed her breasts one at a time, gently and slowly. She threw her head back and moaned softly, parting her legs as she did, and I made love to her right then and there. Sweet, soft, earnest love. It was surprising how easy it came to us in the face of such horrible tragedy. I didn’t need to say the words. I could make her feel, under her skin, down to her bones, how much I loved her, too.

*

Tabitha wanted me to know everything. She didn’t want me to think that she was keeping any secrets about her time with Ash or about Ash’s murder.

“We were leaving that night, the night Ashley was killed,” Tabitha continued, steeling herself to relive it. “We had packed up a bunch of stuff into a rental car that we had stored in Portland. Nobody knew about it. We were going to take the car and just drive north, since Vancouver was only a few hours away. I’d be out of Bradford’s reach, and after my divorce we could get married. We didn’t even apply for visas or anything for fear that Bradford would find out. But we figured, once there, it would all work out.”

“How were you going to get to the rental car, then? I don’t understand.”

“Ashley had a motorcycle, actually.” Ah, so I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t imagined it. “Ashley thought maybe Bradford would chase us down or have the police chase us down. She wanted us to have a motorcycle to get away on. It was maneuverable. We had it down the drive, but when I went out to get it and bring it up, I saw that someone was in the pool house with Ashley so I killed the engine and hid the bike behind the O’Malleys’ broken back gate.”

Ash must have told her about the O’Malleys’ gate. It had been broken the entire time we lived at the estate. The O’Malleys never went back there, and as teens Ash and I would hide behind it to smoke joints with our friends when we didn’t want to get caught.

“That was Father you saw?” I knew the answer. I just needed to hear her say it.

“Yes. I heard a scream and I sprinted to the pool, but Ashley was already dead, on the floor at his feet, and Bradford had a knife in his hand. He wiped the knife on his jacket and dropped it on the floor.”

Tabitha cried as she recounted falling to her knees and cradling Ash’s lifeless body while Father casually stripped off his bloody jacket and shirt, stuffed them in a black garbage bag from under the sink, and slid on a men’s shirt from Ash’s closet.

“I didn’t even think about what he was doing at the time. I was so intent on trying to save Ashley. I couldn’t.” She was sobbing now.

Tabitha hadn’t meant to screw up the forensics of the murder scene. She was honestly in shock that the love of her life had been so brutally killed and that Father was able to be so calm and detached.

“It sounds so awful. I can’t imagine.” I wanted to offer her some condolence, but what could I say?

“It was so surreal, it was like I wasn’t really there in the room, but outside it somehow, watching myself as though I were part of a movie. If it were a film though, Bradford would never have acted the way he did, barely bothering to cover his tracks at all.”

Apparently Father was confident in his ability to smooth talk and distract the police or explain away any forensic evidence that remained. There was probably blood on Father’s pants, but that was easily explained after he knelt in the growing pool seeping from his daughter’s body.

“He told me he did it, after that night, as if I didn’t see him holding the knife. He told me time and again that he’d do the same thing to me if I dared leave. Those first few weeks, I felt like I was in a nightmare. I kept thinking that the police would find DNA evidence or fiber transfer or something and link Bradford to the murder. But they never did. Whatever they did find was explained away, just like he said it would be. And the more he got away with it, the more Bradford flaunted it in front of me. He bragged about getting away with murder and told me this was proof he could do it again if I didn’t watch myself.”

So she stayed. But if she was so afraid of Father, and of his private investigators, I asked, why did she go to the sex shops so frequently? Why would she go to a private gentleman’s club to begin with?

“It’s not what you think. I’ve been working there under the table. Since Ash was killed I’ve been trying to put together enough money to get away from him. They don’t ask any questions at the club. I can come in a couple hours while Bradford thinks I’m shopping and make a couple hundred bucks while I wear a wig and a sexy mask. I’ve got it all in a safe deposit box so he can’t trace it. And I know what the PI looks like so I’m always careful to not be seen without disguise.”

Turns out even before our interaction, Tabitha was planning a getaway. But how could she let Ash’s murder go unpunished?

“I hope he does get punishment, some how. I hope some day he’s rotting in hell. But he’s Bradford Caulfield. He’s a local golden boy—powerful, wealthy, connected. Even with the best of evidence, we both know that men like Bradford rarely get punished.”

True. But that wasn’t enough for me.

“There’s always karma,” Tabitha offered.

I had something a little different in mind. In the back of my mind, though, I couldn’t stop thinking about one thing: Ash was dead and I was in love with the woman Father was willing to kill over once before. What was to stop him this time? How long before he came after me?

*

The next few days while Father was out of town were a whirlwind of activity as Tabitha and I hashed through our plans. We each had one last thing to do. I visited Father at his office.

“Megan, you should call first,” he chided me before I cut him off.

“Save it. This is the last time you’ll see me. I know what you did.” Inside, I was quaking, though surely his office was the safest place for this confrontation. Father prided himself on being a captain of industry. There was no way he’d lose his cool in front of his staff.

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He very clearly knew what I was talking about because his jaw suddenly looked wired shut and his eyes were darkened and his fists clenched.

“I know what you did to Ash. In life and in
ending
her life.”

“Well, little girl, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll stop this gibberish.” Father’s defense mechanism was to pull out the paternalism. He wouldn’t acquiesce easily. I cut him off abruptly. If I didn’t play my hand now I might chicken out.

“Here’s the rub, Daddy-O.” I pulled myself up as tall as I could, pushing out my chest in hopes that it would give me confidence like one of those animals on Discovery who are puffed up with pride. It didn’t work. I felt emboldened, but also frightened and small.

“In this envelope you’ll find copies of Ash’s diary, her secret diary in which she talks about you for pages on end. It’s been authenticated already, so don’t deny she wrote it. There is also Tabitha’s signed affidavit as a witness to Ash’s homicide and a release form giving Ash’s psychiatrist permission to reveal her therapy sessions to the police investigator still in charge of her case. I’m sure she told him a great deal about her relationship with both of you.”

Father started grumbling, a sort of passive protest. It was unlike him to not be fully cocked in a fight, but perhaps he had been beaten down by this. After all, he killed the one person I think he truly loved, as sick as it was.

“Megan, you don’t understand. I loved Ashley—”

“Save it.” I interrupted. I didn’t care to hear any more of his sickening rationale for fucking and then killing his daughter. “All of these items are on file with my attorney. Should anything happen to either Tabitha or me, they will be sent to the media. Because while you may be able to charm the DA and his cronies, I’m pretty sure the tabloids won’t be so kind. And knowing you, losing face will be almost as bad as losing control of your wife.”

Father was silent, unmoving.

“Here’s what you get in this bargain: we won’t go to the police or file suit if you let Tabitha leave now, unencumbered. And as we speak, Tabitha is cashing out the Fidelity International account. We’ll be taking that as a sort of one-time-only, good faith alimony payment for her years of dutiful service.”

Father’s eyes darted to the telephone and back at me. Was he wondering if he could stop the market transfer? Not likely, as Tabitha and I actually cashed it out this morning before he’d have a chance to discover the move. Father had plenty of money. Taking one of his pockets of cash wasn’t going to hurt him a bit.

The more important thing here was keeping his attention while Gualterio and Maria helped Tabitha load all her stuff into a tiny U-Haul trailer. It turned out that during many years of faithful service, Maria and Gualterio both witnessed a lot of wrongdoings by my father, and they weren’t so much loyal to Father as they were frightened by a possible report to and deportation by the INS. Given the opportunity to help me rescue Tabitha and put the screws to Father, they were both willing to oblige—as long as Father never knew of their involvement. So while I was distracting Father, the real move was happening at home. Or what used to be home.

Since Father was still unmoving, I decided to go in for the close. “I’m offering you a Faustian bargain here, Bradford.” Father flinched when I called him by his name. It meant a world of disrespect to him, I was sure. Good.

“Leave us alone and we’ll keep our mouths shut. Come near us, or send one of your goons after us, and we’ll make sure the whole world knows what kind of monster you really are.”

Father stood, this time making me recoil. I tried to steel myself.