by Tara Moss
Thirsty.
To add to her discomfort, the Sydney night was humid, and between the dancing and her boss’s awkward gropes, she had been perspiring uncomfortably. Her slip dress was slightly damp.
My shoes? Where are they? She couldn’t recall where or when she had taken them off.
Oh!
Meaghan patted herself down in a flash of panic. With great relief her fingertips found her small handbag, hanging reliably across her body on its delicate leather strap. Her life was in that thing: her apartment keys; her trusty mobile phone, from which she had already sent at least a dozen SMS messages during the course of the party telling each of her girlfriends which celebrities and corporate types she had spotted together and what they were up to; her lipgloss, and a small, expensive packet of party powder she was hoarding for the right occasion. This was not the right occasion. As she saw it, the most financially challenged, attractive and single young blonde at this kind of monied soiree should not be expected to amuse herself with her own stash.
Meaghan was not rich, powerful or famous. She had scored an invite to this exclusive house party because her boss wanted to get into her pants. At twenty-three, she was already quite familiar with the desires of men, and she had no illusions about Groobelaar’s intentions—at least, not now when he and his octopus hands were passed out before her, and sobriety was settling in on her like an unwelcomed cold front.
Maybe that nice man leaning in the doorway has a little something for me?
When she looked back in his direction, though, he was gone.
There was a line-up for the guest bathroom, and Meaghan joined the end of the queue. A small mirror mounted on the wall outside provided her with an opportunity to freshen up while she waited. Since she was little, her mother had told her she had a pretty face. Meaghan’s features were even and fine—a slim, pointed nose, wide eyes and a small mouth. She took out her make-up compact and cleaned up the dark liner that had smudged across her eyelids, examining her reflection as she did so. Meaghan was a petite and curvy blonde, with tanned skin that contrasted with her pale yellow hair. Though it was shockingly late for a midweek party and her eyes were red, she felt she still looked pretty; but then, there were a lot of pretty girls there, she noticed—a lot of pretty girls and not enough good-looking men.
A slick of lipgloss and she was looking a bit more fresh. She adjusted her hair, her bob slightly damp in her fingers.
Okay, hurry up already…
Meaghan could hear giggling inside the toilet. Whoever was in there was not alone. Suspecting the wait would take longer than she was willing to spare, she left the queue. She didn’t have to go that badly. Meaghan also wanted to leave the dance music for a while, not to mention the sight of her boss and his plump white stomach, which was still visible across the vast living room. Perhaps she should make her way through the party and happen across some fabulously wealthy prince who would sweep her off her feet? Groobelaar had said this gathering would be A-list. Her whole life Meaghan had dreamed of being invited into company like this, and she wasn’t going to waste what could be a valuable social or romantic opportunity. That was the reason she had agreed to come in the first place—it certainly hadn’t been in order to win Groobelaar’s attentions.
Meaghan sauntered her way onto the balcony, wondering if the businessman was out there. Instead she found a group of male guests lined up against a railing, sipping cocktails, in various states of undress—shirts open and ties undone, and strangely one man wearing his dress shirt without any pants to speak of, despite the presence of dress shoes and black socks pulled up neatly to his calves. Like spectators watching a titillating bout of female mud wrestling, the men lustily observed a small group of partyers leaping about and splashing in the spectacular pool below.
The blue rectangle of water was illuminated brightly in the dark, showcasing the lithe bodies of its carefree inhabitants: three attractive women stripped down to G-strings and bras, and at least two others swimming in the nude with their skirt suits and dresses crumpled poolside among a scattering of cocktail glasses.
Just beyond the edge of the pool, a trail of polished mosaic tiles led down to a private beach, from where Meaghan heard laughter and more music. To hoots of delight a male guest leaped up the stones two by two, and at the side of the pool stripped down to his boxers, swaying and nearly tripping as he removed his pants. Forgetting his socks, he plunged into the pool to join the women, the voyeurs cheering with gusto from the railing above.
‘Go, mate!’
Oh, yes!
Meaghan herself did not cheer, but she was relieved to see her stilettos strewn poolside, where she had carelessly left them so many hours before. The sight brought into hazy recall the hour or so she had spent dipping her feet as the sun went down, the ocean turning indigo and the sky orange while she snorted Charlie and flirted with the attentions of Groobelaar and his colleagues.
So her best shoes were not lost.
Is that…? Oh, it is!
Meaghan was distracted by an exciting find in the corner of the balcony to her right. A certain hunky Australian Football League player—a recent Cleo Bachelor of the Year—and a famous brunette newsreader could be seen lustily kissing one another on a patio chair, she sitting right in his lap. Trying to act casual, Meaghan opened her purse, removed her ever-present mobile phone and surreptitiously began to film the pair with the phone’s video function, as she pretended to be scrolling through a text message and looking at the view of the water. Wow. It was dark, but through the screen she could still make out who was making out. The best part about it was that, not only were they both famous, but the newsreader was married—and not to the young footy player.
A guest brushed past Meaghan, giving her a fright.
Oops.
Meaghan put her phone away and leaned on the rail for a moment as if nothing had happened. She hoped no one had seen what she was doing. When the guest who had bumped her—an unattractive man and, it turned out, his too-good-looking girlfriend—hung around, Meaghan turned back the way she had come. She moved through the party a little unsteadily, grinning at the scandal she had recorded, passing strangers who danced and swayed, the couple making out on the settee and Groobelaar still snoring in his almost obscene reclined pose.
She slid through a doorway she found on the other side of the room and tiptoed down a beautiful hallway lit by two large candelabras. She stopped to admire paintings in gilded frames and exquisite statues of the type she would normally see only in galleries. At the end of the hallway a timber staircase beckoned, extending upstairs and down, lushly adorned by a strip of Persian carpet in the centre. Meaghan paused on the landing, considering as best she could whether this would be the way to the deck to retrieve her shoes. She couldn’t truthfully remember how she had arrived at the living room to begin with.
She shrugged, and began her descent.
Meaghan padded down stair after stair, the music above her fading. Her toes sank into the plush carpet. One step, two step, three…Before long she reached the bottom and gripped the railing, smiling mischievously in a shroud of darkness: the stairs had led her to an unlit hallway on the lower floor. Unsure of her surroundings, she looked over her shoulder to see if she was being followed—clearly, this was not an area intended for guests.
Feeling a touch guilty, Meaghan approached the first door of the hall and pressed her ear against it, eavesdropping. She heard the sounds of hushed conversation, and a giggle. So there were guests who wanted privacy, then? Perhaps the brunette newsreader’s husband was in there, enjoying some scandalous adultery of his own? How ironic would that be?
Thank goodness I didn’t end up in one of those rooms with Groobelaar, she thought with a sneer. He continually tried to push her towards having an affair with him, but she would not. It had always just been work for her. Why did some men find that so difficult to understand?
Tiptoeing further down the hall, Meaghan kept her arms extended in front of her so she w
ould not bump into any unseen obstacles. At the very end of the corridor she could see a door partially ajar, and a faint glow of soft light spilling out onto the hall floor.
This, perhaps, was the way out.
She registered voices inside the room. These could be important guests—perhaps even her handsome businessman from upstairs? Meaghan flicked her hair back and adjusted the straps on her dress in anticipation of the strangers beyond the door. Satisfied that everything was in its place, she licked her lips and raised an arm to push the door open, her fixed smile at the ready. But mere seconds before she moved forwards to enter, she found her eyes focused on a vision through the thin gap of the open door, a sight that made her pause.
Oh!
Meaghan found herself looking at a young man who was immediately familiar to her—not from her own acquaintance, but from the newspapers. He was someone important. Very important. Someone with money. She was aware that she should know who he was, but she couldn’t quite place him. She stood and stared through the crack in the door for what could have been ten seconds or ten minutes—she didn’t know—and her hand, which had frozen in position halfway to pushing the door open, moved mechanically to her bag and removed her mobile phone. Like an automaton she stepped back and aimed the phone’s small video-camera lens through the crack in the door.
My girlfriends won’t believe the people I saw tonight.
She realised that the man was arguing with someone. It was odd because his lanky body was unclothed from the waist up, save for a glinting gold watch and some rings, and yet the Asian-looking man he was disagreeing with was fully dressed in a collared shirt and dress pants. Meaghan squinted and cocked her head to one side: something was wrong with what she was seeing. Her heart began pounding in her chest even before her mind fully registered the source of her horror.
The scene through the doorway came into focus slowly, and with awful clarity. Meaghan’s breath caught in her throat, her arm suspended motionlessly as she recorded everything on digital video.
Eyes…staring…
A naked girl lay prone on an unmade bed just inside the doorway. The young face—so close that Meaghan could have reached out and touched it—was turned at an awkward angle in Meaghan’s direction, chin buried in a pillow, the dark eyes wide open, staring lifelessly, her mouth gaping in an awful silent scream. A small manicured hand rested inches from where Meaghan stood in the dark hall, the fingers outstretched as if the girl had been reaching for the doorknob in her final breath, a heavy black leather tie dangling from the wrist. A syringe lay on the floor along with fallen bed cushions and an upturned water bottle, near the opening in the doorway. From the bedroom the musty scent of sex mixed with a horrible, sickly sweet odour Meaghan had not encountered before.
Death.
Meaghan’s stomach lurched. She brought her hand down, stopping the recording. She could not believe what she was seeing.
Oh my God…
The girl on the bed was Asian in appearance and young. Too young. Was she twelve? Fourteen? Dark glossy hair fanned out around her head as she lay stomach down, back and buttocks fully exposed, her diminutive body clothed only in a frilly hot-pink garterbelt that contrasted sharply with the grim setting and the bluey-ashen pallor of her skin. A large intricate tattoo that seemed out of place coloured her lower back in a pattern of lines or script that Meaghan could not make out.
She wanted to tell herself that this girl could simply be unconscious, but those staring eyes were too unresponsive. And besides, death was immediately recognisable: no sleep was so grim and terrible on an otherwise fair face; no living state left a person so empty-looking.
The famous man she had been recording stood at the foot of the bed arguing animatedly with the other man, neither of them bothering to attempt to revive the girl or cover her nakedness. The girl’s body looked so small and vulnerable in death, her limbs splayed out. And those unseeing eyes. The eyes seemed to look at Meaghan. Above the dead girl, the men were engaged in a hushed but heated argument—Meaghan could tell that they did not wish to be overheard. The implications of what she was witnessing were enormous, and difficult to fathom, particularly in her state.
What is that guy doing there with a girl so young and so…dead?
‘Hey!’
A man’s booming voice yelled at her from the hallway behind. Meaghan jumped with fright at the sound, letting out a shocked yelp. Instinctively she palmed her phone behind her back and whirled around to face the voice. It belonged to a strong, even-featured young man who was barely two metres away and closing fast. Behind her the bedroom door was slammed shut from the inside. She heard a scuffle within as the inhabitants realised they had been spotted. Meaghan wore a bold smile for the stranger in the hallway while her fingers worked the buttons of the mobile keypad behind her back, trying to send a video of the dead girl to the first person listed in her phone book.
Should she tell this stranger what she had seen?
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked accusingly, standing over her aggressively.
She continued pressing buttons, with no time to consider to whom the video might be delivered.
‘Hey! I’m talking to you!’
With that he lunged forwards and grabbed Meaghan’s wrists from behind her back. The phone slipped from her hands and dropped to the hardwood floor with a loud thwack, the battery separating from the phone and skittering a few feet away.
No!
‘Ouch! Wait!’ she protested. The man had a painful, vicelike grip; and, to her alarm, he wasn’t easing off. His face was mere centimetres from hers as he held her wrists, and she could see that he was very unhappy with her—a little too unhappy. With his sun-kissed hair, white teeth and tan, he looked to Meaghan like a handsome male model or a movie star. He certainly didn’t fit her idea of a security guard. But his eyes were angry, and Meaghan could not yet register why he would be so cross with her. What had she done to him?
‘I said, what do you think you’re doing?’ he bellowed angrily.
She flinched and closed her eyes. ‘Oh…I…you don’t understand…’ she began feebly. Slowly he eased his grip on her, nonetheless keeping her cornered and bearing down on her without a trace of friendliness. She smiled coyly in response, in a way she hoped would be disarming. ‘There must be some misunderstanding,’ she continued, deciding it was far too risky to admit what she had seen. ‘I’m looking for the deck. Is it this way? I didn’t take anything if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m a guest here, with Mr Groobelaar of Trident Realty—’
And then, to her shock, the man deliberately stomped his foot down on her mobile. She heard pieces of the phone crunch and scatter in the hall.
Oh!
Sickening adrenaline rushed through her as the realisation hit.
He is with them. He knows there is a dead girl in the next room.
Meaghan could see by the look in this man’s eyes that there was no room for outrage. He knew perfectly well what he was doing, and what was happening behind that closed bedroom door—and he also knew that she knew. Meaghan was now very much afraid. She knew the significance of what she had been recording. Though she still couldn’t recall the name of the shirtless man in the room, she knew that he was important, that he was famous, and that he was in a room with a dead underaged girl. And she’d seen it. Meaghan had watched enough movies to know that people were killed for knowing less.
The blond man grabbed her forcefully by the shoulders with both hands while Meaghan panicked inside.
‘Don’t you know it’s not polite to spy?’
She was hauled down the corridor away from the bedroom door, with her shattered phone lying in pieces on the hallway floor, the only evidence of what she had seen now destroyed. Shocked by the stranger’s aggression and looking for any chance to escape, Meaghan was being half dragged, half carried away down one corridor to the next, before being pushed through a doorway into a cold, dark space.
It was a garage. The lights fli
ckered and came on with a hum. Meaghan’s eyes widened. The garage housed several luxury automobiles: a Jag, a BMW four-wheel drive and what she thought was a Ferrari or Lamborghini or something. She didn’t know cars well, but she knew an expensive car when she saw it. These people were very, very rich.
‘Are you going to calm down now?’ the man said.
She stood rigid, unsure of what would happen next.
I just saw a dead girl. A dead girl…
‘No one is going to hurt you,’ he said, palms extended as if to offer a truce. Under the present circumstances, though, she wasn’t so sure she believed him. ‘Now just get in. Please…’ He opened the passenger-side door of the four-wheel drive and signalled for her to step in.
She stood her ground.
‘Relax, babe. I’m only driving you home,’ he said, and smiled for the first time, his teeth dazzling.
‘But my shoes are at the pool,’ she protested and looked down at her feet. ‘I took them off earlier. It will take me two seconds to get them.’
He didn’t go for it.
‘Get in the car,’ he said.
Groobelaar was asleep upstairs—too far to run to—and she certainly couldn’t cry out and be heard with all that dance music pounding through the house. And this man was blocking the door to the garage. He was much bigger than her, and certainly far stronger. There was no way she would make it past him.
With reluctance, Meaghan did as the stranger said and got in, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in her chest. I should never have let him get me in the car. This is bad. This is really bad. She was strapped in and the door closed. A flurry of scenarios buzzed through her mind: What if I leap out as we leave the drive, and flee into the neighbouring yards? Would he come after me if I did?