Punishment with Kisses

by Diane Anderson-Minshall

  As I ran out the door I could hear Ash say something but couldn’t decipher it. For all I know she was laughing.

  Chapter Six

  I spent the next two weeks inside the house where tensions seemed to escalate as well. My father and Tabitha seemed to be yelling at each other constantly, both of them drunk off their asses. The air around the whole estate felt pregnant with disaster. I didn’t know what was going to happen, I just had that terribly foreboding sense that something had to give. I just hoped I would be okay in the wake of whatever storm was brewing.

  Tabitha and Father lived in different rooms now, the three of us eating solo in the kitchen by turn. Maria had learned to make my favorite comfort foods: grilled cheese, mac and cheese, cheesecake. Without Shane, I turned into a pudgy cheese-freak. We hadn’t talked since that horrible night in the pool house. She never called me again, not even an attempt at an apology. Even worse, I’d seen her out at the pool with Ash and Cynthia. The three of them, skanking around like whores.

  I couldn’t bear to watch it anymore. I kept my shades drawn at all times, squirreling myself away in my novels, reading one after another, cramming my head full of words and other people’s lives so I wouldn’t have even a second to dwell on my own miserable one.

  I desperately needed to get out of this place. Maybe I’d go to grad school or spend a year backpacking across Europe like my college roommate. I didn’t know, maybe getting a job and moving to the city would be good. I just wanted to do something to get away from my whole family. They were all nuts.

  The only problem with the options I came up with was that they all required some kind of planning. And I couldn’t find the energy to do any of it—not searching job ads, not filling out graduate school admission applications, not even shopping for backpacking gear. I felt tired all the time; I ached all over; I burst into tears every few minutes.

  Maybe I should just go on vacation somewhere far away, somewhere like Florida or the Cayman Islands, somewhere with frozen tropical drinks that could help me forget—everything. Somewhere I could get my head together and figure out what to do with my life. If only I could get Daddy dearest to loosen the purse strings so I could book a flight immediately.

  In all these years I’d never even had a credit card in my own name. I wasn’t an adult. I was a child. A foolish, gullible child so desperate for love she couldn’t even tell when she was being used. I thought Tabitha was stupid, but at least she seemed to know exactly what she was exchanging for what.

  The putter of a small engine pulled me from my thoughts. I envisioned Shane’s motorcycle coming up our drive, and I couldn’t help but reminisce about her touch on me, her whole effect on me. Shane was my first real lover—not just those college kids and the few tumbles in dorm room beds. She was the first person I’d ever said the L-word to. But now I couldn’t stop imagining Ash and Shane together. Every time we were together, was Shane imagining I was Ash? Ash was probably right. It was better to use people than to be used by them.

  I was going to change my life. I was never going to let someone get that close to me again. I resolved to begin my new sentimentality-free life in the morning. I dozed off fantasizing about how great it would be to be aloof and in control.

  Although I was never much of a television junkie, my secret vice was falling asleep to the sound of crime shows playing in the background. Law & Order, CSI, if it had cops, I could fall asleep to it. I’m not sure what it said about me that nothing lulled me to sleep like the noise of sirens, running feet, and gunfire. I think I can blame it on Mother, who used to read Edgar Allan Poe aloud as bedtime stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum.” I don’t know why. I guess there’s something twisted in our genes.

  So it didn’t shock me when I heard the scream. I assumed it was the television, that the sleep timer hadn’t clicked in and turned it off yet, but then, just before I closed my eyes again, I realized that the room was dark. Pitch black. There was no telltale glow from the television. I looked up and discovered the set wasn’t on. Something was wrong.

  I jumped up and something pulled me to the sliding glass doors that led to my balcony. I shoved aside the heavy curtains just in time to witness some sort of flash of light. Was that someone disappearing into the trees? Was that a scream, or maybe just a gunning engine? My heart jumped at the thought of Shane’s motorcycle, and as pathetic as it was, I immediately searched for her bike. It wasn’t there.

  Could she have left that quickly? Was I wrong in thinking I’d heard the distinct sound of a motorcycle? I stood on the balcony for a moment, sweeping my eyes across the estate, seeking anything that might have caused the noise. I found nothing. Maybe Ash had her TV turned up really loud. I listened intently for the sound to repeat. It didn’t. There was no backfiring car, no late night foray on a golf cart, no landscaper firing up a chainsaw for midnight pruning, nothing.

  I realized that everything had gone still. Even the crickets had stopped chirping and fallen silent. I looked down at the pool house, checking for the flashing lights of Ash’s television, but it was dark. I couldn’t tell if there was a problem, but an ominous sense of foreboding washed over me. Something was wrong. Something was wrong with the night air. It was too quiet.

  And then it wasn’t. I heard yelling, doors slamming, feet pounding hard against the ground, people running this way—toward the pool house. Toward Ash. Something was very wrong. Flashlights bobbed closer and the voices resolved and I heard Father’s husky voice howling out Ash’s name.

  I almost jumped. I almost dove right off the balcony because that would have been the fastest way down, the quickest method to reach the ground. Oh, my God—Ash! I didn’t pause to speculate on what was wrong, I didn’t waste any time stitching together my darkest fears. In that moment I didn’t remember any of the terrible things Ash had done lately, the things that had made me hate her, not even what she had done with Shane—none of it. In that instant all of that was gone. I just ran. I flew out of my room without even bothering to throw on a robe or slippers.

  I took the stairs three at a time, landing hard on a bent ankle and not even flinching at the pain. The front door stood open. The sinking feeling in my stomach plummeted with all the force of an out of control elevator plunging a hundred floors.

  There was something incredibly disturbing about the sight of a home’s front doors gaping wide open. There was almost a perversity to it, and I wanted to look away, to shield my eyes from the obscenity.

  I thought of Ash. The image of her face in my mind was enough to block out the doors as I sprinted through them and down the path. The ground was cold and damp under my bare feet. I’ve always had sensitive feet, and normally I couldn’t stand to go barefoot unless I was walking in weathered beach sand. When forced to, I’d have to hobble slowly along, grimacing at every step, as though I were walking over hot coals. But that night I didn’t even slow down.

  As soon as I hit the ground I could see that the French doors to the pool house were wide open and all the lights turned on. I could hear someone wailing, or was it a dog howling? It didn’t seem real, didn’t seem possible that the sound I was hearing could be coming from a person. Silhouetted against harsh lights of the exposed pool house, I could see figures hunched and bent over. As I got closer, I could see there was something heaped on the floor in front of them, a pile of some kind.

  I ran faster. I could hear the sound of the surf pounding in my ears. Was that my pulse? I ran. One of the figures swept the pile into their arms and stood up. The heap unfolded into the shape of a person.

  I froze. The shape didn’t stand up on its own. Its feet didn’t touch the ground. It just hung there in the air as limp as a rag doll. I heard someone scream, “No!” and the sound echoed off the canyons in my ears. It wasn’t until Gualterio called my name that I realized I was the one shrieking. As though released from a spell, I started forward again. Just as I did, I sent a prayer Heavenward. I begged the man upstairs for something I will alway
s be ashamed of. Please God, I thought, don’t let it be Shane.

  Almost immediately I knew my prayer had been answered. I could make everyone out. Tabitha was wailing, holding Ash’s limp, bloody body in her arms. Maria was sobbing and crossing herself while Gualterio and Father were huddled together as though conferring. Father was shouting something I couldn’t decipher. A distant police siren rang out in the background.

  I stepped into the light of the pool house. I stood arm’s length from the lifeless body of my dear sister. And then I saw it. The bloody knife. An antique silver knife from Grandma’s set, passed down from four generations, now bloodied, discarded on the ground next to my dead sister’s body.

  My dead sister’s body. My sister was dead. Is dead. Slashed to death in our very own home. It was all so horrible to imagine, I fell to my knees and vomited all over the hardwood floor, my refuse seeping into Ash’s blood as Tabitha continued to wail.

  Chapter Seven

  I bent and set my bouquet down, adding it to the pile of roses already blocking the inscription on Ash’s gravestone. A year after she was buried and someone still cared enough to bring her flowers. I didn’t need to push aside the thorns to see the epitaph. Father had chosen a simple Beloved Daughter. It perfectly matched the stone just to the left, with the short descriptor Beloved Mother. I sensed a theme. If I passed into that dark night before my father, I’d be buried on the other side of Ash, no doubt spending eternity resting under my Beloved Sister stone. When Father joined us he’d be on the far left, the head of the Caulfield clan. I bet his epitaph was stipulated in his last will and testament or something. The tombstones were stark testimony to the truth of our family. We only existed in relation to Ash. I had never been my own person. I had always been my sister’s sister. I wondered if that would change now that she was gone.

  Looking at half my family resting side by side, and my own waiting grave, I couldn’t help but wonder what was supposed to happen to Tabitha. Did Father plan to have her buried underneath him in the same plot? Or maybe she was just supposed to throw herself in on top of his casket like women were expected to do in India not too long ago?

  Cemeteries had always brought out my morbid sense of humor. That was one of the reasons I had chosen to come here alone, even though I knew I’d raised Father’s ire by failing to join the official pilgrimage earlier in the day.

  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 h
andle 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.