Ruined (Family Untied Book 1)

by S. A. McEwen

  In the shower, he leans into the heat and lets it pummel his face, run over his body. He keeps his eyes closed, memories like tiny chips of glass under his skin, scratching and pricking at him.

  He remembers crying, and screaming, and collapsing.

  He remembers life being altered forever in that instant.

  He feels the pain like it is yesterday.

  A thousand tiny needles stuck inside him, scratching him from the inside out, forever.

  Subdued sometimes, but never, ever, ever destined to go away.

  20

  As she had suspected he would, the detective closed his notebook with an air of finality when Natalie told him how she and Evelyn really met.

  “You don’t understand,” she had insisted, her voice getting louder, it clear the detective was just humouring her. “She charges six-hundred dollars an hour. This isn’t lowlife scum picking up a powerless woman off the streets and killing her for pleasure. She has good clients. She’s fastidious about screening. She was just visiting my parents for lunch, for God’s sake.”

  But he didn’t seem interested in differentiating between the different types of sex work and the associated risks.

  And Natalie was pretty sure he wasn’t very interested in Grant Boyd.

  This is where sex work stinks, Natalie thinks to herself. No matter how much she charges her clients, the general population curl their lips in distaste. There’s no understanding, no belief that she and Letitia are just as nuanced a person as anyone else. Unless someone personally knows a sex worker and has their perceptions challenged, they assume all sex workers are less than human: drug-addled, desperate women who can’t hold down any other work. Nymphomaniacs who could never keep a partner.

  It was almost as though they thought that by choosing this profession, Evelyn was asking to die.

  Natalie stays in her car, half defeated, half burning with white-hot, brewing rage.

  21

  The man hires a car at Melbourne Airport—a v8 ute, which suits his mood—and drives out to his family’s old farm.

  His latest conquest has left him feeling unsettled.

  Everything had gone to plan, of course. It always did.

  But he feels uneasy nevertheless.

  He doesn’t know why he’s taking this drive. If he tells himself anything, it relates to the solitude, the space to think amongst open fields. Driving has always soothed him.

  He pulls up outside the farm two hours later.

  The old gate at the start of the long drive has been replaced with stone walls with lions atop, and electric gates with sharp-looking tips on each black metal rail. The man supposes they are meant to look impressive, but they make him feel strangely wistful. He can’t imagine why—his memories of living on the farm are hardly heartwarming.

  Still.

  He remembers racing to the bus stop on his bike, skidding to a stop at the gate, and hurling himself over it, his bike discarded where he stopped, despite the endless reprimands from his parents to put it out of sight and not block the drive.

  He thinks he did that for a whole month before his father made sure that he never, ever did it again.

  He sits at the gates, the engine idling. The plain trees lining the driveway are twice the size they were when he left. The house is blocked by high, neat hedges—another new addition from the new owners. His father moved into town several years ago.

  The man has not visited his father in his new home.

  If you asked him, he wouldn’t have been able to explain why. He and his father were thick as thieves, he supposed you could say, after his mother left.

  He stares at the gates, in his mind seeing her running through the orchard, laughing, the sunlight in her hair.

  Her soft voice calling him over for freshly baked cupcakes.

  The warmth of her smile, when his father wasn’t around.

  The man starts, a fleeting feeling confusing him, stabbing at him.

  It’s all okay, he tells himself, shaking his head as though to shake the discomfort away. The dead prostitute. It all went to plan. There’s nothing to worry about.

  It would not have occurred to him that that feeling might be what regret, or grief, or pain might feel like.

  Regret and grief and pain were not part of his vocabulary.

  He’s tempted to go in, chat to the new owners, take a walk down the familiar dirt tracks. But he pushes that urge away too.

  Nostalgia is also unfamiliar to him.

  Instead, he turns the car around and heads back the way he came.

  22

  Her apartment is empty when Natalie returns home, and she’s grateful for the solitude. She heads straight to her bedroom and sinks into her soft bed, pulling the second pillow in to her stomach to curl around.

  The detective has promised to stay in touch, but she doesn’t have high hopes for his investigation. He did, however—with the one flash of empathy he had shown the entire conversation—gently explain that Letitia’s profession would probably be in the media soon enough. They wouldn’t release the information at this stage, but at some point it might help them to have that angle when requesting information from the public.

  “You might want to think about what you want to say to your parents about that,” he’d said, and he had actually managed to look concerned.

  Because, obviously, being a successful, self-employed sex worker was something to be ashamed of and to be kept hidden from one’s loved ones at all costs, Natalie thinks bitterly to herself.

  At the moment, though, that eventuality seems like the least painful thing to be pressing down on Natalie.

  Her grief is quiet, and heavy, and colossal, and complex. It’s not just that she loved Letitia. It was also that Letitia was a kind of home. She understood, experientially, how Natalie experienced the world. She understood her as an escort. She was one of only a handful of people in the world that Natalie felt effortlessly connected to. Who she could laugh about her parents with, and feel understood by. Her fierce protectiveness of them, alongside her abject despair at who they were and how they got there. The ways their experiences pressed into her, and changed her. Her resentment toward them and her connection to them, however dysfunctional. However damaged.

  It’s intermingled with a kind of hopelessness, because do black lives matter? Natalie feels this, rather than considers the question. She doesn’t formulate sentences about it, but she feels it in every cell in her body. Can a black woman just be plucked off the street with barely a ripple? Because already, Natalie knows that there won’t be marches thirty-thousand strong down Sydney’s main streets. There won’t be vigils attended by politicians and academics. There won’t be cries of “things must change” echoing around the nation. Even before her work as an escort comes out, Natalie knows in her bones that for Letitia, this is true.

  Curled up on her bed, her eyes dry, Natalie finds it almost humorous that she went to Aunty She about her parents. Like knowing about them would help her belong.

  In Australia, suddenly and breathtakingly, she knows that no amount of closeness with her mother will help her to feel like she belongs.

  23

  When the man returns to Sydney, his sense of unease hasn’t lifted.

  He scans the news online, again, hoping to find something to settle him.

  Following the story has never really appealed to him. He’d read things for a day or two, maybe a week at the most. But what happened, how people reacted, what the police thought—usually that stuff felt irrelevant to him. He felt invincible, untouchable. His plan was flawless, as far as he could tell. And he was still a free man, so it seemed that his assessment was spot on.

  The police always looked for the disgruntled client. A job gone wrong. That was the beauty of his work. While they were looking at the movements of recent clients, the client they were on their way to and from, or looking for men who’d been sighted in the vicinity—the opportunistic stranger—he was long gone.

  But he’d made
a mistake this time.

  Evelyn.

  He didn’t know Letitia’s real name when he chose her. He always took care to meet his targets when they were working. It was easy enough to arrange. Book an appointment, with an old phone that didn’t have his name attached to it. Be a model client. Nothing memorable. Polite, vanilla, respectful.

  Wait a few weeks.

  Wait, and watch.

  It had worked every single time.

  They didn’t usually remember him, when he first approached them the second time.

  He’d remind them—the day, the hotel, something they’d said. Something unique and well-planned, because he needed them to remember.

  He needed them to feel safe.

  So they’d remember. At least pretend to be happy to see him. Give him a friendly kiss on the cheek.

  It didn’t matter. He didn’t need them to be genuinely happy. He didn’t see them that first time to create a lasting impression.

  That was what the second meeting was for.

  But Letitia hadn’t been going to see a client. She’d been going to visit friends. And even though there was still the “stranger danger” narrative to fall back on, it was much less robust than the whole prostitute-with-a-client-gone-bad narrative.

  The police would be starting with strangers sighted in the area. Cars noticed. Usually, his method results in them being tied up with the “bad client” red herring for the first few days. They fail to focus on asking everyone to remember every car they’d seen in the vicinity.

  And by the time they’d cleared the clients his victim was leaving or en route to…well. People’s memories were pretty iffy two, three, four days later. Whatever people wanted to think about their own memory, the way they saw things was overlaid with all sorts of stuff. What they thought they saw becomes confused when faced with law enforcement, who really, really want them to remember.

  His mind drifts back to the farm.

  In a rare moment of clarity, he wishes his memory was so fickle.

  His mum. His dad.

  He wishes he didn’t remember everything.

  Some things are better to forget.

  24

  Griffin sits on the plane, staring blankly ahead while his fellow passengers disembark.

  “Sir?” the hostess asks him, when those passengers have all long gone, and still he stares.

  “Right. Yes,” he answers, smiling wanly at her, rising from his seat.

  He hasn’t been able to reach Ivy since that day in her apartment, when the news of her friend’s death catapulted her out the door.

  It seems to have catapulted her right out of his life.

  Phone calls and text messages have gone unanswered for nearly two weeks. He’s thought about dropping in, but he guesses that she is grieving in her own way, and might not appreciate him impinging on her space. He sent flowers instead, just reiterating how sorry he was and that he was thinking of her.

  To be honest, he doesn’t know how he can be close to her in that space, post-death. He feels angry and confused himself. It feels too close to him, raises too many painful issues that he felt were long behind him, but are now sizzling and sparking too close to the surface.

  Perhaps pain never really goes away, he thinks to himself, as he walks to a waiting taxi.

  He thinks back to his conversation with Natalie, or Ivy, or whoever the hell she is, the night before the death. Maybe she’s just collecting Natalie’s mail, he thinks to himself. Or maybe she’s lying about something.

  He knows that’s a possibility. Because God knows, he lied enough that night.

  He’s lied enough his whole life.

  Not completely. Not entirely.

  Not about everything.

  He’s found fiction works best when you thread a little truth through it.

  25

  March 2018

  “I don’t have money for you.”

  Natalie stops her advance into the apartment abruptly.

  She just barely stops herself from shaking her head in disbelief.

  Her first client back at work, and it’s a Time Waster.

  She had thought he looked a bit too young and broke for this as he opened the door, despite the fancy apartment.

  Strangely, she doesn’t feel too annoyed, or like he might be dangerous, a thought that plays on her mind a lot these days.

  In the last couple of weeks, she has reached out to the sex-work community in a way that she never has before. Starting out, she had taught herself what worked and what didn’t in this job. What she needed to do. How to stay safe. How to recognise STI’s and dodgy clients. She barely spoke to any other escorts at all.

  But after Letitia’s death, she felt so alone and so lost and so angry, and had so few people to talk to, that she couldn’t really think of anywhere else to turn. Eloise tried to help as best she could, of course. But for the first time, Natalie longed to connect with more people like her. Who understood what it felt like to not be taken seriously. Who understood being reviled and rejected for the work they did. Who lived it, just like her.

  The community was open and welcoming, with various online groups, helpful advice, and all sorts of interesting commentary. Natalie suddenly wished she hadn’t been so solitary when she started—a community like this could have saved her so much time and heartache.

  Plus, she liked these people. They were smart and funny and strong. The more she chatted, the more she read, the more stories she heard, the more proud she felt to be counted among their numbers.

  Nevertheless, she got straight to the point. Her friend was dead. It did not seem to be a sex-work-motivated attack. She was out on a social visit. The police aren’t taking it seriously. “Just a dead whore who picked the wrong client” kind of attitude.

  The response was overwhelming. Support, of course—kindness and rage and genuine understanding. But also practical tips—names and numbers of detectives who had been helpful for other escorts. Grief counsellors who were sex-worker friendly and knowledgeable. Useful suggestions and offers of help for general work administration to lighten her load while she was grieving.

  But more than that, something else stood out.

  Going through all the replies, the knowledge, the tips, something was niggling at Natalie that she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Something important.

  And finally it hit her.

  Wait, wait, WAIT, she types into one of the groups. Are you telling me that between you, you know FOUR OTHER ESCORTS who have been murdered in the last two years with no convictions??

  Doesn’t that seem odd to you???

  She’d called one of the detectives suggested to her—Detective Casey—immediately. She hadn’t expected her to answer, had her message all ready to leave on voicemail. When she answered, Natalie was momentarily taken aback.

  “Hi, detective. My name is Natalie. An escort who was a friend of Minna Francis’s gave me your number. You were investigating her murder a year or so ago.”

  “I see. Yes, I remember the case. How can I help you, Natalie?”

  “I spoke to Detective Burns a month ago about the murder of another escort. Evelyn Weber. He wasn’t very interested in the information I provided. It was suggested you might be more open to hearing from an escort.”

  The detective had only missed half a beat. “Of course. Do you have some information that you think might be helpful?”

  “Yes,” Natalie had said firmly, though she felt idiotic. She had suddenly realised how crazy her theory sounded. “My friend was not on a job. She was visiting my parents. We were…close. The detective thought she probably picked up a last-minute client, but I think that is extremely unlikely. Impossible, actually. I know her well. We screen carefully. We request at least twelve hours’ notice.” Natalie had stopped, the incorrect tenses hitting her hard. Hurting her. She had taken a deep breath. Continued in the past tense.

  “Evelyn made good money. I’m sure she wouldn’t have taken a last-minute booking, and I
’m sure she wouldn’t have just not shown up at my parents’ without letting them know the change of plans. She was very polite, respectful. My parents are quite elderly. She would not have disrespected them like that. I don’t believe that is what happened.”

  A pause.

  “I see. And what do you believe happened?”

  Natalie had swallowed and gripped the edge of her table.

  “I connected with some other workers after her death. And I learnt that there have been similar deaths. Four other escorts, all on their way somewhere that they never arrived to. All murdered and their bodies found outdoors. No one has been arrested for any of the murders.”

  There was silence on the line. Natalie had hurried to fill it, before she could be dismissed.

  “I think a killer is targeting escorts. And there’s a guy…near my parents. He’s been in and out of jail his whole life. He attacked my brother and left him with a brain injury. I just wanted to make sure he’s being looked into. He was right there. Near Evelyn that day.”

  Afterwards, Natalie had slumped on her sofa. What does it matter? she had thought to herself. It might stop Grant killing other escorts, but it wouldn’t bring Letitia back.

  “Ah…Ivy?”

  Natalie was miles away. She focuses again on the young man standing in front of her.

  He can’t be more than twenty-five. He has shaggy, dark hair and an irreverent grin. Under his tight, faded black tee shirt, she can see the definition of his abs.

  Part of a tattoo curves out from the sleeve across a tanned, solid arm.