Ruined (Family Untied Book 1)

by S. A. McEwen

  He looks confident and relaxed.

  Natalie, normally so immune to the charms of men, finds her eyes wandering.

  He’s ridiculously good-looking.

  She knows, from experience, that that means he’s probably horribly entitled and a terrible lover. But her eyes roam over his arms, his stomach anyway.

  “No cash, no loving; sorry, Aaron. Call me again when you’re flush.”

  “No, wait. Please. I don’t want sex.”

  Natalie rolls her eyes at the lifts, which she has turned back toward in order to disappear into. Great, she thinks. Another one who wants to talk and thinks that’s free.

  “Well, if you just want to chat, you can pay my social rate, it’s a bit less. Would that work for you?” she says sweetly over her shoulder, her legs still facing definitively toward her exit. At least he had paid a deposit to cover some of the wasted time.

  “I saw you. In Sydney. At the gallery.”

  Natalie turns slightly. She frowns, her spider sense kicking in, suddenly on high alert.

  “I don’t have ‘sex worker, here’s my website’ printed on my forehead,” she says carefully, backing away a couple of paces into the muted light of the landing. The extra distance is hardly more comforting, though; the apartment block is stunning, and deserted. She can’t even hear evidence of anybody else.

  Through a huge glass window at one end, she can see boats and surfers dotted across the bay.

  “I have, ah…looked at advertising sites now and then,” he says, looking at her under long, black lashes. He looks like an enthusiastic puppy, excited and unabashed.

  “So you saw my picture and recognised me from the gallery…and decided to book me…for…?”

  “A date.”

  “They involve cash.”

  He looks around, amused, suddenly aware of being in a public space.

  “Please come in,” he implores. “I mean I have money. Or rather, my brother does.” He chuckles to himself, then sees Natalie’s look of alarm. “He’s not here, don’t worry,” he hurriedly assures her. “No gang bangs with my brother, I promise.” He shudders to himself, his face contorting with some kind of comical horror. “Give me ten minutes. I’ll transfer you the money for the hour if you want to leave after that. But I think you’ll want to stay.” He saunters back into the apartment, leaving the door open, unbelievably cocky even for an attractive twenty-something-year-old.

  Despite herself, Natalie wants to follow. Her alarm has evaporated. Partly, she trusts her gut in relation to sex work, and she thinks she is safe with this…boy. Partly, she’s curious to see just what someone so young and inexperienced thinks he has to offer. At least it will be amusing to share with her newfound whore-friends. This twenty-year-old man-child tried to convince me to stay for free by showing me what he thought was an impressive cock! she imagines chortling to them later that night.

  If she’s completely honest, part of her, too, wants to wander along behind his arse, admiring his shoulders, the way his jeans hang off his hips. He looks like he could be a cowboy, or a surfer, or maybe Brad Pitt in Thelma and Louise. And the stirrings of interest are a nice change from the despair of the last few weeks. The pain of it.

  So she walks into the crisp, white space, the interior every bit as luxurious-looking as she expected from the fancy lobby and the prime location. A series of small, beautiful artworks are tastefully arranged along the hallway, understated and brilliant. Despite herself, she pauses in front of them, sucking in her breath.

  “In here,” her client calls from farther inside.

  Turning toward the living area, with its pristine white couches and inviting shaggy, white rug, though, it’s not the killer view that stops her dead.

  26

  On the day the man’s mother left, it was the smallest act of self-protection that dictated who left, and who stayed.

  If he ever thought about it, that might have seemed unfair. That he was only trying to protect himself, and he ended up the least protected of them all.

  Catelyn.

  Back then, the little light that flickered inside her—the flame burning brightly that had perhaps drawn his father to her in the first place—had not gone out completely.

  When her husband was at work in the paddocks, she could relax and play with her children. She wanted them to know love. She wanted to see their faces bright with joy.

  She always knew when her time was up: she could see the dust rising from the approaching tractor or ute, hear the growling engine coming closer. In the fifteen or so minutes between her becoming aware of her husband returning home for the night, the day’s work done, she diminished in ways her children could see perhaps even more clearly than she could see herself.

  And they retreated, torn between a desire to protect her and a desire to not see.

  It was not that her husband was routinely violent. Just that she now knew that it would come again.

  It always did.

  The man shakes himself. He does not want to think about that day.

  On that day, he was powerless.

  He was powerless for the entire three years that he didn’t see his mother.

  But he hasn’t been powerless for a single day since then.

  27

  The painting is almost life-size.

  It dominates the room not merely through its colour: the woman depicted is a physical presence. She’s so vivid, so detailed that she almost steps off the canvas and into conversation with Natalie and Aaron.

  Despite the angle, Jack Charles is easily recognisable. He appears exactly as he does in the award-winning portrait, except where the frame ought to be, he fades into dark swirls. He looks like a ghost, or an apparition, or a dream.

  In the picture, Natalie recognises everything she was feeling in that moment. She’s wearing a simple blue dress. Her hair is in its natural state, unstyled and sticking up in random directions. One hand is lifted to Jack’s face, though Natalie knows she did not do that in the gallery. But the gesture perfectly reflects her longing, her confusion. Her pain.

  She looks ethereal. She looks, indeed, like she wants to morph into the apparition before her and float away.

  But as those words come back to her, other things start to niggle and stab at her, too.

  Dead sex workers.

  Her short, short hair.

  Natalie spins away from the lush white rug and vomits all over the wall behind her. For a second, she watches the evidence of her distress sliding down the wall and pooling on the floor.

  Then her legs slip out from underneath her, and strong arms reach out to catch her and save her from crashing to the vomit-covered floor.

  “Hey there.”

  The client’s voice is soft, his fingers gently stroking her hair.

  Her head is in his lap, and she is looking directly up at him.

  Panic.

  Natalie scrambles up and away from him, her eyes wide. But he only looks worried. “That wasn’t quite the effect I was going for,” he tells her, his eyes still dancing, despite their concern. “I thought you might swoon at how clever I was, and agree to a lunch date some time. Fainting, maybe. But vomiting? No. I didn’t consider that as a possible response.”

  “Why did you paint that?” Natalie whispers, though she knows what he is going to say. It’s written all over the damn canvas.

  “You looked so haunting. So beautiful. So sad. I felt like two hundred years of race relations were captured in your face.”

  “I sat and stared at you for a while,” he continues, watching Natalie with concern. “It was probably kind of creepy, actually. I was picturing how I’d paint you. I didn’t even notice you’d left! I ran around the gallery like a lunatic. I even asked the girl at the front desk. But all I could think to say was ‘the one who was staring at Jack Charles like she wanted to morph into him’ to describe the person I was looking for.” His eyes crinkle, laughing at himself. “Needless to say, she thought I was nuts. She just side-eyed me with the �
��I’m-dealing-with-a-crazy-here’ look on her—hey, hey, what’s wrong?”

  But Natalie is gone.

  The front door clicks gently behind her, the soft-close feature at odds with the forceful urgency of her exit.

  Aaron stares after her without moving for a long, long time.

  28

  On the day his mother left, a parcel had been delivered.

  Brian had drunk too much the night before. He wasn’t a big drinker, and the violence wasn’t tied to alcohol alone—but when he did drink, the aftermath lasted for days.

  The parcel was a part his father had been waiting on for the tractor. A piston, perhaps, or maybe a carburettor?

  The deliveryman had chatted for a minute, and Catelyn was brighter than usual, lest he smell the tension in the air, detect the unhappiness that rolled off them all in waves. In a way, she was trying to protect Brian. Or maybe she was trying to protect herself—was she more ashamed for herself, or for him? Did she not want the community to know that he was violent, or that she suffered it?

  But Brian, hungover and blind to this, hissed only “Slut” as she walked back in from the front door, shoving her against the wall almost absentmindedly.

  The thud seemed obscenely loud in the quiet kitchen. Catelyn slid down the wall to the floor.

  Three small pairs of eyes fastened upon her from the breakfast table. Marilyn’s filled with tears. Brody’s dropped immediately back to his cereal, the struggle within him working on his face. The desire to go to her; the fear of the consequences. He’d tried to protect her in the past, and it had only made things worse.

  Catelyn staggered to her feet. She needed the children to know she was okay, so they could stay seated, get ready for school.

  So Brian wasn’t provoked further by them trying to help her, which enraged him.

  But Brody, sensitive and pained, seemed to have come to a decision. The eldest of the three, he felt that if it was anyone’s job to protect his mother, it was his. Loathing and fear toward his father simmered underneath his tiny frame, showing through as defiance. He stood up slowly, the chair screeching on the worn lino floor.

  Everything looked as though it was in slow motion.

  Brody standing up.

  Brian turning toward him. His features transforming into fury.

  Catelyn tried to lunge forward, but as though she was in one of those dreams where your feet seem stuck in treacle, none of her limbs moved fast enough.

  Brian’s hand moved up and across his chest and in front of his face.

  Brody took a step toward her.

  Brian’s hand came back down, so slowly in Catelyn’s mind that for a second she thought that it would land softly, like a pat.

  The crack as it connected with the back of Brody’s head was shocking.

  He dropped to the floor without a sound.

  29

  For the rest of her Melbourne tour, Natalie is on autopilot.

  Part of her is conscious of the things that need to be done—hair, makeup, clean lingerie, changing sheets, being delightful—but if anyone had asked her for a single standout detail of her bookings, she would have been lost.

  Finally, ten-thousand dollars richer and ten-thousand times more worried than when she left, she boards a flight home.

  Eloise picks her up from Sydney Airport, and they drive in silence to Eloise’s flat, where Eloise regards Natalie carefully.

  It’s nearly nine o’clock. For the first time since she fled Aaron’s apartment, and his painting of her, Natalie starts to let her guard down.

  Nursing a Shiraz, she tries to calm her crazy heart. She doesn’t know how it hasn’t been lurching half out of her chest and scaring her clients for the entire tour.

  Taking a deep breath, she tries to explain her jumbled thoughts to her friend.

  “Griffin. He approached me on the street. Said he’d seen me staring at the Jack Charles portrait the night before. He said something virtually identical to what this client said to me in Melbourne. He’d painted a picture of me looking at Jack’s portrait. But they said the exact same things. About me looking like I wanted to morph into the picture. Like, that’s a weird thing for one person to say, right? Two people?”

  Eloise nods, placing a hand over Natalie’s to still its worrying at the tablecloth.

  “But the picture made me remember…Griffin met me all dressed up as Ivy. Whenever I see him I still wear one of my wigs, most of the time. But in the picture…I’m in casual clothes. With no wig. No makeup. I don’t really know that he would have recognised me from the gallery…would he? It’s bothering me. With all these dead escorts.”

  Natalie breaks off, putting her head in her hands.

  “God. None of them were killed in a booking. The last client they saw and the one they were going to visit all had alibis, CCTV, something that cleared them. The police haven’t put a lot of resources into any of them. They’re considering them last-minute bookings gone wrong. But just say. Oh, God. Is it Griffin? He was with me when they found Letitia, but not at her actual time of death. Am I being insane?”

  “No. No. You trust your gut. If something feels off, it probably is. But what about this other guy? What if he’s the off one?”

  Natalie shakes her head slowly.

  “No. He took me to his brother’s apartment. He really thought I would be excited about the painting. I panicked and ran, but I think…the painting was so detailed. He really did see me standing in front of Jack’s portrait. He got the look on my face fucking perfect. It looked exactly how I felt. How I feel when I think of that portrait.”

  “Maybe they work together?”

  “But why? Why disorient me like this? It must have taken him days, maybe weeks to paint my portrait? Why would you bother? And that’s pretty crazy evidence of a connection to have in your studio. Unless he burns it…”

  The two women are silent for a while, staring at each other.

  “Just go to the police. Get them to check Griffin out. You don’t have to tell him. But…” Eloise studies Natalie’s face. “Don’t see him for a while, okay?”

  For the rest of that night, back in her apartment, Natalie gathers information from her new friends.

  Five dead escorts.

  Sephora.

  Catey.

  Minna.

  Kiki.

  Letitia.

  She asks if anyone knew their real names. If they had boyfriends. Even new ones.

  She doesn’t discover much. Like her, most escorts keep their private lives private. Even with her newfound camaraderie, Natalie has no intention of telling these women her real name, or real details about her life. She doesn’t know their stories. And in Natalie’s experience, untrustworthy people are statistically likely to be everywhere. Even in Facebook groups purporting to help people.

  At about midnight, her work phone pings, and she stiffens.

  Melb Aaron: So I guess you didn’t like the painting.

  Despite herself, Natalie’s lips twitch.

  If she was going with her gut, she would say that this young man was optimistic but harmless.

  Then she frowns. But what did my gut say about Griffin? Nothing much at all!

  She doesn’t really think that Griffin is a serial killer. Anyone who brings soup and watches Buffy with you can’t be a killer, can they?

  But she can’t shake the unsettling feeling that something doesn’t quite add up.

  She hesitates, then texts Aaron back.

  Natalie: Sorry. Some weird stuff going on. It was beautiful. Can I buy it off you?

  She hits send, then immediately regrets it. Does she really want a reminder of those feelings taking up a whole wall in her tiny flat?

  Still, she has bigger things to think about, and she pushes her phone aside and looks at her meagre notes.

  Then something else occurs to her.

  In her head, she can hear her mother clicking her tongue in frustration, but she types another message into the group anyway:

 
; Were Sephora, Catey, Minna, and Kiki WOC?

  30

  Catelyn dropped to the floor beside Brody. Blood was trickling down her face from split skin on her temple. A dark purple blotch was already blooming around it.

  Blood had also splattered across her bright yellow dress from Brody’s nose. He was conscious, but so terrified and shocked he might as well not have been. His father had never actually hit him before. Shouted, cursed, pushed a little, yes. But a full strength, adult blow? No.

  Brian sneered down at his other two children. “Which one of you two little pussies is going to come and help me fix the tractor?”

  He was already walking toward the door, the parcel under one arm, not waiting for a response. Andrew pushed his chair back so sharply it cluttered to the floor.

  “He has school!” Catelyn protested weakly.

  Brian did not even pause on his way out of the house. And Andrew scurried after him.

  Catelyn helped Brody into the ute for the school run. Usually, the kids caught the bus, waiting at the end of the drive, Catelyn watching them anxiously out the kitchen window. They looked so little, so vulnerable.

  Andrew was already pulling away from her. Where Marilyn and Brody flung themselves into her arms, confusion and terror in their eyes, Andrew hung back. In some ways, it made her worry less for him. If he was Brian’s ally, he was less likely to be his target.

  But Catelyn also knew how quickly that could turn.

  And in the long run, aligning himself with Brian would only ever lead to ill.

  31

  Melb Aaron: How about an exchange? The painting for a date? ;)

  The time stamp is 1:32 a.m.

  Me: You’re a night owl, I see. Did you by any chance notice how much older than you I am? You should take someone more energetic out for a drink. Someone who can reply to your messages at 1 a.m.