Punishment With Kisses Part 6

She didn't give me a chance to answer.

"It doesn't matter. I'm sure kiddo is no longer appropriate. It's just that-old habits die hard. It's good to see you," she said, putting her hands on my shoulders, holding me at arm's length, and looking me up and down. "You look fantastic!"

I wondered if Cynthia was just saying that because she recognized the clothes I was wearing as Ash's.

"Did you do something different with your hair?"

I blushed, happy she noticed, but a little nervous that Cynthia might confuse my getting my hair done by Ash's stylist as an effort to look more like my dead sister. That was hardly the case. I mean, he obviously did great work, and I had every right to pamper myself once in a while.

And my appearance couldn't have changed more in the last eighteen months than Cynthia's had. Far from the feminine artifice I recalled, Cynthia was now clean and fresh faced, not a hint of makeup on her. Either this was her I'm-not-going-to-see-anyone-so-why-dress-up casual wear or Cynthia had butched it up a bit too, wearing Carharts and Chuck Taylor sneakers. From the soil ground into her pants, smeared on her face, and sprinkled in her hair, it was clear Cynthia had just been out rolling around in the dirt. Or possibly toiling in the garden I could see out back.

Never in a million years would I have pegged Cynthia as the kind of woman willing to do her own dirty work and household maintenance. Maybe it was the help's day off. I couldn't have misjudged her that completely, could I?

"Well, you look great, Megan. Please come in. My girlfriend and I were out gardening, so excuse the mess."

After a few requisite pleasantries, I just blurted it out. "I'm trying to figure out what happened to Ash, and since you were her best friend...and lover, I thought you might be able to tell me something I didn't know."

Cynthia looked more perplexed than resolute. "I'm not sure I have anything that could help you. I already told the police everything relevant. I mean, they interviewed me three times."

I heard her words and the inference behind them. Cynthia didn't know Ash had left me her diaries. She probably thought there was so much I didn't know about Ash that she didn't know where to begin. That's why she hedged her responses. "You never know," I said, repeating lines I'd drifted to sleep to. "Even the smallest thing could help." TV detectives and criminologists always seemed to say that, as though random, irrelevant information was the most likely to solve a case. She washed her hands after going to the bathroom? Oh my G.o.d, I know who killed her!

Cynthia shook her head and shrugged. "Sorry."

Why had she wanted to see me if she was just going to blow me off? She knew Ash better than almost anyone. Did she think there was nothing, not a single bit of information that could be useful? I tried a different tactic. "What did you tell the police?"

"Just that I knew she had dated a bunch of people but no one serious. She was, um, sort of detached with her lovers. But like I told them, I couldn't imagine any one of them going so far as killing her." Cynthia paused.

"Cynthia, you and I have never had a serious conversation, so why don't you start off by telling me about how you and Ash got together?"

"Okay." Cynthia acquiesced, and the story began to spill out of her, first in single words and then in a rush of sentences and paragraphs, recalling their first months as friends in high school, bonding in the backseat over boys, and later, bonding even tighter with the boys out of the picture. Their relations.h.i.+p quickly crossed the boundary between friend and lovers. "She was my first," Cynthia admitted.

"First s.e.x? First love?" I wanted clarification.

Cynthia chuckled at the naivete of her youth. "Both really."

"You both took boys to prom. It wasn't mutual?"

"That I don't know." Cynthia shook her head and was silent for a moment, musing. "But yeah, we dated boys throughout college, always keeping our own relations.h.i.+p under wraps. It killed me to see her date those guys. I never knew if she was f.u.c.king someone else or not, and she always kept me in the dark. Still, I had a pretty good guess. And high school was excruciating because of it. But I didn't dare tell anyone for fear my parents would find out, we'd be separated, and I'd get s.h.i.+pped off to boarding school."

After high school the duo went to the same college, but instead of coming out together, Cynthia stayed closeted, still pining for my sister, while Ash bedded half the cheerleading squad and gained a reputation as a one-woman recruiting dynamo for the gay-straight alliance.

"Ash loved to turn women, and she was good at it too-always beat her quota and took home the best prizes," Cynthia joked, trying to deny her true feelings about Ash's philandering, but you could see them in the frown lines around her eyes. It was the first time I noticed how much older than Ash Cynthia had seemed. Had loving my sister prematurely aged this woman?

"And where were you with all this?" I prodded. Then I wondered why. Why was I making her relive these painful memories? Did I really think they would help find Ash's killer, or did I have some ulterior motive? Did I think Cynthia deserved to be punished? Hadn't she been through enough?

"Waiting mostly," Cynthia said. "And doing whatever Ash wanted me to do."

This apparently involved Cynthia having a lot of s.e.x, just not always with Ash. Cynthia said she loved Ash but that my sister used her as bait for other s.e.xual conquests-with women and men, though Cynthia preferred the former-and rewarded Cynthia with the occasional hump to keep her in line.

"Ash was a very damaged human being," Cynthia whispered conspiratorially. "I realized long ago that she was completely ignorant of the pain she caused other people. It was like she had been hurt so bad that she no longer felt emotional pain and she forgot that other people weren't numb like her. Maybe she did push someone too far one day and she got what she deserved."

I was mortified that anyone would say something like that out loud. Cynthia must have seen my stunned face, because she sat back and corrected herself. "Oh, that sounded horrible. I don't think she deserved to die, I just mean, she sure p.i.s.sed off a lot of people."

I tried volleying a few more questions at Cynthia but didn't get anywhere and was starting to believe that my sister wasn't too far off the mark when she'd implied Cynthia wasn't very bright. Clearly, she was hiding something, she was a world-cla.s.s liar, or she was rather dumb. What could she stand to gain by not telling me all that she knew? Or was it that she was afraid of the truth?

I felt like she was holding back, the way Shane did whenever the subject of my sister came up. It was making me angry. "Look, Cynthia, I know more about Ash's secret life than you might think. I've seen the DVDs, I've read the journal, and I know where the bodies are buried, okay? So why don't we drop the charades?"

"You've seen it?" Cynthia looked around nervously. My G.o.d, who did she think was watching us now? She leaned in and whispered in my ear, "Her s.e.x diary?"

"Yeah. Like I said, I've read her diaries. I found them when I cleaned her apartment."

"No." Cynthia shook her head insistently. "Not those. She has another one. A secret one that n.o.body knew about but me. It was small." She ill.u.s.trated its dimensions with her hands. "Ash carried it with her everywhere. She liked to record gossip, you know, about other people that n.o.body else knew? I don't think she was blackmailing anyone, or anything like that, she just liked to have information other people didn't. She told me one time it gave her this sense of power, being privy to other people's secrets."

What was the point of Cynthia describing the alleged book when she could just be telling me where it was?

"Where did she keep it?" I asked.

"I don't know." Cynthia shook her head again. I wondered if she would tell me if she had it. "Ash kept it somewhere under lock and key, but not at the apartment. That's all I know," she added, lying again.

If I ever wanted the truth, I'd have to come up with another way to entice it from Cynthia. Or Shane. Were they keeping her secrets, or their own?

I was beginning to feel like I missed so much of my sister's life I was unraveling more than just the mystery of her death. But what was I looking for now? And if I found that journal, would it hold the clue to who killed Ash? Or just open up another Pandora's box?

Chapter Eleven.

June 30 It's not bad enough that kiddo watches me through the blinds, spying on me like a jealous lover, but now I'm quite certain someone is following me at the oddest times and places. I don't know if I'm crazy or if it's true, but I feel like I should hire a private investigator to follow me around and find out if he's the only shadow I have. Maybe an ex is stalking me. Or maybe The One has people following me. I can't tell what's real and what's not real anymore. I go off to the parties and can be there at all hours, but when I leave I always feel another set of headlights behind me. I've hidden my real journal, the one that unlocks everything, so that n.o.body can find it without me wanting them to. I'll never give it up either. It's the key to my power, my control over the situation.

I think the real problem is, I don't know if I deserve to be safe or not. Surely if I cared about my future, I might take different actions with my life, might do something different with the information I've been given, with the power that I can master. But I don't see a future for myself, not really, not the way I feel now. I have no one I can trust. Not even Megan, I know, because I see the way she looks at me, like I'm some treacherous tramp she wants to spit on in the street. I'm not the sister she once loved. I'm just a wh.o.r.e, the harlot of Lake Oswego.

So if someone is stalking me, I just hope they don't get in the way of the truth. I know I'll end up in an early grave, but as long as the truth comes out, I'll die a vindicated woman.

I stood in the kitchen with the smoke detector blaring, one of my t.i.ts hanging in the sink under a stream of cold water. I was making chicken for dinner and burned my b.o.o.b on the oven. Hard to believe, I know, but somehow I decided it would be a smart thing to cook oven fried chicken and sweet potato fries in a low-cut s.h.i.+rt on a summer day. The house was steaming, my s.h.i.+rt popped open, and out plopped the b.o.o.b and, well, there I was at the sink just as Shane raged through the front door, slamming it behind her.

"What's wrong?" I asked as gently as I could. Shane had been under a s.h.i.+t storm at work lately, and every day her mood was worse than the one before.

"I got canned."

"What? Why?" Shane loved that lit journal, and she'd been working sixty hours a week to help keep the thing afloat. Why would they just fire her?

Before she even registered the question, I knew the answer. The publicity around Shane's possible involvement in Ash's murder had been fierce, although no law enforcement agency had gone on record to link her to it. Her firing was just another link in the chain of events that was colluding to shove our relations.h.i.+p onto the wrong track. We were fine, but all this external pressure was too much.

Between the media, our jobs, Father, the bloggers, and Cynthia, well, there didn't seem to be a soul alive who thought Shane and I should stay together. I thought this pressure could explain why so many celebrities broke up in the face of constant media scrutiny.

"What are you going to do?" I asked quietly, hoping to coax Shane into talking.

"What do you mean, what am I gonna do? What can I f.u.c.king do? I can't take this, I really can't, Megan." Shane broke down crying then, a touching sign of her humanity I so rarely saw these days. Long gone was the girl who played connect the dots on my skin. Shane was a changed woman. Harder, bitter, indifferent.

More like Ash. More like me. I had changed too. I was no longer the sweet, inexperienced girl I was when that summer began. I spent my days hiding who I was and my nights trying to reenact things my sister had done. I'd watched Ash's s.e.x DVDs obsessively, spending dozens of hours in front of the screen, always worried the next scene would co-star my current girlfriend making nice with my sister.

Video quality being what it was, I could rarely tell faces, masked and covered as they were. Occasionally I recognized someone I knew. I swear the players included a cla.s.smate, a friend's mother, a teacher, and the girl down the block who never said boo to me. I didn't know what to make of the silent videos, each one with the sound intentionally recorded over with dark concertos. If there were secrets on those videos, I'd never decipher them, not orally at least. Well, aurally, that was.

My mind wandered so much I forgot about my b.o.o.b, the chicken, Shane's pain. I put it all away and led her to bed, where she cried in my arms until we both fell asleep.

The next morning, I broached a subject that had been nagging at me for weeks. "Ash had another journal. A secret one she hid somewhere."

I hoped it might draw Shane into conversation, but I was not expecting the outburst that followed.

"Oh for f.u.c.k sake, Megan, your sister is dead and buried. Can you please f.u.c.king let it go?"

"I can't believe you could say that to me! This is my sister we're talking about. I owe it to her to uncover everything I can about who she was and what she was going through, and maybe, if I'm lucky, figure out who killed her."

"That's the police's job, Megan. Let them do it!"

"How can you sit there and say that? When letting the police do its thing is why you're being reviled in the press. If we're ever going to clear our names, we have to figure out who killed As.h.!.+" I was yelling now, trying hard to get through to her.

"I hate to break it to you, honey," Shane drawled. "Ashley was most likely killed by some enraged lover, or someone's jealous husband or girlfriend. Your sister was a tramp and she p.i.s.sed off a lot of people and clearly one of them killed her. End of story!"

"How dare you!" I shouted at the jab, aghast at what Shane had the nerve to say to me. I was sincerely shocked. This was the woman I'd professed my love to, and here she was suggesting my sister deserved to be brutalized.

"Megan, it's just that you're obsessed with Ash. You're reading her journals, acting out scenes from her films. It's not right."

"Gee, you never complained earlier when I was acting out scenes from her home movies. Was it only good if I'm acting them out for you, then? Or are you worried I'm getting too close to the truth, Shane?"

Now it was her turn to be shocked or act it. Well, f.u.c.k her, then. I'd go find that s.e.x diary myself. I'd find my sister's killer myself. I didn't need her or her bulls.h.i.+t any more. I grabbed my purse and my keys and headed toward the door. Shane had other ideas.

She caught my arm and yanked my shoulder back. "Wait!"

"f.u.c.k you," I snarled.

"Hold on, I didn't mean-"

"What? You didn't mean I was obsessed? You didn't mean my sister was a tramp who deserved to die? What didn't you mean, Shane? Or was it you didn't mean I should stop acting out scenes from the s.e.x videos? What is it?" I flailed my fists ineffectively against her broad chest. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted to run down the street shrieking and pulling out my hair. My sister was never coming back. She was dead and no one, especially not the people closest to her, seemed to even care! It was so wrong.

Shane folded her arms around me and pulled me into a bear hug. "I'm sorry about all of it, babe. I didn't mean what I said. I'm just overwhelmed."

And as with all of our arguments, Shane and I went from zero to sixty to bed within minutes, neither of us ever really forgetting or forgiving what had been said. We had angry, reckless s.e.x that left me slightly bruised, but still h.o.r.n.y in the morning. But by then I'd forgotten the sheer animosity I felt the evening before, and as I watched Shane sleep, I thought again about how beautiful and serene she looked with the morning light s.h.i.+ning on her face.

"You're watching me again," she mumbled without opening her eyes.

"That's true." It was a game we played on the weekends. I woke early, I watched her sleep, she caught me and feigned embarra.s.sment. Today, though, she rolled over and wanted to talk. It made me immediately suspicious.

"Where should we look for this infamous s.e.x journal then?"

"You're going to help me? I thought you didn't believe in me."

Turns out she did believe in me, she just wasn't sure she believed in the existence of this secret journal. We made plans to head out to Lake Oswego after dark so we didn't have to run into the parental units. Father would be agog to know that I was still seeing Shane-after he'd made it so clear that he was ordering me not to. So avoiding him and Tabitha was critical. Tabitha had been lovely to me, calling me at least a couple dozen times since the murder, always to talk about nothing really. I enjoyed those conversations, which felt both meaningful and vacuous at once, always on the precipice of something, but what I never knew. It was usually me who rushed her off the phone as I was on my way to something more important, even if that was often just another page of Ash's diaries. I still wasn't sure she'd keep my secrets from Father, so I'd kept her at arm's length. Even so, I was trying to be more mature, and I'd slipped into calling her Tabitha instead of stepmonster. Our relations.h.i.+p had finally transcended animosity. But old habits died hard.

That night, Shane and I dressed in black like cat burglars and drove out to the estate hoping the lights would be out by the time we arrived. All but Maria's were, and I was fairly confident our sixty-something maid wouldn't get up and run out to the pool if she caught a glimpse of our flashlight.

I snuck over the fence, almost musing to myself about how ironic it was Father never installed better security after the murder. That's how men are, though, they always feel safe. Or maybe he felt like it was too late, the worst had already happened. Still, he often left Tabitha alone in that giant house, when that should have given him pause. Like I said, men were overconfident in everything. He probably thought a security system was a sign of weakness or failure. Or worse, he thought Ash deserved what happened to her. Whichever, tonight it was a G.o.dsend because we pulled open the back gate, grabbed the hide-a-key under the rock where Ash always left it, and walked right in.

It made me wonder if the murderer did the same thing.

Shane would have made a terrible jewel thief. The moment we got inside the pool house she started shaking and fidgeting. I don't know what she thought might happen, but I could see from the light of the moon that her face was glistening with perspiration. Between that and the nervous twitch, I felt like I was breaking and entering with that disabled comedian, the guy who can't stop the tremor in his hand.

Shane was one step from hysterical laughter when I whispered in her ear, "It's okay, babe. We'll be out of here in a minute."

"Yeah, I know, but being here creeps me out. I haven't been here since that night."

And then it was me who was totally creeped out. A year and a half after my sister's murder, we were standing on the very site and I was finding out that my girlfriend was here the night Ash was killed. I knew she hadn't been telling me the whole story. So was that her engine that gunned? What the h.e.l.l? I was wondering what I was thinking returning to the scene of the crime, at night, with a woman some people suspected of being Ash's murderer. Was I secure in my convictions about Shane's innocence?

I expected Shane was omitting something, but I had never imagined it would be something as critical as her being here that night. Or had I? That night I was sure I heard her motorcycle. Wasn't that what I'd wanted her to disclose all this time, even if I didn't want to admit it to myself? But what else had she kept from me? What if she had more to do with my sister's death than I was willing to acknowledge? Could she have changed her mind about coming with me because I was getting too close to the truth? Was it her idea to lure me out here in the dark of night and dispose of me too?

"Oh G.o.d." I didn't realize I sighed it out loud.

"What?" Shane said urgently. "What's wrong?"

"Oh, nothing. I'm just overwhelmed. Can you go wait for me by the car?"

Shane didn't budge. She stared at me quizzically for a moment then finally relented. "You sure? I can handle it. I'm better now."

"No." I urged her to leave, to return to the car and keep an eye out on the street in case we were followed. I told her it would be safer for us that way. Plus it was true, standing here in the place where Ash died did overwhelm me. So little had changed since that night, save for some bloodied tiles that had been replaced.

As soon as Shane stepped outside, I locked myself into the safety of the cabana. It was disturbing that locking myself into a crime scene felt safer than being outside with my girlfriend. I used my flashlight to meander through the rooms, rummaging behind shelves and under the dresser. Then I went back to the old cedar closet, a storage s.p.a.ce that had always been kept padlocked shut even though it held only old prom dresses and Mother's wedding gown. Maybe it now held Tabitha's gown too. I wasn't sure. In the years after our mother died, Ash and I would pick the lock with a bobby pin, climbing in Mom's dress and pretending we were about to be married to the man of our dreams.

I wonder when Ash stopped imagining the man of her dreams and imagined the woman instead. Or had she given up on matrimonial love by the time she switched to girls? She was certainly a cynic by the time Tabitha came around, though the two of them hit it off instantly. In those early years, Ash and Tabitha were thick as thieves, shopping together, sharing clothes, and sunbathing topless when Father and the gardener weren't around. By the time Father was constantly railing on Ash to keep her clothes on, Tabitha had stopped joining her, but still Ash never once ratted the stepmonster out.

That was uncharacteristically selfless of her, I thought. Maybe she was just loyal to the stepmonster. Who knows? Either way, the contents of this closet might or might not contain Tabitha's dashed dreams but they would always primarily belong to Ash and me.

I picked the lock as swiftly as I had at fourteen, cracking open the door and inhaling the cedar that flooded the room. When I was younger I wondered why every closet wasn't made of cedar. In rainy Oregon, I learned, that wouldn't be a wise thing to do.

During those years of trying on Mom's dress and playing "I do," we discovered that the green-brown-gold flecked s.h.a.g carpet had a section at the back that pulled the entire rug up and exposed a floorboard that wasn't attached to the others. We felt like Indiana Jones opening it the first time and discovering inside it was another opening to the left that was too small for a man's hand but perfect for my tiny girl hands. Inside that was a pile of notes, a beer can, and a half smoked doobie on a feathered roach clip. Clearly, we weren't the first teens to live at Casa Caulfield.

Though the notes were cryptic kid stuff, we envisioned they were love letters hidden by a tortured princess or Anastasia, before she remembered she was the queen of Russia, or whatever she was. We made up all sorts of silly games, creating lavish stories about the kids who came before us and why they hid secret messages in the floorboards here. We smoked the joint but left the Billy beer can intact, in part because Ash said it would taste revolting and part because it was like our homage to those teens before us and their secrets. When Mother died, she left us without any traditions. Father never cared for tradition, or celebrations for that matter, and Tabitha was from a p.i.s.s poor family she couldn't wait to escape. That's why she married Father, they said, to get out of the house. I wasn't sure if that was true, but it would make sense because she didn't bring a single family tradition with her. She also didn't bring a single family photo to the house either, at least not as far as I'd ever seen.

Even though Mother left us without any traditions, carrying on the secret hiding s.p.a.ce from the kids who came before us became the one shared custom we carried on. Over the years we honored it with more pot, birth control pills, love letters, fake IDs, and bad report cards. We even put our diaries there as kids, which made it all the more ironic that I didn't think to search there earlier. It was so long ago, I couldn't imagine Ash having a secret so dark she still had to use that hiding spot when she had the privacy of an adult.

So I cracked open the hole and shoved my hand through the small aperture, the sides sc.r.a.ping my arm and pus.h.i.+ng splinters inside my palm. My fingers crawled along, feeling their way past the dirt and dead bugs until my hand stumbled on the thing I had been looking for all along. A leather bound diary and a bottle of perfume. The image on the front of the bottle was faded but clearly that of a woman wearing tall boots and nothing else, and the brand name, Nana de Bary, sounded oddly foreign, but when I spritzed a little in the air, it smelled like my big sister was there in the room with me.