Punishment with Kisses Read online

  I nicknamed her Curly Q because she was bubbly and quirky with perfect little features—the upturned nose, the sparkling violet eyes, the puckered lips, and perpetually rosy cheeks. Paula seemed like she liked me. She’d been hanging around my cubicle every day at work, bringing me Twizzlers and mocha and asking me out to lunch or drinks. I assumed she was hitting on me, and I was enjoying it, playing various kinky scenarios in my mind like a series of short porno trailers for a best of compilation, until we went out to dinner and I discovered her true motive.

  “I know about Shane and Ashley,” Paula revealed almost innocently. I was immediately appalled to hear anyone mention their names together. I was particularly perturbed that a colleague from work would bring them up.

  “I’m sorry, what?” I honestly didn’t know where this was going.

  “Look, I’ll be honest with you, Megan. I have an ulterior motive in befriending you,” Paula confessed. “I want to write a book about your sister’s murder and I’d like your cooperation.”

  Apparently Paula had true crime aspirations from her time on the police beat at the Oregonian, and when she discovered she could be working alongside me at the Willamette Week, she was determined to use that connection to write and sell her own based on real life In Cold Blood –style thriller. Paula said she’d already had interest from a publisher, particularly regarding the love triangle angle.

  “Love triangle?” I could feel my cheeks burn. Ash. Cynthia. Shane. I couldn’t help but picture their naked bodies entwined. I tried to push the image away, replacing it with Shane holding me, explaining what happened that day. I told myself eyewitnesses were unreliable, even when they were me.

  “I know you and your sister were fighting over your girlfriend, Shane—”

  “So you think I killed her? My own sister? Jesus.” I shook my head until my teeth rattled. How could anyone think I was capable of murder?

  “I didn’t say that,” Paula protested. “I just think it’s an intriguing element to the story. You don’t think your love triangle played a part in her death.”

  It wasn’t a question, but I answered as though it was. “Look, Paula, I don’t know what the fuck you think you know, but you’ve got it all wrong.” In the eighteen months since Ash’s death I’d become familiar with many of the local reporters, their style and techniques, and I had developed a way of dealing with them all. But Paula’s insinuations—her straightforward accusations—threw me. “Get this straight, I did not kill my sister!”

  “Hey, Megan, I’m on your side, I’m not saying—”

  “Bullshit you’re on my side. I can’t believe the preposterousness of you taking me to dinner to do research for your book. And then you accuse me of being the cause of Ash’s death.”

  “You mean murder.”

  “Her murder,” I repeated. “Neither I nor Shane had anything to do with her murder. And if you knew anything you’d realize that Ash would never fight with me, or anyone else, over one of her many conquests.”

  “You’re right,” she said in what I thought was an apology. “I understand your sister was quite the slut.”

  “You bitch!” I shoved the table away and flung the remains of my blended mocktail on Paula’s smug little perfect face.

  She smiled. “Of course,” she said, dabbing the drink from her brow with a napkin, “I can’t imagine it was your sister who was the jealous one.” Paula smirked.

  Wow, this bitch is unflappable. Meanwhile, I was shaking and my voice started cracking when I shot back, “I’m getting a restraining order in the morning.” Like that was going to happen, and then I burst out crying and couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

  I ran from the restaurant and tumbled into a cab where I sobbed all the way back to the apartment. I was still bawling when I got there, hoping that Shane would do her part to soothe me. Instead, there was a note on the fridge: “We’re in production, had to go back to the office. See you tomorrow. Love, Shane.”

  Fuck, fuck, fuck. Fuck it all to hell. I had a dead sister, a cold girlfriend, a calculating reporter, and a father so rigid he wouldn’t know empathy if it bit him on the ass. I couldn’t believe all of this was happening to me. I mean, I recognized that I was the sister who lived, but I still couldn’t bear feeling like no matter what I did, I couldn’t fucking win. Sometimes I wished I were the one who was dead. The dead had it easy.

  *

  The next morning I had to be at the paper before our family attorney’s office was open, so I hoped I could just avoid Paula until I talked with him about the possibility of getting a restraining order based on nothing but a few rude comments and her blaming me for my sister’s murder. Maybe this could be one of those times where Father’s money and standing in the community would grease the wheels of justice and shake loose the paperwork I wanted.

  In the meantime, surely I could at least tell my boss, right? But Paula was an experienced reporter and I was just an editorial assistant, so who would a publisher keep? Probably her. I just read submissions, answered complaint letters, and wrote calendar copy. You didn’t need talent or a degree to do that. But Paula had bylines. Plus, she wasn’t the one refusing to work within five hundred feet of another employee. Still. I was here first.

  Before I could march into the publisher’s office, my cell phone rang with a call from a girl I was fairly collegial with at Just Out, the local gay newspaper.

  “Have you seen the blogs?”

  “No,” I honestly replied. “What’s up?”

  She inhaled sharply, as though deciding how much to tell me. I was nervous as hell. “Just tell me! What’s going on?” The pregnant pause was freaking me out.

  “All right. Someone posted something on SheWired.com alleging that you’ve been in a long-term relationship with the number one suspect in your sister’s murder!”

  That bitch, Paula.

  “A bunch of local bloggers picked it up and are reprinting it. And so did Perez Hilton.”

  “Wait, what? Who? ”

  “They’re all anonymous posts, but the blogosphere seems pretty captivated by it. Even our bloggers are posting the gossip and, well, I heard the police were paying attention too. I just thought you should know.”

  Oh, my God, how was this even possible? Obviously, this was Paula’s doing. But how could she just have made something up and then posted it anonymously and instantly get it accepted as fact? God, it was so fucking unfair.

  “Wait, why would Perez Hilton reprint it? It’s not like we’re celebrities.”

  “Oh, well, uh,” my tipster stammered, clearly uncomfortable blurting out the problem. “Well, you should read his, um, it’s, I think you should read it. Look, Megan, I gotta go. I just wanted to warn you, okay? Hang in there.”

  With that, she was gone. I snapped my cell phone closed and ducked into the nearest Starbucks—in Portland never more than a few feet away—where I was lucky enough to find an empty terminal and log on to Perezhilton.com. As soon as it loaded I wanted to put my hands over the screen to hide the page from the other patrons. It wasn’t a PG image. At first I thought I’d stumbled onto a pop-up ad for a porn site. Then I looked closer. I recognized the star on the XXX video still. We happened to have DNA in common.

  The story was there too, right on the front page, above the digital fold.

  Well, well, we have news from the naughty today as insiders tell me that Ashley Caulfield, aka porn star Pookie Michaels, was involved in a lesbian love triangle with her own sister! The younger sister, Megan Caulfield, is a reporter at the Willamette Week in Portland, Oregon. Meanwhile, the third leg in this sordid triangle, Shane Ryan, a female editor at the Women’s Poetry Journal, is Caulfield’s on-and-off-again lover (currently on). Michaels, who came to fame (pun intended) in the amateur film Muff Diving Miss Daisy, was stabbed to death last July. No one has officially been named in connection with her murder, though Ryan is apparently considered a suspect. No word yet on the Sapphic sister’s involvement in the homicide, but talk about si
bling rivalry! Crazy lesbionics!

  I couldn’t help but read it over and over again. Then I Googled my name and discovered links to at least a dozen other blogs. Gossip spreads like wildfire on the Web. I wasn’t sure what was worse: being implicitly named a suspect, being romantically linked to an overt suspect, or discovering my sister was an amateur porn star. God, I hope she was an amateur. This would totally kill Father if he found out. I’d never thought about whether Father was a porn aficionado or not. I mean, I assumed he watched porn, even if I couldn’t imagine where or when. He must’ve, though, right? Didn’t all men? Still, it was disturbing to think about Father stumbling onto scenes starring Ash. But that’s exactly what I had done. And having stumbled onto my sister’s homemade sex videos, I didn’t destroy them, didn’t take a hammer to the DVDs and reduce them to shards. No, I deliberately watched them. And then I acted them out. I felt like vomiting again.

  Clearly, Paula had been one busy beaver last night, planting gossip on blogs to stir the pot and lend credence to her own theory of the crime—that Shane or I killed Ash. In doing so Paula might have given my lawyer more to work with, but how could I counter her allegations? They were preposterous, but everyday folks wouldn’t understand that. At best, they’d think I was the slut banging my dead sister’s girlfriend, when it had been the other way around, and at worst, they’d think I was the killer myself.

  It was all too much to handle, and though I couldn’t wait to ream Paula, I couldn’t bear to walk into the Willamette Week offices this morning. I called my editor from the coffee shop and feigned sick. I was pretty certain he knew what was going on, but he sounded sympathetic and told me to “take care of myself now” almost as though I’d never be coming back.

  Was he right? Was this it for my career? Just because I didn’t need the job—financially—didn’t mean I wanted to lose it. Plus, I needed it for my résumé, right? Who’s going to hire me with a blank sheet of paper? Or worse, once they learn I was fired from the only position listed because everyone thought I was a homicidal slut? A friend of Father’s? I shuddered at the thought.

  Chapter Ten

  By the time Father phoned, inviting me to the house for dinner over the weekend, I had already called in sick twice and avoided Shane a full week. I spent the rest of my time reading Ash’s journals and viewing her sex videos. The latest was probably the most shocking to date, and featured a scene I couldn’t quite shake.

  In it, Ash was wearing a black flapper dress with pearls and what I could only describe as Victorian hooker boots, even though such a thing probably never existed. A black mask completely covered her eyes. A tall, thin, and beautiful woman I’d never seen before held Ash’s hand and led her into a room with a mattress on the floor in between four metal posts that looked like modern horseshoe crooks. There were candles everywhere, from the floors to the windowsills.

  Inside the room, there were a bunch of other women all partially naked and wearing macabre black and white masks that looked like bird beaks on a yin yang symbol. Some women had gold chains around their waists that linked to rings in their noses or ran down and disappeared in their crotches. Others had pink leather paddles or cat-o’-nine-tails with handles woven in white and pink buckskin. Still others wore ridiculously large dildos, giant ebony cocks larger than anything I’d ever seen in real life. The production values on the film were far inferior, but otherwise the video struck me as a cross between Eyes Wide Shut and Lair of the White Worm.

  Except there were so many women. Every configuration of woman seemed to have joined Ash in that room: young, old, fat, thin, black, white, brown, yellow, butch, femme. Although some looked vaguely familiar, the masks successfully obscured their faces. I only knew Shane’s body well enough to identify in a naked lineup, and thankfully, she wasn’t among the women in the room.

  A pair of fuzzy pink handcuffs strapped Ash’s wrists to one set of posts and her knees inched up to her chest before two women pulled her legs, forcing them down and using another pair of fuzzy cuffs to strap her ankles down at the end of the bed.

  Within moments each woman was taking turns doing rather unspeakable things to Ash, their meaty paws tearing the straps off her dress, pulling the top down to expose her breasts while pushing the rest up above her waist. She was wearing a gold chain around her waist too but no panties. Was this an initiation? It looked almost like a ritual, but I couldn’t tell how much of it was fantasy orchestrated by Ashley and how much was for the pleasure of the other women. Or was this more amateur porn from Pookie Michaels?

  There was so much I didn’t know about my sister, and watching her fuck half of Portland was only confusing me more. In her homemade videos, Ash could appear submissive but still somehow seemed, usually, to be in charge of her own degradation. I could never tell for sure if she was asking to be violated—to be spanked by that fancy shredded whip while one woman thrust her fist in and out of her at a rapid-fire pace—and how much was Ash ceding control. If she confused pain with pleasure, which was this?

  If the scene didn’t involve my sister, I could maybe find it arousing, this lesbian version of Behind the Green Door or all-female Story of O, but with my dead sister the center of the erotic attention, I found my body and emotions a jumble of contradictory responses.

  The ringing phone broke my concentration, and I felt simultaneously relieved and disappointed. Finding Father on the other end immediately shifted my feelings again, ratcheting up the disturbed dial.

  “Megan, your mother would like to see you this weekend,” he announced, calling Tabitha my mother, though she never curried to the title herself. “Please come to the house for dinner tomorrow.”

  “I can’t,” I said wondering why he said she was mine. Was I somehow responsible for her? If someone had to own her, why wasn’t it him? Why didn’t he call her his wife? “I’m working this weekend. Sorry.”

  Expecting him to accept work as a perfectly reasonable excuse and quickly hang up, I was surprised when he hemmed and hawed for a moment before blurting, “Well, listen, young lady, I need to speak with you.” Oh no, the young lady bit. It must be serious.

  “Okay.” I waited for the rebuke.

  “I understand you’ve been seeing this Shane person who was your sister’s, um acquaintance. ”

  Ah, acquaintance. His language made me pine for the days when the euphemism was friend or roommate. Acquaintance was even less intimate, suggesting even less of a relationship between the two parties.

  “And how do you know that?” I wondered if he stumbled onto a blog while searching for porn. I wanted to scream at him, insist Shane was my acquaintance first, but even I knew that wasn’t true. Everyone and everything in my life somehow belonged to Ash first.

  “It’s been all over the news. We’ve fielded quite a few media calls at the firm. There seems to be a great deal of interest in your, uh, illicit relationship with this Shane character.”

  Father couldn’t bring himself to say “woman” because that would be admitting his daughter, both of his daughters, were big ol’ dykes. Still, the way he hissed “Shane character” made me cringe.

  “I don’t think who I see is your business, Father. I am twenty-four, remember?”

  “Listen, kitten, your behavior reflects poorly on me, our family, and my business. And since Shane is an actual suspect in Ash’s murder, you could be playing Russian roulette with your life. You need to stop seeing her immediately. Out of respect for your sister, and for me. I won’t lose another daughter that way.”

  He spat out the last line with a vengeance.

  What way was that? Did he mean he wouldn’t lose another daughter to murder or to lesbianism? At this point I wasn’t sure. I tried to suss out his motivation. I couldn’t tell if he was convinced that Shane was Ash’s killer, despite the lack of any proof or motive, or if he only cared about appearances, and as long as a cloud of suspicion hovered over Shane, he didn’t want me to go out with her, not even with an umbrella.

  “Father,”
I stammered.

  “No, I said drop it. You’ll do as I say and end this now.” And with that final pronouncement, he was gone. I laid there, stunned at his misdirected admonitions and the sheer irony of watching a filthy sexcapade on screen starring my dead sister while Father warned me to dump my girlfriend for fear Shane would ruin or corrupt me in some indefinable way. If anyone was corrupting me, it was Ash. She hadn’t let something as minor as being dead and buried keep her from exposing me to the dirty truth. Father probably just wanted to prevent another scandal, or maybe he was even trying to protect me in his brusque and paternalistic manner. Was this his way of saying, “Megan, I love you”?

  I hardly wanted to give my father the satisfaction of doing what he’d ordered me to do. But then again, if Father wanted to express his concern for me, shouldn’t I take advantage of it? I couldn’t imagine it happening again anytime soon.

  I debated the idea for a few minutes and decided that I would indeed go to the estate this weekend. I wanted to find out if Father knew something I didn’t about Shane’s guilt. Maybe he had some kind of proof. I mean, I couldn’t believe Shane had actually killed Ash, but I’d always felt she wasn’t being entirely honest with me about that night. Shane was always angry and cagey when Ash was brought up. Maybe she did have something to hide and I let lust blind me to the fact.

  When I arrived at the house, it was Tabitha who looked excited to see me. She was subdued, still beautiful, but definitely unmade, much of her usual artifice stripped away.

  “Welcome home! Are you staying for the weekend?” She was speaking in a high voice. I didn’t realize I was so badly missed out here at Casa Caulfield. More often than not, the only greeting I got was from Maria.