Ruined (Family Untied Book 1)

by S. A. McEwen

  “They’re both dead,” he says softly.

  Natalie pulls away, leans up on one elbow so she can look at him, despite her guilt. “I’m sorry,” she says. “You sound sad. You miss them.”

  “I miss my mum,” he agrees, a troubled look in his eyes. Then they lock onto hers. “What about you? Tell me about your parents.”

  “Oh, God.” Natalie collapses back against Griffin, despite herself. “I don’t even know where to start. They’re impossible.”

  “Yeah? How so?”

  Natalie rolls over onto her back, her arm lying alongside Griffin’s, lightly touching. She stares at the ceiling, wondering how on earth she can explain them.

  “They fled civil war in Sri Lanka. They suffered there. Horrible things, that no one should ever have to suffer, I think. They’re still suffering, but they pretend they’re not. They’ve never spoken about it—to me, or a therapist, or anything. As far as I know. They just want to fit in to Australia. I call them coconuts. They’ve assimilated everything they can except their skin. They really believe that they are white. They raised me and my brother to believe that we were white, too.”

  Natalie pauses, remembering.

  “I have this memory of complaining to my mother about being bullied at school. When she asked what happened, I told her, ‘Nothing happened. It’s just because I’m brown.’ And she said, ‘No. You’re not.’ And wouldn’t hear another word about it. I’m still not sure if she was denying that I was brown, or denying that I was being bullied because of it.”

  Natalie is silent for a while, thinking how impossible it is to capture the essence of families to those outside them. Her family might be particularly troubled, but does anyone escape this? Can a nice white man from a loving family understand hers, even without the layer of race muddying the waters?

  So to speak.

  She cackles to herself involuntarily, and Griffin raises an eyebrow.

  “Tell me,” he says, but Natalie just shakes her head.

  “It makes it very hard to develop a bond with someone, and trust them, when they refuse to see who you truly are,” is all she says.

  It feels easy to talk like this to Griffin. He is attentive and interested. But she wants to hear his stories, not share hers.

  “Tell me about your mum. What do you miss? When did she pass?”

  Griffin pulls her back in tighter, dropping a kiss on her shoulder.

  “She was maybe the opposite,” he says softly. “She made me feel like she could see me inside out, and loved me always anyway.” He’s quiet for a moment, then adds, “She was always baking. She was sunlight. Her smile lit up the entire world.”

  36

  Despite his proclamations, Griffin doesn’t even stay the night, claiming he had work to catch up on and that he’d call her later.

  Natalie is grateful for the thinking space. And even further grateful when Detective Casey calls.

  “Look, from our end, a Griffin Edwards of around that age and description doesn’t exist. The guy in Brisbane is six foot six, not your guy. And the third one is visibly of ethnic descent, which doesn’t match your description. Now, there might be a perfectly reasonable explanation about his nonexistence. Maybe he goes by his middle name, or maybe he has to be careful with his business and goes by a pseudonym socially, but hasn’t legally changed his name.

  “But—the phone number you gave us is a burner SIM, which isn’t a good sign. People usually get those when they don’t want to be found. It was purchased at a 7-Eleven in Melbourne CBD years ago. They’ve been phased out; you can’t buy them without ID these days. What we can do is run it through our system to see if it was in the vicinity of the murder scenes. In the meantime, I would suggest exercising caution. If you must see him, do so in public places. Maybe—”

  “He’s had plenty of opportunities to kill me if he wanted to,” Natalie interjects. “The killer seems to target the women when they’re on their way to meet someone else. I guess it keeps him out of the picture. Maybe he…” Her voice trails off again. She can’t picture Griffin intercepting someone with ill-intent. Not Letitia, not her.

  She shakes herself. She needs to think about an unknown man intercepting Letitia. Did she catch the bus that day? Her Opal Card account didn’t show her as catching public transport that day, according to the police. And Letitia was not the sort of person to fare evade. But then, Natalie knows that she herself has forgotten to tap on, on occasion. She catches public transport so rarely. But Letitia catches it all the time. It should be habit for her, routine.

  “We don’t know if Letitia caught the bus,” Natalie tells the detective, and explains her thoughts about it. “She might have been intercepted between the bus and my parents’ house. Or she might have gotten a lift with someone she trusted, who knew where she was going. No one has come forward, which could mean that person is the….” Natalie chokes on the word killer. She coughs. Continues. “Which means they planned it. Or maybe it was opportunistic. So if Griffin is…the guy…” If she can’t bring herself to say killer in a general sense, there is absolutely no chance she can say it alongside Griffin’s name. This whole conversation, as far as being related to Griffin, feels completely ridiculous. She wishes she had never mentioned the weird coincidence about the “morphing” sentence to Casey.

  “So the killer was likely someone known to the victim. Maybe he was driving her to your parents’ place, or intercepted her on the way. So if Griffin does pose a danger to you”—Natalie catches and is grateful for the less brutal turn of phrase, but it is still jarring—“he’ll likely be taking you somewhere or intercepting you on your way somewhere else.”

  Casey considers this for a minute.

  “So if that’s the case, the police prioritise talking to the wrong people. Who the victim was visiting. Neighbours who might have seen a car or a stranger or a struggle. Descriptions of who was seen in the area at the time.”

  Natalie feels something like relief, but not quite. She can’t put her finger on it. It’s not just that she’s being taken seriously. Some converging of that, appreciation for Casey’s quick mind, and something else. The possibility of justice for Letitia not seeming completely impossible, perhaps.

  “So if you must see Griffin, take some precautions. Going out anywhere, make sure he has no way of knowing your plans. If you see him in an unexpected location, don’t get in the car with him.”

  Natalie starts shivering, despite the warmth in her apartment.

  The wave of relief she had just experienced evaporates. Hearing it laid out like this, it all sounds very real.

  Very plausible.

  Utterly terrifying.

  Someone is carefully planning and then killing escorts of colour.

  Should she just break it off with Griffin? Just to be sure? That seems like the sensible thing to do. But then, if it is him, he could still intercept her somewhere.

  Or move on to someone else.

  Some other brown escort.

  Her skin prickles again. This time with a familiar rage.

  Eloise comes over after work, which means it is late.

  After Natalie has finished updating her on Detective Casey’s information, Eloise berates her for meeting Griffin. Dismissing Natalie’s proclamations of his innocence, she continues musing about him as though he is definitely the killer, and asks the question that even the detective had managed to avoid.

  “But why? What is his motive? It’s not like he’s been rejected. Or maybe he went on a few dates with these women, and they broke it off with him, and then he killed them. But you think he’s insightful and nice. Rich. Good lover. And he was seeing you long before Letitia died. I just can’t get my head around why he would.”

  Natalie blinks. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have the energy. She can’t explain this to her friend.

  To her credit, it wouldn’t occur to Eloise that skin colour might be enough of a motive. While some well-meaning people might claim they don’t see race, Natali
e knows that not seeing race is part of the problem, however much skin colour does not factor into Eloise’s judgements. Because while Eloise would never treat anyone differently based on their sexual orientation, cultural heritage, or even gender, probably—that also means that she doesn’t really see the small ways that other people do. She doesn’t feel the relentlessness of being seen as brown first. Seen as less.

  She’d probably even feel like she understands. She’s banging hot, especially in her office wear—a smart suit and killer heels. She’d have had different, equally unpleasant things yelled at her out of car windows.

  “Nat?”

  Natalie brings her focus back to Eloise. She thinks about all the men who hate women.

  All the people who hate those with a different skin colour to them.

  She doesn’t think Griffin hates either. She’s almost one hundred percent certain that he does not.

  But someone else?

  Skin colour and selling sex? Killer combo.

  37

  Despite all this, by the time she’s slept with him several more times and he’s flown off to China for a week, Natalie is hopelessly in love.

  Her body is, at any rate.

  She convinces herself that an unhinged serial killer would not invest this much time in a potential target. Months of kindness and good humour. It’s almost laughable. She can’t imagine what she was thinking. A word is, after all, just a word. Sticks and stones…

  So when the detective calls her with worrying news—that the burner phone was in the vicinity of where one of the victims was found, in the time around her death—she is inclined to shrug it off as another coincidence.

  “Look, I was wrong,” she tells the detective. “I’ve been seeing Griffin for months. A nutter could simply not keep up a façade so believable for this long. I’d see glimpses of it at some time, I’m sure. It was just a silly coincidence that seemed important in my anxious state. I really think there’s nothing to look into here,” she continues. “In fact, can I withdraw my request and we just leave it alone, now?”

  Though she thinks something doesn’t quite add up, it’s not this.

  On top of that, the phone hasn’t been linked to Letitia’s whereabouts around her death. It was being used in Sydney, but nowhere near Linfield.

  “It would have to match all five if we’re looking at a serial killer, anyway, right?” she adds.

  “That’s the obvious thing to think. If this is the work of the same person, and they’ve managed to not get caught five times, then they’re probably a little smarter than that,” the detective responds. “I can’t really do any more on what we’ve got. Call me if anything else comes up.”

  Privately, Detective Casey doesn’t buy into Natalie’s certainty that the whole idea was silly. People can hide all sorts of things for decades, with no one close to them suspecting a thing. If these deaths are linked—and it seems likely, with the murder method being the same in all five, on top of the target victims all being escorts of colour—then the killer has worked hard to not leave any obvious tracks. Grooming a victim to set up the perfect crime is not a stretch at all to that end.

  Still, there really isn’t anything concrete to go on. Detective Casey thinks she will dig a little further, and keep in touch with Natalie. But there’s no point alarming her further at this stage. And, if she’s honest, no point in scaring a potential killer into hiding.

  Natalie hangs up the phone, though, oblivious to all of this.

  She doesn’t feel worried.

  She leaves it with the detective, and heads off to family lunch.

  It’s only in the car as she turns into her parents’ street that she remembers Grant, and wonders if Detective Casey has followed up on that lead at all.

  She feels a stab of anger at herself—for confusing the investigation with her paranoia. Looking into Griffin because he used a strange word seems ludicrous compared to Grant’s form. She makes a mental note to call Casey back later.

  Then she braces herself for lunch.

  Family lunches have been quiet affairs since Letitia’s death.

  Natalie obediently eats everything Upeksha piles in front of her. Though she has no appetite, and feels sick with nerves most of the time, in her state of vulnerability she reverts to a childlike self, dutiful and subdued.

  The gap between her thoughts and feelings, and her mother’s understanding of her, feels wider than it ever has.

  After lunch, she lies on Alex’s bed, watching him through half-closed eyes.

  She can hear her mother hovering at the bottom of the stairs, distressed that Natalie is in his bedroom again, but averse to calling her out of there even on a pretence, and upsetting Alex.

  “Does it ever bother you?” Natalie asks, against her better judgement. She hasn’t had a serious conversation with Alex since the brain injury. Like everyone else, she’s tiptoed around him, not wanting to upset him. Not really fully understanding how his brain worked anymore.

  Suddenly, she regrets treating him like a child for all these years. He was still in there, somewhere, her calm and steady brother. For a while, she’d tried to talk to him as she normally would, but it only ever confused or angered him. She gave up easily, she thinks now. She didn’t work at it, like Upeksha did with all the other strategies she applied, day in, day out.

  “They never stood up for you. They never so much as said a bad word about Grant. They never batted an eyelid about the whole fucking thing.” The bitterness in her voice startles her. She knows she feels that way; she is surprised by her lack of control around her brother. If she wants to try harder to reach her brother, this is probably not the topic to start with. But she can’t stop the anger seeping out.

  Alex looks up from the figurine he is playing idly with at his desk. His face is thoughtful, but he doesn’t respond. And Natalie can’t help herself; she just wants to talk. Talk to someone like her, who might get it. Sans Letitia, Alex’s silence is like an invitation, a warm cup of milk before bed. Her words keep oozing out of her, hot and thick and sticky.

  “They never wanted us to be brown. They try and try and try to be white, and they weren’t there for us when anything happened that acknowledged our heritage. I felt invisible, not cared for by them. I know they loved us. I know they did their best. But it just wasn’t fucking good enough. All these years later, I can’t let anyone in. I don’t trust that anyone will see me for myself and still care about me, and yes I do fucking well blame them. Kids need to feel that their true selves are seen and loved, bloody childhood development 101, how did they miss that memo? Why did they even have us if they hated brown people so much?”

  Alex is gazing at her steadily now. It’s Natalie who drops her eyes, not because she sees any judgement there, but because she wants to talk into a vacuum. She doesn’t want anything reflected back.

  “I never have relationships. I never trust that anyone will stick around. And our parents didn’t even leave us! They just didn’t make me feel like I was worthy, just as I was. Which was brown. They still don’t want to know me! You know, I once asked them…I told them that there was more to me than what I shared at these goddamn family lunches. That I wanted to be closer to them. That I could share more of my life with them. I wanted to try to bridge that gap. See if, after all these years, they might see me and love me and we might have a fucking normal parent-daughter relationship. And do you know what they said? They went off, and conferred, and came back and said, ‘No thanks. We like things how they are.’ Can you believe that? They want to just have these polite conversations about superficial things and they don’t care who I am underneath that. And it’s horrible and hurtful and painful and I keep coming back every two weeks, why? Even I don’t know why. Why do I still come here?”

  At that, Natalie flicks her eyes back to Alex’s. She’s not upset. Getting emotional is not something that occurs for Natalie. She’s almost clinical, like someone studying this bizarreness from a place of detachment and curiosity. Look a
t this interesting phenomenon! Let’s have a little look at that! Poke it with a stick, maybe!

  Alex is quiet and still, a rare state for him. His silence is like a warm embrace. Natalie falls into it with more words.

  “I’ve been seeing this guy. Griffin. He’s lovely and thoughtful and kind and handsome. But I’ve been worrying that he’s a serial killer. Because of a sentence he said. And I want to kill Grant. I want to kill him for what he did to you, for his casual, evil stupidity that cost you so much. I want him to be a serial killer, Letitia’s killer, so I can fucking kill him. I want someone else to feel persecuted and out of place. Picked on. Ruined. I think I’m going insane. Sometimes, I want to kill our parents, too.”

  Until she says it, Natalie didn’t even know that this was true, but in that moment she knows that it is the case. Not because she hates them, but because she can’t reach them. They’re her people, and they should “get it,” but they don’t. And the pain the separation causes feels as huge as murder.

  For the second time since Letitia’s death, she catches a glimpse of just how alone she feels.

  “He’s just the face of it,” Alex says quietly, and Natalie stops, her mouth half open, another fierce spiel halted in her throat. She stares at Alex in surprise.

  “It won’t help,” he goes on, his eyes steady on hers. “He’s just one person. You won’t feel better. The world won’t be a better place.”

  Natalie swallows her surprise, leaps at the chance this conversation seems to offer her: normalcy, with Alex.

  “I will feel better,” she says, stubbornly. “The world will be a slightly better place.”

  “It won’t help you,” Alex says, shaking his head slightly, his gaze intense. “You didn’t get the love you needed from our parents. You can keep that cycle going. Of fear, of scarcity. Being so afraid of love that you strangle it whenever it comes near you. Or you can open yourself up to love. That’s the antidote.”