Murder on Sex Island (eBook)

1

Like my forefathers, Gene Simmons and Christina Aguilera, my life began in Staten Island, the borough of New York most known for its landfills. The first 25 years of my life were going somewhat according to plan. I was an underpaid social worker, I got married to a man I knew from high school, and to top it all off, I was dead inside. What can I say? It’s the Staten Island way.

When most grown people get bored, they cheat on their spouses. They start buying lottery tickets. They develop a drug habit. Not me, though. No, sir. When I need to fill a gaping void in an otherwise predictable, monotonous life, I like to think outside the box. So I made up an alter ego named Luella van Horn who solves crimes. Is that the worst thing in the world? In theory, no.

When I slap on a blonde wig, fake white teeth, and some red lipstick, I become Private Detective Luella van Horn. Suddenly I’m a woman who knows what she wants and gets it. People start paying attention to me. They tell me things they’re not supposed to. The powerful see me as an ally and the weak see me as a threat. It’s amazing. I think it’s probably because of the teeth.

Growing up, all I wanted was to be someone like Luella van Horn. To have people finally look at me like I have something to offer. Something they want.

When you’re mousy, nobody cares where you’re going at night. When you come back to the house at 2 a.m., and your husband sleepily asks, “Were you gone?” you can say, “No,” and he’ll believe you, turn over, and go right back to sleep. Nobody bothers to ask why you’re spending thousands of dollars on blonde wigs (made with real human hair!), and going to the dentist for teeth molds, and maxing out your credit cards at Sephora. They’ve barely noticed.

I began Luella’s private detective agency a little over four years ago. The cases were small to start, like who stole the cookie from the cookie jar? (As it turns out, it was the local police commissioner.) I ruffled feathers here and there, but only enough to get a certain amount of notoriety around Staten Island. The local blogs described Luella as intuitive, smart, and savvy. A rising star private detective. A bombshell. Me! A bombshell! In retrospect, I’d been lucky. Then the Bell case happened.

It was around this time, the whole double-life shtick had started to wear me down. My husband was becoming suspicious. He couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a hot dinner on the table every night. Things were getting a little tense in our marriage. I’d hurry home after a long day of social work, make him a dry pork chop, grab my duffle bag and change in the car. Then Luella would take it from there. I was tired but I was happy. I was simply not prepared for the monster that is Taylor Bell.

If you only read the news reports, you’d think Luella van Horn was good at her job. You wouldn’t know she almost convicted the wrong man, nearly lost her social worker’s license, and essentially ruined her marriage. All the papers said was, thanks to the elusive Luella van Horn, Taylor Bell was now in jail awaiting trial for murdering his wife. That was enough to comfort the masses. Gotta love lazy journalism.

After the Bell case, I kept thinking what it would be like to be Luella full-time. Maybe I wouldn’t mess up so much if I wasn’t stretched so thin doing two jobs, living two lives. Soon after that, I left my husband and decided to quit social work altogether. I moved to Manhattan with what was left of my savings, turned 29, and adopted a cat. And then another cat. To keep the first cat company, of course. Using this logic, I understood how quickly someone could end up with forty cats in a one-bedroom apartment. To keep the other thirty-nine company. Duh.

So, now I exist as two women. One is who I’ve been most of my life: Marie Jones. A mousy ex-social worker divorcée with frizzy brown hair and an addiction to bad reality TV. The other is Luella van Horn. A glamorous private detective who has yet to find a case she couldn’t solve, even if it was messy as hell. It’s like I’m Sherlock and Watson rolled up in one. I am jealous Sherlock had a friend to take notes.

The hope is that I can one day leave Marie Jones by the wayside, exist only as Luella van Horn. I guess time will tell. That Staten Island Ferry runs to Manhattan a little more regularly than I would like.

TUESDAY

This particular case began like most of them do. With a missing person. New York City hadn’t seen the likes of Luella van Horn for a while. There were small cases here and there, but after the Bell case, I felt like I needed a breather. I usually told callers Luella was on an extended vacation in the Keys. This translated to me sitting in my apartment talking to my cats (named Meatloaf and Meatball, if you’re curious) and watching Sex Island like it was a religion.

If you’re not familiar, Sex Island is an incredible reality television show. They take the country’s sexiest 22-year-olds and fly them to a tropical paradise, while we, the viewers, watch them have sex and emotionally destroy each other. I don’t know why or how the FCC allows them to broadcast intercourse, but I’m not going to be the one to raise a red flag. Maybe because the contestants are always under the covers? Who knows!

The show was somehow both addictive and completely unwatchable. There is something oddly comforting about sequestering our nation’s sexually active youth to a land mass in the middle of the ocean. It aired every night for one full hour, and the ratings were, as you might imagine, very high. I did my part.

This season of Sex Island was quite compelling already. Every night, there was sex, screaming, fighting, and more sex. I mean, what more could one ask for. Smell-o-vision?

Each season of Sex Island started out with fifteen men and fifteen women, all straight, all cis-gendered, all 19 to 23 years old. This was the type of show where a 25-year-old was considered geriatric. As the season progressed, contestants were eliminated for anything really, from not having sex “good enough” to having an odd-smelling anus. Sure it was dystopian, but have you watched the news recently? It’s about on par with the news. Suffice it to say, as Marie, I wasn’t in a great place emotionally, financially, or otherwise.

The last two episodes of Sex Island had gotten strange. My favorite cast member, David G, was suddenly absent. No other cast members had addressed it, which was even more off-putting. Cast members would frequently leave the show, but their exodus would be decided upon by the group. Plus, it would be all anyone could talk about the next day in their confessionals. The last contestant to tearfully leave the show of her own accord was a professional cheerleader from Dallas, Texas named Rachel. The show’s official statement: Rachel suffers from Crohn’s Disease. We wish her well.

I wasn’t the only one to notice David G was gone. The message boards were abuzz — kidnapping was a popular theory, but one Reddit user was adamant she’d seen him in her local grocery store in Tampa, Florida. Another commenter claimed he was sending her signals through her air fryer. This is all to say the show had a very devoted following and David G was a unanimous favorite.

Before his disappearance, David G had been sleeping with a contestant named Tasha, a tall woman with long black hair who hated “wearing clothes.” In the most recent episode, Tasha had been acting very strange. Take this little nugget from her confessional that had the Sex Island fans reeling:

Off-Camera Interviewer: Are you okay?

Tasha: Bitch, shut up!

I had a feeling something weird had happened, and usually — sadly — I’m not wrong about this stuff. David G was a rare type of contestant, in that he was hot, but he also seemed like he had a soul. He was called David G because there was another David on Sex Island called David N, and let me tell you, David N could not hold a candle to David G. Anyway, it might have been his cleft chin or his close-cut beard or the fact that he was a nurse before becoming a reality TV star — whatever it was, David G was a straight-up catch, and his absence was extremely noticeable.

I remember very clearly the night I got the call. I’d just poured myself a second bowl of generic Frosted Flakes. Technically it was my fifth bowl of the day but my second after-dinner bowl. I had taken a very large bite just as the phone started ringing. I chewed and looked at the phone, milk spilling down my chin. No Caller ID. I knew what that usually meant: a case. I looked to Meatloaf, the more spiritual of my two cats. His green eyes said, Answer it. I picked up on the third ring.

“Hello,” I said with a mouth full of cereal.

“Is this Luella van Horn?” a man’s voice asked.

I managed to chew and swallow. “This is her secretary. I can take a message,” I said, coughing up a rogue flake. It landed gracefully on my couch cushion. I picked it up and ate it again. Meatloaf stared at me in horror.

“Uh, this is strictly confidential but I work as a producer on the reality show, Sex Island, and we’d like Ms. Van Horn to look into the disappearance of one of our cast members. His name is David G,” the man said.

I bit down on my knuckle and kicked my legs. The cats darted away from me....