The Devil's Pretty Daughter Read online



  THE DEVIL'S PRETTY DAUGHTER

  by

  Nicola Rain Jordan

  Copyright 2011 Nicola Rain Jordan

  Contents

  Short Story: The Devil's Pretty Daughter

  About The Author

  Robert William Pickton tortured and murdered up to fifty women at his Port Coquitlam pig farm. Many of the victims were addicts and sex workers from the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside neighbourhood. From the early 1990s until his arrest in 2002, ‘Willie’ Pickton disposed of human remains along with animal waste at several Vancouver rendering plants. It is said that Pickton and his accomplices ground up victims’ bodies and added them to pork mince and sausages, prompting province-wide product recalls.

  In 1996, Shae-Lee Price* from Cygnet, Tasmania got into a van with Robert Pickton.

  ***

  What the hell was I thinking?

  Hitching. In Canada. In winter.

  It was the coldest day of my life.

  I was thinking, “I can’t wait to see Shannon. She’s a poem, she’s a song. I love her big deer eyes.”

  But winter.

  I was thinking, “If I was down south I’d be warm right now. I should be riding a scooter through Capetown, I should be bird-watching in the Galapagos Islands. If I was back home I’d be fishing in the dam in the sunshine and pottering ’round in the salad beds.”

  But Shannon.

  ***

  I got a Skytrain to the outskirts of Vancouver. I got a bus to the outskirts of the outskirts. I stood on the road to the interior with my pack at my feet and a walkman in my pocket. The only things between me and the weather were an oilskin jacket and some cheap boots I’d sealed with linseed oil and beeswax.

  I put out my thumb.

  I caught a quick ride to the Okanagan with a young Native guy. He let me out in Osoyoos where the snow was falling fast. I found a 7/11 and used the toilet then I made a cup of tea to warm my hands. I ate a few garlic-miso rice cakes under the awning and walked back out to the highway.

  I waited half an hour. You have to expect that in North America, it’s not like Tassie where you can hitch to work and get there on time. I’d factored in the time on the shoulder but it didn’t hurt any less. The icy wind as each car rushed by, the rejection.

  A white van slowed down and pulled over. It drove in so close the door almost touched my chest. I hefted my pack onto my shoulder and I grabbed the door handle thinking heater yesss heater. The handle flicked up and my hand recoiled. I got a feeling or had a thought, I don’t remember how it came to me. Just NO.

  I looked back at the sliding door on the side of the van and that’s when it happened: I saw through it, saw right inside. Chained to the back wall was a woman’s body, no head or limbs, just pale boobs and belly and vagina and dirty metal chains. Venus, headless and screaming. Ten years of suffering went through me in seconds.

  But winter.

  I’m ashamed to say it and for the rest of my life I’ll dig at the darkness behind it but so help me, I did it: I grabbed the handle and pulled harder. The door swung open and there was the driver. I leaned inside and looked into the back. “How far are you going?” I asked.

  “Nelson. How far do you wanna go?”

  “I’m going to Nelson.”

  “Get in, then.”

  What can I say, the air was warm and the driver was smiling and he was going all the way to Shannon. I got into the van and I stuffed my pack under my feet. He reached under the wheel and I heard the doors lock around me. And Venus in the back, she meant nothing.

  ***

  My driver was good at polite conversation, but then so was I. (“You’re so charismatic,” Troy said after we hitched around Vancouver Island. He must have been a little bit in love with me to say that. It’s not a superpower though, it’s just liking people, it’s just energy. You have to love the road.) My driver, Bob, reminded me of someone. It annoyed me because I never forget a face. He had a scruffy grey beard, balding head and watery eyes that were stretched wide across his face. I can’t give you a name for how he looked at me but it was the same look my boss Tula gave me when she accused me of sleeping with her husband. (Her psychotic episodes hadn’t been diagnosed at that stage. She opened the fridge and accused the milk bottles of murdering her father and I suppose she looked at them the same way.)

  “You work?”

  “Yeah, on and off,” I said. “Back home I work on a herb farm. Here I work in a restaurant on the Island and I look after a boy with disabilities.”

  “I’ve got a farm myself. Work’s important.”

  “I’m not that focused on it right now, to be honest. I’m young. I just use my jobs to save money to get me from A to B.”

  He looked shocked. “I worked every day of my life. Up before dawn every day my whole life, taking care of the pigs. Since I was three.”

  “Wow, good on you. I couldn’t do that. I’m not a morning person, especially in this cold.” I smiled and shook my shoulders, brrrr. He didn’t smile back.

  “Where do you stay in Vancouver?” he asked.

  “Oh, I’m on the Island ‘til summer. I’ve got friends in East Van, though.”

  “You should stay at the Roosevelt hotel down in, Downtown Eastside it is, Hastings Street.”

  “Why, is it nice?”

  “Not ’specially, but the owner takes in strays.”

  Just like that, like a pinch on the leg.

  “Thanks but I’ve got heaps of friends,” I said. “I don’t really need to stay in hotels.”

  “Tell me when you’re back that way, I can get you in real cheap,” he said. “Strays are always welcome.”

  “I’m not a stray.”

  He turned to me. Those wet, red eyes. “What are you?”

  “There are no words for what I am. I’m off the grid. I’m free” … is what I wanted to say, but I didn’t. “I’m an Australian. I’m on a working holiday visa.”

  “Doesn’t that mean a stray?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He stared at the road, thinking. Deciding.

  ***

  Bob drove fast and aimed for every bump. I reached out to lean on the door and that was when I realised there was no lock, just a hole where the button should have been. I put on my calm window-gazing expression and thought about Lisa, who hitched a bad ride in Queensland. She pulled out her knife and held it to the car ceiling and the guy freaked out and let her out. Later she told me, “If you ever get one, threaten to fuck up the car. Slash the ceiling, the dashboard and the seats if you have to. They care more about how they’re gonna hide the damage than they do about dealing with you.” I unbuttoned the cargo pocket that held my camping knife, appreciating the weight of it on my leg.

  “I had a daughter like you,” he said.

  “Oh really, you’ve got kids?”

  “Oh really, you’ve got kids?” in my exact tone and accent.

  How did I know not to react? Why did I decide not to set him off? I can’t tell you, I just did. “What’s your daughter like?”

  “Stubborn. Pretty girl, coulda been something but she wasted her life away. She thought she could go where she wanted on her own time, wandering around living it up. She was like you, thought the rules didn’t apply to her.”

  “What rules? Who makes these so-called rules?” No, of course I didn’t say that. “Does she live in Port Coquitlam?”

  “No, Michigan. I was down there in ’74. Her mother bunked off in the middle of the night, didn't let me see my own kid til she was goddamn grown. The girl’s living now, she’s I don’t know, South America somewhere.” He glowered at the road. “She met a spick and ran off with him. Got a shac
k full of kids and they party and do drugs. He doesn’t work. Summer all year long down there. Good riddance I say, send ’em all down there. Keeps Canada clean.”

  It wasn’t the first time I’d had a racist driver but it was the first time I felt compelled to let it the fuck fly. “Families are painful, eh?”

  ***

  The hippies who owned Cygnet Calendula Farm sent me off with a generous bonus and a ten minute travel warning:

  “Shae, if you get into any trouble overseas remember to breathe out a circle of light.”

  “A sphere or an oval? A ring, like around Saturn? Like a smoke ring.”

  “We’re serious. Inhale your air and then exhale a golden shield, push it all the way around yourself. Use circular breathing, like playing a didj.”

  “O-keeee.”

  I made jokes about them later. I did. But you know, in that white van what else did I have? I stared at the snow and I willed myself to Nelson and I wrapped myself in armour made only of air. Push, breeeathe, shiiield, just like they said. All the while feeling the woman in the dirty chains behind me. That torso and I, we were together.

  ***

  Hours passed and we didn’t stop, not even for petrol. Bob took digs at me, lots of digs. The way a bad man breaks down a woman who loves him, not with a sledgehammer but with a chisel, chip by chip. He called me names. He joked about my hygiene. He asked me about money, he asked me about sex. He asked me if I smoked or drank or lied or cheated and he scoffed at me when I said no. He didn’t believe me, not about anything.

  A town went by and another town and another. I made up rules and I kept them a secret:

  Do not react to an insult.

  Do not, under any circumstances, lie.

  Do not ask to stop the vehicle.

  Do not try to exit the vehicle.

  Do not scream.

  I didn’t know anything, not rationally. Had Venus followed the rules and gone gently, agreeably to her death? I couldn’t think about it, I still can’t. All I know is it was a sober person’s game. I couldn’t have played it without every last one of my wits.

  ***

  Nelson,15km. “You always degrade yourselves.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Women, you can’t help it, you lower yourselves,” he said. “Drinking and drugging and going with different men.”

  “I don’t.”

  He laughed, I don’t know why.

  “I don’t know that it’s a female thing,” I said. “I’ve seen plenty of males act like that and nobody thinks anything of it.”

  “It is women, it is, you can’t understand how one thinks or why she does what she does. No sense, just what she feels when she feels it. Cut out a bitch’s brain and lay it on the table next to a man’s, I heard they say it’s the complete opposite. The sides are reversed, I heard that.”

  Circle of light, circle of light. “Oh you mean left brain right brain, males are logical and mathematical, females are intuitive and creative? Yeah, that idea’s been around for a long time, lots of people argue with it though.”

  “I don’t know about it in those words. I’m not up on all that. I’m just a pig man.”

  ***

  We arrived in Nelson. I pulled Shannon’s address from my pocket. “Pine Street,” I told him, “Number 108. Or you can just drop me off on the main street.” Please please please.

  He drove me to Pine Street, the van groaning its way up the hill. He pulled over in front of Number 108 and I slid my backpack up my legs, hugging it on my lap. I said thank you and goodbye and I reached for the door handle, gripped it and pulled. And pulled.

  I turned to look at Bob and the smile on his stretched out face was so bitter and poignant. He wanted what, a rematch? Salvation from himself? Just to keep me close?

  It was his game, I had to let him decide.

  I waited.

  He stared at me.

  I met his gaze. In a low, smooth voice I said, “Open the door.”

  Smile.

  “Now.”

  Smile.

  I waited.

  He reached under the wheel. Click, the central locking turned over.

  I got out of the van and I closed the door. Number 247 was just a hundred metres away but I’d wait here at 108 ‘til he was gone.

  He didn’t move.

  I started walking, casually walking up the hill. He started the van and cruised along beside me. Finally, catching me in a lie.

  “Bye, Bob,” I said. “I’m okay now, thanks a lot for the ride.” Yelling through the side of my neck, I know about the woman, I know what you did.

  I sped up. The van fell in behind me and followed me up the road, inching along, my driver probably still smiling at the back of my head. I walked past 247, hoping Pine Street was as long as I needed. My God I wanted to run, to disappear into the house—any house—and yet I walked and I walked with the white van nipping at my heels. Thank goodness the street was long because after a couple of blocks I heard him stop. Turn the van around. Drive back towards town.

  Still… I didn’t look back.

  ***

  Shannon welcomed me in and took my coat. She led me to her bedroom where the fire was roaring, her tarot cards spread out on the fluffy rug. “Almost finished,” she said.

  I couldn’t talk. I looked at her dark eyes rambling over the cards and I started thawing, painfully, from the inside out. In all my years of travelling I’ve never been so homesick for the south, the polar pull of Tasmania like a feather bed with a patchwork quilt and a joey tucked up inside. Shannon picked up the deck and she shuffled. The cards whistled through her hands, faster and faster and then pop, a card sailed from the deck. It floated through the air and it landed in my lap.

  The Devil. He had a scruffy grey beard, a balding head and watery red eyes. He was grinning at me and below him stood a man and a woman, naked, in chains.

  Hell isn’t hot at all, see. That’s where they’ve got it wrong. It’s biting, it’s bitter, freezing cold.

  I broke into tears and I crawled into Shannon’s arms.

  ***

  In 2004 I was sitting in my living room in Hobart. My husband finished the Sunday paper and passed it to me. I never read the damn thing but instead of tossing it into the recycling bin that day I plopped it onto my lap and flipped open to the centre. There was a double page feature about a Canadian serial killer murdering women on his pig farm. In the centre of this paper that I never ever read, amid text that I would not allow myself to absorb, was a large close-up of my driver’s face. There he is, that’s him, that’s the one, I thought, and then the chill set in.

  Am I certain ‘Bob’ is Robert William Pickton? The internet said Pickton had no children, so I don’t know about the daughter in South America. The court transcripts don’t mention him owning a white van, although his brother apparently did. I don’t even know what Pickton would be doing in Nelson. I’ve followed the case for years now and for every ten clues that tell me yes, one or two tell me no.

  But the face.

  I don’t feel good talking about this. As a Mum I’m averse to violent entertainment and I never enjoyed the macabre. The Crime Channel asked me to appear in a documentary as ‘the one that got away’ but I turned the offer down. I’m writing my story down for you, Beaten Track readers, to remind you to listen to your instincts. I’m writing to honour the woman in the back of the van. Venus, you were with me all the way. I love you, I thank you, you saved me.

  *(Names and addresses have been changed to protect privacy.)

  ***

  After online publication of the above article in our July edition Robert Pickton sent a written response from North Fraser Pretrial Centre where he was serving a life sentence for murder (he has since been transferred to a federal penitentiary). Pickton addressed the following letter to Shae-Lee Price of Cygnet, Tasmania care of the editorial department of our publication. It is reprinted here with her permission.

  Hello ______.
You told me that was your name – Not Shay Lee Prince. Also it was’nt snowing it was only mid November. It was not very cold. I never forget dates like you with faces. I remeber your face too, you where a pretty girl. You now know sinse you read about my trial on the computer… I do’nt really have a dauhgter, I came close in Michigan but no. I was just saying it for fun, Sorry. I can be a devil somtimes.

  If I had a dauhgter she would be like you. Not the going everwhere and thinking you do’nt have to take part in society or work hard. Thats not right with me. (I know you grew out of that and you have a famly now. I hope you are a goodmom) But you were a descent girl and not into anything wrong and deseve to be spared. Hoever I ca’nt say that if we were going in the other direction from Nelson to Van I would say this. Only that I was so far from my farm and it was inconvenient.

  Bob –Willie

  ******

  About The Author

  Born and raised in Sydney’s outer west, Nicola Rain Jordan divides her time between Penrith and southeast Queensland. She has an MA in Scriptwriting from Australia's national film school. Her debut novel The Spider Wasp is coming in 2011.

  Find Her Online

  Blog: https://nicolarainjordan.blogspot.com

  Twitter: https://twitter.com/nicrainjordan