Murder on Sex Island

Murder on Sex Island

1

Tuesday

New York City hadn’t seen Luella van Horn for a while. I told callers she was on an extended vacation. Those long-­lost dogs would have to stay lost. This all translated to me sitting in my apartment talking to my cats (Meatloaf and Meatball, if you’re curious) and watching Sex Island like it was a religion.

If you’re unfamiliar, Sex Island is an incredible reality television show. They take the country’s sexiest twenty-­two-­year-­olds and fly them to a small island near Bermuda, while we the viewers watch them have sex and emotionally destroy each other. The show is 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 Atlantic ocean.

They film in the mornings and edit together gold in time for the show to air for a full hour five nights a week. Those editors should be given some kind of Nobel. And I don’t know why or how the FCC allows the show to broadcast intercourse, but I’m grateful! Maybe because the contestants are always under the covers? Who knows?

The ratings are obviously 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 starts out with fifteen men and fifteen women, all straight, all nineteen to twenty-three years old. This is the type of show where twenty-­five is considered geriatric. As the season progresses, contestants are eliminated for anything really, from not having sex “good enough” to having an odd-­smelling anus. Sure it’s dystopian, but have you watched the news recently? It’s about on par with the news.

But this most recent episode of Sex Island was strange. My favorite cast member, David G, was suddenly absent. No other cast members had addressed it, which was even more off-­putting. Contestants would frequently leave the show, but their exit would be decided upon by the group. Plus, it would be all anyone could talk about the next day in 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. The show had a very devoted following, and David G was a unanimous favorite. His absence, even for one episode, was noted.

Before his disappearance, David G was sleeping with a contestant named Tasha, a tall personal trainer with long black hair who hated wearing clothes. In the most recent episode, Tasha was acting strange, too. 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 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. It might have been his cleft chin 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 the show wasn’t the same without him, even for one episode.

The night I got the call, I’d just poured myself a second bowl of Sugar Crunchies, also known as generic Frosted Flakes. They’re three dollars cheaper than the name brand and they come in a plastic bag. If you’re not willing to cough up the extra three dollars, somehow you don’t deserve a cereal box? Where’s the justice?

Technically it was my fifth bowl of the day, but my second after-­dinner bowl. I had taken a very large bite just as my phone started ringing. I chewed and looked at my phone screen, 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 hesitantly picked up on the third ring.

“Hello,” I said with a mouthful of cereal.

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

I managed to chew and swallow, already brainstorming the excuse I’d give. “This is her secretary. I can take a message,” I said, coughing up a rogue Sugar Crunchy. 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 my name is John Murphy, and I work as a producer on the reality show Sex Island. We’d like Ms. Van Horn to look into the disappearance of one of our cast members. His name is David G.”

I sat up straight and a chill ran through me. Taking a deep breath, I tried to steady the quiver in my voice. “Say that again?”

“David G was last seen Friday, and we’re under immense pressure to find him. Can Luella come track him down? She saved my cousin’s dog once and comes highly recommended.”

“Which dog?” I asked.

“Miss Fluffy; she was a Pekingese.” There was growing urgency in his voice. I remembered Miss Fluffy. She pissed in my Honda Civic. Who would’ve thought little Miss Fluffy had a family connection to Sex Island?

A second voice spoke up then. It sounded more confident than John, less shaken.

“Hi there, I’m Stephanie Hillson, another executive producer on the show. Listen, we’ve scoured the island and talked to all the cast and crew. Nobody knows anything.”

“We’ve done everything we could other than contact his family and call the police,” John said. “We just don’t want to alarm anyone unnecessarily, you know? His family will be hysterical.”

“And of course, the viewers . . .” I said sarcastically.

“Yes, the viewers are our number-­one priority,” Stephanie agreed. “They’re already starting to theorize online, and that’s not good for them or us.”

I hoped she was joking, but it didn’t seem that she was. I’d say, off the top of my head, the two main things you’re supposed to do at a workplace when an employee disappears is contact their family and the police. But this was Hollywood, baby, and I figured they did things differently there.

With the ratings so high, John and Stephanie didn’t think police interference was necessary at this point, but they wanted the problem solved.

“We’re certain it’s simply a matter of David G hiding somewhere,” Stephanie insisted.

“Right,” John said. “Sometimes these actor types really do take off for a few days. They only tell the production assistant, who forgets to tell us, then they come right back. Everyone’s okay! For all we know, David G is suntanning on a boat somewhere right now.” John chuckled nervously at his own joke. I noticed Stephanie didn’t join him.

David G was a front-­runner on Sex Island, and his star was on the rise. If he was hiding, there had to be a good reason for it. John and Stephanie hoped Luella could do some hush-­hush private investigating, find David G alive and well, and be on her merry way. You might be wondering how someone could actually disappear in the age of social media. It seemed the geniuses running Sex Island had a moratorium on posting, liking, and even sharing during filming, and that applied to all cast and crew. In fact, all contact with the outside world had been actively discouraged. David G’s (and everyone else’s) social media had been untouched for months.

The producers offered a first-­class ticket both ways if Luella could get to the island by tonight, as time was of the essence. I said I would relay the message and get back to them after I’d spoken with Luella. I hung up the phone and took the next three minutes to chew off all my fingernails. Meatball hid under the bed while Meatloaf hissed at me from the top of a bookshelf.

My confidence was at a zero. Even if I hadn’t botched the Taylor Bell case, finding David G was a higher profile case than I’d ever handled. On the other hand, my life basically revolved around watching a reality show that was now a potential crime scene, and maybe not doing something would feel worse than doing something poorly. I tried telling myself maybe this could be the turning point I’d been hoping for. But was I doomed to repeat my mistakes, putting more and more people in danger? I looked at my hands and realized four of my cuticles were bleeding. I thought of Taylor Bell out there, ready and willing to kill again. But here I was, presented with a chance to become a better PI and possibly save a life, restore justice, even.