The Good Daughter: A gripping, suspenseful, page-turning thriller. Alexandra Burt

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      Not a single car passed her as she made her way down the road. It was cool, at least in relation to the three-digit daytime temperatures, and her legs moved all on their own as if they were on a mission. Before she knew it, she was on the outskirts of Aurora, on FM 2410, and it seemed as if those three miles took her less than an hour to walk.

      Thirty years had passed since she had left the farm, maybe more; she wasn’t so sure anymore. The departure had been hasty and unorganized and she had left everything she owned behind. After their time on the road, she’d lived right here in town, yet she had never been back, never so much as looked at it from afar, not until the police had come to her door.

      She had been unprepared for the police, hadn’t even heard them approach. Too many cars passed by the house, too many doors slammed, too many children went to school or walked home, rapping twigs against fences, screaming and running and laughing. Over the years she had let her guard down, especially since Dahlia had left town. There had been over fifteen years or so without Dahlia, years she had lived alone, working menial jobs, and during those years she had become less vigilant.

      She loved cleaning houses the most—the people were usually at work and money was left on some foyer table for her to collect—she enjoyed the solitude and she’d imagine those houses were her home and she’d walk in and for a split second she’d picture Dahlia as a child, running through the hallways, playing in backyards, so far removed from what reality had been.

      The care of the elderly was also something she didn’t mind, mostly Alzheimer’s patients, still capable of living with their families, not so far gone that they needed 24/7 supervision. She’d play the radio as she cooked for them, did the laundry—sometimes she’d sit and read books she found somewhere on a nearby shelf, and then she’d imagine that one day she’d be one of them and Dahlia would care for her the way she cared for these strangers. She watched their old wrinkled faces, eyelids drooping over their eyes, staring off into space. At times she was jealous. Not having any worries, any consideration for people watching them, not fearing the doorbell, not dreading the ringing of the phone. Compared to what she had been through, their existence was bliss.

      So yes, her guard had been down and when the police showed up, when she saw the uniforms, every muscle in her body went tight, preparing for her escape. Her brain shouted at her, Run run run, her mind a merry-go-round of fears, and with every turn another thought developed, one more disturbing than the last.

      “Are you Memphis Waller?” the female officer had asked.

      Memphis stood in silence. Frozen. Then she nodded.

      “This is about your daughter.”

      Memphis still couldn’t move, stood in the doorway to keep the officers from entering.

      “Your daughter,” the officer then said, “is at Metroplex. Don’t worry, she is fine. She’s just being looked over right now. If you want to, we’ll give you a ride to the hospital?”

      It wasn’t easy to shut off the adrenaline and so she just stood there blocking the door; she couldn’t move an inch.

      “Are you all right? May we come in?” the second officer, also a woman, asked and leaned in slightly.

      She would have asked them in if she had had any power over her body, but she was reduced to a pillar of salt. The officers all but pushed her aside and entered the house, looked around, nosy and prying, intruded into the dining room, even up the stairs, as if it was any of their business. After they’d left, she sat with her heart beating out of her chest. It wouldn’t stop thrashing and at times her own reflection in a window prompted her to call out, Who’s there?, and she’d stand still and so did the shadow, and then she’d move and so did the shadow, and she realized she couldn’t trust her own eyes. She had looked out of the window and seen shapes moving across the yard; then a branch swiped against a window, making her jump.

      She took to creating acoustic clues then, arranging dead crickets in a carpet of even rows and columns to alert her if someone came in, no longer trusting that the shadows mocking her were born of her imagination, so their dry and rigid bodies would crunch beneath someone’s feet and there’d be no mistaking the actual weight of a real person for shadows and ghosts are weightless and luminous.

      When she couldn’t stand it another minute, it got worse. There was another knock at the door—yet a glance out the window revealed nothing but a porch bathed in the harsh light of a bare bulb—and she ran out the back door then, leaving it wide open.

      She had to lay the ghosts to rest, silence them somehow. She had to see the farm one more time. Yet again, it was the little things she didn’t take into consideration. If Dahlia had thought her to be in bed, Memphis would have made it out to the farm and back home by the time the sun came up, before Dahlia woke. She could even have waited until after Dahlia was asleep and taken the car, but she didn’t, just ran out, and that was another blunder in her thinking. The only reason she’d agreed to stay at the hospital was to calm herself, get her story straight. She could have fought the hospital stay—no one was able to keep her against her will, that wasn’t even legal—but she needed time to think. Time to put her ducks in a row.

      That night, after Memphis realized she had lost her purse, it took her some time to find the dirt road behind the trees and shrubs. Over the years, property lines had been redrawn, new roads had appeared, and if it hadn’t been for the old wooden bench she would have never found the place. The fact that it was still there meant there was money in the bank to pay property taxes, even though she had never checked up on how much exactly was left, but Bertram County had only a couple of schools and taxes were low and the money must have been enough or the farm would have been sold by now, or even torn down.

      That night, she didn’t plan on setting foot onto the property at all; she just wanted to look at it from afar. It was still so vivid in her mind—the winding dirt road, the meadow, the shed, and the barn—and decades later reality matched her memory. The farm was still intact—the barn slightly warped, the meadow in full bloom—but as she stood peeking through the trees, crickets started chirping all around her, and one did jump at her, pecked at her leg, or maybe it was something else, she couldn’t be sure. And she stood by the road, determined not to set foot on the property, as if history was going to catch up with her, as if merely walking the grounds was going to infect her with some contagion.

      Her muscles were tired, her limbs heavy from the long walk. She licked at her cracked lips, feeling the thickness of her saliva. She looked past the shed, and there it was. The cypress. She couldn’t make out anything underneath, but the old cypress stood there, firmly anchored; had gained a few more feet in height, even. She beheld the tree from afar but still she felt mocked by it, as if it said, I’ve guarded the secrets, but they are still here. Don’t you get any ideas. You haven’t escaped.

      In a way, she had it coming, Memphis knew that. And she decided to stop fighting.

       Chapter 9

       Dahlia

      It’s almost as if there’s a hole in the ground somewhere, swallowing lives, like the hole in the woods was supposed to swallow Jane. At home, I throw the bag of cleaning supplies on the couch and power up my laptop.

      The numbers are staggering; thousands of people go missing every day, adults and children alike. Other crimes take priority and missing persons cases are mostly solved by sheer accident or coincidence; there are tens of thousands СКАЧАТЬ