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

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      Her mother called her Pet. The girl didn’t like the name, especially when her mother introduced her. This is Pet, she’d say with a smile. She’s very shy. Then her mother moved on quickly, as if she had told too much already.

      Pet, the encyclopedia said, a domestic or tamed animal kept for companionship. Treated with care and affection.

      The girl opened the encyclopedia to a random page. She remembered when it was new, how the pages and the spine had not yielded as readily, and she wondered if the pages would eventually shed. She attempted to focus on a word but the movement of the car made her nauseous. Eventually she just left the book cracked open in her lap.

      “My feet are cold. Can I get a pair of socks from the trunk?” she asked somewhere after the New Mexico/Texas border.

      “Not now,” her mother said and checked her watch.

      The girl fell asleep again and later awoke to the slamming of the car door. She rubbed her eyes and her surroundings came into focus: red brick walls, a large sign that read Midpoint Café, her mother standing by a pay phone only a few feet away, rummaging through her purse for change. It was noon and the girl felt ravenous as she stared at a display poster of fries and milkshakes in the café window.

      “I’m hungry,” she called out to her mother.

      “It has to be quick, we have to be somewhere,” the mother said, and the girl slid on her sandals in a hurry.

      In the gloom of the dingy café, their knees touched under the narrow table. The mother opened up a newspaper left behind in the booth and scanned the headlines.

      The girl had so many questions: Why are we rushing?; Who did you call?; Where are we going?; Why did we drive all the way from California to Texas?—she had the whole conversation planned out, knew exactly what to ask: short, direct questions that left no room for vague and elusive answers. The place was loud and crowded and the diners competed with one another to be heard, creating an overall atmosphere of raucousness. In the background, a baby cried and a waitress dropped a plate.

      They ordered lunch—French fries and a strawberry shake for the girl, coffee and a Reuben sandwich, no sauerkraut, for the mother—and while they waited for their order to arrive, the mother excused herself. “I have to make another call, I’ll be right back.”

      She ate and watched the diners and minutes later, her mother returned. She had seemingly perked up, now appeared bubbly, almost as if in a state of anticipation, and her eyes moved quickly. “Let’s play a game,” she said and opened the paper. “Tell me a number between one and twenty-two.”

      The girl loved numbers. Numerology; belief in divine, mystical or other special relationship between a number and a coinciding event. The number 7 was her favorite one. 7 meant she was a seeker, a thinker, always trying to understand underlying hidden truths.

      “Seven,” the girl said and silently recited random facts: seven ancient wonders of the world, seven days of the week, seven colors of the rainbow.

      They ate silently, the girl devouring the fries, then taking her time with the milkshake, studying the people around her while her mother skimmed page seven of the newspaper. She wondered how naming a number of a page was a game to begin with, but her mother seldom answered questions posed to her, and so she didn’t ask.

      The mother paid the check and the waitress counted out the change.

      Just as the girl attempted to decipher the headline the mother had been studying, she called out to her. “Hurry up, Pet.”

      The girl did as she was told.

      Later, the mother rolled down the window and the girl watched her check her face in the rearview mirror. When a siren sounded, the mother licked her lips, fluffed her hair, and pulled into a dirt patch where three wooden posts formed an entrance with a cow skull nailed to its very top. An officer appeared next to the car.

      “Your headlight’s out,” he said and scanned the car’s interior.

      The police officer was lean with closely cropped hair and skin the color of nutmeg. The mother got out of the car, pulled her red scarf tighter around her head. Her hair fluttered in the wind, her clothes clung to her body, and her arms were tightly wrapped around her.

      The girl noticed a boy in the back of the police cruiser. “What did he do?” she called out to the officer.

      “He didn’t do anything. That’s my son, Roberto,” he said, “he’s just riding along.”

      The next time the girl turned around, her mother and the officer were standing in the shade of a large oak tree. Her mother’s voice trailed toward the car like pearls rubbing gently against each other. The officer leaned back and laughed at something her mother said.

      Later, the mother drove to a motel, where the girl fell into a deep sleep. The next morning, after free coffee from the dingy lounge and day-old donuts, they emerged from the Aurora Police Precinct with paperwork in their hands. When the girl read the paperwork, it stated Memphis Waller and her daughter Dahlia Waller had been robbed by the side of the road, including the mother’s wallet and identification.

      Dahlia; flower, symbolic meaning of a commitment and a bond that lasts forever.

      The girl did not ask questions. She was glad to finally have a proper name and no one, not even her mother, would refer to her as Pet ever again.

      Later, she would remember that the sky was overcast and turning darker by the minute.

      

       Chapter 1

       Dahlia

      It all started with the crickets.

      My mother sweeps them off the porch but to no avail: they seem to multiply exponentially—They’re taking over, she says melodramatically—and she sprays lemon-scented Raid in every nook and crevice until the fragrance of artificial citrus descends upon her Texas bungalow and becomes part of our lives like the unsightly boxes in her room she hasn’t managed to unpack in decades.

      April and May bring more rain, which in turn brings more crickets. By June, the porch is covered in shadowy forms climbing up the wooden posts, reaching the horizontal rail just to fall off the precipice and pool under the porch. Come July, my mother is convinced that a rogue crowd of crickets will work their way up the brick walls and discover small pockmarks and cracks along the exterior. Eventually they will invade the house, she says.

      I explain that last year there were the frogs, and the year before there were the crane flies, and before that—I can’t remember, but I make something up—there were the potato bugs. “Next year it’ll be something else. Just relax,” I say but she won’t have any of it.

      “I just can’t stand those crickets,” she says, getting more irate with every swipe of the broom.

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