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

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       Chapter 3

       Quinn

      The old, detached garage had been in desperate need of a paint job for years. The layers were peeling off and the bleached birch wood had been painted numerous times; multiple coats had merged into a shade that was hard to identify.

      Killing time in the swinging chair on the front porch, Quinn listened to the metal poles screeching with every painful descent. First, the garage was there. Then it was gone. There, gone. She wished everything was that easy, that she could make things disappear. She went over the list in her mind; PE on Tuesdays and Thursdays—she was too heavy and sweated profusely—even though she liked watching the boys play football and loved the sound of the rumbling buzzer; church on Sundays came in a close second. She could do without the itchy tights and the leather shoes pinching her feet, the dress stretching tightly over her body, the scent of Play-Doh and gossip and old hymnals with gold-rimmed pages. But most of all, she wanted to make a woman disappear—the woman she was waiting for on the porch.

      She hadn’t met her yet; in fact, she had just found out about her the previous morning. Her father had waited for her to come down for breakfast—she couldn’t remember the last time they’d had breakfast together—and he hadn’t even given her a chance to eat.

      “I met a very nice lady,” he had said and set the coffee cup down. “And I hope you’ll grow to love her as much as I have.”

      Just like that. There’d be another woman in the house. All those days and nights of business in some town were nothing more than a lie. He’d been out looking for a wife.

      Quinn thought about all their plans, traveling for the summer—he had even promised he’d take her to Galveston this fall, had told her all about the hotel, the Galvez. He had described in detail how only rich and famous people and American presidents had frequented it in the past, Roosevelt and Eisenhower, even famous actors, like Jimmy Stewart and Frank Sinatra, and Howard Hughes. Suites were named after them and Quinn had been looking forward to the trip.

      “What about Galveston?” Quinn had asked. “The hotel? The spa? Are we still going?”

      “Don’t you worry,” Mr. Murray said and patted her arm, “we’ll go soon, I promise. Really soon.”

      “The two of us?” Quinn asked.

      “Sure. Maybe we all go?”

      He had all but promised it would be just the two of them, and there’d be spas and a theater and restaurants where they’d serve fish with the head attached and he’d teach her how to use one of those fish knives with a spatula blade to separate the fish’s skeleton from the body. In a moment of clarity she admitted to herself that she’d have to give up on Galveston—it was never going to happen.

      Quinn continued swinging with brisk speed, hypnotized, running her fingers through her hair. It was poufy and frizzy and regardless of how diligently she used the flat iron, it returned to its untamed state once she stepped into the humidity of a Texas summer day.

      Quinn’s mind started to rush and her hands began to fidget as she recited ingredients from a cookbook. The old ladies at church, smelling of talcum powder, were always impressed.

      “What’s your daddy’s favorite dish?” they’d ask, and Quinn tried not to stare at their hands covered in dark spots with veins like blue rivers running through them.

      “Chicken-fried steak,” Quinn said and elaborated on the cut of meat—cube steak—and how she had to pound it fiercely with a meat mallet and then dip it in seasoned flour, pan-fry it, and serve it with a cream gravy made from pan drippings.

      As Quinn continued to swing, she yearned for that night’s dinner, could almost smell rosemary and chives on her fingertips and the scent of the pot roast with mashed potatoes and okra cooked to perfection wafting through the house. She loved the comforting clinks the fork made against the fine china as she scraped off every last morsel of food.

      Quinn forced herself to abandon this culinary vision—after all, she was waiting on the porch for her father and her new mother to show. He hadn’t given her a time or date, just said he’d pick her up—and so Quinn had been waiting out on the porch for the second day in a row, waiting for a car to kick up a cloud of dust on the winding road up to the house.

      Quinn stared at the cracked floorboards. She mistook the fissures for spilled paint but then looked closer and recognized an orderly army of ants marching along СКАЧАТЬ