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

Chapter 5

Aella

They appeared at Aella’s door by nightfall. There had been signs; first the dog had raised his head, then his ears had perked up, and he had let out a deep bark, shallow and low. Atlas was a crossbreed, half wolf, half dog, and she trusted him with her life.

Aella opened the door and stepped outside. Atlas followed her, stood motionless to her left, let out a bark. It was a mere warning on his part, giving her a sign: Watch me. I’ll tell you if there’s trouble.

A man with an unkempt beard and teeth too perfect to be his own stepped forward and Aella knew he had rapped on her door. There were more; she heard their mumbled voices in the dark from where they were standing, to the right where the road had led them to her trailer in the woods.

Aella’s eyes got used to the dark and she realized they were all men, with beards and grimy clothes, who had parked their cars by the road, car doors propped open. The men had gathered around, smoking, talking, and stretching their backs.

Atlas continued to keep his distance from them, remaining next to her, his nose darting out occasionally, only to retreat immediately. Bad news, yes, but dangerous, no. Atlas was a skillful judge of people and therefore Aella was not afraid.

“It’s a bit late for a visit,” she said and watched a couple of cats scurry off into the dark.

“We are just passing through and were wondering if it’d be okay to camp out back.”

Out back was a field with cedar stubs caught between shrubs and trees releasing pollen in explosive puffs of orange-red smoke whenever cold winds blew from the north. Like gnarly little fishhooks, the pollen invaded nostrils and sinuses. It wasn’t a place to camp out, but it was all the same to Aella. It wouldn’t be the first time they had passed through—not the same men, but their kind. “Who’s passing through?” Aella asked, shushing Atlas as he let out a low growl.

“It’s twelve of us. Just for one night.”

“I can count,” Aella said, even though the night was pitch-black and she barely made out the men’s silhouettes. “But who are you?”

The man paused for a second, then stroked his beard downward. In the light coming from the trailer Aella saw strong hands, uncut and clean, maybe a man working with gloves? His arms and face were sunburned and the knees of his jeans worn.

“We are travelers,” the man finally said.

“I see.” Tinkers, Aella thought. Irish travelers passing through, looking for employment. “I guess one night is okay with me.”

The man mumbled something Aella couldn’t make out, and another man from the group called out to him. They conversed in a language with soft vowels and words Aella hadn’t heard before.

“You are here why?” Atlas had settled down, yet he kept his distance.

“Roofing jobs, after the fall storms.”

“But why are you coming here? To my house? You can park anywhere and spend a few days. Who told you about me?”

“Well”—he scratched his beard again—“we’ve heard from travelers that they sometimes pass through here and that you allow them to camp on your property.”

He spoke the truth. Tinkers passed through all the time. Mainly bad seeds, the ones that trick the old folks, scam everybody out of some money, and before locals know they’ve been had, they’ve long since left town.

Aella didn’t care about their dealings but she didn’t want people in town to know they stayed on her land, didn’t want to be connected to them. Aurora had never got used to her, and people gossiped. Women like her didn’t want to be the talk of the town. Too many people came snooping, and then there were the teenage dares, and it would all get out of hand so easily.

The local men were reluctant, shook their heads at the sight of her; some spit in the dirt as they passed by. The women worried. How can you live out there, all by yourself? Aren’t you afraid? they’d ask, and Aella just grinned. I’m the baddest thing out here, she’d say, and they’d stare at her and then break out in a nervous giggle. Yet the people of Aurora flocked to her: meek boys who wanted the pretty girls, men who couldn’t keep beautiful women in their beds, lacking money and prowess. They asked for potions and salves and bottles containing strange things. Reconciling with a lover was what men were usually after—nothing a black cat bone and lodestones couldn’t fix—but the women looked to cure ailments. Ringing in the ears was a big one—no doctor can help with that; no ear drops or pills can cure the dead talking about you because you’ve done them wrong while they walked this earth. Some women wanted to keep their men, bind them so they’d never leave, not thinking about the future when they’d long for them to go, and then they’d return and the unbinding would cost thrice. Mothers came for their children: a cleft palate, a head tremor making other kids scatter in disgust, the inability to read or write, infants who stared straight past their mothers, struggling to make eye contact. Mothers were the most desperate of them all.

Aella held the man’s gaze and cocked her head, as if to say, What’s it worth to you? The man shoved a hand at her, causing Atlas to growl again. This time Aella didn’t correct him. The man took a step back, then extended out his arm again, his hand facing upward. In his palm was a substantial wad of dollar bills held together by a rubber band. Aella reached for the money.

“Wait,” the man said. “There’s something else. One of us needs to stay here for a few weeks. We’ll get her on our way back.”

Her. Aella scanned the group of men, and a woman of petite stature emerged from the backseat of one of the cars and walked toward them, dragging her feet. Atlas approached her and sniffed the air. When the woman stepped next to the man and the moonlight illuminated her, Aella saw an expanding stomach that seemed overly large, almost freakish. Her elfin frame had nowhere to put a baby but to push it outward, and then there was her age; she seemed young, too young to be pregnant, and her eyes were vacant as she protectively placed a hand over her stomach.

“She doesn’t feel well. We thought a bit of rest would do her good.”

Aella grabbed the wad of dollar bills and counted the money. The amount was more than generous, more than double what they usually paid to camp out on the land behind her trailer. It was hard to admit, but she looked forward to having company, especially during a time of year when storms kept her indoors for days on end.

“You can spend the night in the field. She can stay with me.” Aella pointed at the pregnant woman and then back at her trailer. Aella beheld the belly underneath the filthy shirt poking out from an unzipped jacket one of the men must have given her. There was something in her eyes—not so much what was there but what was lacking—that made Aella consider her longer than she would have any other woman. Atlas continuously sniffed the air, tracking invisible scents, veering left to right. He approached her and put his nose on her hand. He slinked back and hid behind Aella.

It was a sign. “What’s wrong with her?” Aella asked.

“Nothin’.” The man scratched his head, then shrugged.

Inside, after the men had carried their tents and belongings past the trailer, Aella took a good look at the woman. She wasn’t a woman after all; she was merely a girl, barely grown. If it wasn’t for the obvious signs of pregnancy, the belly and the engorged breasts, she would have assumed she was barely sixteen years old.

The girl lowered herself into a chair, her feet clearing the floor by several inches as they swung back and forth. Her face had an unhealthy look to it and her eyes were open as she stared at nothing on the wall. Her pale skin was a peculiar backdrop for her black hair and bushy eyebrows. “What’s your name?” Aella asked.

The girl sat, still and quiet, scooting farther back into the chair. “Tain,” she finally said, and it seemed as if the words had fallen from her mouth by accident.

“You can stay with me until they come back.”

Her brown eyes then lost their emptiness, became rounder, glossier. Her face buckled, her breathing stopped momentarily, and tears streamed down her face.

“What’s the matter? Why are you crying? You’re safe with me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“There are storms coming soon,” the girl said. “I’m afraid.”

“It’ll be all right,” Aella said. “It’s not so unforeseeable, you know. If you pay attention to certain things you’ll be able to tell exactly when the storm is coming.”

“Like what?” Tain seemed fascinated by the fact that Aella could predict the weather.

“Watch the bees,” Aella told her. “Horses shake their heads a lot, and there are lots of cobwebs in the grass. Most of all, the clouds are pink in the evenings.”

“I’ve always been afraid of thunder and lightning.”

“Nothing to be afraid of. It’s like this here in the summer, but usually storms are severe on the coast, never this far inland. No need to worry. Just a little bit of rain and thunder.” The words didn’t seem to calm the girl, who wrapped herself in the jacket and continued to stare straight ahead, burying her hands in the oversized pockets. She looked cold. “Let me make you a cup of tea.”

Tain’s face remained blank. Aella thought about the chamomile she had collected in the nearby fields and how she’d brew the blossoms for a long time so they’d be strong enough to calm her, and maybe she’d add valerian root.

When Aella finished brewing the tea, she extended the cup. Tain’s tiny hands reached for it and they touched Aella’s ever so slightly. Tain’s hands were cold—icy as if the girl was merely a ghost or was about to turn into one. Aella had felt that sort of thing before, people who didn’t have a lot of time left, as if they were already part of another world—and she watched Tain cup her hands around the hot tea and then something gave way, as if a floorboard had shifted. Tain’s form shimmered and fluttered, and Aella held on to the table. She wasn’t worried; everything around her had been gleaming for a while—the woods and the trees, the cars passing her, even Atlas and the red cardinals outside—and it was always like that in her head when a storm was gathering strength. The girl was right to be afraid of it. It would be a big one.

Later, as Tain slept on the couch, her stomach tucked off to the side to allow her to breathe easier, Aella regarded her; her face was softly flushed with sleep, and her dark eyes shone through her thin and heavy lids.

The girl seemed ethereal, as if painted into this life with a fine brush; with every stroke the colors faded so quickly that she was dissolving in front of Aella’s very eyes. Aella knew it was a sure sign that the girl wasn’t going to be on this earth for a long time, or maybe the baby’s life would be cut short—Aella wasn’t sure.

She tried to make sense of this girl, wondered how easily people who didn’t know any better could fall victim to her. Tain was like a gentle uprising of heavy clouds in the distance on a windless day—but then there was a distant boom, announcing what those brooding clouds had promised all along—a powerful storm.

Aella watched Atlas. It was true that the dog cared for no one but his master, yet he always allowed for courting by strangers, especially women. He remained at a fair distance from Tain at all times, didn’t make any attempt to approach her.

That too was a sign.

Chapter 6

Quinn

Quinn placed one foot in front of the other, skipping the third step from the top, the one that screeched like an angry old woman. She paused at the bottom of the stairs. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a movement beyond the hallway, inside the darkened kitchen. It was formless and indistinct, like a shadow, barely shifting, and she knew it was her imagination. She calmed when she reminded herself that Sigrid was sleeping upstairs and that it was nothing more than the fear of being found out that made her see shadows and other spooky obscure shapes. Without as much as a creak of the wooden floorboards, Quinn made her way through the kitchen and out the back door.

Outside, the darkness disturbed her, as if there were feathered beasts baring incisors lurking beyond the shadows, yet Quinn vowed to embrace the feeling, for she was no longer a child, easy to impress. As she marched down the dirt road toward the fields, near the woods, a faint wind brushed against her, making her skirt cling to her thighs. Her gait was nimbler than it used to be, than it had ever been, really; her body was now as agile as a dancer’s. Quinn could no longer conceive of inventing recipes and chatting with old ladies in town, she was no longer preoccupied with harvesting vegetables in the backyard and the planning of future meals.

Taking a lover was what she called it. It was an expression Quinn had pondered and concluded was something that would make her powerful beyond comparison. To take him implied power, yet her lover was merely a boy, hardly a couple of years older than herself, and far removed from Cadillac Man. But to Quinn he meant everything.

After she had watched her stepmother and Cadillac Man in her father’s bedroom—along with the many times since that encounter, in secret, through the same crack in the door—Quinn had begun to wonder about it all. It seemed to be a matter of men succumbing to a certain kind of beauty; not the cheap kind that came from loose behavior and tight blouses, no, but the power of women who were what she liked to call mysterious. The less a man knew about a woman, the more he seemed to be enamored of her. Cadillac Man, after all, knew nothing of Sigrid’s true self—her indigestion and frequent belching after large meals, or the way her eyes were red and puffy when she woke and how ill-tempered she was before noon—but he got to enjoy her company after she had bathed and dressed and curled her hair. Quinn had read about geishas and how they were considered artists and could seduce a man with just a hint of their necks, but only if they chose to, as if all the power was within them, a power so intricate Quinn had problems understanding it herself. Supposedly you could tell a prostitute from a geisha by her clothes; prostitutes tie their kimonos in the front while geishas have help tying them in the back.

She thought of geishas when she watched men stare at Sigrid, their eyes eating her up, with her restrained makeup and tasteful appearance, always crossing her legs and appearing helpless somehow so random men would offer to lift groceries into the car, carry packages, and pump gas. Some men were even in the company of other women, yet they couldn’t refrain from staring, their eyes wondering what it would be like if she belonged to them. Maybe they thought possessing her somehow would automatically elevate them to some higher standard.

Wiles, Sigrid called it; the wiles of a woman.

Quinn’s father had had a coronary during a city hall meeting the previous year. Seconds after he had pulled a starched handkerchief from his pocket, beads formed on his brow and the room watched his large frame drop and hit the floor with a thud.

“He was gone before he knew what was happening,” the doctor told Sigrid later and went into detail about how it took six grown men to lift him up onto an ornate desk, where the doctor performed CPR with a high degree of difficulty due to the circumference of his body.

“Don’t worry, child,” Sigrid said to Quinn after the doctor had told them the news. “You’ll stay with me. He wouldn’t want it any other way,” Sigrid added and uncrossed her legs.

“He was a sick man and he was sick for a long time. The town will remember him. He was a good man,” the doctor said while taking in Sigrid’s face underneath her new hat, a veiled half-moon-shaped affair with matching gloves.

Oddly, in the days after his death, Quinn imagined he was still alive, and it seemed quite plausible because her father had never been home when he was living, never spent a lot of time with her, so he might as well still be around, just not present in the house. She preferred to retain the memory of him this way, absent yet still alive somewhere. As with her mother’s passing, the word still was a strange concept, implying a movement from one state to the other, yet she couldn’t imagine what or where that place was. And so Quinn thought of her father often, with great sadness but also with great reverie, knowing that his body no longer held him back. Diabetes had caused ulcers on his legs, and he should have retired years ago, should have taken better care of himself, seen doctors—it was not as if one can cure diabetes with magic water—but he had seemed to be content going on as long as he had. Quinn prayed for him often and kept his watch in her jewelry box. When she did cry she thought mainly of the trip to Galveston they’d never taken. How she’d love to have that memory of him, on chairs by the pool, dining at fine restaurants, strolling along the harbor with Spoil Island in the distance. She would have held his hand. She wished she had this memory, but maybe one day she’d get to go after all. As time passed, imagining this lost opportunity became more and more painful, and eventually Quinn tried not to think about it anymore.

That night, as Quinn made her way to meet her lover, she knew her trim body was powerful; she now ate only two small meals a day, but mostly she was thin because she had decided for it to be so. Her new body was a mere mouthpiece of her never-ending dominance over her hunger. She had stood in front of a mirror that morning and admired the part where her thigh curved into her hips, the dimples above her buttocks, and her defined collarbone. Not a single part of her hidden below a layer of flesh. Feeling the power of her new body, she strode through the bright night with a crescent moon overhead and imagined the pressure of her lover’s hands all over her, even though he hadn’t dared touch her quite yet.

Quinn called him Benito, and they had met for the first time when he and his uncle had delivered bales of hay to her house to fertilize the rosebushes. Sigrid, after the death of her husband, had insisted on growing roses, and even though the bushes looked measly and were speckled with what seemed like large black pepper flakes, she wouldn’t give up on them.

“Hay is good for the soil, it makes it fertile. You’ll see,” Sigrid said and had Benito and his uncle drop the hay next to the forlorn flower bed. The uncle inspected the soil, rubbed a clump of dirt between his fingers and promised to return the next day and till the flower bed and fold in the hay.

Benito wouldn’t look at Quinn that day, but when he returned the next, they struck up a conversation even though the uncle gave them sideways glances. From then on, Quinn waited on the porch until she heard the rumbling engine of the old truck become more powerful with every passing second that it approached the house, imagining the pipes spewing twin plumes of black smoke. Once the uncle was tending to the flower beds, Benito was the one who was sent back and forth for a forgotten tool or to empty a bucket of rocks they had dug up from the soil. Quinn sat on the front steps and watched Benito jump in the bed of the pickup, the muscles of his long skinny arms quivering under his brown skin when he lifted wood, bags of mulch, and gardening tools.

“What school do you go to?” Quinn asked.

“I’m not in school,” he said. “I’m from Palestine. I went to school there,” Benito said and reached for the hand tiller, pushing it to the very edge of the truck bed. He jumped out and landed on his feet like gymnasts Quinn had seen in school. Then, seemingly without strife, he lifted the heavy tiller and placed it gently on the ground. His hair had a sheen like deep dark mahogany wood and it swished gently in the wind, swaying with each word he spoke.