The Nowhere Child: The bestselling debut psychological thriller you need to read in 2019

MANSON, KENTUCKY

Then

On Tuesday 3 April 1990, Jack Went emptied his bladder in the upstairs bathroom. His wife was in the shower a few feet away. There was something fitting about watching her through frosted glass. The vague shape of the woman he once knew. That sounded about right.

Molly shut the water off but stayed behind the screen. ‘You about done, Jack?’

‘Just about.’ He washed his hands. ‘You don’t have to hide in there. You don’t have anything I haven’t quite literally seen before.’

‘That’s alright. I’ll wait.’ She stood behind the screen with her shoulders hunched forward. Her posture reminded Jack of something from his World War Two books – a Holocaust survivor with a broken spirit, or a simple village girl standing in a field of bodies.

Her clothes for the day were hanging on the back of the bathroom door: a pastel-pink sweater with long sleeves and a heavy denim skirt that fell an inch above her ankles. Pentecostal chic.

Once upon a time, before Sammy was born, Molly had been warm-blooded and tangible, but lately she seemed watered down. Haunting the halls of their home instead of living in them. She was a remarkable woman in that way: even with the family drugstore doing well enough that she didn’t have to work, three beautiful children and the support of her faith, she could still find something to be sad about.

Molly opened the shower screen an inch to peer out. Her shoulders were pinched with gooseflesh. ‘Come on, hun. I’m freezing here.’

‘I’m going, I’m going,’ he said, stepping out into the hall and closing the door behind him.

He found two of his children downstairs in front of the television, engrossed in an episode of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Neither said good morning. Stu, the lumpy nine-year-old, was getting over a cold. He sat under a woollen blanket with a box of Kleenex, staring at the screen with eyes wide and mouth slack.

‘Feeling any better, buddy?’ Jack asked, placing the back of his hand against Stu’s forehead. He didn’t reply. The Turtles had him transfixed.

Sammy, the two-year-old cherub, was also watching, but she seemed just as interested in her big brother. Her eyes darted from the cartoon to Stu’s face. When Michelangelo made a wisecrack and Stu laughed, she copied him, parroting not just the volume of the laugh, but the rhythm too. When Shredder put some sinister plan into action and Stu gasped, Sammy gasped with him.

Not wanting to disturb the scene of domestic bliss he’d stumbled into, Jack backed quietly out of the room.

His eldest daughter, Emma, was eating cornflakes at the kitchen counter, one arm forming a wall around her bowl, the way he imagined prison inmates would eat.

Is that how she sees this house? He wondered. A sentence she needs to wait out. Sometimes it felt that way for Jack too.

‘Good morning, sweetheart,’ he said, making coffee. ‘Coach Harris came by the drugstore yesterday. He says you had PMS again so you couldn’t participate in gym. Need me to bring you home some naproxen?’

Emma grunted. ‘I don’t know why two grown men think it’s okay to talk about my period.’

‘Isn’t using your period to get out of gym sort of cliché?’

‘It’s not cliché, Dad – it’s a classic. Besides, Coach Harris is a creep. He always makes us climb the gym ropes so he can “spot” us. That reminds me, I need you to sign this.’

She dug deep into her backpack, pulled out a permission slip and handed it to Jack.

‘For permission to participate in the study of science and evolution?’ he read. ‘You need a parent’s permission to take a class nowadays?’

‘You do when half the kids are fucking fundies.’

He lowered his voice. ‘Has your mother seen this?’

‘No.’

He took a pen from his breast pocket and signed the permission slip quickly. ‘Let’s keep it that way. And don’t let her catch you saying the F-word.’

‘Fucking?’

‘Fundie.’

Emma folded the slip and tucked it safely back into her backpack.

While both Jack and Molly were technically members of the Church of the Light Within – Molly through conversion and Jack through blood – Molly took it far more seriously than he did. She attended all three weekly services. That was common for members who found the faith later in life: usually they already had a hole that needed filling.

Jack had started drifting from the Light Within as a teenager and had stopped attending services altogether when Emma was born. He’d justified it by calling it a safety issue: like many Pentecostal fundamentalists, the Light Within handled venomous snakes and ingested different kinds of poison as part of their worship – not exactly a healthy environment for children. So he had stayed home to babysit and let Molly do her thing. He still called himself a Light Withiner to keep Molly from leaving him and his parents from disowning him – although at times neither of those possibilities sounded too bad – but in truth he had long ago lost his faith.

Molly came downstairs, pulling on her pastel-pink sweater. ‘Morning, Em.’

Emma grunted a reply.

‘Coach Harris told your father you’re using PMS to get out of gym. Is this true?’

‘Dad’s already given me the lecture, so you can cool it.’

‘Well, I hope he told you that lying is a sin and your studies are the most important thing in your life right now.’

‘Jesus, here we go.’

‘Em.’ Molly drummed her fist on the kitchen counter. ‘Each tree is recognised by its own fruit. The mouth speaks what the heart is full of. When you say His name in vain—’

‘—you dishonour the faith,’ Emma finished in a tired monotone. ‘Words testify to our devotion to God and words are the truth of what we are. I got it. Thanks.’ She put her bowl in the sink. ‘I have to go. I’m meeting Shelley.’

She picked up her backpack, clomped across the kitchen in her dirty Chuck Taylors and disappeared out the door.

‘Some back-up would have been nice,’ Molly said to Jack.

‘I thought you handled it pretty well.’ He put an arm around her shoulders and tried to ignore the way she stiffened under his touch.

‘I worry about her, Jack.’

‘She’s not a lost soul just yet,’ he said. ‘Just a little lost. Remember what you were like at her age? Besides, I won’t be the favourite for long. I read somewhere that when girls hit puberty something is triggered inside their brain and they’re reprogrammed to hate the smell of their father. They say it’s an evolutionary thing. To prevent incest.’

Molly’s face turned sour. ‘Just one more reason not to believe in evolution.’

Sammy yanked on one of Jack’s pant legs. She had waddled into the kitchen, dragging a stuffed gorilla behind her. ‘Dada,’ she said. ‘Incest?’

Molly laughed. It felt good to hear her laugh. ‘Good luck with that one. I have to check up on Stu.’

When Molly left the kitchen, Jack hoisted his little girl into his arms and drew her tight toward his face. His whiskers and hot breath made her giggle and squirm. She smelled like fresh talcum powder.

‘Incest?’ Sammy said again.

‘Insects,’ Jack said. ‘You know, like ants and beetles.’

Went Drugs, the family business, was situated on the corner of Main Street and Barkly, in the middle of Manson’s shopping district. The store also provided a shortcut between a large parking lot and Main Street, which meant plenty of foot traffic. People always got sick and business was always good.

When Jack arrived, Deborah Shoshlefski was bagging up a customer’s order at the front counter. Deborah was the youngest and most reliable of Jack’s shop assistants, a dowdy girl with wide-set eyes that made her seem perpetually surprised.

‘Morning, boss. There’s a load of scripts need filling. They’re on your spike.’

‘Thanks, Debbie.’

She rolled her eyes, laughing, and told her customer, ‘He knows I hate it when people call me Debbie, so he calls me Debbie every chance he gets.’

Jack smiled politely at the woman as he slipped behind the counter. He barely had time to button on his white tunic before a skeletal hand reached over the counter and grabbed his forearm.

‘My joints are hurting something awful, Jack,’ an old voice wheezed. Graham Kasey had lived in Manson forever and had seemed ancient even when Jack was a boy. He spoke through loose false teeth in that old-timer death-gurgle that Jack’s grandfather had taken on in his final years. ‘My bones feel like they’re punishing me for something I can’t remember. None of the stuff you keep on the shelf is working for me, Jack. Give me something harder than this pussy shit.’ He held up an empty packet of Pain-Away, an extra-strength heat rub designed for superficial pain relief.

‘Have you seen a doctor, Graham?’

‘You expect me to drive all the way to Coleman just so Dr Arter can send me back here with a scrap of paper? Come on, Jack. I know you got what I need.’

‘I’m not a drug dealer. And who says you have to go all the way to Coleman? We’ve got Dr Redmond right here in Manson.’

‘Redmond and I don’t see eye to eye.’

Jack threw a subtle wink at Deborah, who chortled in return. Graham Kasey was the sort who would rather drive twenty miles to Coleman in his gas-guzzling old Statesman than have Dr Redmond – who was both black and a woman – give him a prescription.

‘Sorry, Graham. I don’t write the scripts. I just fill ’em.’

In the whole time they had been talking, Graham hadn’t let go of Jack’s arm. His fingers were cold and bony, reminding Jack of dead white caterpillars. ‘Don’t you know you’re s’posed to respect your elders?’

‘It’s illegal.’

‘Oh, illegal my ear. I know how it works, Jack. You can write off anything you keep behind your little counter there. Things get lost all the time. They go missing or get chewed up by rats or they expire.’

‘And how might you know that?’

‘Well, let’s just say it wasn’t so damn uptight round here when Sandy ran things.’

At hearing his mother’s name, Jack felt hot energy rise in the back of his neck. Went Drugs was opened two years before Jack was born, as the sign above the door – WENT DRUGS EST. 1949 – reminded him daily. He had bought into it fair and square just four years out of college, but it never really felt wholly his.

It didn’t help that his mother – a druggist too and technically retired – popped in every other week under the pretence of picking up a bottle of Aspirin or a jumbo-sized pack of toilet paper, only to wander the aisles saying things like, ‘Oh, why did you put the antihistamines here?’ One time she even ran her index finger along the rear shelf to check for dust, like an uptight British nanny.

Graham might have seen a little too much fire in Jack’s eyes because he softened and finally released Jack’s arm. There were pale marks in the skin where his fingers had been. ‘Ah, hell. I’ll just take another pack of this pussy shit.’

Jack flashed a smile and clapped a hand against Graham’s shoulder. He could have sworn he saw dust rise off the old coot’s blazer.

‘You heard the man, Debbie,’ Jack said. ‘One pack of pussy shit for Mr Kasey here. Bag it up.’

‘Right away, boss.’

Jack went back to his station to fill some scripts but couldn’t quite relax. Graham Kasey had picked at an old scab and now he was irritated.

A grown man with mommy issues, he thought. Talk about cliché.

It’s not cliché, he heard his daughter say. It’s a classic.

Jack tried to focus on work, but as he pulled the first script from the spike, he nearly tore it in half. Luckily the important parts were still readable: Andrea Albee, fluoxetine, maintenance dose.

He took a small plastic cup and wandered among the towering pill shelves out back, then returned to his desk with Andrea Albee’s Prozac and powered up the fat computer on his desk. It buzzed and struggled. A few minutes later a black screen appeared with a green directory. He found fluoxetine on the database and hit the PRINT SIDE EFFECTS button for the side of the bottle.

The printer shook and screamed as the list emerged. Hives, restlessness, chills, fever, drowsiness, irregular heartbeat, convulsions, dry skin, dry mouth. Just how sad was this Andrea Albee anyway? Was turning her brain numb – and that’s exactly what she was doing: contrary to popular opinion, Prozac didn’t make you feel happy or right – truly worth the side effects?

Deborah poked her head into his station. ‘Phone call for you, boss. Wanna take it in here?’

‘Thanks, Deborah.’

Her eyes grew even wider than usual. ‘You didn’t call me Debbie!’

Jack flashed the same smile he’d given Graham Kasey, and Deborah connected the call to the phone on his desk.

‘Jack Went speaking.’

‘Hi, Jack.’ He recognised the voice right away. ‘Free for lunch?’

At two pm, Jack pulled in to the parking lot at the east end of Lake Merri and stood waiting against his red Buick Reatta convertible – a car Emma lovingly referred to as his mid-life-crisis-mobile. The lot was hidden from the highway by a quarter-mile of shaggy bushland. It was almost always empty, even at this time of year when the spring weather started to bring people back to the water.

Travis Eckles arrived ten minutes later in his industrial cleaning work van. He got out of the van in a pair of baggy white coveralls and checked his windblown hair in the windscreen reflection. He had a nasty-looking black eye.

‘Heck, what happened to you?’ Jack asked.

Travis gave the bruise an exploratory poke and winced. ‘It’s not as bad as it looks.’

Jack took Travis’s head between his hands and examined the injury. It puffed out his face, made him look thuggish like his older brother. ‘How’s the pain? Need some Advil?’

Travis shrugged. ‘No. It’s alright.’

‘Did Ava do this to you?’

Travis ignored him, which was as good as answering in the affirmative.

Ava Eckles was Travis’s mother, a wild drunk who liked to talk with her fists from time to time. If the rumours could be believed she had also slept her way through half the men in Manson.

Travis’s father was a crewman in the air force and was inside a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter when it crashed during a training exercise off the southeast coast of North Carolina in 1983. Everyone on board was killed.

Travis had an elder brother too – Patrick – but he was currently serving time in Greenwood Corrections on an aggravated assault charge. Then there were his cousins, a collection of college dropouts, drug dealers and delinquents.

Some family, Jack thought. But Travis was alright. At twenty-two he was still young enough to get out of Manson, and while being a janitor wasn’t anyone’s dream job, it was solid work for a solid paycheck. He was crude and abrasive sometimes, but he was kind and funny too. Not many people saw that side of him.

Travis slid the side door of the work van open. CLINICAL CLEANING printed on the side in big red letters turned into CL ING. He stood aside. ‘After you.’

Jack looked over the lake. The evergreens on the Coleman side shifted as a stiff breeze swept through them, but the water was still and empty. They were alone. He climbed into the back of the van and Travis followed, pulling the door shut behind them. It was warm inside. Travis rolled his coveralls down to the waist and Jack unbuttoned his pants.

MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

Now

My sister’s townhouse was in a labyrinth of identical-looking homes in Caroline Springs. I’d been there at least a dozen times already but I wasn’t sure I had the right place until Amy rushed out to meet me.

‘What is it?’ she called. ‘What’s wrong? What’s going on?’

‘What are you talking about? Nothing’s wrong. Who said anything was wrong?’

She bent over at the waist and braced herself on her knees, heaving with melodramatic relief. ‘When I saw you out front I just … I didn’t know you were coming and … I’m sorry. I guess I have a habit of assuming the worst.’

‘Yikes. Can’t a girl just visit her sister?’

‘Not when that girl is you, Kim. You’re not exactly the pop-in type.’

I made a big show of rolling my eyes because I didn’t want her to know she was right – which, of course, she was. I’m generally solitary by nature. I feel much more comfortable alone, staying in and reading a book or wandering the aisles of the supermarket for an hour trying to find the perfect brand of linguine.

Amy was five years younger than me, with a warm, round face and full body. ‘Bumps in all the right places’, our mother used to say. It was as if my sister’s genes had defined themselves in opposition to my own. Nobody in school ever stopped her to say, ‘Excuse me but I think your boobs are on backwards.’

Technically Amy and I were only half-sisters. Her father (my stepdad) met my mother when I was two, and they had Amy when I was five. But blood and DNA aside, there was no half about it. Amy was my sister, for better or worse.

Dean had been around long enough to earn the position of official, bona fide Dad. Of course, never knowing my real father meant there was no basis for comparison.

‘Aunty Kim!’ Lisa, my three-year-old niece, had hurried out through the open front door and onto the lawn, two fingers wedged into her mouth. The grass was wet and her socks were immediately soaked through, but that didn’t slow her down. She crossed the lawn as fast as she could. I grabbed her under the armpits, hoisted her into the air and turned her upside down. She screamed in delight, giggling until snot came out of her nose.

I set Lisa down on the front step and let her run into the house, her wet socks leaving tiny footprints on the hardwood floors. As usual, the house was a mess. Dishes were piled six plates high in the sink, Lisa’s toys were strewn up and down the hallway, and the living-room sofa was covered with coloured crayon, its creases foaming with forgotten chalk and food crumbs.

The television, a brand new fifty-two-inch, was blaring at full volume. Lisa was lured to it like a zombie. She stopped less than a foot from the screen, mouth agape, as if the cartoon characters on the screen were whispering all the secrets of the universe.

In the middle of the living-room floor was an Ikea box, roughly torn down the middle to expose a mad tangle of cheap wood and plastic brackets.

If I spent just one day in Amy’s shoes my mind would melt with sensory overload, but she seemed to thrive in the chaos.

‘It’s a goddamn toy chest for Lisa’s room,’ she said, picking up an L-shaped bracket and turning it over in her hands, as if it were some mysterious archaeological artefact. ‘Or at least it will be a toy chest … one day. In the far off, distant future.’

‘Need some help putting it together?’

‘Nah, I’ll leave it for Wayne to finish. And I don’t even care what that says about me as a woman. Coffee?’

‘Sure.’

As she prepared coffee in the adjoining kitchen, she talked about the toy chest for a full five minutes. Shouting over the sound of the percolator, she told me how much the toy chest cost, which section of Ikea she found it in, what it should look like after its construction and the complex series of decisions that led to its purchase. She told me all of this without a break as I waited in the living room. I could have left, gone to the bathroom and come back, and she wouldn’t have noticed. Instead I used the time to scan her bookshelves, searching for her photo albums.

In particular I was looking for a fat pink folder with EARLIEST MEMORIES spelled out in purple block letters on the cover. The album had belonged to our mother, and should really have been kept at Dean’s place, but Amy went a little nutty with photos after Mum died.

The photos were the whole reason I was here. Last night I’d half-convinced myself that I could have been the kid in James Finn’s photograph, and I was eager to knock that speculation on the head.

The bookshelf was packed with DVDs, magazines, a framed cast of two tiny feet marked Lisa, age 6 months, but there were no albums.

‘What are you looking for?’ Amy had snuck up behind me. She handed me a cup of black coffee. ‘We’re outta milk.’

‘That’s fine. And nothing. I was just looking.’

‘You’re lying.’

Damn it, I thought. Ever since we were kids Amy could always tell when I was trying to hide something. She had a knack for it that bordered on psychic. The morning after I’d lost my virginity to Rowan Kipling I told my parents that I had stayed over at my friend Charlotte’s place. Amy, at all of eleven years old, looked at me over her breakfast cereal and said, ‘She’s lying.’

Assuming Amy knew something they didn’t, Mum and Dean started picking at my lie until the whole damn story came unravelled. It wasn’t that I was a bad liar; Amy was just an exceptional lie detector.

Sighing, I came clean. ‘I’m looking for the photo album with the baby pictures.’

Amy clicked her tongue, a thinking technique she’d used since she was a kid. The wet click-click sound briefly transported me back in time to my bedroom at number fourteen Greenlaw Street. The memory was hazy and fragmented, lacking context like a fading dream. But I could see Amy clearly, at four or five years old, in pink-and-green striped pyjamas. She was climbing into my single bed and I was pulling back the covers to let her in.

As the memory drifted away a heavy sadness remained.

‘All the photos are probably in the garage someplace,’ Amy said. ‘We still haven’t totally unpacked the garage, if you’d believe it. Six months later. It’s Wayne’s job but every time I bring it up he does this big sigh. You know that sigh he does that sounds like a deflating tyre? Like you just asked him for a kidney.’