PRAISE FOR
THE GOOD DAUGHTER
“[A] rich tapestry of a story that is surprising at every turn and impossible to put down. I was incredibly impressed with her ability to take seemingly unrelated threads and connect each one to the core of the story. Excellent read!”
—Rena Olsen, author of The Girl Before
“Stunning. Every landscape, from rural Texas to the dark past of the characters, is intricately and beautifully crafted, pulling you in from the very first page to the very last. Rarely do we get to enjoy psychological suspense with such extraordinary descriptive narration. It’s a wonderful read!”
—Wendy Walker, bestselling author of All Is Not Forgotten
“An eerily beautiful novel . . . Alexandra Burt fills the Texas woods with her haunting prose and multiple layers of faithfulness, blood ties, and betrayals. The suspense draws you in those woods and keeps you there until the final page.”
—Kathy Hepinstall, author of Blue Asylum
PRAISE FOR
REMEMBER MIA
“As riveting as Gone Girl, but with an even sharper emotional edge, this story . . . will pull you in from the very first page. The fast-paced plot, psychological intrigue, and engrossing twists will have you flipping pages faster and faster as Estelle’s memories are gradually uncovered and piece by jagged piece the puzzle comes together.”
—Kelly Jones, author of Lost and Found in Prague
“Remember Mia is a twisty, gripping read—beautifully written and impossible to put down.”
—Meg Gardiner, Edgar® Award–winning author of Phantom Instinct
“If you enjoy books that pull you in from the beginning and keep you so fully engrossed that you think about them even when you are doing other things, [this] is a book that you should not miss.”
—Fresh Fiction
BERKLEY TITLES BY ALEXANDRA BURT
REMEMBER MIA
THE GOOD DAUGHTER
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra Burt
Excerpt from Remember Mia copyright © 2015 by Alexandra Burt
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY is a registered trademark and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Burt, Alexandra, author.
Title: The good daughter / Alexandra Burt.
Description: First Edition. | New York : Berkley, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016030296 (print) | LCCN 2016037167 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780451488114 (paperback) | ISBN 9780451488121 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Mothers and daughters—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Suspense. |
FICTION / Contemporary Women. | GSAFD: Suspense fiction
Classification: LCC PS3602.U7694 G66 2017 (print) | LCC PS3602.U7694 (ebook) |
DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016030296
First Edition: February 2017
Cover art: Tree branches © vertyr/Adobe Stock; Water background © Dutourdumonde
Cover design by Natalie Slocum
Interior art: Tree branches © Ihnatovich Maryia/Shutterstock
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
To those who live under beds,
and pass through walls.
To old and battered houses
with creaking wooden floors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to the many people who saw me through this book; to all those who gave their time willingly and generously, provided support, offered comments, and allowed me to quote their remarks.
Thanks to my editor, Michelle Vega, and the Berkley Publishing Group, and everyone who assisted in the editing, proofreading, and design. As always, thanks to my agent, Laura Longrigg.
I thank my husband, my daughter, and the rest of my family, who supported and encouraged me in spite of all the time it took me away from them.
Thanks to those whose names I have failed to mention. You too are deeply appreciated.
All the great stories have witches in them.
—UNKNOWN
CONTENTS
Praise for Alexandra Burt
Berkley Titles by Alexandra Burt
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Part Two Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-one
Chapter Twenty-two
Chapter Twenty-three
Chapter Twenty-four
Chapter Twenty-five
Chapter Twenty-six
Chapter Twenty-seven
Chapter Twenty-eight
Chapter Twenty-nine
Chapter Thirty
Part Three Chapter Thirty-one
Chapter Thirty-two
Chapter Thirty-three
Chapter Thirty-four
Chapter Thirty-five
Chapter Thirty-six
Chapter Thirty-seven
Chapter Thirty-eight
Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-one
Chapter Forty-two
Chapter Forty-three
Chapter Forty-four
Epilogue
Readers Guide
Excerpt from Remember Mia
About the Author
Prologue
THEY stopped once for the night, in Albuquerque. The name of the city intrigued the girl, so she looked it up in the encyclopedia she carried with her. It was her most prized possession.
Albuhkirkee . . . She silently repeated the word until it lost all meaning. The girl caught herself drifting off into some paranoid daydream, not knowing what time it was or where they were going. They had never driven this far for so long, never had to pump gas so many times.
Weary with the burden of her heavy eyelids, she was drunk with sleep by the time her mother stopped at a hotel. Rodeside Inn,
the sign read. All she’d remember later were the weeds that grew through the cracks of the concrete parking lot.
The next morning, her mother bought donuts at a drive-through and they got back on the road. The girl went to sleep, but when she woke up and looked out the window, the scenery hadn’t changed at all. After days on the road, she felt as if she was leaking electricity. The hours stretched, and she wished her mother hadn’t thrown her bag in the trunk of the Lincoln—she longed for her American Girl magazine and the jelly bean–flavored ChapStick.
She opened a bag of Red Vines, sucked on them, and then gently rubbed them over her lips until they turned crimson.
Running her fingers across the cracked spine of her encyclopedia—the first pages were missing and she’d never know what words came before accordion; a box-shaped bellows-driven musical instrument, colloquially referred to as a squeezebox—she concentrated on the sound of the pages rustling like old parchment as she flipped through the tattered book.
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: redbrick 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.
Part One
What is this madness blazing in your hearts?
—ACHILLES
One
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.
“Let me go for my run. I’ll think of something when I get back,” I say, feeling myself getting impatient.
Over the past months, I have become a master in avoiding fights with her, yet the better I’ve become, the more she insists on
the drama. The world always revolves around her, she sees no point of view other than her own, no explanations occur to her but the ones that make sense to her and her alone.
I step off the porch and stretch my calves, yet my mother is determined to discuss the crickets.
“I hate the sound they make,” she says and follows me into the street.
“What sound?” I ask. If I wait any longer it’ll be too hot for a run.
“It’s like an old hardwood floor when the flooring nails rub together and they squeak,” she says and holds her hand behind her ear as if she is attempting to direct sound waves into it. “You don’t understand, Dahlia . . .” She pauses as if something important just occurred to her. “They crunch when you step on them. At least no one can come in undetected,” she adds as if her logic has a special shape that fits a special key which in turn fits a special lock.
“I’ll call an exterminator,” I say and jog off before she can say anything else.
I regret having come back to Aurora.
Months ago I stood in front of her door and I realized the house hadn’t changed at all—the same crooked solar lights from fifteen years ago were stuck in the cracked soil like elfin streetlights. The same drab curtains covered the windows; the paint was still chipped; the door chime hadn’t been fixed. I knocked and my mother opened the door and as we embraced, I felt a hesitation, but I was used to that. She still looked impeccable—wore a dress, had done her makeup, didn’t have a gray hair to be seen—yet she seemed grim and dark, and rarely was she without a cigarette between her manicured nails. And now she obsessed about crickets.
Leaving my mother’s subdivision behind, I make my way down a rural road toward the woods. It’s July and the sun that was orange an hour ago is about to turn into a yellow inferno. Another hour and everything will cook.
About two miles into the run, I realize I haven’t stretched nearly enough. I feel a slight stinging behind my left knee, an old injury that has been flaring up lately. When I reach the top of the hill leading into the woods, I stop. Hands on my hips, I attempt to catch my breath. The heat bites into me and the sun eats my skin and eyes. I ignore the pesky insects swarming around me, barely wipe away the salty beads trickling down my neck. I scan an unfamiliar tree line to my right—haven’t I paid close enough attention, or have the columns of rain that have swept North Texas for the past few months somehow changed the vegetation?—and I long for shade to stretch my leg.
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