My Name is Anna

by Lizzy Barber

  ‘I met Jane on the TheHive, and she passed on some of the contacts she’d made, including one of the private detectives your parents had hired, Rosie. I found the pub he went to, started hanging around; you know, not too often to look weird, but enough to become a familiar face. One night I sat next to him up at the bar, and offered to buy him a beer. Told him he reminded me of someone and in fact, wasn’t he – oh yes, he was! – one of the detectives I’d seen on TV, who’d been involved with the Archer case?

  ‘He sussed me out straight away, of course.’ Michael snorts, giving us a roll of his eyes. ‘But he told me he’d give me one thing, off the record: recently they had gone back through the CCTV footage to look for anything unusual that could be connected with any of the new information that had come to light.’

  Michael fiddles with a cushion, pulling it into his lap and working a corner back and forth as if he’d rather focus his attention on that than on either of us. ‘I’m not proud of what I did next,’ he says. ‘I had a grandmother who’d died, left me some money. I promised him a decent chunk if he’d let me have copies of the stills. He refused at first, said it was unethical. But I kept hounding him, and eventually he agreed. And the time after that …’

  He reaches to the debris on the coffee table and plucks a brown cardboard folder from the pile. We crane our necks to look over his shoulder as he splays its contents across the glass. There are hundreds of grainy photos, blown up to A4 – images from the park. Most of them contain lots of people, and many more are no more indistinguishable than blobs. I don’t know where you’d even begin.

  ‘I agonised over these for days.’ Michael strokes his fingers over them. ‘Most of them were useless. There was nothing I could identify, without police records or any other files, that would give me any leads. And then I saw this.’ I already know which picture his hand is about to pick. It’s one of the less crowded images, the familiar green towers of the Astroland castle in the background. Judging by the position of the castle behind her, I guess she must be walking towards the carousel. She’s alone – no kids beside her, no bags or souvenirs that I can make out – and she looks tall, with broad shoulders and light-coloured hair that’s held back with an old-fashioned Alice band. She’s not that old, maybe in her early twenties – it’s difficult to tell exactly with the quality of the picture – and the dress itself is unremarkable; short sleeves, buttons down the front, not much by way of shape. I know this is her: the woman in the navy dress. What I don’t know is why she caught his eye.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ I say. I gesture hesitantly at the picture, pausing my hand inches from it. ‘What made you think this woman was more remarkable than anyone else?’

  ‘Nothing, at first.’ He places his finger on the centre of her throat, where I can just make out something around her neck. ‘Except for this.’

  ‘A necklace?’ I squint dubiously, bringing my face closer.

  He reaches across the table, and pulls up another piece of paper. This one looks like a website printout: the name ‘The Lilies’ loops in white cursive on the left-hand side, underneath that a welcome message, and hyperlinks for ‘Who We Are’, ‘What We Believe’ and ‘Where We Meet’. On the right, next to a photograph of a group of people holding hands, laughing into the camera, is the outline of an elongated cross, its edges bowed, fanning slightly outwards. Wound around it, its leaves twisting around the base, is a flower. A lily.

  I follow Michael’s finger as he traces a pattern around the throat of the woman in the CCTV still, and then again with the cross in the printout.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I shake my head. ‘I’m not sure I could make out if that was one cross or any other.’

  Keira, next to me, reaches out for the piece of paper and holds it inches away from her nose. Then she shrugs and puts the paper down. ‘Sorry, I don’t buy it.’ I know what she’s thinking – the same thing as me: all this way, all this time, and he’s just another Jane after all. ‘And even if it was,’ she says, ‘why would the two be connected?’

  But Michael doesn’t seem perturbed or embarrassed. He rustles through the documents again, and pulls out a different folder. Inside are dozens of images of the same thing: close-ups of the woman’s neck, zoomed in to different points, some of them almost blurred beyond recognition. He takes one in particular, where he’s drawn over the points of the cross in black ink, and holds it next to the web printout.

  ‘I wasn’t sure either, at first. After looking through hundreds of images, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees; started to think the whole thing was a complete waste of time. But something about the cross’s shape made me sit up. I went back to the detective, and convinced him to get me access to more images, closer up. I think he decided that it was easier just to give me what I wanted to shut me up – I was pretty persistent. I don’t think he believed I’d actually find anything worthwhile.

  ‘As soon as I got hold of the close-ups, I was convinced it was the same symbol. I remembered Angela’s mother wearing one – I hadn’t thought about it at the time; after all, it’s not so out of the ordinary for people to wear crosses – but then I remembered something else. The day I went to visit Father Paul, they’d all been wearing them. I must have noticed it, logged it in some corner of my mind, but once I saw it again it came back to me. I remembered thinking it was quite uncanny, seeing them swinging from people’s necks like that, all exactly the same. And I thought to myself, isn’t it awfully odd for someone from The Lilies to be wandering around a theme park like that on their own? They hardly share a common love of roller coasters. It didn’t sit right with them at all – their beliefs, their eccentricities. I looked at the website, but there wasn’t a church I could find in Florida. From what I knew from Ruth, they didn’t tend to travel far from the church, unless they were looking to start up somewhere new. And then I looked at a map. Florida is only one state over from Georgia: perhaps that was all it was; Father Paul was looking to find a spot in Florida. But that wouldn’t explain why the woman was on her own. Or in Astroland.

  ‘This woman: could it be that there was a more sinister reason for her presence? That she was connected to the disappearance of Emily? I wondered, what if I were the one to break the case? Not the Americans, not Scotland Yard, not some private detective or even a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, but me. I stopped drinking. I lost two stone, moved into a place of my own. I was up every night, researching. Even when I was sleeping, scenarios would develop in my dreams: how I’d unmask Father Paul, how I’d find out the truth about Emily Archer, how I’d honour Bill and get closure for Ruth and Angela. And finally, my mind was made up: I couldn’t let it drop. I had to go back to Georgia.’

  ANNA

  21

  Father Paul and The Lilies. The names that have been haunting me since this all began, reverberating around the attic walls. I process them as I watch Mamma across the room. I see something inside her melt. Imperceptibly at first: the sag of her shoulders; the drawing down of her eyes and mouth, pulled by some unseen force. Then, wordlessly, she sinks into the wicker chair, her arms lifeless at her sides. Whatever they are to her, their names alone have the power to change her before my eyes.

  ‘Mamma, who is Father Paul?’ I speak sotto voce, afraid of upsetting the balance. ‘Why does he have such a hold on you?’

  Her mouth puckers. She steers her face away from me like a toddler refusing food. ‘I can’t explain it to you. If I do, you’ll leave me. You’ll never be able to love me again.’

  ‘There’s no turning back now, Mamma – it’s too late. Tell me from the beginning. Pretend you’re telling me a story. I’ll listen.’

  A bead of sweat snakes down her forehead. The air in here is stale, dead. My body is drunk on sleeping pills and medicine. But I am alert. I have to know. At last, Mamma wipes her head with the back of her hand, exhales so deeply I can almost feel the breeze on my face. There is nowhere else to go.

  ‘I was a good child,’ she begins plaintively, turni
ng her chin to the shaft of light spilling through the attic window. She’s turning back to the beginning, to where it started. ‘I was quiet and obedient. Kept myself to myself. We lived in the very north of Georgia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Just Daddy and me. On a twenty-acre farm that belonged to him, and his daddy before that.’ She squints into the sunlight, as if trying to picture the place in the shape of the clouds. And then her mouth moulds itself into an ugly ball. ‘I hated that place. Hated the leaking roof, and the windows that rattled every time the smallest of vehicles drove past it. Hated the sickly-sweet smell of hogswill, and the constant squabbling of the broiler chickens, and the way even breathing near the hay made you feel its dryness scratch the back of your throat.’ She snorts.

  I try to picture her, Mamma as a young girl, her sturdy form among the muck and muddle of farmland. Knowing her as I do, it’s not hard to see why she disliked it.

  ‘Mamma died when I was just a baby, and Daddy hated me for it. He was strict. But it often felt like he was making up the rules as he went along, and the only way I knew a rule existed was when I broke it. I left school at fourteen,’ she continues, ‘to help on the farm. Daddy didn’t see the point in a “dumb girl” like me staying on at school.

  ‘I wanted to grow things – pretty things to brighten that bleak place – but every time I did he’d just rip them straight up. I found a kitten once – wandered into the farm; a darling little thing that must have lost its mamma. But it chased the chickens and got underfoot, and one morning when I came down for breakfast he told me he’d drowned it.’

  ‘Oh Mamma.’ I hurt for her, for this girl who had no one. How different would her life have been if she’d had someone to care for her? She looks down at her hands, and for a moment she is silent, remembering. ‘Please,’ I urge. ‘Go on.’

  ‘My only relief was on Saturdays,’ she swallows thickly, ‘when Daddy would spend the day getting drunk with the other farmers, and I’d sneak off to the library in town. If the weather was pleasant and not too hot, I’d pack myself a sandwich and an apple, and then I’d check out a book and go sit in the park under a shady tree, reading until it started getting dark. Daddy said fiction was the devil’s tools. But he never found out.’ There’s a ghost of a smile on her face. I never knew she liked to read. All those books I’ve hidden from her. All those chances to understand her, for us to share something special in common.

  ‘There was a boy there I’d see sometimes,’ Mamma goes on, and her voice gets a softness to it, a certain lilt I don’t recognise in her. ‘We didn’t talk to each other, but we’d smile across the way. I used to watch him and his friends out the corner of my eye, and think that if I were a different sort of girl, maybe I’d go up to them, say something casual. And then, one afternoon, a shadow fell over the book I was reading. He was standing right there in front of me, holding his hand to his forehead to block out the sunlight, and he said, “You read more than anyone I’ve ever met.” He said his name was Mason and invited me to come sit with him and his friends. I remember the little prickle in my heart when he took my hand to help me up.’

  Mason. My father.

  ‘Mason had those wide, kind eyes and the gentlest smile, and when he looked at me I felt something stir inside me and thought, So this is what all the fuss is about.’ I think of his picture in the kitchen. There was something placid in his face, yes, but there was also a tightness to his mouth, a solidity in his eyes, that suggested sternness. ‘He wanted to know all about me. Where did I live? What did I do? Where did I go to church? And then, when we started talking about church, Mason patted my knee and nodded to his friends – there were four or five of them then – and he said that, funnily enough, church was how they all met.’

  ‘So it was Daddy who …?’

  Mamma nods. ‘It was Mason who first told me about The Lilies. He said they’d come to town a couple of months before from Indiana; that their leader had started his mission in San Francisco in the eighties: to bring purity and righteousness to the world.’

  ‘Father Paul?’ I coax. I shift uneasily on the bed, feeling the snarl of twine against my skin, trying to ignore every sensation except for the sound of Mamma’s voice.

  She sighs. ‘It was the first time I heard his name. And when I made to leave, Mason clasped his fingers around mine and said he thought I’d really like their church and would I like to go. I said yes.’

  ‘But’ – I try to cling to words, form a sentence from the thoughts that tumble from my mind – ‘why?’

  Mamma clasps her hands together, and there’s a brightness in her eyes that sets off a creeping unease in me. ‘The way Mason talked about him, it was like he was the Second Coming. You have to understand: I had nothing in my life. Nothing to divert me from my daily chores. But suddenly there was this man, showing me a new way to be.’ I think of William, of the chance of freedom he has shown me, even before all of this, and I think I understand.

  ‘The church was about half an hour’s drive away from where we lived.’ Mamma’s fingers played idly with a corner of her dress, working a seam with the edge of her nail. ‘It was set right next to the river, and the crystal water bounced the light off it and reflected right onto the church so it seemed to glitter white. As we got out of the car, Mason explained the river was one of the signs Father Paul looked for when assessing the grounds of a new church. He said they believed the soul must be continually baptised, not just at birth, in order to wash away the sins that stick to the mortal body from the outside world. He told me Father Paul was a blessed man; that he had been chosen by God, to deliver His mission on earth.

  ‘Mason squeezed my hand and led me to the altar, to a tanned man in a white linen suit, with his hair tied back in a ponytail. He said, “Father Paul, I’d like to introduce you to Mary,” and he presented me to him. Father Paul beamed at me – he had two rows of perfect teeth. He said, “Mary, welcome to our little church. We do hope you like it.” He said they’d heard so much about me.

  ‘I often think to myself, what would it have been like if I’d never met Mason; if I’d never gone to that church?’ Her head shakes gently from side to side, and she fixes her gaze on the Bible on the floor beside her. ‘Unfortunately, that didn’t happen.’

  She rises from the chair, crosses the attic floor. There is something fragile in her movements, despite her height and broad stature; a trembling, in the intricate bones of her fingers; an unsteadiness on those long legs.

  I swallow. ‘But what did?’ I strain to catch her eye, but she stands at the window, looking out.

  ‘After that first visit, it was so easy to fall into it all.’ The back of her neck stretches as she looks through the slanted glass, over the treetops and parcelled fields that have always protected our little house from the outside world. In a way, she is as trapped in here as I am. ‘There was a small fee, to join officially, to pay for the robe and the sandals, and other items necessary for my first baptism. I got an allowance from the work I did on the farm but I was always embarrassed that I wasn’t offering enough. I started selling some of my trinkets – a necklace I inherited from my grandmother; my mamma’s pearl earrings – and every time I was able to contribute a little more, it made me feel good, especially with Mason sitting beside me, squeezing my hand and telling me how generous I was, that I was truly a blessing on the church.

  ‘I brought flowers I had grown, to dress the church, and when Father Paul saw them, he took me into his arms and told me it was clearly the will of the Lord that I had been sent to them; that I was special. No one had ever told me that before. For the first time, I felt like I was surrounded by people who treasured me, and admired my gifts, and valued goodness and truth. For the first time, I felt loved.’

  I am mesmerised, captured by Mamma’s story: a woman who seems to have been so devoid of love her whole life. I want to speak up, to ask if it could have driven her to do such a thing as this, but something stops me. Instead, I listen.

  ‘After that,�
� she says, ‘Father Paul began showing a particular interest in me. He gave me licence to plant whatever I wanted around the church, and I spent all my free time there, sowing seeds, my hands in the earth. I grew lilies, of course, great big white ones that the members would pin to their robes on special occasions, hoping for my good fortune to rub off on them. And white roses – the symbol of the Lord Himself; and wild purple Passiflora, each part a representation of the Lord’s Passion and suffering; and they all blossomed and multiplied so fruitfully that it really did seem like the will of the Lord.

  ‘When I was done each day, I’d scrub my hands until not a speck of dirt remained, to please Father Paul, to show how strongly I believed. I became so good at it, so meticulous, he would call me up to the altar, heralding me as an example to the congregation. “Look at your sister!” he would say, holding my hands out for the church members to inspect. “See how she toils the land; and despite this keeps herself pure as the lilies in the field? This, I tell you, is doing the Lord’s work.”

  ‘But soon, I started running out of things to sell. My donations to the pot got smaller and smaller, and I became fearful, every week, that someone would notice, and say something. But Daddy was always leaving change around here and there, and there were little things I found to pawn, things nobody could notice, money that would benefit the church far more than our crumbling farmhouse. I felt bad, it’s true; I spoke about it during the Confession Ceremony, and let the members shouts of “Unclean” swell around me, but afterwards Father Paul called me to his office, told me I shouldn’t feel guilt for actions which would benefit the church; that The Lilies had a higher plan for me. The way he looked at me, and touched his palms to mine, I felt certain he was right.’

  Mamma’s movements are hypnotic: the pulse of her eyelids, the jolt of her throat with each swallow, the repetitive smearing of her palms across her skirt. I can’t tear my eyes away from her.