My Name is Anna

by Lizzy Barber

  ‘Daddy complained about the missing money,’ she says. ‘I told him it was probably one of the farmhands, but he knew straight away that it was me. One night, Mason dropped me back home, and I found everything I owned strewn on the front porch. Everything trampled through the dirt.

  When I walked in the house, it was so dark I almost missed him completely. But there he was, sitting at the head of the carved oak chair that his daddy had sat on, and his daddy before him, every inch the head of the household. And he told me I had to leave.’

  Mamma’s hands squeeze into fists, and her face twists in hatred. ‘I spent my whole life being scared of that man. Everything about my life up to then was dirt and decay, from that wretched farm to my own father’s soul: my muddied clothes were a symbol of that. Before, I was trapped – there was nowhere else for me to go. But now I had a choice. There was Mason. And Father Paul. And purity and love and happiness. I made a choice, Anna. I chose The Lilies. If you had two paths in front of you, one you knew was dark and the other had even the smallest promise of light, which would you choose?’

  When she looks at me there is a ferocity in her eyes, an intensity bubbling up in her that makes me feel scared, yes, but also the tiniest bit impressed. ‘I understand,’ I murmur. And I do.

  Mamma’s face softens, and she comes over to me on the bed. I struggle against the twine, twisting my fingertips to reach for her hand. She notices, moves it towards me, and I clutch her fingers clumsily in mine. Would it have been different if she had had a mother; or someone who cared for her as she has cared, in her own way, for me? We remain motionless, listening to the faint call of birdsong and my own dry swallows. I think this could be it – the moment she’ll come to her senses and let me go.

  But then a noise intrudes into the silence. Low at first, but gradually getting louder. A repeated thud, thud, thud.

  And a voice. A man’s voice.

  Mamma drops my fingers, and her whole body goes rigid, her eyes round as full moons. She races to the door and barricades it with her body.

  She turns to me, her face white. ‘It’s him.’

  ROSIE

  22

  Through the French windows, the daylight is mellowing into early evening. Michael seems to relax into himself, his body slackening against the sofa. Georgia. At last it seems he is bringing us closer to the woman in the navy dress. Closer to Emily.

  It’s quiet, Michael’s home. I’m so used to the familiar grumble of traffic outside our front door, or the even patter of Mum moving through the house, or the soft chords of Dad’s music, switched on as soon as he walks in the door. But here, it’s like every living thing has left us alone, giving Michael the stage to tell his story.

  ‘Stepping off that plane in Atlanta was like stepping right back three years. The lingering smokiness from mountain wildfires, the corporeal reek of the Bradford pear trees, that dry, scorching heat. When I was living there, they became so much a part of my make-up that they’d stopped existing for me, but distance made each scent fresh and new.

  ‘I admit I was scared. Excitement and a fair bit of bravado had got me as far as border control, but once I entered Georgia proper I couldn’t escape the feeling that Father Paul would somehow know what I was up to, and I half expected him to be there waiting for me as soon as I walked through the exit. It wasn’t that I thought he was dangerous, exactly, it was more of an overall unease.

  ‘I hired a car, parked in town; just walked around for a bit. I bought some food from a deli and went to sit in the park. There was a group of teenagers in the shade near me, and something in their manner, the way they moved, reminded me of Ruth. There was the careful way they sat on the ground, the cautious glances they gave to their hands, subconsciously checking them for dirt. When I spotted the pendants around their necks, I knew I’d found who I was looking for.

  ‘I played the tourist card, told them I was passing through on a road trip with my wife and daughter, that we were heading through Georgia down into Florida, and might stop off at that theme park … Astroland … had any of them ever been? No, no, they all shook their heads, most of them had never been out of the state. They genuinely seemed like they didn’t know why I was asking. Did they know that a girl had disappeared there, a little English girl, about ten years ago? That was when they began to get shifty, like maybe I was starting to go a bit off the beaten track. I told one of them that I liked her necklace. She was a pretty girl with white-blonde hair that hung in a sheet down her back. I reached out to touch the necklace but she pulled away and they all seemed to get up at once, said they had to leave. I was being stupid and erratic, but I’d come all that way and I was jet-lagged to buggery and thought this might be my only chance.’

  Michael seems to hesitate, as if he’s decided to say something else but then thinks better of it, because his cheeks puff and he sways his head a little before carrying on. ‘I ate dinner with the owners of my B&B – a sweet old couple. I was the only guest, and the wife was keen to show off the best of her Southern hospitality. The husband told me their kids had all left the state, and that it was nice to have someone new visiting, so I let them coddle me. When I was released at last I sat in my room with its dusty floral bedspread and all those doilies, and I tried to piece together the broken fragments of the story.

  ‘There was a knock on my door about ten o’clock, and Mrs Leary, the wife, peeked around it. She was sorry to be bothering me, she said, but there was a man there to see me. She’d said I might be sleeping, but he told her it was urgent.

  ‘Even before I left the room I knew who I would find. Part of me feared it, but part of me realised this was what I needed all along. I saw his boots first, shined so high his reflection bounced onto you. And a white suit – not a crease, not a wrinkle. And that hair, so neatly tied. Father Paul was standing in the Learys’ chintzy living room, under a wooden sign that said, “If Mamma Ain’t Happy, Ain’t Nobody Happy”—’

  From upstairs there comes a distant wail, footsteps moving on the landing. Michael turns his eyes to the ceiling, then looks back at us. ‘Hugo waking up from his nap.’ He looks almost as though he’s going to ask us to leave, and although I feel bad for forcing ourselves upon him, one look at the images scattered on the table tells me I can’t leave, not yet.

  ‘What did Father Paul say, when you saw him?’ I ask, gently but forcibly pushing him back into his story.

  He cocks his head towards the hall, listening for signs of his family. ‘He told me I was an easy man to track down.’ The noises upstairs settle and fade, so he turns reluctantly back to me. ‘There was a sneer to his voice, the way he said it, as if to say, wasn’t he so clever, to have found me. But now I think of it, I suppose I wasn’t being awfully discreet: an Englishman poking around a small town, asking questions. Once those kids mentioned it to him, it wouldn’t have been too hard to find me. He was very jovial, as seems to be his way. Asked me how my trip was, how I was finding the bed and breakfast. He asked after Angela, and Ruth. When I told him about Bill, he held his hands up to the heavens and said that was always going to be the way. He said, “Cancer like that – there’s not much chance of coming back from it.”’

  Michael’s mouth thins into a hard line. ‘I think he was goading me. It was like he was trying to cut the small talk and get straight to the point, and I took the bait, like an idiot. I went for him. All that praying, and all that money, and he knew all along it was a complete waste of time. I told him he was a charlatan, and a con artist, and that I could have him locked up. And he just listened to me rant and rave, and when I finished he quoted as if by rote, that studies show that hope and prayer can have a powerfully healing effect. He said he wasn’t touting anything that hadn’t been written about by the modern, mainstream Christian Church. He was actually laughing at me, that scumbag, so I told him, let’s cut the niceties, why not tell me how the church was involved in the disappearance of Emily Archer.’ At the sound of her name my whole body tingles, and I sit up, convinced, sudden
ly, I’m about to hear the definitive proof I need.

  ‘I thought I had him there, for a moment,’ Michael says. ‘He didn’t speak, and his expression froze on his face, but then everything seemed to smooth itself out like an iron over one of his goddam white robes, and he said, “I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” with a voice like silk. I was feeling cocky now, and told him I knew all about it – that I had the images of the woman from Astroland. I thought I had him pinned down: a park full of kids; the proximity to Georgia; a member of his church, there on her own. Why else would she be there? I made a mental leap: the park’s exactly the sort of place Father Paul would despise: dirty, noisy, messy. I thought perhaps she’d been sent to kidnap someone … I don’t know … for one of their purification rituals or something.

  ‘I said I knew they’d taken her, and demanded to know if she was still alive and where they were hiding her, and what they wanted her for. That’s when Father Paul really began to laugh. He told me I didn’t know anything at all. He said they had nothing to do with the girl, and that I should learn to keep my nose out of other people’s business if I knew what was good for me. And then he said, completely in control: “You should think very carefully before trying to involve yourself in matters that go way beyond you. You should go home, to your life in England.” And he looked me dead in the eyes and said, “Look after your lovely Rebecca.”’

  Beside me, Keira puffs her cheeks and blows a stream of air through her lips. ‘This guy sounds like a lunatic,’ she says.

  Michael nods. ‘That’s putting it lightly. It creeped me out, the fact that he used Rebecca’s name. We’d only been dating about six months. But I didn’t take him too seriously at first. Anyone with half a brain and access to Facebook would be able to find us. I kept my head down for the rest of the week, looking out for anyone who looked like Emily, spending a lot of time at the local library, reading through reports from the time and trying to find something unusual which could point me in the right direction.’ Again he pauses, as if something has come into his mind he’s considering mentioning, but again he shakes it away. ‘But there was simply nothing to be found. So I went home.

  ‘I didn’t think much more about Father Paul’s threat. I was still convinced I was on to something, even with nothing solid to go on, and that was when I started writing on TheHive myself. I mentioned the church, calling for information, anyone who knew what they were up to. I went back to that detective, the one who’d given me the images. But he dismissed me, told me I couldn’t possibly have found something that wouldn’t have already been checked out by the police. And then one day I came home and there was a card in the post. A watercolour on the front – of lilies, what else? When I opened it, a picture spilled out. It was a photo of Rebecca going in my front door. Just that. We’d just found out she was pregnant … it wasn’t exactly planned, but we were pleased all the same,’ he mumbles. ‘I’d asked her to move in with me.’ He puts his head in his hands, and I feel the blood run cold in my veins.

  ‘I looked at the envelope for some kind of clue,’ he says, ‘but it was plain brown, delivered by hand. I threw it away immediately, didn’t say anything to Rebecca of course. But that was just the start. They sent letters to my work – I’d stopped freelancing by then. There was nothing direct: one was just a blank postcard, a picture of Atlanta on the front; another sent Congratulations, great article! from The Lilies, with a torn-out copy of my latest hack job; one was just a quote from the Bible: Even a fool, when he holdeth his peace, is counted wise: he that shutteth his lips is deemed a man of understanding. Each time, they seemed bolder. They sent a bunch of lilies to the house. Rebecca assumed they were from me and thanked me for being so thoughtful, and I had to put up with their cloying smell and have their brown pollen dust on my clothes every day as a reminder, until she finally threw them out.

  ‘I was spooked. The way they were all so nebulous, that there was no identifiable sender. I kept everything they sent together – you can have a look if you like; they’re in a box in one of my desk drawers – and when I looked at it all laid out, I realised each one was written in a different hand.’ He shivers visibly. ‘I started to feel like there were hundreds of unseeing eyes watching me, that there was some network of Lilies keeping tabs on my every move.

  ‘I did some research and found out there was a branch of the church in the UK, in Slough: it would have been easy enough to orchestrate. And Father Paul is a powerful man; I didn’t fully appreciate it until then. Each individual church is small, but there are quite a few of them. He has at least six in the States; one in Mexico; I think there’s even one in Israel. And the money these people willingly fork out to him … God, it makes it easy to command attention with the right number on a cheque.’ He addresses me directly, his face a mask of gravity: ‘We’re talking about a cult here, Rosie, operating under the guise of Christianity.’

  He breathes then, heavily, and shifts his weight in his seat. ‘Sorry. Would you mind if we stop for a moment, so I can get myself a glass of water?’

  When he’s out of the room, Keira pulls at my arm. ‘What do you think?’

  I raise my hands at the ceiling. ‘I mean … what’s there to say really? It all sounds batshit crazy. This Father Paul is obviously some kind of religious lunatic, and I feel like Michael is a good guy, you know? And sane. Not one of the strange conspiracy theorists my mum is always so worried about. But,’ I shrug, ‘I can’t see how any of this is connected to Emily. Firstly, I don’t know what they’d want with her, and secondly, if they do have her, why hasn’t someone spotted her by now?’

  ‘Unless she’s …’ Keira leaves the thought dangling. She doesn’t need to finish it – it’s the noise I’ve been trying to drown out of my own head. Could it have been some sort of religious ritual? How dark does this stuff really get? For all I know, they were into sacrificing children, and Emily was picked out as their next victim. I push the thought back down.

  Michael returns – I hear the rattle of the tray before we see him. Along with the glasses are a couple of cartons of kids’ apple juice, elderflower cordial, and a can of Diet Coke. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d prefer something more glamorous than water,’ he says.

  He drinks slowly. I hear the glug of water as it passes through his throat. He finishes, puts the glass down with a soft clink on the table, and then rubs both palms of his hands over his forehead and down the back of his head. He looks tired, older than when he started telling us his story.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says eventually. ‘I haven’t dredged all this up in a long while. It wasn’t a pleasant period in my life; not one I particularly relish retelling.’ He folds his arms across his chest, takes a gulp of air which he holds, briefly, his shoulders nudging up to his chin. ‘I kept all of this from Rebecca. I know it doesn’t sound like it was the right thing to do, but at the time, with the baby, especially after what happened with Angela … I just didn’t want to do anything that would upset or frighten her. But it turns out all of my caution was a waste of time anyway.

  ‘Someone stopped her on the steps to our house. She was about seven months pregnant at the time. She couldn’t remember anything particularly outstanding about them: it was a woman, medium height, she said, medium build, brown hair … about as bland as you can get. She asked her if she was Rebecca, Michael’s girlfriend, and when she said that she was, the woman pressed a package into her hands and said, “Would you see that he gets this?”

  ‘When I came home Becs was sitting at the kitchen table, with the package open in front of her. I don’t know how long she’d been there; maybe an hour, maybe more … just staring at it. She said she’d been curious, that once she’d shut the door behind her it did seem a pretty odd interaction, and she had a funny feeling about what was inside it.’

  Michael pauses, and looks at each of us in turn, as if debating how to continue. ‘It was a foetus. Of a mouse,’ he quickly adds, as I feel my stomach churn. ‘I can still picture it. It was probably no bigger
than my thumb. Its skin was translucent peach, so thin you could see the spider of veins beneath it, and the little thing was curled in on itself, so that the tip of its tail pointed towards its beady, half-formed black eyes.’

  I take a sip of water. I hear Keira do the same.

  ‘I looked at her belly, at the child – our child – growing inside her. It wasn’t hard to guess what they were trying to insinuate. It was one thing when they were threatening me, but now they were turning to my family, I …’ He pinches the bridge of his nose, swallows hard. ‘Rebecca demanded to know what was going on – as she had every right to. She was crying and shouting and asking to know what it meant, why someone would send me something like this. And all the while that creature was on the table, its eyes staring up at us, and I thought, You know what, Father Paul? You’ve won.

  ‘I told her everything, but I already knew what I was going to do. I’d already lost one wife, and one child; I wasn’t about to lose any more. I wiped everything from the Hive profile – almost everything; I still hoped that, maybe, if someone else out there happened to stumble upon something, at least they’d know they weren’t the only one. I started looking for a new job instantly. We needed to get away from the city, away from London. And then, when we were set and ready to go, I went on that website,’ he points to the printout from the church he showed us earlier, ‘found an email address, and asked them to pass a message on to Father Paul. He had his wish: I would leave everything alone; I wouldn’t say another word about The Lilies, to anyone, as long as he and his minions left my family alone.

  ‘To this day he’s kept his side of the bargain, and I’ve kept mine, but I’ve never quite shaken the feeling that they’re watching me. Which is why, Rosie, I didn’t want to speak to you. The party – I only wanted to pay my respects. I felt so connected to it all. But as soon as I got there I knew it was a bad idea – if they were indeed keeping an eye on me, what might they do if they saw me there?’ There isn’t malice in his voice, but I hear the sting of his words all the same. I feel truly terrible now, for springing myself on him like this. For threatening the equilibrium he has created.