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

“All in all I’m still pretty shaken up about this woman in the woods,” I concede. “Please forgive me if I’m not making much sense. I don’t really understand what’s going on with my mother. Is there anything you can prescribe for her? Someone she should see?”

“Your mother’s diagnosis isn’t just a matter of a blood test or therapy. It’s hard to pinpoint any diagnosis at this point. I need to know more about her, but she seems tightlipped, which makes it difficult for me. There should be some extensive counseling and I have offered to set up an appointment with a colleague of mine, but”—I can hear him switching the phone to the other ear—“she just flat out declined.”

I punch down the urge to ask him the question that is rising like mutant dough over the rim of a bowl: the possibility of heredity.

“I prescribed her anxiety medication that should mellow her out some for now. Your mother isn’t bothered too much about anything but her purse. She is quite upset about it. She told me she lost it where the police picked her up. I assume she had her wallet and credit cards in there. She didn’t elaborate, but if you could make an attempt to locate her purse that would make life a lot easier. Not just on her.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

“We are testing her for Alzheimer’s but I don’t think that is the case. We just want to make sure. She is scheduled for release in forty-eight hours. I really want to talk to you in person so I can get a better picture of what set her off. Do you think you can pick her up Wednesday afternoon? We can talk then?”

“Sure,” I say. “Anything else I can do?”

“Keep all stress away from her when she comes home, make sure she takes her medication, and just basically do what you can to keep her even-keeled.”

After I hang up the phone, I check under the sink for cleaning supplies. I rummage past the balled-up plastic bags and dirty sink towels, deformed and dried up. Empty spray bottles tumble out. There is Borax and some foam promising to do the work for you. Not a single sponge or glove. There is a jar. It seems to be an empty jelly or pickle jar, with the label pulled off partially but not quite; lots of white residue and glue sticks to the glass.

I lift it out of the dark below the sink and into the light, hold it up. It is a jar full of crickets, their antennae and legs tangled beyond recognition. There are about twenty of them, if not more. I shudder, wondering what that’s all about. Do people freeze and eventually cook them? I don’t know and I don’t plan on dwelling on it.

Later, at the market, I’m greeted by the scent of rotisserie chicken and a smile from a seventy-something age-spotted man with orthopedic shoes and a heavy limp. He offers me a cart and I decline, making my way straight to the cleaning supply section and grabbing one bottle of multipurpose cleaner, a box of wet mopping cloths, and yellow latex gloves. The lines are long; children are fussing and leaning out of carts, reaching for candy planted enticingly nearby. I don’t care to interact with anyone and use the self-checkout at the far end of the store.

The image of the crickets in the jar remains with me, even though I no longer ponder the logical reason as to its existence. I am realizing that most of my mother’s peculiarities cannot be explained by a sane mind. As I make my way back to the entrance, I pass a bank, a customer service counter, and a Western Union. On the wall that separates the restrooms, I see a poster dotted with pictures of children of all ages, declaring that Every Second Counts. I step closer. Individual pages behind document protectors are thumbtacked to a large blue board. I do the math; altogether there are eighty-four pages. Every page has a picture of a child, a name, gender, age, height, weight, eye, and hair color. This child was last seen on, then a date, sometimes a description of the circumstances—disappeared walking home from school or didn’t return from a friend’s house—and some have an additional age-progressed picture. I scan the missing dates and realize they reach as far back as ten years. Just a few of the pictures have a red Located banner across them.

I wonder where they are. Have they willingly abandoned their families or are some held captive? I cannot conceive of the fact that so many people, children at that, just float around somewhere, on the fringes of society, forgotten, abandoned, and written off. Those who are no longer alive ended up … where? In basements, ditches, hidden graves? Washed up on shores, floating on ocean surfaces in plastic bags? Hidden somewhere in basements just to be recovered decades later, in shallow graves in backyards? Or buried in some woods, underneath branches, shed leaves, bark, acorn caps and other vegetative debris in various stages of decomposition.

The images of missing children overlap and tilt my mind; suddenly I sense a zigzag pattern, like a contorted screen between my eyes and the physical world. I see flashing lights and my skin starts prickling. It begins in my fingertips and travels slowly up my arm and my shoulder blades, all the way up to my temples. As they start pulsating, I feel as if I am on my back in a field of prickly grass or some golden yellow crop that suddenly turns black right in front of my eyes. It grows all around me, tingling and pinching my skin. I want to scratch my entire body but my hands won’t cooperate and then billions of spores fly off the black crop and I can no longer breathe. The world around me is shrouded in hot and aromatic pungency and trying to escape this odor is like trying not to smell food cooking on a stove. I desperately bury my face into the crook of my elbow to make it stop, to escape this almost resinous compound. The scent reminds me of a place I can’t be sure of, for I don’t recall the location itself, but I stand barefoot on rough wood, a porch maybe, peeling away squeaky corn husks and handfuls of silk.

By the time I get home, the feeling has dissipated. The Texas summer sky is a doodle of colors, hesitant brushstrokes at best. The sun is about to set and the entire picture will soon turn into a canopy of luminous stars; minute specks of light will shine within the blackness.

I have never hulled the husk of an ear of corn in my life. Not that I know of. Just like the snow blizzard, maybe this is all just my brain misfiring?

Chapter 8

Memphis

Days ago, when, through the peephole, Memphis laid eyes on the distorted bodies of two police officers standing in front of her door, the first crack had appeared. This is it, she had thought, now it all comes to an end.

That night, on a whim, when she had left the house and had tried to find the farm again—merely wanting to know if it was still standing, still out there at the end of a dirt road with its barn and shed—she had lost her purse. Just like that; it was in her hand one moment, gone the next. At first she hadn’t noticed, but once she did, she didn’t dwell on it. She was preoccupied with the scent of the night and the memories that rushed toward her.

Not a single car passed her as she made her way down the road. It was cool, at least in relation to the three-digit daytime temperatures, and her legs moved all on their own as if they were on a mission. Before she knew it, she was on the outskirts of Aurora, on FM 2410, and it seemed as if those three miles took her less than an hour to walk.

Thirty years had passed since she had left the farm, maybe more; she wasn’t so sure anymore. The departure had been hasty and unorganized and she had left everything she owned behind. After their time on the road, she’d lived right here in town, yet she had never been back, never so much as looked at it from afar, not until the police had come to her door.

She had been unprepared for the police, hadn’t even heard them approach. Too many cars passed by the house, too many doors slammed, too many children went to school or walked home, rapping twigs against fences, screaming and running and laughing. Over the years she had let her guard down, especially since Dahlia had left town. There had been over fifteen years or so without Dahlia, years she had lived alone, working menial jobs, and during those years she had become less vigilant.

She loved cleaning houses the most—the people were usually at work and money was left on some foyer table for her to collect—she enjoyed the solitude and she’d imagine those houses were her home and she’d walk in and for a split second she’d picture Dahlia as a child, running through the hallways, playing in backyards, so far removed from what reality had been.

The care of the elderly was also something she didn’t mind, mostly Alzheimer’s patients, still capable of living with their families, not so far gone that they needed 24/7 supervision. She’d play the radio as she cooked for them, did the laundry—sometimes she’d sit and read books she found somewhere on a nearby shelf, and then she’d imagine that one day she’d be one of them and Dahlia would care for her the way she cared for these strangers. She watched their old wrinkled faces, eyelids drooping over their eyes, staring off into space. At times she was jealous. Not having any worries, any consideration for people watching them, not fearing the doorbell, not dreading the ringing of the phone. Compared to what she had been through, their existence was bliss.

So yes, her guard had been down and when the police showed up, when she saw the uniforms, every muscle in her body went tight, preparing for her escape. Her brain shouted at her, Run run run, her mind a merry-go-round of fears, and with every turn another thought developed, one more disturbing than the last.

“Are you Memphis Waller?” the female officer had asked.

Memphis stood in silence. Frozen. Then she nodded.

“This is about your daughter.”

Memphis still couldn’t move, stood in the doorway to keep the officers from entering.

“Your daughter,” the officer then said, “is at Metroplex. Don’t worry, she is fine. She’s just being looked over right now. If you want to, we’ll give you a ride to the hospital?”

It wasn’t easy to shut off the adrenaline and so she just stood there blocking the door; she couldn’t move an inch.

“Are you all right? May we come in?” the second officer, also a woman, asked and leaned in slightly.

She would have asked them in if she had had any power over her body, but she was reduced to a pillar of salt. The officers all but pushed her aside and entered the house, looked around, nosy and prying, intruded into the dining room, even up the stairs, as if it was any of their business. After they’d left, she sat with her heart beating out of her chest. It wouldn’t stop thrashing and at times her own reflection in a window prompted her to call out, Who’s there?, and she’d stand still and so did the shadow, and then she’d move and so did the shadow, and she realized she couldn’t trust her own eyes. She had looked out of the window and seen shapes moving across the yard; then a branch swiped against a window, making her jump.

She took to creating acoustic clues then, arranging dead crickets in a carpet of even rows and columns to alert her if someone came in, no longer trusting that the shadows mocking her were born of her imagination, so their dry and rigid bodies would crunch beneath someone’s feet and there’d be no mistaking the actual weight of a real person for shadows and ghosts are weightless and luminous.

When she couldn’t stand it another minute, it got worse. There was another knock at the door—yet a glance out the window revealed nothing but a porch bathed in the harsh light of a bare bulb—and she ran out the back door then, leaving it wide open.

She had to lay the ghosts to rest, silence them somehow. She had to see the farm one more time. Yet again, it was the little things she didn’t take into consideration. If Dahlia had thought her to be in bed, Memphis would have made it out to the farm and back home by the time the sun came up, before Dahlia woke. She could even have waited until after Dahlia was asleep and taken the car, but she didn’t, just ran out, and that was another blunder in her thinking. The only reason she’d agreed to stay at the hospital was to calm herself, get her story straight. She could have fought the hospital stay—no one was able to keep her against her will, that wasn’t even legal—but she needed time to think. Time to put her ducks in a row.

That night, after Memphis realized she had lost her purse, it took her some time to find the dirt road behind the trees and shrubs. Over the years, property lines had been redrawn, new roads had appeared, and if it hadn’t been for the old wooden bench she would have never found the place. The fact that it was still there meant there was money in the bank to pay property taxes, even though she had never checked up on how much exactly was left, but Bertram County had only a couple of schools and taxes were low and the money must have been enough or the farm would have been sold by now, or even torn down.

That night, she didn’t plan on setting foot onto the property at all; she just wanted to look at it from afar. It was still so vivid in her mind—the winding dirt road, the meadow, the shed, and the barn—and decades later reality matched her memory. The farm was still intact—the barn slightly warped, the meadow in full bloom—but as she stood peeking through the trees, crickets started chirping all around her, and one did jump at her, pecked at her leg, or maybe it was something else, she couldn’t be sure. And she stood by the road, determined not to set foot on the property, as if history was going to catch up with her, as if merely walking the grounds was going to infect her with some contagion.

Her muscles were tired, her limbs heavy from the long walk. She licked at her cracked lips, feeling the thickness of her saliva. She looked past the shed, and there it was. The cypress. She couldn’t make out anything underneath, but the old cypress stood there, firmly anchored; had gained a few more feet in height, even. She beheld the tree from afar but still she felt mocked by it, as if it said, I’ve guarded the secrets, but they are still here. Don’t you get any ideas. You haven’t escaped.

In a way, she had it coming, Memphis knew that. And she decided to stop fighting.

Chapter 9

Dahlia

It’s almost as if there’s a hole in the ground somewhere, swallowing lives, like the hole in the woods was supposed to swallow Jane. At home, I throw the bag of cleaning supplies on the couch and power up my laptop.

The numbers are staggering; thousands of people go missing every day, adults and children alike. Other crimes take priority and missing persons cases are mostly solved by sheer accident or coincidence; there are tens of thousands of unidentified remains waiting in coroners’ offices all over the country; more than a hundred thousand cases are open at one time.

The computer freezes. As I wait for it to recover, I imagine a map with tiny dots for every buried body, missing, undiscovered. And there’s my Jane, found, safe, yet no one seems to know her. It seems impossible that no one but me seems to care who she is. But maybe nothing is as it seems, maybe the police have a clue, maybe found DNA even, but how would I even know? Bobby should know, or at least he should be able to find out. I dial his cell and he answers after two rings.

“I’m on patrol. Something happen?”

“No, nothing happened.” I don’t know how to ask the questions that bounce around all day long in my head.

“I’m in your neighborhood. I can come by.”

Fifteen minutes later we are in the very house and on the very couch where we used to sit together as teenagers.

“I can’t believe no one knows who she is. Someone must miss her. Is there anything you can tell me? The hospital won’t talk to me.”

“They expect her to wake up from the coma and tell them who she is. Who did this to her.”

“How do they know she’ll wake up and be okay?”

“They don’t know. They’ve done tests but they won’t know for sure until she wakes up. But we know she’s not matching up to anyone reported missing.”

“Why don’t they make her picture public? Someone might recognize her.”

“She’s got a tube in her mouth, her face is swollen—I’m not sure that would do any good. I’ve seen people after car accidents, or fights, and they are so swollen not even their own family recognize them.”

“You’ve seen her lately?”

Bobby pauses, ever so slightly, then takes a sharp breath in. “No, not really. Detectives are working on the case and I don’t really know any more than you do.”

“Are there others?”

“Other what?”

“Missing women. In Aurora.” There is a hint of a shadow descending over his face. His cheeks become stiff, no longer a friend sitting here, catching up, but a door just closed, like the gates of a fortress. “What if there were other victims, in the past? How can you explain the way he buried her? What if he was right there, watching me? What if I interrupted something and he knows who I am?”

“Dahlia—”

“There must be others. What he did to her, that’s not something that someone does once. There’s someone out there, maybe, I don’t know. Really, I don’t. But it’s not impossible. You can’t say it’s impossible.”

“You’re going overboard. I—”

“Bobby, what if there are more missing women? And no one does anything about it.”

“You need to stop worrying. There’s no reason to believe that he was watching you. How do you—”

“Are there others?”

“Dahlia—”

“Missing women. Cases like this. As a cop you should know if there’ve been any cases in the past ten years or so.”

His expression goes blank. I know the face, have seen it before. We used to get into a lot of trouble, back in high school. We smoked behind the gym, broke some equipment in the chemistry lab, but Bobby—the most honest person I know—changes when he lies. His face turns indecipherable with no signs of life. Your facial expressions give it away. Learn to have a poker face, he used to say to me.

“She’ll wake up. It’s only a matter of time.”

“So there are others?”

“Just allow it to play out for now. I think she’ll wake up and then we’ll know what happened. In the meantime, try not to worry. You saved her life. Isn’t that enough?”

His radio goes off, the voice of a female dispatcher squawking, just a couple of words at most, clipped, short. Bobby gets up and walks off to the side, pushing radio buttons, talking into his shoulder mic. “Let’s talk some other time,” he says and ends our conversation.

After he leaves, I go back to skimming through the articles. When I run across something with additional information, I hit the print button—I can’t stand reading on a computer screen—and finally I pull up the FBI site, which lists the missing by state.

I’m just about to compare online photos of missing girls with any resemblance to my Jane when I remember my mother and her lost purse. Lately, forgotten tasks enter my mind in completely unrelated moments, like an air-filled float popping to the surface of the ocean. The purse had completely slipped my mind, yet here it is, urging me to go find it. It’s too late to go out and search for it now; it’s about to get dark.

The composite woman pops back into my head, and the report on TV I watched that day in the hospital. I do a search for her and come across an article.

I see a red blinking light coming from the printer on the kitchen counter. I reload the tray and wait for the last few pages to print. I grab the stack and sit on the couch in the dining room and I start reading.

Last week, a jogger found a young woman on the brink of death in the woods of Aurora, Texas. The very discovery has stirred up a cold case of another alleged missing person that began with a man appearing at the Aurora police station over thirty years ago. The headline in the 1985 Aurora Daily Herald read as follows:

Man booked for resisting arrest after reporting disappearance of a woman

Aurora, December 12, 1985

A man by the name of Delbert Humphrey appeared at the Aurora police station claiming his girlfriend, a woman known to him only as “Tee,” had gone missing after he looked for the woman at the Creel Hollow Farm in Aurora. Two deputies questioned Humphrey extensively but even the police chief, Griffin Haynes, was unable to make sense of his story. Questioned further, Humphrey admitted he was not licensed to drive a vehicle and he was also unable to produce a photograph of the missing woman. He did, however, offer a pencil drawing of her. When the police doubted his story, he insisted on a sketch artist. A composite was rendered of the mystery woman.

The deputies asked permission to search his vehicle. During the search, they recovered what looked like drugs, commonly referred to as rock cocaine or crack. The rocklike substance, however, had a strong fragrant odor. Upon questioning, Humphrey referred to it as “High John the Conqueror Root” and “Balm of Gilead.” Humphrey explained that the missing woman was part of a group of travelers working at local carnivals, reading palms and selling herb and plant resins, the very rocks deputies thought to be rock cocaine.

The deputies also recovered an old rudimentary brass scale and weights. Humphrey was booked for driving without a license, on suspicion of possession with intent to distribute an imitation controlled dangerous substance and possession of drug paraphernalia.

The young woman who was found by a local jogger in the woods, which locals refer to as the Whispering Woods, is on the mend, however. It’s been over a week but police are confident that her identity will be revealed as soon as they are able to question her.

At the end of the article is a rudimentary pencil drawing of the woman who went missing in 1985. Her individual features are flat, barely dimensional. The composite, however, shows more depth and dimension. She seems to be a woman in her twenties, long hair parted in the middle, full lips.

When I emerge from the stack of papers, it’s dark outside and the cold air coming in through the open sliding glass door makes me shiver. I sit on the floor and fan out the papers on the coffee table. There are Jane’s articles, and the woman whose only likeness is a composite.

When I run out of room on the coffee table, I arrange the papers on the floor. I get lost in sorting them and realize no one cares about Jane as much as I do. They can’t possibly know what I have come to realize the day I snuck into her room; how I saw and felt that she wanted to communicate with me. And that she holds the key to her very own identity and she wanted to tell me. How else can I explain what happened at that moment, the whiff of cinnamon, my mind slipping, feeling as if I’m tumbling down a staircase, the tremor going through my body? How can I explain what I saw that night? The vision of the woods. It can’t be nothing, I’m sure of that.

The printer behind me feeds more paper and I grab the last of that stack once the motor goes quiet. The mystery woman without a photograph was a rather big story—even papers of surrounding counties had picked it up. The articles revolved more around the man going to jail for the possession of an antique scale and some resin than the fact that he was there to report a missing person.

The papers on the floor get mixed up. Short of stapling them there’s no way to keep them in order. I collect them into a stack, and with thumbtacks I pin them to the wall. I run out of room; I have covered the entire wall behind the couch with papers.

I tuck the composite underneath the mirror frame. The woman looks to be about twenty years old. Her eyelashes are long, her eyes slightly bulgy between prominent cheekbones. Her face is gaunt. Her picture floats to the ground but I am out of tacks and nothing would irritate me more than the wall not being complete. I stick it back under the mirror and this time it remains.