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

Aella saw an expanding stomach that seemed overly large, almost freakish. Her elfin frame had nowhere to put a baby but to push it outward, and then there was her age; she seemed young, too young to be pregnant, and her eyes were vacant as she protectively placed a hand over her stomach.

      “She doesn’t feel well. We thought a bit of rest would do her good.”

      Aella grabbed the wad of dollar bills and counted the money. The amount was more than generous, more than double what they usually paid to camp out on the land behind her trailer. It was hard to admit, but she looked forward to having company, especially during a time of year when storms kept her indoors for days on end.

      “You can spend the night in the field. She can stay with me.” Aella pointed at the pregnant woman and then back at her trailer. Aella beheld the belly underneath the filthy shirt poking out from an unzipped jacket one of the men must have given her. There was something in her eyes—not so much what was there but what was lacking—that made Aella consider her longer than she would have any other woman. Atlas continuously sniffed the air, tracking invisible scents, veering left to right. He approached her and put his nose on her hand. He slinked back and hid behind Aella.

      It was a sign. “What’s wrong with her?” Aella asked.

      “Nothin’.” The man scratched his head, then shrugged.

      Inside, after the men had carried their tents and belongings past the trailer, Aella took a good look at the woman. She wasn’t a woman after all; she was merely a girl, barely grown. If it wasn’t for the obvious signs of pregnancy, the belly and the engorged breasts, she would have assumed she was barely sixteen years old.

      The girl lowered herself into a chair, her feet clearing the floor by several inches as they swung back and forth. Her face had an unhealthy look to it and her eyes were open as she stared at nothing on the wall. Her pale skin was a peculiar backdrop for her black hair and bushy eyebrows. “What’s your name?” Aella asked.

      The girl sat, still and quiet, scooting farther back into the chair. “Tain,” she finally said, and it seemed as if the words had fallen from her mouth by accident.

      “You can stay with me until they come back.”

      Her brown eyes then lost their emptiness, became rounder, glossier. Her face buckled, her breathing stopped momentarily, and tears streamed down her face.

      “What’s the matter? Why are you crying? You’re safe with me, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

      “There are storms coming soon,” the girl said. “I’m afraid.”

      “It’ll be all right,” Aella said. “It’s not so unforeseeable, you know. If you pay attention to certain things you’ll be able to tell exactly when the storm is coming.”

      “Like what?” Tain seemed fascinated by the fact that Aella could predict the weather.

      “Watch the bees,” Aella told her. “Horses shake their heads a lot, and there are lots of cobwebs in the grass. Most of all, the clouds are pink in the evenings.”

      “I’ve always been afraid of thunder and lightning.”

      “Nothing to be afraid of. It’s like this here in the summer, but usually storms are severe on the coast, never this far inland. No need to worry. Just a little bit of rain and thunder.” The words didn’t seem to calm the girl, who wrapped herself in the jacket and continued to stare straight ahead, burying her hands in the oversized pockets. She looked cold. “Let me make you a cup of tea.”

      Tain’s face remained blank. Aella thought about the chamomile she had collected in the nearby fields and how she’d brew the blossoms for a long time so they’d be strong enough to calm her, and maybe she’d add valerian root.

      When Aella finished brewing the tea, she extended the cup. Tain’s tiny hands reached for it and they touched Aella’s ever so slightly. Tain’s hands were cold—icy as if the girl was merely a ghost or was about to turn into one. Aella had felt that sort of thing before, people who didn’t have a lot of time left, as if they were already part of another world—and she watched Tain cup her hands around the hot tea and then something gave way, as if a floorboard had shifted. Tain’s form shimmered and fluttered, and Aella held on to the table. She wasn’t worried; everything around her had been gleaming for a while—the woods and the trees, the cars passing her, even Atlas and the red cardinals outside—and it was always like that in her head when a storm was gathering strength. The girl was right to be afraid of it. It would be a big one.

      Later, as Tain slept on the couch, her stomach tucked off to the side to allow her to breathe easier, Aella regarded her; her face was softly flushed with sleep, and her dark eyes shone through her thin and heavy lids.

      The girl seemed ethereal, as if painted into this life with a fine brush; with every stroke the colors faded so quickly that she was dissolving in front of Aella’s very eyes. Aella knew it was a sure sign that the girl wasn’t going to be on this earth for a long time, or maybe the baby’s life would be cut short—Aella wasn’t sure.

      She tried to make sense of this girl, wondered how easily people who didn’t know any better could fall victim to her. Tain was like a gentle uprising of heavy clouds in the distance on a windless day—but then there was a distant boom, announcing what those brooding clouds had promised all along—a powerful storm.

      Aella watched Atlas. It was true that the dog cared for no one but his master, yet he always allowed for courting by strangers, especially women. He remained at a fair distance from Tain at all times, didn’t make any attempt to approach her.

      That too was a sign.

       Chapter 6

       Quinn

      Quinn placed one foot in front of the other, skipping the third step from the top, the one that screeched like an angry old woman. She paused at the bottom of the stairs. Out of the corner of her eye she caught a movement beyond the hallway, inside the darkened kitchen. It was formless and indistinct, like a shadow, barely shifting, and she knew it was her imagination. She calmed when she reminded herself that Sigrid was sleeping upstairs and that it was nothing more than the fear of being found out that made her see shadows and other spooky obscure shapes. Without as much as a creak of the wooden floorboards, Quinn made her way through the kitchen and out the back door.

      Outside, the darkness disturbed her, as if there were feathered beasts baring incisors lurking beyond the shadows, yet Quinn vowed to embrace the feeling, for she was no longer a child, easy to impress. As she marched down the dirt road toward the fields, near the woods, a faint wind brushed against her, making her skirt cling to her thighs. Her gait was nimbler than it used to be, than it had ever been, really; her body was now as agile as a dancer’s. Quinn could no longer conceive of inventing recipes and chatting with old ladies in town, she was no longer preoccupied with harvesting vegetables in the backyard and the planning of future meals.

      Taking a lover was what she called it. It was an expression Quinn had pondered and concluded was something that would make her powerful beyond comparison. To take him implied power, yet her lover was merely a boy, hardly a couple of years older than herself, and far removed from Cadillac Man. But to Quinn he meant everything.

      After she had watched her stepmother and Cadillac Man in her father’s bedroom—along with the many times since that encounter, in secret, through the same crack in the door—Quinn had begun to wonder about it all. It seemed to be a matter of men succumbing to a certain kind of beauty; not the cheap kind that came from loose behavior and tight blouses, no, but the power of women who were what she liked to call mysterious. The less a man knew about a woman, the more he seemed to be enamored of her. Cadillac Man, after all, knew nothing of Sigrid’s true self—her indigestion and frequent belching after large meals, or the way her eyes were red and puffy when she woke and how ill-tempered she was before noon—but he got to enjoy her