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

works itself up to my shoulder? It then rushes through my body and a metallic taste develops in my mouth. I plunge into what feels like madness in the making; images of trees, branches clawing at me. Someone has turned a switch, making reality hard to identify; it’s blending with visions of Jane in the woods, digging a hole with her own bare hands. I can smell dank creek water, feel it seep into my nostrils. Is that what my Jane went through or am I reliving falling into the creek and losing consciousness? Suddenly we are one and I am inside Jane’s body, I am the one in the woods, not her.

      I’m not sure when I fall, but I hit the floor, knees first, then my body folds in on itself. Cold linoleum seeping through the thin scrubs snaps me back into reality. There’s a voice coming from above, almost as if I’m at the bottom of a well and someone is talking down to me. A pinpoint-sized speck of light seems to appear out of nowhere. The speck turns into a beam, then the beam turns into something brighter than the sun, so bright that it sears my eyes, hot and sharp like a blade.

      “Are you okay?”

      I know the voice. Dahlia. Dahlia. Dahlia. Over and over. I want to answer but I can’t. The pungent cinnamon scent is trapped in my nostrils, bitter and sharp. There’s pressure under my arms and then around my waist. I’m nothing but dead weight, yet Bobby manages to place my body onto something rather soft and comfortable.

      All that is left of what’s happened is a pounding headache and aching joints. I’m beyond hungry. Famished.

      “What happened? No one is allowed in here. Did you pass out?”

      I find my voice: “I think she just tried to communicate with me.”

      Bobby cocks his head to the left; his eyes go soft. “Look at her,” he says. “Does she look like someone trying to communicate?”

      I have taken a long hard look at her. I know it sounds nuts.

      “You smell that?” I ask.

      “Smell what?”

      “Cinnamon,” I say.

      “I don’t smell anything. Let’s go,” Bobby says.

      How can he not smell that? It’s all over the room, pungent, sharp, biting its way up my nostrils.

      “Wait. You really don’t smell that?” I ask and resist when he tries to push toward the door. “Just breathe in.”

      “I don’t smell any cinnamon, Dahlia. But we’re about to be in a shitload of trouble if they find us in here. I’m taking you home. Now.”

      The scent remains with me as we depart through the sliding glass doors and even when I fasten the seatbelt in Bobby’s police cruiser. I stare straight ahead, my head against the headrest. Something feels different, as if a part of me went AWOL in Jane’s room. What that missing part has been replaced with I can’t tell.

      The police radio squelches and splats until Bobby turns the volume down, the communication now white background noise.

      “It’ll be okay. Just try to relax,” he says and rests his hand on top of mine, which are shaking in my lap.

      His hands are familiar, sinewy, with short fingers and large palms. I roll down the window, close my eyes, and allow my hair to blow in the breeze. The silence between us is natural, soothing. We used to be that way, comfort for each other. I feel myself calm down, almost as if hardly any time has passed between us at all.

      Fifteen minutes later my mother’s house appears on Linden Street, a road ironically lined with Mulberry trees. The scent remains, yet watered down, the pungent part now in need of detection, no longer presenting itself without any effort. The sweetness, now replaced by an earthy, nutty scent, reminding me of something pure and uncontaminated, not the syrupy and artificial kind drifting through the mall when you pass the Cinnabon counter in the food court.

      “She’s in a coma?” I ask Bobby one more time as I reach for the car door. “You know that for a fact?”

      Bobby nods. “It’s all over the news.”

      I try to tell myself I just went through a lot—finding Jane, hitting my head, falling in a creek, seeing her comatose and hooked up to machines—and that I have the right to feel out of sorts and that it’s really no surprise that I’m beside myself.

      I nod and as we shuffle along the driveway, I see the front door is ajar, my mother kneeling on the porch. She sees us, stands, and goes inside, slamming the door shut.

      “It’ll be okay,” Bobby says. I’m not sure if he’s talking about me or my mother. “Get some rest and call me when you wake up, okay?”

      I trust Bobby. Trust him with my life. And so I just come out and say it again. “She tried to tell me something.” Just like that. I don’t know of any other way to communicate what just happened to me in that room.

      He doesn’t acknowledge the comment, but doesn’t tear at it either.

      “Don’t come inside,” I say. “She’s in a mood.” There is no such thing as rest in my mother’s house, there is no resting from my mother’s moods. She is unpredictable at best.

      Bobby looks at me as if he is going to argue, but then his shoulders drop. My eyes follow his cruiser lights as he drives off. He taps the horn three times and I smile. It’s something he used to do a lifetime ago.

      I catch another whiff of the cinnamon scent. I turn my head, expecting to see its origin, but I know better. What if this is it? This is how it starts. Soon there will be crickets in my world too. Have I been a sitting duck, a sure victim of my mother’s faulty and mentally deranged DNA?

      At the threshold I sidestep a cricket that looks like a miniature black raven on its back. But there are others I can’t avoid, and as the tip of my shoe crushes the carcasses to dust, I hear my mother’s voice.

      “Where’ve you been?” She appears calm but her voice is higher pitched than usual. She wears makeup and a dress; her hair is a couple of shades lighter than it was this morning. She is barefoot as if somehow she forgot to complete the illusion of having it together.

      “You’ve heard what happened?” I ask.

      She turns the kitchen faucet on full blast. The microwave stops running, then beeps. The scents of burnt popcorn and cigarette smoke sting my nostrils. The cigarette between her fingers is short enough to burn her. She leans forward and crushes it out in an already overflowing ashtray.

      “Have you heard what happened?” I repeat, my voice louder than I want it to be.

      “You had some sort of an accident. They wouldn’t tell me anything else,” she says.

      “I found a body in the woods. A woman. She’s alive but in a coma.” I shudder at the mental image of my Jane covered in forest debris.

      My mother shifts in place as if she is trying to find a way to perfectly position herself, like she is expecting a blow. “You should’ve stayed home and taken care of those crickets. You never listen to me.”

      I stand next to her, pass the dish soap, and watch her swirl her hands around in the water.

      “I was running but my leg hurt and I went into the woods and—”

      “Where did you find her?”

      “Let me tell you the story from the beginning.” My mind is still attempting to make sense of everything and recalling the moment. Allowing me to relive what happened might help me do just that, might help me separate truth from imagination. But as always, my mother won’t have any of it.

      “What woman and where?” She scoops up dirty silverware and immerses the pile into the sudsy water.

      “Will you just be patient,” I say and then lower my voice. “If you’ll allow me to tell the story without—”

      She stomps her foot on the linoleum, and it strikes me how silly the gesture is. I watch the sudsy water turn into a pink