The Good Daughter: A gripping, suspenseful, page-turning thriller
‘A stunning read from a superb storyteller.’ Clare MackintoshFrom the #1 ebook and Sunday Times bestseller, comes the tale of a young woman in search of her past, and the mother who will do anything to keep it hidden…What if you were the worst crime your mother ever committed?Dahlia Waller’s childhood memories consist of stuffy cars, seedy motels, and a rootless existence traveling the country with her eccentric mother. Now grown, she desperately wants to distance herself from that life. Yet one thing is stopping her from moving forward: she has questions.In order to understand her past, Dahlia must go back. Back to her mother in the stifling town of Aurora, Texas. Back into the past of a woman on the brink of madness. But after she discovers three grave-like mounds on a neighbouring farm, she’ll learn that in her mother’s world of secrets, not all questions are meant to be answered…The Good Daughter is a compelling take on a genre that shows no sign of slowing down. The perfect read for fans of Gillian Flynn and Paula Hawkins.
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Published by Avon an imprint of
HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street,
London, SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Publishers 2017
Copyright © Alexandra Burt 2017
Cover photographs © Barbara Teager Photography / Shutterstock / Getty Images
Cover design © HarperCollins 2017
Alexandra Burt asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008220853
Ebook Edition © February 2016 ISBN: 9780008220860
Version 2017-01-19
To those who live under beds,
and pass through walls.
To old and battered houses
with creaking wooden floors.
“All the great stories have witches in them.”
Unknown
Table of Contents
They stopped once for the night, in Albuquerque. The name of the city intrigued the girl, so she looked it up in the encyclopedia she carried with her. It was her most prized possession.
Albuhkirkee … She silently repeated the word until it lost all meaning. The girl caught herself drifting off into some paranoid daydream, not knowing what time it was or where they were going. They had never driven this far for so long, never had to pump gas so many times.
Weary with the burden of her heavy eyelids, she was drunk with sleep by the time her mother stopped at a hotel. Rodeside Inn, the sign read. All she’d remember later were the weeds that grew through the cracks of the concrete parking lot.
The next morning, her mother bought donuts at a drive-through and they got back on the road. The girl went to sleep, but when she woke up and looked out the window, the scenery hadn’t changed at all. After days on the road, she felt as if she was leaking electricity. The hours stretched, and she wished her mother hadn’t thrown her bag in the trunk of the Lincoln—she longed for her American Girl magazine and the jelly bean–flavored ChapStick.
She opened a bag of Red Vines, sucked on them, and then gently rubbed them over her lips until they turned crimson.
Running her fingers across the cracked spine of her encyclopedia—the first pages were missing and she’d never know what words came before accordion; a box-shaped bellows-driven musical instrument, colloquially referred to as a squeezebox—she concentrated on the sound of the pages rustling like old parchment as she flipped through the tattered book.
Her mother called her Pet. The girl didn’t like the name, especially when her mother introduced her. This is Pet, she’d say with a smile. She’s very shy. Then her mother moved on quickly, as if she had told too much already.
Pet, the encyclopedia said, a domestic or tamed animal kept for companionship. Treated with care and affection.
The girl opened the encyclopedia to a random page. She remembered when it was new, how the pages and the spine had not yielded as readily, and she wondered if the pages would eventually shed. She attempted to focus on a word but the movement of the car made her nauseous. Eventually she just left the book cracked open in her lap.
“My feet are cold. Can I get a pair of socks from the trunk?” she asked somewhere after the New Mexico/Texas border.
“Not now,” her mother said and checked her watch.
The girl fell asleep again and later awoke to the slamming of the car door. She rubbed her eyes and her surroundings came into focus: red brick walls, a large sign that read Midpoint Café, her mother standing by a pay phone only a few feet away, rummaging through her purse for change. It was noon and the girl felt ravenous as she stared at a display poster of fries and milkshakes in the café window.
“I’m hungry,” she called out to her mother.
