A Girl Named Anna, page 20
She allows me the indignity of a bedpan she must have bought from I have no idea where, and I let the mortification of this be washed away by the relief that at least she doesn’t expect me to lie in soiled sheets.
Then she stops, holding a damp flannel half folded to her chest. “That William was there. He gave me the strangest look—went quite pale and asked me where you were. Apparently, he was with his father in the church all morning. A pipe burst and flooded into the offices. I told him you were all right, just a little under the weather.” Her face wrinkles into a frown, and she slaps the flannel down on the bed. “I wish he’d listen to my advice and let you be. You need to understand, Anna. Your relationship with William wasn’t right. You don’t know what boys his age want. He wants to lead you down an unrighteous path. He wants to lead you away from me. But if you’re pure, if you’re good, nothing—no one—can take you away.” William. Hearing his name kindles a spark inside of me. I’m not alone. There’s someone for me to fight for. Someone to fight for me.
“I love him, Mamma.” I speak slowly and carefully, dragging each word out through my dry lips. “We’re going to get married.”
“Anna, don’t be ridiculous.” She brushes it off. “You’re only a child.”
But I can hear the quiver at the edge of her voice. I’m encouraged: I think I may have found a chink in her armor. Years of living with Mamma have me attuned to the tiniest of her tells.
“It’s true,” I say. “He asked me, and I said yes. We’re going to get married, Mamma.” A tiny part of me relishes it, the chance to twist the knife in deeper. “It’s not just you and me anymore. You can’t keep me locked up here forever.”
“Stop saying that. You’re not marrying that boy. You’re not leaving me. I won’t let you.” Mamma is shaking her head, turning away from me.
I was right. I’ve got her. “Mamma, come on now.” I speak forcefully, but with caution. Now I’ve taken hold of her, I can’t afford to set her free. “Look at me. Look at what you’ve done to me.” I hold up my wrists, tense against their bonds. “You can’t keep me here like this. It’s not right. I know that whatever drove you to this, you must have had good reason. I want to understand what that is. And I want to try to help you, to protect you. But to do that, you have to tell me the truth, and you have to let me go. I’m not your little girl anymore.” I swallow, delivering the blow I know will devastate the most. “I’m not your little girl at all.”
She presses herself against the padlocked door, holding her hands over her ears to block out my voice. “No, no, no, no, no.”
“Please, Mamma. Tell me. Tell me the truth. I’ll listen.”
“No, no, no, I won’t listen. You’re my daughter. You’re mine.” She rocks back and forth.
“We both know that’s not true, Mamma. You have to face up to it. It’s a lie. It’s all a lie.” I thrash my wrists. All the hurt, all the churned-up feelings of the last few weeks rise inside me, and I need to know who Mamma really is: my mother, or my captor? “You took me. You tricked me. Why did you do it? What drove you to it? Let me go. Tell me, and I swear I’ll understand.”
“No.” There’s a storm in her voice. In a flash, she is beside me, standing over the bed. I try to look into her face, to find some semblance of the mother who raised me. “I won’t let you go. I have to keep you safe. I have to keep you pure. I won’t let him take you from me again, Anna. He took you from me once, but I won’t let it happen again.”
“Who, Mamma?” But I know the answer already. I picture his face, leaning toward me, the dazzling whiteness of his suit.
Her whole body is trembling. She looks wildly around the room, as if she’s afraid someone is going to burst in and attack her. “It’s Father Paul, isn’t it?” At the sound of his name she cowers into herself, an animal struck. “It is, I know it. Mamma, I met him. I know he’s a dangerous man. I understand why you’re scared—he could hurt you, hurt us both. But if you let me go, together we can stop him.”
She turns to me, her eyes hollow in her head. “I can’t stop him, Anna. I never could. There’s nothing we can do.”
ROSIE
Michael rises from his chair, places the empty mugs in the sink. With a brief jerk of the head bidding us to follow him, he makes his way into the hall.
“This next bit makes more sense if you see it for yourself.
“Your sister’s disappearance happened maybe five or six years before I moved to the States.” He leads us into the living room and gestures to the sofa. We both sit, poised on the edge. Michael moves around the room with ease, pulling files from a shelf and flinging them onto a glass coffee table, rummaging through the drawers of a desk that faces French windows that open onto a small, perfectly manicured garden. “I remember the initial burst of news—the search for leads, the backlash against your family. At the time it wasn’t of that much interest to me. It wasn’t the sort of thing I covered, and by the time I’d moved to New York, there was the Crash, Lehman’s going under, et cetera, et cetera—enough fruitful material right in Manhattan alone that some kid going missing in Florida wasn’t really front and center—” He catches himself, the storyteller and the host clashing. “I’m sorry—that sounds crass. It’s not to say it wasn’t important. It’s just...”
“I know.” I nod that it’s okay to continue.
“But once I moved back to the UK, I’d lost whatever it was that made me write. I couldn’t make ass or end out of a story. Nothing excited me. I managed to get a steady stream of work as a freelance reporter, but I was a mess. Living in a shitty flat with a roommate I couldn’t stand. Drinking more often than was good for me. And then the ten-year anniversary of Emily’s disappearance rolled around.
“The last few years had been pretty doom-and-gloom in the UK—we were still feeling the recession, the coalition happened, student riots. And amid it all was this adorable little blonde girl, snatched from Britain’s hands by Evil Corporate America. It was like she became the hope of the nation. Like finding her would make everything right. Suddenly, every journalist I knew was trying to find their own angle on the case. And seeing them all fighting for scraps, I became consumed with a desire to beat them—to prove myself as the great journalist I once was.
“I met Jane on the TheHive, and she passed on some of the contacts she’d made, including one of the private detectives your parents had hired, Rosie. I found the pub he went to, started hanging around. You know, not too often to look weird, but enough to become a familiar face. One night I sat next to him up at the bar, and offered to buy him a beer. Told him he reminded me of someone and, in fact, wasn’t he—oh yes, he was!—one of the detectives I’d seen on TV, who’d been involved with the Archer case?
“He sussed me out straightaway, of course.” Michael snorts, giving us a roll of his eyes. “But he told me he’d give me one thing, off the record. Recently they had gone back through the CCTV footage to look for anything unusual that could be connected with any of the new information that had come to light.”
Michael fiddles with a cushion, pulling it into his lap and working a corner back and forth as if he’d rather focus his attention on that than on either of us. “I’m not proud of what I did next,” he says. “I had a grandmother who’d died, left me some money. I promised him a decent chunk if he’d let me have copies of the stills. He refused at first, said it was unethical. But I kept hounding him, and eventually he agreed. And the time after that...”
He reaches to the debris on the coffee table and plucks a brown cardboard folder from the pile. We crane our necks to look over his shoulder as he splays its contents across the glass. There are hundreds of grainy photos, blown up to A4—images from the park. Most of them contain lots of people, and many more are no more indistinguishable than blobs. I don’t know where you’d even begin.
“I agonized over these for days.” Michael strokes his fingers over them. “Most of them were useless. There was nothing I could identify, without police records or any other files, that would give me any leads. And then I saw this.” I already know which picture his hand is about to pick. It’s one of the less crowded images, the familiar green towers of the Astroland castle in the background. Judging by the position of the castle behind her, I guess she must be walking toward the carousel. She’s alone—no kids beside her, no bags or souvenirs that I can make out—and she looks tall, with broad shoulders and light-colored hair that’s held back with an old-fashioned Alice band. She’s not that old, maybe in her early twenties—it’s difficult to tell exactly with the quality of the picture—and the dress itself is unremarkable; short sleeves, buttons down the front, not much by way of shape. I know this is her: the woman in the navy dress. What I don’t know is why she caught his eye.
“I don’t understand,” I say. I gesture hesitantly at the picture, pausing my hand inches from it. “What made you think this woman was more remarkable than anyone else?”
“Nothing, at first.” He places his finger on the center of her throat, where I can just make out something around her neck. “Except for this.”
“A necklace?” I squint dubiously, bringing my face closer.
He reaches across the table, and pulls up another piece of paper. This one looks like a website printout: the name The Lilies loops in white cursive on the left-hand side, underneath that a welcome message, and hyperlinks for Who We Are, What We Believe and Where We Meet. On the right, next to a photograph of a group of people holding hands, laughing into the camera, is the outline of an elongated cross, its edges bowed, fanning slightly outward. Wound around it, its leaves twisting around the base, is a flower. A lily.
I follow Michael’s finger as he traces a pattern around the throat of the woman in the CCTV still, and then again with the cross in the printout.
“I don’t know.” I shake my head. “I’m not sure I could make out if that was one cross or any other.”
Keira, next to me, reaches out for the piece of paper and holds it inches away from her nose. Then she shrugs and puts the paper down. “Sorry, I don’t buy it.” I know what she’s thinking—the same thing as me: all this way, all this time, and he’s just another Jane after all. “And even if it was,” she says, “why would the two be connected?”
But Michael doesn’t seem perturbed or embarrassed. He rustles through the documents again, and pulls out a different folder. Inside are dozens of images of the same thing: close-ups of the woman’s neck, zoomed in to different points, some of them blurred almost beyond recognition. He takes one in particular, where he’s drawn over the points of the cross in black ink, and holds it next to the web printout.
“I wasn’t sure either, at first. After looking through hundreds of images, I couldn’t see the wood for the trees—started to think the whole thing was a complete waste of time. But something about the cross’s shape made me sit up. I went back to the detective, and convinced him to get me access to more images, closer up. I think he decided that it was easier just to give me what I wanted to shut me up—I was pretty persistent. I don’t think he believed I’d actually find anything worthwhile.
“As soon as I got hold of the close-ups, I was convinced it was the same symbol. I remembered Angela’s mother wearing one—I hadn’t thought about it at the time. After all, it’s not so out of the ordinary for people to wear crosses—but then I remembered something else. The day I went to visit Father Paul, they’d all been wearing them. I must have noticed it, logged it in some corner of my mind, but once I saw it again it came back to me. I remembered thinking it was quite uncanny, seeing them swinging from people’s necks like that, all exactly the same. And I thought to myself, isn’t it awfully odd for someone from The Lilies to be wandering around a theme park like that on their own? They hardly share a common love of roller coasters. It didn’t fit with them at all—their beliefs, their eccentricities. I looked at the website, but there wasn’t a church I could find in Florida. From what I knew from Ruth, they didn’t tend to travel far from the church, unless they were looking to start up somewhere new. And then I looked at a map. Florida is only one state over from Georgia. Perhaps that was all it was. Father Paul was looking to find a spot in Florida. But that wouldn’t explain why the woman was on her own. Or in Astroland. This woman...could it be that there was a more sinister reason for her presence? That she was connected to the disappearance of Emily? I wondered, what if I were the one to break the case? Not the Americans, not Scotland Yard, not some private detective or even a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, but me. I stopped drinking. I lost two stone, moved into a place of my own. I was up every night, researching. Even when I was sleeping, scenarios would develop in my dreams. How I’d unmask Father Paul, how I’d find out the truth about Emily Archer, how I’d honor Bill and get closure for Ruth and Angela. And finally, my mind was made up. I couldn’t let it drop. I had to go back to Georgia.”
ANNA
Father Paul and The Lilies. The names that have been haunting me since this all began, reverberating around the attic walls. I process them as I watch Mamma across the room. I see something inside her melt. Imperceptibly at first: the sag of her shoulders, the drawing down of her eyes and mouth, pulled by some unseen force. Then, wordlessly, she sinks into the wicker chair, her arms lifeless at her sides. Whatever they are to her, their names alone have the power to change her before my eyes.
“Mamma, who is Father Paul?” I speak sotto voce, afraid of upsetting the balance. “Why does he have such a hold on you?”
Her mouth puckers. She steers her face away from me like a toddler refusing food. “I can’t explain it to you. If I do, you’ll leave me. You’ll never be able to love me again.”
“There’s no turning back now, Mamma—it’s too late. Tell me from the beginning. Pretend you’re telling me a story. I’ll listen.”
A bead of sweat snakes down her forehead. The air in here is stale, dead. My body is drunk on sleeping pills and medicine. But I am alert. I have to know. At last, Mamma wipes her head with the back of her hand, exhales so deeply I can almost feel the breeze on my face. There is nowhere else to go.
“I was a good child,” she begins plaintively, turning her chin to the shaft of light spilling through the attic window. She’s turning back to the beginning, to where it started. “I was quiet and obedient. Kept myself to myself. We lived in the very north of Georgia, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Just Daddy and me. On a twenty-acre farm that belonged to him, and his daddy before that.” She squints into the sunlight, as if trying to picture the place in the shape of the clouds. And then her mouth molds itself into an ugly ball. “I hated that place. Hated the leaking roof, and the windows that rattled every time the smallest of vehicles drove past it. Hated the sickly sweet smell of hogswill, and the constant squabbling of the broiler chickens, and the way even breathing near the hay made you feel its dryness scratch the back of your throat.” She snorts.
I try to picture her, Mamma as a young girl, her sturdy form among the muck and muddle of farmland. Knowing her as I do, it’s not hard to see why she disliked it. “Mamma died when I was just a baby, and Daddy hated me for it. He was strict. But it often felt like he was making up the rules as he went along, and the only way I knew a rule existed was when I broke it. I left school at fourteen,” she continues, “to help on the farm. Daddy didn’t see the point in a ‘dumb girl’ like me staying on at school.
“I wanted to grow things—pretty things to brighten that bleak place—but every time I did he’d just rip them straight up. I found a kitten once—wandered into the farm, a darling little thing that must have lost its mamma. But it chased the chickens and got underfoot, and one morning when I came down for breakfast he told me he’d drowned it.”
“Oh Mamma.” I hurt for her, for this girl who had no one. How different would her life have been if she’d had someone to care for her? She looks down at her hands, and for a moment she is silent, remembering. “Please,” I urge. “Go on.”
“My only relief was on Saturdays—” she swallows thickly “—when Daddy would spend the day getting drunk with the other farmers, and I’d sneak off to the library in town. If the weather was pleasant and not too hot, I’d pack myself a sandwich and an apple, and then I’d check out a book and go sit in the park under a shady tree, reading until it started getting dark. Daddy said fiction was the Devil’s tools. But he never found out.” There’s a ghost of a smile on her face. I never knew she liked to read. All those books I’ve hidden from her. All those chances to understand her, for us to share something special in common.
“There was a boy there I’d see sometimes,” Mamma goes on, and her voice gets a softness to it, a certain lilt I don’t recognize in her. “We didn’t talk to each other, but we’d smile across the way. I used to watch him and his friends out the corner of my eye, and think that if I were a different sort of girl, maybe I’d go up to them, say something casual. And then, one afternoon, a shadow fell over the book I was reading. He was standing right there in front of me, holding his hand to his forehead to block out the sunlight, and he said, ‘You read more than anyone I’ve ever met.’ He said his name was Mason and invited me to come sit with him and his friends. I remember the little prickle in my heart when he took my hand to help me up.”
Mason. The man I believed was my father.
“Mason had those wide, kind eyes and the gentlest smile, and when he looked at me I felt something stir inside me and thought, So this is what all the fuss is about.” I think of his picture in the kitchen. There was something placid in his face, yes, but there was also a tightness to his mouth, a solidity in his eyes, that suggested sternness. “He wanted to know all about me. Where did I live? What did I do? Where did I go to church? And then, when we started talking about church, Mason patted my knee and nodded to his friends—there were four or five of them then—and he said that, funnily enough, church was how they all met.”
