Darling Girls, page 1
About Darling Girls
It’s not just secrets buried at Wild Meadows.
For as long as they can remember, Jessica, Norah and Alicia have been told how lucky they are. Rescued from family tragedies and raised by a loving foster mother on an idyllic farming estate, they were given an elusive second chance of a happy family life.
But their childhood wasn’t the fairy tale everyone thinks it was. And when a body is discovered under the home they grew up in, the foster sisters find themselves thrust into the spotlight as key witnesses. Or are they prime suspects?
A thrilling page-turner by New York Times bestselling author Sally Hepworth of sisterhood, secrets, love and murder.
CONTENTS
About Darling Girls
Title Page
Contents
Dedication
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
1 – Jessica
2 – Norah
3 – Alicia
4 – Jessica
5 – Jessica - Before
6 – Jessica – Before
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
7 – Norah
8 – Norah – Before
9 – Norah – Before
10 – Alicia
11 – Alicia – Before
12 – Alicia – Before
13 – Jessica
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
14 – Norah
15 – Jessica – Before
16 – Alicia
17 – Alicia – Before
18 – Norah
19 – Jessica – Before
20 – Jessica
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
21 – Norah
22 – Jessica – Before
23 – Norah
24 – Jessica – Before
25 – Jessica
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
26 – Jessica
27 – Alicia
28 – Norah
29 – Jessica
30 – Norah
31 – Norah – Before
32 – Jessica – Before
33 – Jessica
34 – Alicia – Before
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
35 – Alicia – Before
36 – Alicia
37 – Jessica
38 – Norah – Before
39 – Alicia
40 – Jessica – Before
41 – Norah
42 – Alicia
43 – Jessica
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
44 – Alicia
45 – Jessica
46 – Norah
47 – Alicia
48 – Norah
49 – Jessica
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
50 – Norah
51 – Alicia
52 – Norah
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
53 – Alicia
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
54 – Norah
55 – Alicia
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
56 – Jessica
57 – Jessica – Nine months later…
58 – Norah – A year later…
59 – Alicia
60 – Holly Fairchild
Acknowledgements
About Sally Hepworth
Also by Sally Hepworth
Copyright
Newsletter
For Jen Enderlin, who made me an author.
There will never be enough thank yous in the world.
THE OFFICE OF DR WARREN, PSYCHIATRIST
Dr Warren sits in a grey folding chair, one ankle resting on the opposite knee. His suit is brown; his tie, red. His thin-rimmed glasses lie against his chest, on a chain. When I knock on the open door, he points to the vacant chair facing him, his gaze fixed on an old-school manila folder in his lap. His bald, liver-spotted head is as waxed and shiny as a freshly buffed sports car.
‘Hello,’ I say tentatively.
No response. After a brief hesitation, I squeak across the floor in my sneakers and sit.
Dr Warren remains bent over his file.
The room is bare apart from the chairs, a pot plant and a battered wooden coffee table. While I wait for him to acknowledge me, I observe a couple of sparrows pecking at the peeling paint on the windowsill outside.
‘Excuse me,’ I say after several minutes, when Dr Warren still hasn’t greeted me. The clock on the wall says five past the hour.
He looks up, faintly irritated. ‘Yes?’
‘Are we’ – I feel silly – ‘going to start?’
He looks at the clock, then back at his paperwork. Sighs. ‘Whenever you like.’
I haven’t seen a therapist before, but this feels a little unorthodox. Perhaps he is one of those therapists who uses unconventional means to bring about a particular result – like failing to provide a chair because studies have shown that people get to the heart of things faster when they are uncomfortable?
Or maybe Dr Warren is an arsehole.
‘So I just . . . talk?’
‘Yes.’
‘About what?’
He sighs again. ‘It’s up to you. But I’d suggest that you might want to talk about what happened at Wild Meadows.’
It shouldn’t be jarring, hearing the name of my childhood home spoken in such a familiar way. These days everyone is familiar with Wild Meadows. The media love the juxtaposition of the whimsical country estate and the atrocities that happened therein. They also love anything to do with foster children. The headlines practically wrote themselves.
WILD MEADOWS OR HOUSE OF HORRORS?
SECRETS BURIED BENEATH THE WILD MEADOWS
WHAT’S LURKING IN THE WILD MEADOWS
These headlines have put Wild Meadows on the map. These days, apparently, people even drive up there to see it . . . or what’s left of it. But while it’s a headline or novelty to most, to me it’s my life. The place where I learned about loss, and shame . . . and hate.
‘I can’t talk about Wild Meadows,’ I say. ‘Not yet.’
Not ever.
Dr Warren leans back in his chair, clearly disappointed. I don’t like to disappoint people. And yet, if I just come out with it, he won’t understand. No one understands what it was like for me, growing up at Wild Meadows. The suffering that woman caused me, day after day. The only ones who understand are those who lived it.
‘Well, we can just sit here if you’d prefer.’
Then Dr Warren looks back at his file, which I now realise is folded to conceal a newspaper. It confirms something I’d suspected for most of my life: that no one cares.
1
JESSICA
‘Jessssica!’
Jessica had nearly escaped through the magnificent double front doors of Debbie Montgomery-Squires’ home when she heard her name.
She had just finished a ‘Room Overhaul’. Three hours of painstakingly ordering her client’s bathroom cabinets into a Pinterest-worthy vision of colour-coded, labelled and stackable containers. The result looked spectacular – all of Debbie’s friends said so. The fact that all of Debbie’s friends were present to say so was the reason she was dangerously close to being late for her next client – even with the extra fifteen-minute contingency time she built into her schedule.
Her first instinct was to keep walking. Nothing – nothing! – vexed Jessica more than tardiness. Except perhaps messiness. And people who cut corners, or people who missed RSVP deadlines. Jessica always RSVP’d to invitations the moment they landed in her hand or inbox. Then she diarised the event, made a note in her organisation app to buy a gift, if necessary, and created a block of time in her calendar to ensure she had an appropriate outfit to wear. At least forty-eight hours before the event, she decided on transport and mapped out the approximate time it would take to get there (with fifteen minutes added for contingencies).
Jessica had agreed to today’s job only as a personal favour to Tina Valand, a beloved client who’d purchased a gift voucher for Debbie as a birthday present and begged Jessica to attend personally (rather than sending one of her excellent staff) because ‘Debbie is such a dear friend’.
These days, Jessica could afford to be choosy. Since her home-organisation business had taken off a few years back, Jessica left the grunt work to her staff while she concentrated on positioning herself as Australia’s leading expert on home organisation, appearing on The Morning Show and Better Homes and Gardens with handy tips for a more structured life.
Debbie had booked her session on the same day she hosted a post-Pilates coffee morning. It wouldn’t have bothered Jessica had Debbie not seen fit to bring each woman into the bathroom one by one, announcing, ‘Jessica is my home-organisation whiz,’ before inviting the guest to tell Jessica all about their own organisational struggles.
‘You don’t mind, do you, Jessica?’ she’d say.
‘Of course not, Mrs Montgomery-Squires,’ Jessica replied.
But Jessica did mind. Now, Jessica was running late for her next job.
‘Jessica?’ Debbie said, jogging to catch her at the door. She was panting from the effort.
Jessica sighed. Pasted on a smile. Turned around.
‘This is awkward,’ Debbie said, ‘but I’ve noticed some items missing from the bathroom. I feel awful even bringing it up . . .’
Debbie did not feel awful. Debbie could barely breathe through her delight. Behind her, in the living
‘I reorganised your bathroom cabinets,’ Jessica said, trying for patience, ‘which means everything will be in a slightly different place. I left a cheat sheet showing you how to find –’
‘I understand that,’ Debbie interrupted. ‘But I’ve looked carefully.’
Jessica wondered how carefully she could have looked in the four minutes that had passed since she left the bathroom. She also wondered if there was a way to go back in time to the moment she agreed to do the job so she could slap herself in the face.
‘May I ask what is missing?’
Debbie glanced back towards her Pilates friends, suddenly less assured. She lowered her voice and leaned a little closer. ‘I’m missing a bottle of Valium.’
Jessica pulled herself up to her full five-foot-nothing height. She felt humiliated, as well as appalled for service people everywhere. ‘I can assure you, Mrs Montgomery-Squires, I have not taken anything from your bathroom. But, if you are concerned, I’d be very happy for you to search my bag.’
She held out the bag, glancing away as if she couldn’t bear to watch. For a shocking moment, Jessica thought Debbie might actually search it. But the other woman said, ‘That won’t be necessary.’
After a momentary stalemate, Jessica’s phone began to ring, saving them from navigating an awkward exit. ‘If there’s nothing else,’ she said, ‘I do need to get to my next appointment.’
Debbie nodded stiffly and Jessica turned and strode away.
‘Love Your Home Organisational Services,’ she said as she slid into the leather seat of her new Audi. If the traffic lights were all miraculously green, there was a chance she could still make it on time. ‘Jessica Lovat speaking.’
‘Ms Lovat? My name is . . .’
There was a pause as the phone synced with the car’s speakers. ‘Sorry,’ Jessica said, pulling into the traffic. ‘I missed that. Who is calling?’
‘My name is Detective Ashleigh Patel.’
No, Jessica wanted to scream. No, no, no.
There was only one reason detectives contacted her: Norah. But Jessica didn’t have time for it today. She’d already used up her fifteen-minute buffer!
‘What can I do for you, Detective?’ Jessica said.
Last time the police called, her sister had assaulted a minor. Upon investigation, Jessica discovered the ‘minor’ was a fifteen-year-old boy whom she’d jabbed with a broomstick after catching him peering through her window while she was getting dressed. Still, it wasn’t Norah’s first assault, and her motives weren’t always quite so reasonable. The court had imposed a community corrections order; if she reoffended within a twelve-month period, the sentence would be considerably harsher.
‘It’s time to stop this pattern of behaviour,’ the judge said to Norah. ‘If I see you in this courtroom again, it will be to decide how long you’ll go to prison for.’
‘Did you hear that, Norah?’ Jessica cried on the way home. ‘Next time you’re going to jail! In the real world, you can’t use violence to deal with your feelings.’
‘How do you deal with your feelings in the real world?’ Norah asked.
‘You bury them,’ Jessica replied. ‘Good and deep.’
It was a philosophy Jessica had always lived by. But a couple of weeks ago, Jessica had stumbled across an article which claimed that burying toxic feelings could cause cancer. Immediately Jessica decided she must be riddled with cancer. After all, no one repressed more toxic emotions than she did. The idea of a physical manifestation of her suffering held a perverse sort of appeal. She found herself visualising her insides, admiring the spoils.
‘You,’ she’d say to the tumour wrapped around her spleen, ‘were caused by that time I had to bail Norah out of jail for the four thousand five hundred and sixty-seventh time. And you,’ she’d say to the masses in her ovaries, ‘are the product of every time I had to worry about Alicia. And you,’ she’d say to the tumours dotted across her pancreas like confetti, ‘are the product of my childhood.’
She’d almost been disappointed when her doctor gave her a clean bill of health. All that repressed anger and nothing to show for it.
She’d been repressing anger about it ever since.
‘I hope I’m not calling at a bad time,’ the detective said. She sounded young and unthreatening and polite – which was something, Jessica supposed.
‘I have a few minutes,’ Jessica said. She put on her indicator to switch lanes. ‘What can I do for you?’
A learner driver pulled in front of Jessica, and she had to slam on the brakes to stop from hitting him. The mother waved in apology, and Jessica waved back, repressing her anger yet again.
‘It’s a little sensitive, to be honest,’ the detective said. ‘If you’re driving, it might be an idea to pull over.’
‘I’m not driving,’ Jessica lied. She had seventeen minutes to get where she was going – with no allowance for contingencies. She could listen and drive.
‘Good. I’m calling to ask for assistance with an investigation I’m working on.’
Jessica frowned. An investigation. Perhaps it would be like the time she was summoned for jury duty? A man was being tried for murder after strangling his wife in front of their three small children. Of course Jessica had been selected as a juror. A small, neat, thirty-something-year-old woman with honest brown eyes, scrupulous morals and tasteful nude flats – she’d been born for the role. Perhaps the judge had given this detective her name?
‘What are you investigating?’
‘I understand that you lived at Wild Meadows Farm back when it was a foster home in the 1990s?’
Jessica slammed on the brakes. A cacophony of horns sounded behind her.
Suddenly she understood why the detective had asked if she was driving.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Fine,’ Jessica squeaked. She pulled over to the side of the road, feeling strangely distant from her body.
‘As you may or may not have heard, Wild Meadows has recently been demolished to build a McDonald’s.’
Jessica had heard. Even though she was now living in inner-city Melbourne, a two-hour drive – and another world – away from the country town where she grew up, her meticulous level of organisation in all aspects of her life meant she kept tabs on everything she needed to know – and quite a lot that she didn’t. She probably had a better idea of the goings-on in Port Agatha than most of the locals.
‘Well,’ the detective continued, ‘the excavators had to dig quite deep to make room for the car park, and . . . they uncovered something.’
Jessica thought she might vomit. She’d heard about these kinds of moments. One minute you’re living your life, caught up in trite little everyday stresses, the next you’re blindsided by a full-blown crisis. And on an otherwise regular Friday.
She started fossicking in her handbag.
‘I’m afraid that what I have to tell you is quite upsetting,’ the detective was saying. ‘Unfortunately there’s no way to sugarcoat it.’
Jessica’s fingers wrapped around the bottle of pills she’d tucked into the secret side pocket of her bag.
With two Valiums in the palm of her hand, she reached for her bottle of water. Thank goodness, she thought, for Mrs Montgomery-Squires.
‘What did you find?’ she asked the detective.
2
NORAH
At a secluded table in the back of a cheap Mexican restaurant opposite the train line, Norah was counting the number of ways her date had disappointed her. One – in his profile, Kevin professed to be ‘interesting’, yet he’d already mentioned his passion for Dungeons & Dragons twice. Two – he’d called himself ‘intelligent’ but wore the gormless dull-witted smile of a simpleton (it was common knowledge that, on average, smiley people had a significantly lower IQ than the sombre). Three, and the most glaring of the disappointments so far, was the fact that his profile picture resembled Harry Styles, yet the man who sat before her bore a striking resemblance to a weasel.
‘So,’ Kevin said, beaming like a fool, ‘I noticed that you were Norah with an “h”. What’s that all about?’
Norah stared at him. ‘I noticed you were Kevin without an “h”,’ she said. ‘What’s that all about?’
‘An “h”?’ Kevin replied, perplexed. ‘In Kevin?’
She closed her eyes. Four, his self-professed ‘great sense of humour’ appeared to be in the eye of the beholder.
