The Fallen Girls
An absolutely unputdownable and gripping crime thriller
Kathryn Casey
Books by Kathryn Casey
Detective Clara Jefferies Series
The Fallen Girls
Her Final Prayer
The Sarah Armstrong Mystery Series
Singularity
Blood Lines
The Killing Storm
The Buried
True Crime
Evil Beside Her
She Wanted It All
A Warrant to Kill
Die, My Love
Shattered
A Descent Into Hell
Deadly Little Secrets
Murder, I Write
Possessed
Deliver Us
In Plain Sight
AVAILABLE IN AUDIO
The Fallen Girls (Available in the UK and the US)
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Epilogue
Her Final Prayer
Hear More from Kathryn
Books by Kathryn Casey
A Letter from Kathryn
Acknowledgments
*
For my husband, who’s been with me through all the good times and the bad. Life is a journey, an adventure. How wonderful to have a trusted companion.
Prologue
Sixteen brothers and sisters perched on chairs and table edges, sat hip to hip on the cramped floor: the girls in long-sleeved prairie dresses that swept to their ankles, the boys in pants and collared shirts. All heads bowed and hands clasped, as twelve-year-old Delilah whispered, “Heavenly Father, thank thee for this day. For the rain that fell this morning and watered our crops. Please send more. Thank thee for the well the men are digging and the water it will bring.”
Evening prayers. Delilah had always cherished the ritual, the calm before the chaos of helping prepare the little ones for bed. Yet she dreaded what followed. The prospect of leaving the family’s mobile home and walking into the night terrified her.
The double-wide trailer smelled of the coming day’s bread baking in the oven. On the couch, the women of the household huddled together, serene yet attentive, hands folded piously on laps. Delilah’s smooth brow wrinkled in worry as she focused on her mother. The girl looked so like Sariah that townsfolk who saw them together remarked on the resemblance. From her mother, Delilah inherited her thick auburn curls, her startling blue eyes, and the sprinkle of pale freckles that arched across her upturned nose. Sensing her daughter’s gaze, Sariah formed a cup of her palm and drew it toward her chest, a signal the children understood meant “more.”
As instructed, the youngster resumed her posture, pinning her chin to her chest. “Thank thee, Lord, for my brothers and sisters, for our mothers. Bless our father and Mother Constance, who have left us to live with you in heaven.” Delilah paused, and then murmured, “Oh, and if you could please tell Sadie—”
“Amen!” Mother Ardeth roared.
A snicker flitted through those gathered, the scattered teenagers rolling eyes, the adolescents glancing nervously from Delilah to Ardeth, while the youngest sensed something significant had happened but didn’t understand what. Fourteen-year-old Lily leaned into Delilah and whispered, “Sis, you know my mom doesn’t like any talk of Sadie. You shouldn’t—”
“Enough, daughter!” Mother Ardeth snapped at Lily. A staunch woman with arched black eyebrows, Ardeth held a special place in the household. As first wife, she functioned as the family matriarch. But she’d also taken on her dead husband’s roles, and these responsibilities weighed on her, in the past year turning her long black hair a steel gray.
Seated between Ardeth and Sariah, Mother Naomi made certain no one misunderstood. A softly round woman with wire-rimmed glasses, a slender nose and a pile of fading brown hair, Naomi tilted her head back. “Thank you, Heavenly Father!” she cried, as enraptured as if she gazed on heaven’s gate rather than stained ceiling tiles. “Evening prayer has ended.”
At that, Mother Sariah rose and clapped her hands. “It’s time, children. Lily and Delilah, take the young ones out, then pajamas.”
“Mom, I…” Delilah pleaded. Her stomach churned dinner’s beans and tortillas, perhaps a physical manifestation of her fears. To quiet it, she pressed her hand against the wide white sash that belted her worn blue cotton dress.
Bending down, Sariah whispered in her daughter’s ear, “No more, Delilah. Please, stop. You’ll frighten the little ones.”
The girl’s bow-shaped lips melted into a frown. “Yes, Mother.”
The battered aluminum door squeaked in harsh complaint as it scraped the concrete stoop. Lily and the children jostled behind her as Delilah stepped out into the night. All around her, insects chirped and burred. The double-wide rested on concrete blocks on the edge of the community cornfield, acres of pencil-straight stalks heavy with the year’s harvest. In the near distance, a mountain ridge formed a solid black wave between the shadowy valley and a cloudless, navy-blue sky speckled with pinpoint stars. A golden oval, a nearly full moon hung high above Samuel’s Peak. A hundred years earlier, the leaders of Elijah’s People, a small fundamentalist Mormon sect that settled the valley, named the precipice in honor of its great prophet, the saint who led its people to Utah’s Alber Valley.
A soft breeze carried the scent of fresh-cut alfalfa drying in the fields. As Delilah clomped down the five stairs to the dirt path, eight little ones followed like a brood of chicks trailing a hen.
Each step as loath as a prisoner’s to a cell, Delilah marched forward. Wielding a neon-orange plastic flashlight thicker than her arm, she pointed a wide funnel of light ahead and followed it. The short procession turned a corner, and Delilah could no longer see the trailer.
Hastening to catch up, Lily shuffled beside her. “You need to stop talking about Sadie, Delilah. You know my mom—”
“I know!” Delilah came to an abrupt stop that left the younger children bumping into one another like dominoes behind her. “Lily, can you feel it?”
“What?”
“Someone,” Delilah said, a catch in her throat. “Watching.”
Lily’s black hair was gathered in a topknot and puffed to frame her coffee-colored eyes. An analytical girl often in trouble for questioning her elders, she appeared doubtful. Why would anyone watch them? They
