The Guilty One by Lisa Ballantyne

Author:Lisa Ballantyne [Ballantyne, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Psychological, Thrillers, Suspense, General
ISBN: 9780062195517
Google: NN3FrUcgkZcC
Amazon: 0062195514
Barnesnoble: 0062195514
Goodreads: 15818363
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2012-01-01T06:00:00+00:00

20

It was spring. The air was strung with the scent of manure and brave new buds. Daniel’s Wellington boots squelched in the mud of the backyard as he fed Hector and the chickens. The door of the coop was hanging off its hinge and some of the wire mesh was torn. Daniel knelt in the mud to repair the mesh and screw the lock back into place. Foxes had killed chickens at the farm next to Minnie’s. Her own birds had only been startled, set clucking and fluttering against the mesh in the middle of the night until Minnie had gone out with Blitz to scare off the fox.

It was six thirty in the morning and Daniel’s stomach yawned with hunger as he worked. It was still cold and his hands were pink to the cuff. He was growing out of his clothes again, and his shirts had begun to ride up his forearm. Minnie had promised to get him new ones at the end of the month, along with a football shirt. He was a forward now on the school team. But today was Saturday, and they had the market.

Daniel could see Minnie at the window, filling up the kettle and making the porridge. In the morning, her gray hair hung down, held up at the sides by two tortoiseshell clips. Only after she got dressed would she wind it up on top of her head. Daniel’s mother’s hair had been light brown and short, but she dyed it blond. As he emptied the last of the scraps into the chickens’ pen, Daniel remembered the feeling of her hair between his fingertips. Her hair was thin and soft, unlike Minnie’s heavy curls.

After the trouble with the Thorntons, Minnie had told Daniel that she would adopt him. They had done all the paperwork together, spreading the forms over the kitchen table. Now they were just waiting. The idea of being someone else’s son, at the same time as being his mother’s son, was strange to Daniel, yet he had agreed and felt a strange auspicious joy at the thought.

Minnie had asked him if he wanted to change his name to Flynn, but he had decided to keep his own name: Hunter. It was Daniel’s mother’s name, not his father’s. He wanted to keep her name because he liked it. It was his name, but he also reasoned that when he was eighteen his mother might want to find him. If she ever looked for him, he wanted to be easy to find.

Inside, Daniel washed his hands in the bathroom, enjoying the feeling of the warm water on his cold fingers. When he was finished, he leaned on the sink and stared at his face in the mirror. He stared at his dark hair, which was almost black, and his dark brown eyes, which were so dark that you had to look really closely to distinguish the pupil from the iris. Daniel had often felt estranged from his own face. He looked so different from his mother.

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