The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy Read Online Free PDF

butch after I’ve been in the country for a while. Dwayne ended up coming to work for us. Autumn’s a busy time, like I said. Plus our usual caretaker, Vic Early, Hollywood bodyguard extraordinaire, was on location in Maui guarding the body of Cindy Crawford. Poor Vic never could catch a break.
    Yeah, I was living the sweet life, all right. But then again, I wasn’t. I almost always awoke in the night, bathed in sweat, Merilee sprawled there next to me in deep, exhausted slumber. If Tracy needed changing, and she always did, I’d change her. Afterward, I’d sit up with her in the front parlor, staring gloomily at the glowing embers of the fire and sipping eighteen-year-old Macallan while she gurgled in my lap, studying me intently, waiting for me to explain myself. I’d study her right back. She was a calm baby, sunny and hopeful and not at all inclined to be irritable, which meant she took after Merilee more than she did me. Her head seemed abnormally large to me but I was assured that this was normal for a midget human life-form her age. I’d think about what lay ahead for her. In two years she’d be singing along with Barney. In three she’d be parked in front of her own Mac playing Putt-Putt Joins the Parade. In four she’d be calling me a butthead. I didn’t know what I’d be calling her. I still hadn’t made up my mind about her. I didn’t love her. I didn’t dislike her. I didn’t feel anything toward her. I wondered if I ever would. Maybe when she got older and starting asking me questions, like where do duckies go when they die, Daddy, and why is there greed and is it okay to give a boy a hand job on the first date? Maybe then.
    I’d sit there sipping single malt and staring at the fire and brooding a lot about life, death and fatherhood—three things I knew nothing about. I knew I’d never had it so good. Christ, I knew that. But I also knew I’d never felt so frustrated and unfulfilled and lost. Part of it was the novel, no question. But not all of it. I didn’t know what it was, the rest. I only knew there seemed to be an absence of joy in my life.
    That’s what I was thinking about the night Thor Gibbs showed up, begging me to help Clethra pen her Tale of Whoa. Like I said, I didn’t want to. And not just because I’d had it with ghosting. As far as I was concerned, Thor had behaved like a swine. A seventy-one-year-old man doesn’t run off with his eighteen-year-old stepdaughter. Not if he’s thinking straight. But therein lay my dilemma—the man wasn’t thinking straight. Couldn’t be. Something had to be wrong. Terribly wrong. And part of me felt that Thor knew it. That’s why he’d shown up. Not because she needed a ghost but because he needed me. My old friend was crying out for help. So was poor Arvin, an innocent boy who was being ripped apart by his parents’ battle—not to mention his half-sister’s rather queer taste in boyfriends.
    Face it, this was a family in desperate need of a healer. John Lee Hooker calls the blues our great healer. I don’t disagree with the old master. It’s just that most of the people who come to me for help are tone-deaf. And they don’t see things too clearly either. They need someone to set them straight. Someone who’ll tell them what they don’t want to hear. Someone who’ll whomp them upside the head if need be.
    They need me.
    And sometimes, if I get real lucky, I need them, too.

Two
    I PICKED SOME WHITE MUMS from the garden to put on Merilee’s breakfast tray. Breakfast in bed may be Merilee’s favorite thing in life, other than watching Regis & Kathie Lee, and she won’t watch them anymore. Doesn’t want to expose Tracy to crap. She’d heard that just as you are what you eat you are what you absorb—in other words, if you watch crap, if you listen to crap, if you read crap, you become crap. I don’t know who told her that. It may have been me.
    I’d been up for hours. Never went back to bed, actually. After I’d gotten