The Murderer's Daughter

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Five-year-old Grace lived with two strangers on the fringes of a desert. Biology and the law labeled them her parents but Grace had never found them other than alien. As best she could tell, they felt the same way.

Ardis Normand Blades was twenty-eight years old, tall, reedy, long-haired, and patchily blond-bearded, with a sliver of morose face dramatized by jug ears. Those bat-like appendages notwithstanding, he was semi — decent-looking in a greasy, vaguely dangerous way. Only semi because some of his God-given looks were long eroded by dope and alcohol and a near-perfect record of bad decisions.

Ardis’s childhood had been a swamp of neglect and apathy. Troublesome at school, he’d been tested numerous times by counselors of uneven qualifications. Each of them had been surprised to find Ardis’s IQ significantly higher than his dull mien and chronically maladaptive behavior suggested. He’d made it through ninth grade grudgingly, could read at the fourth-grade level, had abandoned arithmetic before mastering long division.

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