The Girl Who Ran Off With Daddy Read Online Free Page B

we wanted to be left the hell alone for a while. The farm was our safe haven. Eighteen acres in all. There was the main house with its seven working fireplaces. There was the post-and-beam carriage barn of hand-hewn chestnut, the chapel with its stained glass windows, the duck pond, the brook that babbled. There were the vegetable gardens and herb gardens and flower gardens, all of them Merilee’s doing. There were the apple and pear orchards and the open pasturage that tumbled down to Whalebone Cove, where there were six acres of freshwater tidal marsh that held one of the state’s largest remaining stands of wild rice, not to mention several rare marsh plants. Also birds, if you like birds. There were bald eagles, great blue herons, long-billed marsh wrens. In the fall, osprey hunted the shallows. For a while, Merilee had kept animals—until she developed an unfortunate attachment to Elliot, her late pig. So lately we’d shared our safe haven only with Lulu, my faithful, neurotic basset hound, and Sadie, the gray and white barn cat.
    Oh, and there was the baby.
    I suppose you want to hear my horrifying tales of the crib. All about it … her … Tracy. Everyone does. She was six months old that fall, blonde and beautiful, possessor of Merilee’s bewitching emerald eyes and her full attention. As I’m sure you must know if you read a newspaper or watch Hard Copy, A Current Affair, Inside Edition or Entertainment Tonight, Merilee had decided to go have herself a love child. Much fuss was made over the identity of the father, since she told the world it wasn’t me. Hey, she told me it wasn’t me—until several weeks after the blessed event. She did this because she knew I wasn’t big on midget human life-forms and because she didn’t want to pressure me and because she is an actress, and therefore incapable of doing anything in a quiet, rational way. It was an ugly experience. I know I found it ugly. I can only imagine how it was for Merilee. The two of us weren’t speaking at the time. This often happens when you throw together two highly gifted, highly sensitive semi-adults who are not completely sane. That fall, when Thor Gibbs showed up, we were. Speaking, that is. I had decided to forgive Merilee. And she had decided to let me.
    Mostly, Merilee and Tracy were in their own little world. Tracy was hers, hooked up to her day and night. Me, I had my own full-time responsibility—Lulu, who deeply resented this new little throw pillow that drooled and spit up and cried and sometimes smelled really bad. We’re talking serious sibling jealousy. I tried to convince her we loved her as much as we ever had. I got a videotape called What About Me? for the two of us to watch together. We read a story, Ezra Jack Keats’s Peter’s Chair. We even did a coloring book, My Book About Our New Baby. But it was no use. Lulu was inconsolable. Periodically, she’d even taken to wading morosely out into the middle of the duck pond with the intention of drowning herself. She can’t swim, you see. I didn’t know what to do about her. I only knew Merilee and I both had our hands full. It was just as well we’d both decided to retire for a while.
    Not that I had walked away from my first career. Not me. Not Stewart Stafford Hoag, that tall, dashing author of that smashingly successful first novel Our Family Enterprise, the one that led The New York Times to label me “the first major new literary voice of the Eighties.” I’m referring to my second career. I’m a pen for hire, a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs. Not just any ghost, mind you. I am the ghost—the best money can’t buy—with five, count ’em, five no. 1 bestselling memoirs to my non-credit, as well as somebody else’s bestselling novel. I am not one of the lunchpail ghosts. I cost a helluva lot more, for one thing—generally a third of the action, including royalties. The usual As Told To kids don’t command nearly so much. But they also don’t know how to