Jonathan Kellerman: The Murderer's Daughter

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.

All that limited Ardis’s occupational goals and when he wasn’t maxing out his welfare and his unemployment benefits, his jobs ranged from dishwasher to janitor to fry cook. The exception was a brief, unfortunate tenure as a carpenter’s assistant that left him minus a pinkie and phobic of heavy machinery.

Women of a certain type were drawn to Ardis’s easy smile and good bone structure. Dodie Funderburk was one of those. Her academic achievements rivaled Ardis’s and helped cement a shallow rapport.

Dodie and Ardis met when they both worked at Flapper-Jack’s Pancake Palace, a struggling highway stop on the outskirts of the Antelope Valley. Ardis was charged with scraping the grill and mopping the floors after closing. Dodie bussed tables during the night shift then lingered so she could earn some extra money draining the grease traps and sweeping the dining room. The side benefit of her working late was hanging with Ardis, just the two of them smoking and trudging in the shabby eatery.

They began flirting the first night they met, were doing it by the second, Dodie perched spread-legged on the kitchen counter, Ardis just tall enough to get to the goal without a footstool. He was barely shy of twenty-two and already a serious alcoholic and dabbler in meth. Dodie, three years younger, had never enjoyed regular periods and she’d always been a little curvy so it took four months for her to realize she and Ardis had created an embryo.

One night at Flapper she figured she should say something because her belly was getting swelled up. Walking over to Ardis, who was smoking a blunt and mopping, she lifted up her T-shirt.

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s what happens.”

Dodie said, “Sure does.”

Ardis puffed and shrugged. “Got no money to get rid of it.”

“Okay,” said Dodie. “Maybe I’ll keep it.”

He walked away from her.

“You love me, Ardie?”

“Sure.”

“Okay, I’ll keep it.”

“You think?”

“Maybe.”

“Whatever.”

Marriage had never been considered. Ardis had no desire for it and while Dodie might not have minded, the way she figured they were already living together in her single-wide in a nice slot at Desert Dreams Park because it was bigger than Ardis’s horse trailer at the rear of the long-dead palm tree farm where he’d been squatting for two years. On top of that, filing paper was a hassle and cost money and no one Dodie knew, including her own parents, ever bothered. Dodie’s father had booked before she was born and she figured Ardis might do the same thing. She could handle living alone, her mother had lived alone just fine and anything that retarded bitch could do, Dodie could do better.

She didn’t show a real big bump for a while and went back to pretending it wasn’t happening. That got harder and harder and sometimes, when she was by herself, her thoughts tried to get happy with the situation. Other times she got low and had feelings deep inside that rose up like heartburn and made her cry. Maybe a baby would be fun, dressing it up, buying toys you could also play with. Having someone think she was smart.

Pushing out the baby was eighteen hours of torture and Ardis wouldn’t stick around in the delivery room for more than a few minutes, getting grossed out or bored with Dodie’s screaming and cussing. Mostly, he just craved a smoke. Each time he returned, Dodie screamed at him worse, yelling filthy things that made the nurses flinch. Then she got too exhausted to even do that and became a crawled-up little worm, suffering by herself, oh God how long could she last this way?

When Dodie cried out in agony she mostly got ignored unless a nurse felt like being nice and shot stuff into her I.V. that didn’t work so good, anyway. What Dodie really could’ve used she couldn’t have because it was illegal.

After all that hell, the baby wasn’t laying right, had to be turned like a hot dog on a grill, and guess who that made feel like she was being all torn up? Finally, Dodie felt the slimy thing shoot out of her and the glimpse she caught was gray and not moving.

The doctor, a black guy who’d just showed up, said, “That’s a serious cord, wrapped around... three places.”

Then the room got all quiet and Dodie figured she’d pushed out something dead and at that moment, no big deal, main thing is she wasn’t hurting no more and her and Ardis could go back to the way it was before.

A slapping noise then a humongous Waaaaah!

“There we go,” said the doctor. “Nice and pink, Apgar two elevated to eight.”

After that, there was all sorts of murmuring and clicking and buzzing. Dodie lay there feeling she’d been hollowed out like a melon, just wanting to sleep forever.

One of the nurses, the short one with the cheeks like tomatoes, said, “Here’s your new daughter, dear. Fresh out of the oven, loud and healthy, good set of lungs on her.”

Which was stupid, bread and cake didn’t make noise and they didn’t chew up your insides like a chain saw. But Dodie, too spent to argue, closed her eyes and felt the weight of the baby settle on her chest.

The apple-cheeked nurse said, “Hold her, dear. With your arms, she needs your comfort.” Folding Dodie’s limbs over the blanket-wrapped bundle and pressing down so they’d stay there.

Dodie wanted to smack the bitch. She kept her hands in place so the cow would finally let go.

The nurse said, “There you go, dear, that’s right — oh, she’s a cute one. After all your hard work, a fine bit of grace, no?”

Dodie thought: At least I got a name for it.

That night, they brought the baby to her to feed, even though she said all she wanted was to sleep.

“Oh, sweetie,” said another nurse, “you can forget about sleep for a while.”

Two days later, Dodie and Ardis took the baby home.

Bitch was right.

Five-year-old Grace had no idea how she’d survived from infancy. She’d seen other families with babies in the trailer park, had a notion of what it took to raise an infant. Had the strangers actually done all that when she was tiny and helpless? Hard to believe, they sure didn’t feed her much now.

It wasn’t a matter of no food, there were always leftovers from the McDonald’s, where Ardis now worked along with junk pilfered from the Dairy Queen, where Dodie swept up nightly. Plus stuff each of them shoplifted. They just never had real meals where everyone sat down together. The few times it happened, Grace would cram as much as she could into her mouth, chew fast, swallow hard, and go for more. When Ardis was feeling mellow he’d slip her candy. But there was rarely an offer to prepare a meal and mostly Grace went to sleep with a gnawing in her tummy.