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  Prologue

  Part I – Bark and Brown Sugar

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  PART II - The House in the Swamp

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  PART III - Open Flame

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Epilogue

  END

  Daughter

  Family Values Trilogy

  Book 3

  Patrick Logan

  Prologue

  “What the hell is that?” Patty asked, her eyes flicking up at a large moss-covered boulder beside a long dead oak tree. When Tommy Ray didn’t answer, she looked over at him and was surprised to see that he had removed his shirt and rolled his pants up to just below his knees. During her most recent daydream, he had also waded a foot deep into the foul-smelling water, and as she watched, he reached down and grabbed a handful of green and brown vegetation and threw it at her.

  Patty yelped and ducked, even though the slime slapped the water more than ten feet from where she stood.

  “Gross!” she shouted. “There’s gotta be leeches or some shit in there, Tommy! Don’t throw it at me!”

  Tommy Ray broke into a grin.

  Shaking her head, Patty turned away from her boyfriend and looked back at what had first caught her eye.

  A strange stick figure, made entirely of wood and vines, sat atop the large boulder that she had been leaning against. When she had first seen it, Patty thought that it was just another piece of driftwood, but upon closer inspection, she realized that this wasn’t the case: it was too ordered, too precise, too human. There were two angled cross pieces for legs, and one straight twig for arms. A twisted knot of vines made up the head. All told, it couldn’t have stood more than four inches tall, but stood it did.

  Patty started to walk toward it, shielding her eyes from the sun that leaked in through the long-dead oak trees that made up this part of the swamp. As she neared it, she confirmed that it was indeed a stick figure and not just something she had imagined.

  Patty frowned and looked back at Tommy Ray, but he was still messing around with the boggy mess and paid her no heed, let alone the figure.

  When her gaze returned to the boulder, her eyes passed by another large rock, not five feet from where she stood.

  There was another stick figure atop this boulder, one that was nearly identical to the first. A shudder passed through her then, and she suddenly felt a chill despite the warm air.

  Now that she had noticed the first, Patty realized in horror that the little stickmen were everywhere. She counted twelve just on the boulders alone, and several more tangled in the dead branches above their heads

  Her heart racing now, she started to back away, slowly making her way to Tommy Ray behind her.

  As she did, Patty caught sight of something else marking the largest of the boulders. There was a dark brown stain on the face of the rock, which at first, being so riveted by the stick figure, she had failed to notice.

  Now, however, Patty didn’t know how she could have missed the two capital letters written using some long-dried ink: BH.

  Patty’s breath caught in her throat.

  “Tommy Ray? I think we should—” but a girlish giggle cut her off.

  Her heart, which was already pounding in her chest, thumped so strongly now that it started to make her entire body quake.

  I imagined it, I—

  But then she heard it again.

  A distinct giggle, coming from somewhere to her right. She whipped her head in the direction of the sound, only to turn it back around again when the laughter erupted from off to her left.

  “Tommy Ray?” She shouted, almost running backward now.

  Something wasn’t right here—a lot wasn’t right here in this swamp. They had to get out, they had to get out now.

  Patty turned around to stare at her boyfriend. He was covered in mud and muck, completely absorbed in his own, childish game. As she watched, Tommy Ray reached down deep into the swamp water and grabbed something. With a grunt, he tried to pull it to the surface, but it didn’t budge. Determined, Tommy Ray used both hands and yanked hard. Even with all the grime covering his torso, Patty could see the man’s chest tighten and go red with the effort.

  “Oh, this is gonna be the biggest—” but he stopped short as the object finally surfaced.

  It was a hand.

  A blackened, soggy hand, severed just before the elbow.

  Patty and Tommy Ray both started to scream.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Patty caught sight of several shadows moving between the trees, coming toward them.

  They moved quickly in and out of the tall, warped oak stumps making it difficult to focus on any one of them for more than a second or two. The only thing that registered with Patty was their bobbing heads of blond hair.

  She opened her mouth to scream again, but a filthy hand wrapped around her face, muffling her. Before she knew what was happening, Patty was pulled backward and dragged through the mud.

  A second before she was turned around, her back pushed up against a tree, Patty Smith saw at least a dozen girls with blond hair and black eyes descend on Tommy Ray, who was still holding the severed arm like some sort of macabre souvenir.

  Part I – Bark and Brown Sugar

  Chapter 1

  Father Larry Smith grunted as he pushed his lawn mower up the small embankment. The hot South Carolina sun beat down on him, causing sweat to break out on his forehead, under his arms, and across the thin line that separated his belly from his chest, what his wife had affectionately come to call his “man boobs”.

  “Must be a hundred and five degrees out here,” Larry said more to himself than to Ginger, who he knew was staring at him from the kitchen window. Larry didn’t look up as he spoke; he just continued to push the damn lawnmower across the lawn. He had long thought it a bad idea to mow the lawn when it was so hot out, but he had little choice in this matter.

  Once he had asked Johnny Trundle, the octogenarian
who had worked at the local garden store for, well, pretty much all eighty years of his life, about this very point.

  “Should I mow the lawn in the middle of the day? When it’s close to a hundred degrees outside?” He’d asked.

  “Naw, not the best thing to do. When you cut the lawn with the sun shining, it has a tendency to burn it. You see, when the blades of the grass are long…” Johnny used his hands to mime what to Larry looked like twisting tentacles blowing in the wind, and this marked the exact moment he’d lost interest. And yet, Larry had gotten the answer that he had wanted, the one that he’d expected.

  But to tell his wife? To tell Ginger Smith that the Sunday afternoon ritual she’d imposed was actually doing more harm to their precious lawn than good?

  Nope, not happening.

  Which was why Larry found himself mowing the lawn in 105° heat while his wife stood by the window inside their air-conditioned home, a cool glass of non-alcoholic ice tea clutched in her bony fingers.

  He wiped his brow with the back of his arm, but his skin was so sweaty that it only seemed to add to the problem. Clad in a black T-shirt that ran to his elbows and sporting the thick black pants that he wore while giving his nightly sermon, Larry felt massively overdressed for this type of work.

  But try bringing that up to Ginger Smith.

  In fact, he had tried to bring this up with her just the other day. He told her that, hey, it didn’t make sense for him to mow the lawn wearing such garb, the same uniform he wore when he gave his sermons, and that maybe while he was at home, they could relax on the rules somewhat.

  But Ginger was having none of it.

  “What do you want to do Larry? You want to go outside with no shirt on? Show off your pasty belly and your man boobs like that delinquent Greg Peacock up the road? You’re a disciple of God, Larry, so why don’t you act like one.”

  Larry had bit his tongue.

  He bit his tongue so hard, in fact, that he’d tasted blood in his mouth.

  And so here he was, in 105° weather, wearing the same black shirt and pants that he wore during his sermons, trying to convince himself to be grateful that Ginger let him wear running shoes instead of his black patent leather loafers that he tucked beneath the pulpit.

  Larry closed his eyes for a moment and turned his chin towards the sun high above.

  Lord, what does a man have to do, in order to—

  The creaking sound of the wooden gate to the backyard opening caused Larry to lower his chin. It was the same gate that he’d told Ginger he’d fixed three weeks ago.

  Only it hadn’t been fixed; he hadn’t gotten around to it, and wasn’t planning to.

  Larry knew that pettiness, while it wasn’t specifically denoted as a sin, should very well be one, but he took his victories where he could get them.

  “Mother of one, mother of all.”

  Larry’s eyes snapped open.

  At first, he thought it was just the sun playing tricks on him, as although his eyelids were closed while aimed up at it, the sun was so bright that it still made an impression on his retinas. But when the voice came again, he knew that this was no half-baked mirage or hallucination.

  He blinked rapidly and then wiped away small tears from the corners of his eyes to get a better look. There was a figure walking through the broken backyard gate.

  It was a female figure, of that he was certain, but his eyes were still adjusting to the contrast from looking up to make out anything more specific.

  “What in the heck?”

  Larry let go of the lawnmower handle, and the engine immediately shut off.

  “What in the heck?” Larry repeated more loudly this time.

  The woman wasn’t approaching him so much as she was shambling towards him, her movements and gait awkward, reminiscent of a robot in desperate need of some WD-40. Larry blinked again and his vision finally focused.

  And what he saw made his blood run cold.

  It wasn’t just a female figure, Larry realized, but it was his daughter.

  And she was completely naked.

  Chapter 2

  “No, no, no,” Sheriff Liam Lancaster muttered to himself, “This can’t be right.” As he spoke, Liam shuffled the papers in his hands. “This can’t be right at all.”

  “What’s that, boss?”

  Liam looked up from the folder and then pulled the reading glasses down his nose so that he could get a better look at the man across from him.

  Deputy Stephen “Stevie” Johnson was staring back at him, a goofy grin plastered on his awkward face. The man’s ears were too big for his head, his eyes were slightly uneven, and he had jet black hair that he insisted on stuccoing to his forehead in crooked bangs.

  An Elloree deputy for the past three years, Stevie had a way of making Liam laugh. It wasn’t just his looks, although those were amusing enough, but the fact that he had no filter between his ears, as if the thoughts that materialized inside his gray matter was squished between those over-sized ears and simply vomited or regurgitated out his mouth.

  But the candidness that Larry had once found humorous seemed to have run its course. Things were changing in the South—even in Elloree, South Carolina, even as far as the swamp. No longer could a man grab a woman’s ass at the workplace, just give it a gentle squeeze, a tangible way of saying, hey, I see what you’re doing in the gym, I notice that you’re looking after yourself. Nor was it acceptable to call people retards—the dreaded ‘R’ word as they now referred to it—else be called a bigot. Refer to someone as a fag, in jest? Forget about it. You’d be better off calling them a motherfucking cunt, instead.

  Not that Larry minded this much. He didn’t care much for either of those words, but he couldn’t help feeling that putting so much emphasis on what people said, rather than on their intentions, set a poor precedent. And maybe that was why he liked Stevie so much; the man was a breath of fresh air in the political quagmire that life had become. Sylvie Sinclair, the newly instated head of HR, on the other hand…

  “Hey boss, you see the guy on the news the other day? The guy who got the Twinkie stuck up his butt?” Stevie asked.

  Even though Stevie was a breath of fresh air, if Sylvie overheard him now, not even Liam would be able to insulate him from the inevitable lashings.

  “What’s that now?” Liam asked in a hushed tone.

  Stevie’s dark eyes darted about the room before answering. Like societal language laws, the Elloree Police Station had undergone many changes over the years. It had gone from a bustling three division suite to just the four of them: Sheriff Lancaster, Deputy Stevie Johnson, Stevie’s massively overweight and badger looking partner Dwight Porter, and the newly acquired Sylvie Sinclair.

  Down-sizing, down-sizing, down-sizing.

  For a while mid-transition, it had even just been Liam and Stevie, but when there were a series of break-ins about five years ago, the Mayor had decided that they needed someone to man the station while the duo were out trying to apprehend what had eventually become known as the 13-Gang looters. The 13, in this case, didn’t refer to the number of people in the gang, but rather the age of the looters. And then, after several quasi-anonymous reports of inappropriate comments made by Stevie, the Mayor had decided that in order to save face with his constituents, he would hire a full-time HR consultant for the station. The irony was that the bigger-than-life Mayor, Bobby Lee Ross, was the worst type of offender. While Stevie might let his tongue wag in his mouth like the tail of an excited Doberman, he meant no offense by what he said. The mayor on the other hand? Well, Mayor Ross was as sleazy as they came. Instead of a thoughtful ass squeeze, Bobby Lee was more inclined to stick a finger the size of a Pogo up someone’s butt and ask them to cough.

  “Twinkies,” Stevie whispered, bringing Liam’s thoughts full circle. “A man in South Carolina had to go to the hospital because he had so many Twinkies shoved up his—”

  The door to the police station suddenly flung open and Sylvie Sinclair didn’t so much st
ep through as barrel over the threshold, as she always did. Her hair was white blond, almost certainly chemically enhanced, and tied up in a bun so tight that it pulled her eyebrows nearly to the back of her head. Her lips, a deep red, were pressed together so tightly that if she had tried to speak in that moment, Liam expected that her eyes would’ve bulged from the simple fact that she needed the extra skin from her eyelids in order to form words.

  Liam’s own eyes went wide in that moment, and he shot the most glaring and purposeful look that he could manage at Stevie. The man just started to chuckle, which made Liam even more nervous. In fact, he was so nervous that when Sylvie walked over to them and said good morning, the only thing that Liam could say was Twinkie.

  Yes, he said it; he actually said it.

  “Twinkie.”

  Sylvie gave him a strange look and Stevie broke into such roaring laughter that he slipped from his chair and fell to the floor.

  Uttering a curse under his breath, Liam immediately went to the deputy and tried to help him to his feet. Stevie, however, was laughing so hard that he couldn’t be lifted.

  “Twinkie,” Stevie repeated between gasps for air.

  This time, Liam chuckled.

  He couldn’t help it.

  Twinkie.

  Predictably, Sylvie remained stoic during this episode, her hands locked on her hips. Eventually, the two men managed to regain some semblance of control.