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In Volume One of The Warden’s Daughters, young Melinda and Bonnie Parker have come from their college dorm life into a strange and unusual world they never knew existed… a hidden-away valley in the Appalachians where their father, separated from them since their early childhood, is the warden of a prison farm and processing plant operation that draws the roughest and least rehabilitatable of the state’s prison inmate population.
It could truly be said that Melinda, vivacious, and dark-haired and already a woman at the tender age of twenty, and her younger blonde sister Bonnie arrived completely in the dark, answering an invitation from their father, Captain Amos Parker, after all these years of being apart. Summertime this year had offered no exciting prospects for the young Parker sisters, their mother recently deceased after a long illness and their errant stepfather off somewhere spending the last of what little money there was.
Dinner that night was an unaccustomed treat for Captain Amos Parker, as well as for his two young daughters, for the camp warden had allowed himself the rare privilege of having a special dinner prepared by the trusty cooks who worked in the guards’ mess hall; five uniformed black inmates brought it all up to the captain’s white frame house overlooking the camp in covered trays and served it in the seldom-used dining room. It was fully his right, of course, as commander of the Athens Prison Farm to have all his meals delivered here if he so chose, but Amos Parker, being basically a simple man, had always considered that sort of affectation bad for camp morale, as too much distance from his men in this kind of profession could be a fatal mistake – and how would he hear the latest from the prison grapevine? He would never know who was plotting an escape, what two inmates had decided to live together as “man and wife,” who was planning to “cut-up” whom. All of those juicy tidbits that made running this enormous operation the trying occupation that it was.
Dan Simmons sat uncomfortably at the end of the table opposite the captain – it was unheard of for any of the employees to have dinner here at the warden’s private house. If it had ever been done before, it was beyond the memory of his twenty-eight years; maybe some lieutenant or sergeant of the guard, but never a civilian employee. Dan had struggled valiantly to wriggle out of this invitation when Captain Parker’s daughter Melinda practically insisted that he be included in the dinner plans; he had noted painfully the look of annoyance and surprise that momentarily swept the captain’s face but the gray-haired warden had recovered quickly and was himself most demanding that Dan join them and make it four for this evening’s meal. For Dan Simmons, it was more like being a fifth wheel; this was the Parker family’s first meal together in fifteen years!
Fictional reading for entertainment purposes only.