Benson, who serves as a nemesis for Daisy Fay throughout the rest of the book. Daisy's best friend is Michael Romeo, a Catholic, and the only other child, aside from Daisy and Kay Bob, who lives in Shell Beach full-time. She also makes friends with classmates, Patsy Ruth Coggins and Amy Jo Snipes, among others, and is good friends with an African-American mortician/bar owner named Peachy Wigham and her co-hort, an albino named Ula Sour. Peachy, the owner of the Elite Nightspot bar, had a secret on the white Sheriff's daughter, (she had had an abortion) which was why she wasn't ever arrested. Also, she meets Mrs. Dudley Dot, a journalist (she writes the Dashes from Dot column for the local paper) and the leader of the Junior Debutantes, a pre-teen group which meets in the bait shop over the summer. Mrs. Dot is idolized by Daisy, and is eventually institutionalized after trying to kill her hateful husband. The taxidermy doesn't seem to work out well, as the bobcat had a smile on its face and the flamingo's neck was crooked. Added to that is the fact that Daisy Fay's father didn't add bread to the hamburgers, and his drinking increased. Daisy's parents relationship gets even more and more rancorous, with them fighting over money and various infidelities. In fact, one argument was so bad that Mrs. Harper, armed with a gun, was intent on killing Mr. Harper dead. So angry was she at him that she kicks the screen door clean off the hinges and knocks him eight feet into the back yard. She then proceeded to chase him all over the beach, but she never catches him. After the malt shop burns down in a suspicious fire (the insurance money wasn't enough anyway), Daisy Fay's mother, finally having had enough of Daisy Fay's father, leaves him to go live with her sister, Mignon, in Virginia. With her mother gone, her father devises a three-day scheme with a scheming local preacher named Billy Bundy to use Daisy Fay as a "glory getter" to bring her back from the dead and bilk the faithful religious out of their donations. The plan falls apart of course, when Daisy is asked to heal a disabled girl named Betty Caldwell, the girl walked, and the crowd went berserk. Her father and she had to escape quickly in Jimmy Snow's cropduster to Florida, and