The Coffins of Little Hope Read online

  Jane David waived her enormous fee in order to conduct a private consultation at the Crippled Eighty.

  “I believe you,” Jane told Daisy upon arriving, before Daisy even spoke a word. Jane always talked quickly, always fussing with an unkempt curl or two. She wore a simple white blouse and a simple tan skirt and what looked to be pearlescent ballerina slippers. “Lenore is an enigma,” she told Daisy. “She’s an Alice having fallen into the Looking Glass, now, isn’t she? We just have to reach in and yank her on out.” Jane David mimicked reaching into something and yanking something out, making her hand into a fist and bringing it to her chest. Her secretary lit a cigarette, then poked it in between the fingers of that fist. “You don’t mind if I smoke,” Jane David said, looking into Daisy’s eyes as if hypnotizing her.

  First Jane David examined the mirrors in the house, finding whatever cracks she could. “Da Vinci wrote in some of his notebooks backward,” Jane David mumbled, her head back, her eyes closed, her fingers pressed against a crack that snaked along a corner of a mirror in a gilt frame that hung in a hallway. “I’ve held those journals in my hands,” she said. “I held the pages up to a mirror, and when I read them, I knew that the Mona Lisa was a woman he’d fallen in love with.” She opened her eyes, looked at Daisy, and reached out. “Touch the hand that touched Da Vinci’s papers,” she said.

  Daisy hesitantly, gently, placed her hand in Jane David’s. For a moment, Jane and Daisy held hands, until Jane snapped her hand back as if Daisy’s had suddenly grown hot.

  Out in Lenore’s garden, Jane David’s secretary tossed mirrors onto the hard dirt to break. Jane squatted next to the mirrors. She stroked her chin and shook her head. When she dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out with the toe of her slipper, we noticed that her slippers were speckled with the dots and holes of cigarette burns.

  “You’ll hear from me,” she told Daisy. Jane David, all business, fled the farm, twisting her hair, and later that day a young boy on a bicycle rode up to Daisy’s front door. He handed her a letter from Jane David.

  “I wish I could tell a lie,” the letter began, “but never before have I felt so powerful a certainty. I would not be doing you a courtesy, Daisy, if I told you that I thought your daughter still lived. She has died, and she has died violently. To settle her soul, you must release her. Find a coffin, a little white one, put a doll in it if you must, but bury it, say a prayer over it, have her name carved into a gravestone. End everything. Let her spirit leave that decrepit farm.”

  Daisy cried. She dropped the letter to the floor of the front porch, and she went into the house. We could hear her crying, and hear the wailing rise and echo, and we didn’t know if she’d ever stop. Her hiding behind the ratty drapes of the house of the Crippled Eighty served both her devotees and her detractors. She’s devastated, some said, while others said, She can no longer sustain the lie.

  Part

  FIVE

  · 23 ·

  In the months before the publication of the eleventh book, the date of release set for mid-December, the highly secretive author, Wilton Muscatine, had revealed only a title: the novel was to be called The Coffins of Little Hope. Could this mean that Miranda and Desiree would finally find their mother, who they’d long believed to be an undertaker’s widow in the village of Cranberry Bog? Was Little Hope a person? Or only a condition?

  Muscatine never made appearances, never gave interviews; children, even the healthy ones, pained him too much, not from annoyance but from the vulnerabilities so evident—from their runny noses and tangled knots of dirty hair to their skinned knees and mouthfuls of lost baby teeth. He himself had grown up in foster homes, oversensitive, often paddled for daydreaming. To Muscatine, childhood was a gothic keep; like a princess in a tower, he’d longed for rescue.

  How could I know such intimacies about such an unknowable man? I know because, in those days of Lenore, he wrote me letters.

  “It’s very surprising to look forward to the mail again,” I told Tiff over breakfast one morning in my kitchen. She’d flipped together some chocolate-chip pancakes, mostly so she could wear the ruffled apron, of an impractical blue silk, I’d bought her for her home economics class. “It’s like getting messages in bottles.”

  I didn’t tell Tiff that the letters were from Muscatine. When I received the first fan letter he sent to me, I suspected fraud. Why would he write to me? He’d written on the white side of a square of Miranda-and-Desiree holiday gift wrap that featured illustrations from the sixth book, Muscatine’s Christmas-themed novel, the one in which Miranda and Desiree fall into a crack in the frozen lake and meet watery phantoms in long, flowing scarves skating figure eights across the underside of the lake’s layer of ice. Forgive the lack of proper notepaper, he wrote, but I have reams upon reams of this god-awful stuff. All the paper wasted on me keeps me up at night. My books, so far, have killed eight million trees.

  “Are they love letters, Essie?” Tiff asked.

  “No,” I said.

  I’m not sure I’ve ever received a love letter in my life. My few lovers, when alive, had always been within my proximity.

  · 24 ·

  Doc continued to regularly publish that photo of Lenore on the front page, that same abstract snapshot that revealed practically nothing week after week, throughout September and October, the image sharp in our memories even as it dissolved before our eyes, the girl vanishing little by little the closer we looked at her. Doc ran the photo alongside articles reporting even the slightest changes in the case, of which there were few. “The Mystery of Lenore Still Unsolved” read one dreary headline. The town went back to criticizing Doc. Time to move on, read their letters to the editor. We’re much more than just that missing girl. But I knew, and Doc knew, that that was not what the town really wanted. Even their protestations seemed meant, consciously or not, to keep Lenore alive. Though the townspeople did not actively contrive together, didn’t gather, didn’t vote on the subject of Daisy’s claims, we recognized our need for notoriety.

  Even when Doc composed his own editorials, about other things entirely, his metaphors always seemed to lean in Lenore’s direction. “As some of you know,” he wrote in a mid-October edition of “Another Think Coming,” his weekly column, “I’ve had, for the last few years, an amateur magic act. And as some of you have witnessed, I’m not very good at it. To the great relief of my niece, Tiffany, who serves as my lovely assistant, I don’t strap her to a spinning wheel and throw meat cleavers at her. The results would be unhygienic, I suspect. And though, together, we’ve enjoyed our clumsy approximations of creaky tricks, I worry my girl is outgrowing not just the little boxes she tucks herself into but also our time together. She has turned 13, and spending Sunday afternoons at old-folks’ homes with her eccentric uncle, pulling rabbits out of hats, is likely growing old hat, lickety-split. So, long story short … For sale: one Madame Sakaguchi’s Japanese Cabinet, slightly shopworn, with a trapdoor and hidden compartment. It would make a great wardrobe, or maybe you could add some shelves and turn it into a bar. But, if you’re like me, making kids disappear, even for the sake of illusion, isn’t feeling much like entertainment these days.”

  Over the years in his weekly editorials Doc had, with mixed success, affected his father’s fatherly patter. Doc’s father, in his classic hard-actto-follow fashion, had been the beloved narrator of our every tale. Doc had respectfully kept the title of Josiah’s column, but the patronizing tone, even one so cherished, had seemed to him no longer relevant. He’d immediately done away with some of the folksier aspects, such as the collective first person (after we ate up our heaping slice of humble pie, we asked the missus if she could at least serve it up á la mode next time) and the cast of down-home archetypes: the missus, sonny-boy, little sis, granny. I don’t think people had been as distressed about Doc’s revisions as they’d been about what they’d represented: yet another simple thing lost to antiquity.

  · 25 ·

  Tiff and Ivy bleached their h
air a matching platinum blond on the afternoon of the auditions for Missing in America, the popular TV documentary series. The tryouts, held in the high school’s gymnasium, were for the dramatizations to be filmed for a Lenore-based episode. Missing in America traveled across the country, gathering interviews and news footage, to bring attention to recent abductions—the company’s short caravan of a few RVs had driven up from Oklahoma, where it had filmed an episode about a pierced-lipped teenybopper believed snatched by a carny who’d operated the Screaming Mimi at the state fair.

  Ivy and Tiff hoped for the parts of Daisy and Lenore, though Daisy’s hair, in reality, wasn’t platinum. Ivy clearly just wanted to indulge in a mother-daughter dye job. I waited for them in a red-vinyl booth down the street at the café, having sneaked in my own vodka cocktail, sipping from the thermos lid as I wrote a letter to Muscatine. When you’re old, I wrote, you begin to feel like something worse than useless. You become a distressing and vivid reminder that there’s no exit of grace and beauty.

  Even when not in the act of writing Muscatine a letter, I was often composing one in my mind, situating the words just so, plunking one here, then one there, gauging how to sound worthy of his regard. Whereas Muscatine had written on whatever paper was near at hand, I’d had stationery printed, a thick stock of a light violet hue, S Myles embossed at the top. In the letters I’d received, he’d spoken mostly of his addiction to the County Paragraph (mailed weekly to his home in Brooklyn, New York). I was sent over the moon by your obit for Jolene Watkins, he’d written in his first letter, and her devastating collection of dollys with crochet gowns concealing rolls of toilet paper. Oh to visit that collection of gawd-awful dawls!

  The café was packed with Daisys and Lenores—some little girls with hair bleached a shocking-white shade of corn silk, others bewigged, others naturally blond. At the counter sat the town’s swarthiest—the men fancying themselves worthy of the role of the dangerously magnetic Elvis, most of them affecting the famous police sketch’s interpretation, with forelocks and cowlicks, that mussed look of men too comfortable in bed.

  “There should be some auditions for somebody to play me, don’t you think?” Doc said, scooting in across the table from me, having gone to the counter for a slice of pumpkin pie. “I’ve been very involved.” And he’d certainly dressed for the part that afternoon, his getup particularly colorful despite the bone-white linen of his suit—his buttonhole sported a silk orchid, a knotted watch chain dangled in a loop from a vest pocket, his socks were argyle. “What’s with the Cheshire-cat grin?” he said.

  “I don’t have a Cheshire-cat grin,” I said. “I’m not even showing teeth. A Cheshire-cat grin is a big, wide-mouthed, full-of-teeth grin. I think you mean I look like the cat that ate the canary. That’s the grin you’re thinking of.” My correspondence I kept secret. The man writing to me as Muscatine might not have been Muscatine at all. As far as I knew, my pen pal could have been an imposter. Even that I found tantalizing, the possibility of some stranger compelled to deceive me. But I didn’t want my letter-writing, and my letter-writer, to be speculation for anyone at all.

  “You’re right,” he said, sighing, taking my correction a bit too much to heart, it seemed. “I’m full of mistakes, always. Maybe I’ll be ruined.”

  “Ruined by what?” I said, reaching across to pinch his arm.

  “For telling Daisy’s story,” he said.

  “You won’t be ruined,” I said. For years I’d felt pangs of regret, and pangs of guilt for that regret, that Doc was so ill-suited for the family business. But there was no denying he’d finally found his voice. The people in our county—having been run ragged by debt and bankers and biblically bad weather for years—had come to need not just Daisy and Lenore but also Doc’s gracious portrait of them.

  Doc dropped a quarter into the tabletop jukebox and selected a song I recognized not at all—it could’ve been old, it could’ve been new. But I knew for certain that the jukebox itself, with its neon flicker, and all the other little jukeboxes tucked into the café’s booths, were recent additions. The café had been slinging hash at farmers since the 1940s but had never before had tabletop jukeboxes. They were a nod toward a nostalgia for a time that never was.

  Other main streets in little towns in the state were going through costly renovations to look old-fashioned. Those towns installed streetlamps with elegant frosted globes and wrought-iron hooks from which they hung pots of begonias, and they mounted their police on Clydesdales. They reopened their opera houses for amateur productions of melodramas and olios. They installed soda fountains in hardware stores and subsidized used-book stores and candy shops for the sake of charm. But our town … we were much too late to pursue our history—too many other communities around us had beaten us to it, and we were too far off the interstate for tourists to be lured by a quick stop-off for saltwater taffy and sips of local wines.

  In the town of Lemontree (which all the locals pronounced not “lemon tree” but rather “la-mawn-tree”), in the next county over, benefactors were buying up all the properties, restoring them, filling them with antiquities, as if they were carving Pompeii from its ashes. Lemontree had been the home of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch, the writer. There was the bank with its vault (the inspiration for Myrtle’s short story “The Bank Vault”) and an opera house where Myrtle had danced in recitals as a girl. The grocery store was now a museum, the post office a gallery of Western art, the haberdashery a concert hall due to its quirky acoustics. For years, the bountiful Myrtle Kingsley Fitch Foundation had been saving that dying rural town by killing it, inch by inch, and casting it in amber.

  “You feel a little fatherly toward Lenore,” I suggested. But we all did, whether we believed in her or not. Our collective fear for Lenore, for Daisy, put some fight in us. The legend of Lenore, if carefully composed, would save our town from a quaint decline into barbershop quartets and taxpayer-supported ice-cream parlors.

  “Tiff was seven? Wasn’t she? When Ivy left?” Doc said. He fiddled with a matchbook, twisting a few matches into a redheaded stick figure. “Tiff has missed Ivy every day of her life since, and every day of her life she’s expected Ivy to just show up again. And now here she is. She showed up. So now everything’s good, right? Back to normal?” Doc took a sip from my thermos lid, smacked his lips, and turned up his nose. “Needs a little soda pop or something,” he said. It was a sour brew I’d concocted myself with a glass urn, a few bottles of the grocery store’s cheapest vodka, and the cherries I’d plucked in June from the Nanking bush at my kitchen window. I’d planted the bush years before because the tart bite of the cherries reminded me of one fine summer of my first widowhood.

  “Did I ever tell you how I never loved your grandfather?” I said. I’d married him because my grandmother, a classic German-Russian battle-ax, had wanted me to. And it was her I’d blamed when he’d widowed me, leaving me alone with our little boy. I have few warm feelings for cold old Theodore with the fatally and metaphorically weak heart, who, at this late point, seems barely to have ever happened to me at all. It was my second husband who I’d loved, though he and I had met so late in his life, we’d had only ten years together.

  “Yes,” Doc said. “Many times. It makes you feel rebellious to say it.”

  “Did I ever tell you that I had a love affair three months after his death?”

  Doc looked at me. Of course I hadn’t told him. But it was time that he got to know me. My sister, nearly ninety, rattled off so much nonsense as she paced the halls of her nursing home that no one knew what was truth and what was symptomatic of her dementia—that poetic word for a departing, psychedelic brain. Married and divorced five times, Lydia had had a long life of peril and indulgence, and her nurses all secretly wanted to believe her every breath of scandal.

  “I was only thirty but looked old for my age,” I told Doc. “I had bags under my eyes and puffy purple lips. That, with the dead husband and the twelve-year-old orphan, made me just damaged enough to be appealing
to the mean son of a bitch.”

  That son of a bitch had been much on my mind lately, which was the reason I’d spent the afternoon sipping cherry vodka. The man had had in his yard a cherry bush, every year letting the fruit rot and fall to the ground. One evening we’d drunk martinis while sitting in the grass, me in my best dress, and I’d identified the plant for him, assuring him that the cherries weren’t poisonous. I’d taken a toothpick from his front pocket and poked some of the cherries, dropped them into my glass of vodka, and toasted suicide before taking a gulp and laughing. I’d leaned back on my elbow, at the edge of a pond with a few black fish among its gold ones, and as I’d watched one of the fish nibble on the end of a dried leaf floating on the surface of the water, I’d begun to doubt my own knowledge of deadly horticulture. All the deaths by poison I’d ever explained in my years of obit-writing had come tumbling back into my brain: nervous Mrs. Peamont with her hexagonal blue bottle, with its skull-and-crossbones paper label, clutched in her fist; slow Charlie St. James eating daffodil bulbs in the greenhouse. But what a way to go, I had decided, taking another sip of my drink—death by cherries in a summer cocktail during a near-illicit rendezvous.

  Aw, don’t crumble, Cookie, my cruel lover had told me weeks later as I’d wept, in only my slip, after a noontime roll. He’d kept having to knot and re-knot his necktie to get it to hang precisely at his belt buckle. It’s just over, that’s all. Don’t let something like this get to you. You’re smarter than that, pretty girl. Don’t turn this into some romantic collapse. It’s not worth it, trust me. But even as he’d said it all, with a pitying smile he’d watched in the vanity mirror, I’d known he was only saying it to wound me forever, to be the man who broke my heart irreparably.

  “Some man was terrible to you?” Doc said. The kid seemed to be getting tears in his eyes.