The Coffins of Little Hope

by Timothy Schaffert

  “Stay near one of the news trucks,” Doc told Tiff. “I’ll be just a few minutes.”

  Tiff frowned, pushing all her hair up into the stocking cap she’d wrenched onto her head.

  The young woman led Doc to the kitchen table and poured him tea from a small china pot painted with a tea-party scene in pale blue: a Victorian girl in a plumed hat sipping from her cup with pinky raised. The pot and cups were very nearly the size of a child’s set and unlike any Doc had seen before in the house. He looked around the kitchen. A scrambled alphabet of magnetic letters now stuck to the refrigerator door. A pink jacket hung from its hood on a pantry doorknob.

  The indoor Lenorians were younger and quieter than the outdoor Lenorians, and they walked barefoot, heads bowed in cultish devotion. In the corner, on a stool, sat a shirtless young man strumming an unplugged electric guitar.

  “Lenore’s not a delusion,” the young man said, and Doc first mistook his words for lyrics to the impromptu tune he played. Then Doc realized the man was speaking to him. “It’s easier for them to try to convince everyone that she doesn’t exist than it is for them to go out and find her.”

  “Imagine it,” the young woman said, her finger making circles on top of her nearly bald head, as if she’d once been in the habit of twisting her hair. “Some asshole snags your kid,” and she nodded toward the window, toward Tiff, presumably, “and when you call the cops, they tell you your kid wasn’t real enough. How effed up is that?” When she saw Daisy enter the doorway, she stepped forward quickly to pull out a chair. Daisy wore the daisy-print dress.

  “Thanks for letting them let me in,” Doc said.

  Daisy sat down and shrugged. “It’s your story now too,” she said. She lifted the lid of the teapot and looked inside.

  “Plum spice,” the young woman said. “You want some?”

  Daisy shook her head.

  “A gift?” Doc said. “That tea set?”

  “I don’t know,” Daisy said. “The children bring things in, they take things out.” Doc looked at the young woman again; now that Daisy had labeled her a child, he noticed she seemed older than he’d first suspected—crow’s feet cracked out from her eyes, and her teeth had a nicotine tint.

  “How long have they all …” Doc started, but Daisy shook her head and brought her finger to her lips for a shushing.

  “I have something very specific to tell you,” Daisy said. “I won’t take questions.”

  “Okay,” Doc said.

  “You’re not going to write it down?” she said.

  Doc took a digital recorder from his pocket and set it on the table before him. Daisy reached across to slide it closer to her. “Lenore won’t be the last missing little girl they say never existed,” she said. She leaned over to speak into the recorder, her arms crossed at her chest. “Ever notice how they don’t put missing kids’ pictures on milk cartons anymore? Got to be a reason for it, don’t you think? And it’s not because nobody’s kids are gone. A child goes missing every forty seconds.” She looked up at the young woman. “How long have we been talking here, Cassie?”

  The young woman glanced at her wrist, but she wore no watch. “I’d say a good forty seconds,” she said, though it had seemed to Doc that minutes had passed.

  “So one whole child’s been kidnapped while we sit here talking about Lenore, a girl who should’ve been found more than ten weeks ago,” Daisy said. “Ten weeks is 6,048,000 seconds. Divide that by forty. That’s 151,200 missing kids. You don’t have to be a math whiz to understand the implications of turning our back on Lenore. She’s more than just one little girl now. She’s tens of thousands of little girls.” Daisy pushed the recorder back across the table.

  “Daisy,” Doc said, “how many people are in—”

  She interrupted him again by standing from the table, shaking her head. “Go home and go to bed,” she said.

  Doc stood and bumped his head on a little white bamboo birdcage that housed the light bulb above the table. Before, the bulb had been covered by a dusty globe; Doc remembered the shadows of the husks of dead bugs collecting at the bottom of it. As he lifted his hand to stop the cage from rocking, Daisy left the room.

  Cassie took Doc by the arm and led him toward the front door. “You’d better go find your little girl,” she said. “I’m a little worried about her.”

  Doc became worried too when he stepped into the yard and saw no sign of Tiff. And his worry failed to ease even after he found her. “Coo-coo,” Tiff called down from the upper branches of a fir next to the house. “Coo-coo.”

  Before he was able to even finish his fateful sentence—“What are you trying to do, break your neck?”—Tiff fell, slowing her descent by grabbing at the branches she passed, skinning herself. She lay in the needles as Doc reached her, staring up at her camera dangling above them caught by its strap.

  “Are you okay?” Doc asked, desperate to see Tiff nod her head. She did nod, her finger stuck in her mouth.

  “I think I nearly bit my tongue out of my head, though,” she said. “My tongue look okay to you?” She opened her mouth, and Doc aimed the beam of his penlight inside. He squinted.

  “It looks fine,” he said, “but tongues are weird.”

  “Climb up and get my camera,” she said. “I got some shots of a few Lenorians in an upstairs room playing cards.”

  “You don’t say,” Doc said. He was furious, but you never could tell with Doc. When peeved, he grew aloof, as if he couldn’t be bothered with being annoyed by someone so foolish. “Unless it’s dogs playing poker, I don’t know if the juice was worth the squeeze on this one, punk.”

  “You really shouldn’t be mad at me,” she said. She lay back on the ground, her hand at her forehead. “I’m still rattled.”

  “Get up,” he said. “We’re getting in the car. This is your mother’s night.” He nudged her shoulder with his foot.

  “Yeah, you’ve said that lots already. This is my first night in my mom’s house. It’s important. I get it.”

  “Don’t you want to go there tonight?” he said.

  “No, I do,” she said. Doc sat on the ground next to her. Something rustled in the ditch, a rabbit most likely, crackling through the dried weeds. “Her feelings are going to get hurt when I peel all those glow-in-the-dark stars off the ceiling. But I’m going to have to get used to hurting her feelings. Unless I pretend I’m six for the rest of my life, her feelings are going to get hurt. It’s exhausting.”

  “If I knew you were going to climb trees and fall out of them, I never would’ve let you come along,” Doc said. “I shouldn’t have left you out here by yourself. I know you’re not six years old, but you’re not as old as you think you are.”

  “You have no idea how old I am,” she said.

  He nudged her shoulder again. “Get up,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. I’m going to be up all night writing about your stupid Lenorians.”

  “You still have to climb up and get my camera,” she said. She rolled onto her side, away from Doc, and curled up, fetal. “I’m glad we were able to have this little talk,” she said, and though Doc suspected, from the way she sighed, that she meant to be sarcastic, he couldn’t help but hear a twitch of sincerity in her voice.

  “If you’re being mouthy to me,” Doc said, “I don’t appreciate it, frankly. Is this how you are, now that you’re a teenager? If it is, you’re not aging well.”

  “Are you scolding me?” Tiff asked, propping herself up on her elbow. “It sounds like you’re scolding me.”

  “No,” he said.

  He stepped into the tree and up a few branches, but when he reached for the camera, he stopped. His fingers brushed across paper. In a crook of the tree, Doc discovered a ragged, short plank of wood. Back on the ground, he shone his light on the plank—it had been part of a thin, makeshift wall papered with a print of tiny red roses. Curving around and among the roses was a minuscule, mostly illegible scrawl. Doc could read only random words across the plank—friend, hea
rt, mouse, blue, thistle, sleep.

  “You gotta be kiddin’ me,” Tiff said when Doc showed her the plank. “That’s a girl’s handwriting.” Tiff’s finger traced the path of the sentences among the roses, and she recalled, once again, how Doc had often promised to build her a playhouse in the backyard, with a little stove that baked cakes with a light bulb. Sleeping baby, she read. Or maybe it said, creeping early. Or leaping fatly. Or slugging eels, slurping brain, keeping flap.

  There were many other words written on the plank as well, and as Tiff and Doc attempted to read them aloud, the letters seemed to dissolve into hieroglyphics, the child-like scribble jumbling into knots.

  “This could’ve come from anywhere,” Doc said. “That tornado last spring had sticky fingers. It’d lift something from one farm and drop it smack-dab in some wacky place.” It had indeed been a fickle breeze. In the aftermath back in June, we’d taken a drive along the country roads, surveying the wreckage. A billboard advertising itself (This Space Available) had been lifted from its posts and cradled in sagging power lines. The north wall of Eleanor Allen’s house had been peeled away, and we’d seen that her piano had been pushed from the parlor into the kitchen. Eleanor had told us later that her book of gospel songs had nonetheless remained open to the same hymn.

  “Who are you calling?” Tiff asked Doc.

  “The sheriff,” he said, flipping open his cell phone. At that, Tiff grabbed the plank from the ground and ran toward the back of the house. Doc could’ve caught up with her; he could’ve stopped her, and he knew he should’ve. But he was already growing accustomed to what seemed to be his new role: the permissive parent. It was cruel to do that to Ivy, he knew. But if she wanted motherhood, she could have it. He, meanwhile, would let Tiff fall from trees.

  Tiff let herself in the back screen door and walked up to the kitchen table, the plank held out before her like a shiv, where Daisy sat with a deck of cards. Tiff might have looked suspect, had anyone bothered to notice her. Though three Lenorians hovered, Daisy played solitaire. She gazed down at the splay of cards, caught in a deep concentration, her thumb inching the top card back and forth across the stack in her hand.

  “It’s all right,” Doc told them all as he entered the kitchen, before there was even a hint of alarm. But once the Lenorians caught sight of Tiff, her angel-white hair a fright wig of nettles and static, the plank held before her like a water-witching stick, they came to life, poised to wrestle the girl away from Daisy’s sight. “It’s okay, Daisy,” Doc said. “She’s mine. She’s with me.”

  “Look at this,” Tiff told Daisy.

  Daisy, unbothered, seemed to be seeing it and not seeing it at the same time. Her thumb still worked at that top card. She then put down the deck. She reached up and walked her fingers across the plank lightly, spider-like.

  “Tell me what it is,” Tiff said.

  Daisy shrugged.

  “She doesn’t know,” the buzz-headed Lenorian said, pushing the plank away from Daisy.

  “Look at the handwriting,” Tiff said, pushing it back toward Daisy. “Are you seeing the handwriting? Do you recognize it?”

  Daisy looked past the plank at Tiff. “Does it say where Lenore is?”

  “Nooooo,” Tiff said slowly, as if speaking to a child. “It doesn’t say anything that makes sense. But it was in a tree near the house.”

  “You need to leave,” said the Lenorian with the guitar, but he made no movement toward Tiff.

  “What’s your name?” Daisy asked, and Tiff told her. “Tiff ?” Daisy said.

  “Tiff,” Tiff said. “Short for Tiffany.”

  Daisy nodded, tilted her head to the side. “Tiffany,” she said, “if it doesn’t tell me where to go to get Lenore, then I don’t see much reason to bother reading it.” Daisy’s spirits seemed suddenly to lift. She straightened up in her chair and held her folded hands beneath her breasts in a matriarchal pose of utmost serenity. “Every day but Sunday the mailman brings to this house a bagful of letters; some of them have nothing but ‘The Crippled Eighty’ written on the envelope, but they all find their way here to me. All that sympathy, all that advice. People who’ve lost their own children, writing to offer condolence. Miles and miles of letters that lead me nowhere. Newspaper article after newspaper article.” She glanced toward Doc, then back to Tiff. “Thousands of words. Why does anyone read any of it if it doesn’t change anything? If everything’s still the same when you get to the end, then haven’t you given up part of your life to the person with all the words? This stranger just telling stories to be telling them?”

  “Yeah, okay,” Tiff said. “Yeah, I understand. But you don’t have to read anything. Just look at the writing. If you recognize it, then maybe that will actually help them get to Lenore.”

  “How?” Daisy said. “Because if I tell you that Lenore wrote those words, then maybe that’s proof that she exists? Because we still don’t believe in her, do we? But even if that is Lenore’s writing, it doesn’t prove that she exists, Tiffany. I don’t know if she exists. She could’ve been killed minutes after she was taken from me, or hours, or weeks. He could’ve killed her while I sit here talking, or he could kill her tomorrow. I’m no longer an authority on Lenore’s existence. As a matter of fact, I hope to God that everyone who says I’m crazy is right. I hope Lenore has always been a figment of my imagination. Don’t you?”

  · 28 ·

  Sitting in Doc’s car, parked in front of Ivy’s house, the motor running, Tiff held the plank on her lap, tracing her finger along the twist of the sentences, describing for Doc her theories. The tornado took Lenore, Tiff explained, sweeping the girl into its spin, stealing her breath and leaving her deflated and tangled in a fence. “And Daisy just wanted to block it all out,” Tiff said. “She destroyed everything of Lenore’s then—took a hatchet to her playhouse, burned her clothes. And now she doesn’t remember Lenore blowing away at all. She convinced herself that Lenore is still alive somewhere.”

  “Far-fetched,” Doc said.

  Tiff shrugged. “We’ll see,” she said. She looked to the pink house and the bright glow of its porch light. Ivy sat by the front picture window, pretending to be so engrossed in a book that she didn’t notice Doc’s car out front. “She waited up,” Tiff said.

  “Of course she did,” Doc said.

  “I do feel sorry for her,” Tiff said.

  “Why?” Doc said.

  Tiff shrugged again. “Because I’m not really a little girl anymore, I guess,” she said. “I think she’d like it better if I was the same little girl she left.”

  Doc tried to think of something supportive to say but could come up with nothing. Defending Ivy took a level of imagination he didn’t have at that late hour. He pushed in the cigarette lighter, though it hadn’t worked in years. He fiddled with the volume on the radio. “Ivy loves you,” he finally said.

  Tiff held her hands to her face to cry. Throughout her childhood, Doc had cradled Tiff in his arms many times as she’d wept. He’d rocked her; he’d kissed the top of her head. But he had no idea what to do with a crying thirteen-year-old. One wrong move and he’d make things ten times worse, he feared. He reached over to pat her shoulder. It didn’t seem enough, so he squeezed her shoulder too.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I guess I’m just a little homesick already.”

  Doc didn’t tell her that he was pleased to hear it, but he did smile one of those sympathetic smiles that look like a flinch—his face squeezed into a little grimace, and he nodded.

  “We’re always just down the street,” Doc told her.

  “For now,” Tiff said. “I’m afraid Great-Granny’s going to die someday soon.”

  “Your great-granny’s going to outlive us all,” he said. “She’s already outlived two husbands. A son. A daughter-in-law. She’s clearly cursed. You should be afraid to be around her.” Tiff sniffled out a laugh, probably just to be polite. “And the way you went storming into Daisy’s with that plank, you’re lucky to be alive. Those
Lenorians might be packing heat.”

  “I thought Daisy would be excited to see it,” she said. “But she wouldn’t even look at it.”

  “We shouldn’t have taken it from the tree,” Doc said. “We’ve kind of disturbed evidence.”

  Tiff nodded, then hugged the plank to her chest. “I’m going to take some pictures of it and e-mail them to you,” she said.

  “Wait till morning,” he said. “You need to eat some of that cake your mom bought for you.”

  “No need to worry about us, Uncle Doc,” Tiff said. She patted his hand and then opened the car door. Doc wasn’t sure what us she meant. Him and her? Her and Ivy? Who didn’t she think he should worry about?

  · 29 ·

  In the morning, a few hours into daylight, we all joined the sheriff and his deputies in the pasture, where he’d found more planks of handwriting. In the dry creek bed at a dip in the pasture were the charred remnants of some of the farm’s branches and wrecked structures from the previous spring’s tornado. Back then, the deep, dark nights across the countryside had been spotted with fire-light, the farmers burning away the ruins of their houses and barns.

  Not everything had burned away in Daisy’s effort. Though she’d lost mostly trees in the storm, among the branches in the pile in the creek bed were parts of small buildings—half a door, shingles, a bench, the rungs of a ladder. And when a deputy pushed through the refuse with a garden hoe, he unearthed more of the marked-up planks, the wallpaper ashen and curling but no less revelatory.

  The house is on fire, one line of graffiti seemed to read before the words untangled before our eyes and snaked away into other shapes. The winter is alive, it said next. For weeks afterward, every bit of writing I passed became words they weren’t—Fines Double on a highway sign was Bones Fragile for a brief, murky moment. No vacancy in red neon promised Novocain.

  We pinned many hopes on the expertise of Astrid Jacobs, a handwriting analyst who worked for the state. Technically, she kept reminding us, she was a forensic document examiner—hers was a scientific endeavor, to solve crimes and settle disputes, involving an intimate understanding of ink and paper, of the paint of graffiti on concrete; she’d even once determined the whereabouts of a kidnapper by studying the loops and hangs of the lettering of frosting on a cake. Handwriting analysis, a carnival act called graphology, was empty razzle-dazzle, she said, with all it claimed to reveal about personality and tendencies. It was of the school of palmistry and tarot, whereas her work had effectively put men away for life.