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.