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.
Astrid was nearly my age, and her vision was still crystal-clear, her hand steady. She could identify someone by the slant of a letter in a signature, could find fraud in the lazy smear of an erasure in a ledger book. In 1966, she’d once cracked a case in six seconds just by scratching her thumbnail against a dot of Wite-Out, revealing a telltale decimal point. But her confidence, a key element of discovery, had weakened. Crimes now were solved by computer experts tracing digital paths or summoning up echoes of old conversations—deleted chat logs and e-mails in the recesses of a computer’s memory. Communication had become a bowl of alphabet soup, with the illiterate shorthand of text messages and the millions of fonts at everyone’s fingertips. Where in all of that was the mark of the primitive individual?
What can you tell us? we asked, holding forth the plank of wood.
“Inconclusive,” Astrid said. She said the scribbles could be those of a young girl. Or not. She said they could be Daisy’s effort to simulate a child’s writing. Or not. “It could be something,” she said, “or it could be nothing.”
But the images of the plank, the words and half sentences, ran in newspapers and on websites around the world, resulting in new lines of scrutiny—the words became pieces of puzzles and sources of theories. One man, after deciphering the words and applying numbers based on the letters’ places in the alphabet, devised a code that revealed Lenore’s approximate whereabouts (a blue rowboat in a Southern river at a crumbling dock in a weedy delta), while another man interpreted the language as poetic prophesy predicting Lenore’s own abduction. And a handwriting analyst—a practitioner of the mumbo-jumbo Astrid ridiculed—gauged Lenore’s personality by studying the direction of her cursive. Lenore was impulsive yet cautious; tough yet delicate.
All the new speculation, and the reporters’ pursuit of Daisy to speculate on that speculation, sent Daisy into a new period of solitude. One day, on what became known as Blue Sunday among the Lenorians, Daisy threw them all from her home. She grabbed them by their arms and shoved them toward the door. She yanked at their collars and slapped at their backs. The Lenorians, particularly the young ones, the runaways driven to the Crippled Eighty to escape addiction and cruelty, had no idea where to go.