A truck driver—perhaps the very same trucker who’d possibly driven me off the road?—had been the first to hear Daisy on the CB radio that Thanksgiving night. Miranda, he’d heard among the chatter of the CB. Desiree. He knew the Miranda-and-Desiree books well, because he’d read them aloud to his kids. Though the woman’s voice was soft, too soft, he concluded that what he was hearing must be The Coffins of Little Hope. He texted his son about it, and his son texted his sister even though she sat in the chair next to him at the dinner table. They then texted all their friends.
Doc stayed up all night that Thanksgiving, making calls, gathering information, disrupting sleep in a number of houses, determined to be the first to report any news of a leak of parts of the forthcoming eleventh book, even if the leak had originated with his own printing plant. I couldn’t sleep that night either. When Tiff and Ivy, in their coats and pajamas and winter boots, walked to Doc’s house across the street, I was standing at my window naked, in the dark of the den, sipping hot bourbon and watching the snow. My white hair, full of knots and frizz, hung long and undone down my back. If anyone had been able to see in, they would’ve thought they’d seen a ghost.
After my run-in with the truck hours before, I’d arrived at Ivy’s house and spoken not a word of the incident. I had nibbled at Ivy’s un-appetizing feast, careful not to let my still-jittering hand clink the fork against the plate.
“How was Lydie doing?” they’d asked.
“Oh, she was here and there,” I’d said. Ivy had mulled the wine, and I’d stirred and stirred it with a cinnamon stick.
So upon arriving back at my house after dark, I’d stripped naked only because I could, because I could pace through my own rooms without anyone thinking I’d gone batty, without anyone rushing after me to cover me up. One normally doesn’t think of being naked as a privilege, but it really is, I suppose, when your beauty and privacy have left forever. On the interstate, on the drive to the nursing home, I’d been passed by a young man on a motorcycle. Though the day had been cold, he’d worn no coat, and the wind had lifted his T-shirt, exposing his skin. That naked patch of flesh had seemed so tender, so in danger from any scrap of highway shrapnel, and I’d stared, captured by his skin’s startling vulnerability.
But when I saw Tiff coming back out of Doc’s house and walking across the street to mine, I put on my fur coat to answer the door. I waited a bit after she rang the bell so she wouldn’t know I’d been up and rattling around so very late in the night.
“Do you have a CB radio?” Tiff asked.
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because it’s night,” she said.
“Why do you want a CB radio?” I asked.
Tiff affectionately petted the sleeve of my fur coat. “We should release Trudy back into the wild,” she said.
“Trudy’s much too old and mangy,” I said. “She’d just be the day’s kill for some stylish leopard-print coat. Why do you want a CB radio?”
“If you tell me that you have one, I’ll tell you why I want one.”
I didn’t have one, but she told me anyway, and I slipped my feet into my slippers, buttoned my coat up as far as it would go, and followed Tiff to Doc’s car. The stepmother of Tiff’s friend Lucas drove a semitruck, and we were all off to cram ourselves into the cab to see what we could hear.
Which was nothing, as it turned out. Doc sat in the driver’s seat fiddling with the CB radio’s knobs, Tiff and I in the truck’s sleeper, ears peeled for any suggestive bit of static.
I shivered and pulled my coat tighter around me. “What are you wearing under there, Great-Granny?” Tiff asked. “Some flimsy nightie?”
“Guess again,” I said. “Something even flimsier.”
“Like what?”
“Like nothing,” I said.
“You’re naked?” Tiff whispered. “What’s wrong with you? Is Lydie’s Alzheimer’s contagious?”
“I don’t know if I even believe in Lydie’s Alzheimer’s,” I said. Tiff tugged on a loose red thread in the embroidery of my slipper, quickly undoing the petals of a rose. I slapped Tiff’s hand away.
Pauline Creechly, a portly forty-something who wrote articles for Doc, arrived at the semitruck in a trench coat and stocking cap. On first sight, you might think chubby Pauline, with her pin curls and holiday sweaters, capable only of a homemaker’s advice column, but she was a master of the redneck felony story, bringing a brisk, gum-chomping attitude to every local tale of domestic violence and trailer-park dogfighting. “Whoever it is has been off the air for over an hour now,” Pauline said, flipping open her notepad with an affected snap. “But I chatted with some folks who heard it. They told me the story—it sounds particularly morbid. If it’s really The Coffins of Little Hope, Wilton Muscatine was in a pretty crappy mood when he wrote it. But here’s the interesting part—Roy at the truck stop said it sounded like Daisy’s voice. Our girl Daisy may be indulging in some serious copyright infringement.”
“Beautiful,” Tiff mumbled.