Daisy began reading chapter two on the Friday after Thanksgiving. Doc had bought a CB radio from a junk shop in the next county over and positioned it atop his dashboard—the radio had a tricky dial, and its cracked speaker hissed with every sibilant, but considering Daisy’s hushed, listless delivery, we weren’t missing much. Everyone was left to guess the specifics of at least half of what she read aloud. We parked as close as we could to the Crippled Eighty, but word had already widely spread of this potential unofficial leak, this illegal, inexpert performance of a book still two weeks from release, and hundreds of the impatient had driven, some for miles, to be within range of her frequency, to be the first to know what they could of Miranda and Desiree’s plight.
We found ourselves—Doc and Tiff sitting in the front seat of Doc’s car, Ivy and I in the back—piecing the story together from snippets of the heard and the misheard. Doc would hear Daisy say the undertaker while Tiff would hear the undertow; Ivy heard something about bones in a butterfly net while I heard something about bends in a bubbling creek. Nettles in Miranda’s lace may have been needles in her face, depending on your sense of the book’s sinister intent. In Doc’s car, we listened and debated.
“False,” Tiff said, hugging a pillow. She wore her pajamas beneath her parka. “Miranda and Desiree are not gigglers.”
“I don’t know,” Ivy said. She sipped cold mulled wine from a lidded cup. “I could imagine those girls giggling over something. But I thought she said they were sniffling, not giggling.”
“Shush,” I said.
All the transcripts that listeners later posted online varied in marked ways, and podcasts recorded from the original CB broadcasts were mostly unlistenable, Daisy’s voice too muted, the static too distracting.
“The end of chapter two,” Daisy finally read. Only a moment of silence passed before the people in the cars up and down the road honked their horns and flashed their lights, a spontaneous gesture of community. We all heard it, we all seemed to be saying. We all were there.
“This is vintage Muscatine,” Ivy said.
“I don’t know, Sis,” Doc said. “Maybe, maybe not. Sounds kind of authentic, but a little … I don’t know … optimistic. But maybe writing the final book made him sentimental.”
“It’s fake,” Tiff said, sighing to demonstrate her boredom. She breathed on the glass of the window and wrote “fake” backward in the fog, for anyone who might pass by.
They fancied themselves slavish experts; Doc had been reading the Miranda-and-Desirees to Tiff since she was seven years old. He’d read some of them to her three or four times. They’d performed their own original theatricals with Tiff’s Miranda and Desiree puppets, and they’d played the video game Miranda and Desiree’s Medical Atrocities until their fingers had blistered.
We remained parked in the road as the other cars dispersed, and then Doc drove to the chained and padlocked front gate of the Crippled Eighty. Doc knew of a broken slat in a section of fence behind the fir trees, so we all followed him through the ditch and up onto the property. As we waited on the porch, Ivy helped me pluck off the sandburs that had stuck to my socks and pricked my skin. No Lenorians any longer attended to Daisy, and though the house’s lamps were lit, we could see Daisy nowhere when we looked in the windows.
Even after we all agreed to give up after several rings of the bell and knocks on the door, Doc lingered. “She has an obligation,” Doc said. “If she has a copy of Coffins, then she stole it. From me, from the printing press. When she was in my employ. She’s required to surrender it.”
“I agree with him,” Tiff said. She no longer seemed bored now that confiscating the book had been suggested.
“What if Henceforth Books sues me?” Doc said.
“Why would they?” I said, though I knew that Henceforth was quite litigious. Just a few days before, a holiday festival in North Dakota had featured snow-and-ice sculptures in a park for which an artist had illegally appropriated the illustrator’s representation of Miranda and Desiree in the sixth book, a popular image of them in thin coats in a cold winter, their umbrellas spindly and threadbare as they glance back over their shoulders at the frostbiting storm on its way. Though the sculpture, due to an unseasonal massacre of Indian summer, had quickly melted down to just Miranda’s and Desiree’s flea-bitten legs, Henceforth Books had commanded a legal blitzkrieg on the violators. Over the years, Henceforth had shut down fan-based magazines and websites, unauthorized encyclopedias, unlicensed satire.
Despite Doc’s anxiety, I still said not a word about my secret pen pal, but I stayed up late that night composing a plea to Muscatine. I begged him to ignore us. We could barely hear Daisy, I told him, so there was hardly any need to shut her up. We’d all lose interest quickly enough, I promised.
I finished my letter to Muscatine around 2 A.M. and only then noticed the noise of the wind rattling the glass in the windows of my house’s front room. When was it, exactly, that I’d finally become used to quiet again? When I’d been widowed, the second time around, five years before, I’d kept some kind of racket always within earshot of every room of the house—TV, radio, records playing. I’ve never had any interest in tennis, but I came to be comforted by its announcers’ hush and the rhythmic thump and volley of the ball.
I buttoned my sweater and put on my slippers to take the letter to the mailbox; I didn’t want to risk oversleeping and missing the postman’s early arrival. With one hand atop my head to keep my braids from wrecking and blowing in my face, the other clutching the envelope, I hurried to the end of the walk. When Tiff had lived across the street, I’d loved glancing up to her window in the middle of the night, where her lamp often still glowed behind the lowered blind.
After shutting the letter up tight in the mailbox and lifting the flag, I thought I could hear an old song above the whistle of the wind. Or maybe I was hearing it in the whistle of the wind, inventing the sound from something heard long ago. My skirt flapped once, with the hard, sharp snap of a sheet on a line, knocking the thread of the tune from my hearing. I walked back into the house and sat in the front hall in the little chair embroidered with birds with posies in their beaks, where Tiff would sit to put on and take off her winter boots before coming in or going out. I closed my eyes and tried to locate the song again. Even when I’d been young, I hadn’t thought the popular songs were meant for me. I’d not been all that pretty, and clothes had so rarely flattered me. The songs, the fashions, they’d always been for other girls. They’d always been for the girls who knew by heart all the different dances.