novel he’d bought from a street vendor in Hong Kong, a piece of apocrypha that fell between books six and seven, in which Miranda and Desiree find and saddle an extinct Tasmanian tiger and rescue a family of orphans who’d been locked away in a grandfather clock. Elvis collected everything—all the counterfeit books bought in other countries, the miles of pages of fan fiction online, the encyclopedias of characters and associations and devices, the dolls, the movies, the board games, the cereal boxes, the comic books, the first two seasons of the animated series on DVD, and the DVDs’ hour after hour of extras.
When Lenore had fallen asleep, Daisy and Elvis had walked to the old pickup behind the tin lean-to in the feedlot. She’d carried her shoes in her hand, though the grass was dry and burned-up, sharp against her bare feet.
After they’d stepped into the pickup, as Elvis pried open the bottle tops of the hard lemonade against the steering wheel, Daisy checked herself in the rearview mirror. So very plain, she thought.
To desire and to be desired was the best part of it all. Sex left Daisy feeling greedy—she could never get close enough. She’d rather stay in the quiet moments leading up to it. She wanted to be whispered to, all his little promises. She would, every night that he was there, lie with his arms around her, her back to his chest, cradled, and he’d fall asleep first, his hold growing sweetly slack, his breath going slow. She loved staying awake long enough to lose him like that.
It was already the middle of July, but a few leftover fireworks nonetheless popped and spun in the black sky, shot off by kids on adjacent farms. Daisy and Elvis drank and watched. This time, Daisy fell asleep first.
· 13 ·
In the morning Elvis was gone, and Lenore was gone too. Or, as many might say, she was not gone at all but suddenly there, newly sprung from her mother’s imagination.
What woke Daisy in the early morning wasn’t the racket of the airplane’s motor but rather the tickle of the pickup seat she lay against. A mouse scurried beneath the vinyl, tiny among the rusty springs, working into Daisy’s dream about sleeping on the kitchen floor. A chill shimmied up her spine from the thought of the mouse, and she sat up just soon enough to see the plane lift into the sky and only just clear the electrical lines at the tops of the poles.
Elvis was an aerial photographer, flying from town to town across the country’s farmlands—he would take photos of a home place from far enough above to capture several verdant acres, to offer a rare view of rooftops, and rows of corn bins, and the geodesic patterns in the colors of the crops. But somehow, also, and this was his gift, he’d bring out some fine detail that made the photo more than just a view of a farm from a few miles up. In a photo of the Ruskind place, you can see the dots of Mrs. Ruskind’s prize Whirly-Girl tomatoes, still only a lemony orange in midsummer, like freckles, in the vegetable garden near the house. In the photo of the Jansenn farm, there’s the family’s snow-white husky, since dead from a sudden liver failure, a blur, chasing a passing car. Sunflowers along fence lines, pale green apples visible in the dark green leaves of trees. In these photos taken from a distance, Elvis allowed farmers a new intimacy with their own homes.
Elvis would develop the photos, put them in fancy gilt frames, and peddle them door to door, asking you to pay for pictures of your own place. He’d wear a charmingly outdated denim leisure suit, with a pair of aviator sunglasses pushed up on the top of his head. His hair was just a tad too long, tucked behind his ears. Women were happy to invite him in for a cup of coffee (but he preferred tea, Darjeeling if you happened to have it), and he might stay for an hour, or longer, complimenting your needlepoint or demanding your recipe for the rhubarb pudding cake you cut him a slice or two of. By the time you wrote the check, you hated to see him leave.
This was all before, though, a few years before, during his other sweep through town, before he cultivated the Vegas-style pompadour and whatever kind of beard that was. We didn’t know his name—some of us remembered him as Kip; others remembered him as Jeb; others seemed to think his name was Mickey. Kim, Hank, Dusty, Max, Seymour. Some of us insisted his name was Cash, as that was who we all made our checks out to.
But the farm wives did remember, vividly, some other names—the women’s names on his arms. Because Elvis calculated his sales calls so they’d fall when only the missus was likely to be home, he’d at some point take off his jacket, revealing short sleeves and the names tattooed and crossed out up his forearm. Vicki. Mitzi. Veronica. Lois. It might have been his idea of a joke, but the women liked entertaining the thought of him falling so passionately, so permanently for these temporary loves.
All the winking and drawling he did, the effortless romancing of the women in and around our town, probably didn’t help Daisy’s case, especially when she told her stories to the newspaper—all that “Daddy” and “Baby” business, all that Baby needs her daddy. It sounded perverse to the women in our town, but, worse yet, many of them were jealous. No, no, worse than that: they were regretful. Why, for God’s sake, had they led the lives that had led them to sit there, dusting their thimble collections or stirring ice cubes into their Jell-O mixes, while this prettylipped freak sat, sex on the brain, wrinkling the doilies on their sofas? Why did that very strange woman, only a few farms over, get to be the one to be violated? All any of the farm wives would have had to do was reach over and flick a few top buttons of his shirt to see his hairy chest—they’d all been within arm’s reach of complete self-destruction. Why wasn’t it themselves they were reading about in the morning papers?
Not that anyone could love a man who would endanger a child. And that was why it was easy for some of us to cast Lenore into nothingness. Elvis had not abducted a little girl. He loved women. We all knew that by the names on his arm—they were women’s names. There were no little girls anywhere, anymore, named Mitzi or Veronica.
· 14 ·
Daisy, at first, felt no panic when Lenore was nowhere to be found. It wasn’t unusual for Lenore to wake early, to walk to the peach trees to see if the fruit was still too green to eat. That one, Daisy would tell the sheriff later, pointing at a peach on a low-hanging branch, when they were trying to piece together a clinical portrait of Lenore’s existence—seeking a single strand of hair, a bit of skin that had flaked from a peeling, sunburned shoulder. Anything. Any sliver of soap or chewed-up plug of gum stuck beneath the seat of a kitchen chair. Didn’t you ever snip off a curl to tape onto a page of her baby book?
This peach, Daisy said, reaching out to cradle it in the palm of her hand, careful not to disturb its precious place in the investigation. It was all she had, she knew. The skin’s broken there, just slightly, she explained. She put her thumb to where the peach was bruised, its skin nicked. That’s where Lenore pressed at it with her fingernail. She was seeing if it was soft enough to eat yet. See? That’s Lenore. She was here.
· 15 ·
Lenore,” she called out the back door. “Lenore, come to the house. I know you can hear me.” Still undisturbed, she returned to Lenore’s room and picked up from the floor the book that had been propping open the window. A Prairie Wedding Among the Radishes, by Myrtle Kingsley Fitch. The local library was sponsoring a citywide read that summer, and we were all to read, and to discuss, A Prairie Wedding, a suitably musty bit of Pulitzer-winning frump from 1918. In the band shell at the park, Dr. Tanya Krelb, the Myrtle Kingsley Fitch Professor of English at the state university, gave a talk about the symbolism in the book—explaining what the pumpkin blossoms meant, and what it meant that a woman’s father was murdered at a bend in the river, and how we were to interpret the creaking of the katydids, the sound of which she mimicked with the aid of a wooden whistle handcarved from cedar, though many of us thought she sounded more like a locust. “Myrtle Kingsley Fitch is your sister,” the suspiciously unbridal Dr. Tanya Krelb told us, “her land is your land,” explaining that Myrtle Kingsley Fitch had grown up in our state, only miles from our town. Had Lenore not disappeared in July to distract us, we all would’ve