until one of the men made a movement toward the phone in the kitchen. “Tell them there may be a missing child,” Abby said then.
Abby returned to the bedroom, closing the door, and that was when Daisy first told the story she would tell again and again in the coming weeks—of Lenore under the table with the string from the mop, of Elvis on the farm, of his reading to them the counterfeit Miranda-and-Desiree he’d bought from the black market of Hong Kong, his airplane, the cider, the old pickup on blocks, his illicit baby talk, the new dress with the daisies on it, Lenore and Elvis nowhere in the morning.
And the Board of Elders, when told, chose to believe it all. They couldn’t have worried more about Lenore if she’d been one of their own.
· 19 ·
Had the idea of Lenore simply occurred to Daisy as she’d languished in the parish house bedroom? Are there such psychological cases—childless women with delusions of motherhood? We’d heard of Munchausen syndrome by proxy, a pathology in which a mother, desperate for attention, wounds her child in some tender way (slight suffocation with a baby blanket, a teensy-weensy spoonful of kitchen cleanser) to have an excuse to visit a doctor or an emergency room and to bask in the attention we reserve for women with sickly babies. And, to be frank, it’s a kind of insanity too many of us can understand. A doctor with an irresistible bedside manner, a nurse who hugs.
When my last husband—my second—died after three weeks in a hospital in Omaha, I couldn’t bear to not go back to room 526. I desperately missed the nurses we’d loved, and I even missed the ones we hadn’t liked nearly as much. I missed my husband’s roommates (he’d had three in the three weeks there), and I missed his roommates’ wives, and I even missed all their visitors. Polite, they’d respectfully looked past the partially drawn curtain to ask about my husband’s condition, his progress, where we were from, what we’d done with our lives, when we might be going home. I loved the sardonic humor of my husband’s nurses—the delight they took in temporary human fallibility. They were, to a person, unshaken by sickness, but not in a callous, cynical way. Their lack of sentiment was a beacon of hope—it was like they knew something we didn’t, that there was no need to be morose, that they wouldn’t bother with efforts of survival if survival was unlikely.
And so, two weeks after I buried my husband, I returned to the hospital in Omaha, checking into a nearby Holiday Inn. I spent most of one week on the hospital’s first floor, in the cafeteria, the chapel, the florist. The corner coffee shop, with a wall of windows and a view of a memorial rose garden, served a pineapple-whip ice-cream cone that I’d been craving. I ate the cone and read a paperback I’d bought from the gift shop. I bought a tote bearing the hospital’s logo, and a pair of slippers. I gossiped with the old-lady volunteers in their smocks, women who didn’t know that my husband was dead and who kindly asked after his health. (“Good,” was all I could bring myself to say—one simple word didn’t seem like a psychotic lie.) I didn’t dare go to my husband’s old room. As much as I wanted to travel up in the brightly lit elevator with its carpet on the walls, I couldn’t risk seeing someone alive in his bed, some survivor of something. And, of course, the nurses I’d loved would’ve spotted me, clucked their tongues with a mix of distress and sympathy, and sent me away. Our nurses belonged to other people now.
This went on for several days, until Doc found me out, and he and Tiff came to retrieve me. They walked up to me in the coffee shop as if they’d only happened by. They had liked the pineapple-whip cones too, so we spent a little while right there, pretending nothing was amiss. Doc finally let Tiff buy an overpriced yarn-haired rag doll she’d had her eye on in the gift shop throughout my husband’s last weeks—Tiff was about seven at the time, Ivy having only just left her in Doc’s care. “We can’t buy it,” he’d told her before; “we’d be depriving some sickly baby of it,” and Tiff had learned to feel noble for simply not having the doll. But on this afternoon’s return to the hospital, Doc slipped a ten-spot into Tiff’s fist, as some kind of tribute to grief, perhaps. “I can’t stand thinking of all those little girls walking by that ugly, pricey doll,” he said, “and wanting it, and never getting it. The least we can do is get it out of the window.” Then, later, “Cocktail hour,” Doc said. “Let’s go downtown for a martini,” and with that, he and Tiff eased me out of the hospital, into the city, then onto the interstate, and home.
· 20 ·
No, wait. Wait. Before that, before we got in the pickup, we were in the back of it, in the bed of the pickup. We were dancing.” Daisy put her hand to her head, tapping her fingers against her brow. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m just not sure I’m remembering things right. Nothing’s feeling right at all.”
Doc and the sheriff sat at the kitchen table with her while I kept to the corner, inconspicuous but for the frequent creaking of the chair with each shift of my weight. I was a twin, I suppose, for the shrunken-apple-head doll in a bib-overall dress that had been propped there previously and now lay across my knees. I licked my thumb and wiped at the dust that had collected in its wrinkles and along its toothless smirk.
Daisy had changed from her daisy-print dress into a T-shirt and jeans. She sat with one foot up on her chair, her arms wrapped around her leg, as she fussed with the mop string still around her ankle. The bottle of scotch on the kitchen table gleamed in a ray of sunlight, an amber ripple of reflection wavering on the tabletop, Doc would write in his article, his first of many about the case. The bottle felt conspicuous, as did the glass next to it, and whenever anyone walked into the room, their eyes were drawn to the scotch. Was it as some sort of strategy that the sheriff and his deputies had left the bottle there?
Elvis, only a temporary presence in the house, had left evidence of himself everywhere. A disposable razor rested on the edge of a sink. A green bottle of aftershave sat on the windowsill in the tiny room in which he’d slept. There were stray hairs on the pillowcase, a man’s shirt on a hanger in the closet, and, at the bottom of a garbage can, chewed-up toothpicks and a Band-Aid with a few little dots of blood. There was a bottle of beer on the nightstand, a cigarette butt at the bottom of it. And his airplane. The sheriff, in his investigation later that day, found a puddle of fuel in a patch of grass and a plane’s tire tracks gouged into the earth. Weeds had been flattened and torn apart by the airplane’s landing and takeoff.
Forensics could’ve gathered enough DNA to Frankenstein together a whole army of clones of Elvis, but Lenore remained ethereal. All Daisy had produced was a photograph, a Polaroid, taken by Elvis, she claimed. The picture was a blur, the girl in it hard to see. You could tell that the girl’s hair was fine, and faint, and windblown, but you couldn’t make out the set of her eyes or the shape of her chin, or whether she smiled or frowned for the picture, with lips thin or full.
Daisy told us she’d given birth eleven years ago, not in the hospital but in her own bedroom with the aid of a midwife and potent herb teas—hence no birth certificate, no hospital documents. The midwife’s name was Mrs. Grey, Daisy explained, an old woman who lived in a little house on an island several miles up the Platte River. And there was a Mrs. Grey, we learned, and there was an island. But we were told by Mrs. Grey’s daughter that the woman had long since died, felled by a swift cancer, dead only weeks after receiving the diagnosis from her doctor. Mrs. Grey, though cosmic in disposition, had kept detailed records, but the daughter had burned them all one autumn, file after file, in a brick oven behind the house, to ward off the chill when she had outdoor parties, her neo-hippie friends coming down from Grand Island with red wine and marijuana.
Soon enough, we discovered that the national reporters were extremely vulnerable to Lenore-inspired deception—the more absurd, it seemed, the more enticing. “Let me tell ya something,” a fifteen-year-old boy told a news program. “Lenore wasn’t so innocent. She and me used to sit in the ditch by her house and smoke cigarettes. She could smoke down more cigs than any other eleven-year-old girl I know. And it was beautiful, you know that? It was a thing of beauty to watch her smoke. When somebody really knows how to smoke, it’s