Hello, again. It's New Years' Eve as I write this so it might take some time to reach you. It's been another turbulent holiday season thanks to John and Elly. I'm currently looking out the front window of Mike's house looking for signs of Elly's presence; a jimmied-open gate here, unscooped doggie droppings there and so on and so forth. I just hope Wilf, Connie Poirier, her brother Phil, John (not that I rely on him TOO much) and I can keep her distracted long enough to keep her from noticing Mike's absence; after all he's been through, the last thing he (or Liz) needs is to be the unwitting focus of an amber alert. (April, not existing as she does, is immune to that danger.) Cst. Luggsworth knows enough to keep things buttoned up but not every peace officer in the town knows about Elly so we've got to maintain our vigilance until the ninth. We do not want a dream vacation to become a nightmare because Elly lost her mind and John thinks he can put it back together with chewing gum and baling wire. Fortunately, we seem to have a powerful ally in her younger brother. The odd thing is that Mike seems a lot more comfortable around his uncle than his parents; okay, maybe not so odd. He seems to have been the first cool adult Mike ever met; he doesn't yell, he doesn't get angry with him and he doesn't try to pick him apart. When he first arrived, he said he wanted Elly to come back to herself so she could see that she had a pretty good life. That's the problem, though. Elly seems to have suffered from depression most of her life; when you stop to think about thing, you realize there was always sort of a dark aura surrounding her. The waves of negativity emanating from her person seem to have made the city all but uninhabitable for Liz and her new family. Her moving to the Coast might be good for her but it adds a bit of a worry to our lives; what will happen when Elly realizes that Baby Lizzie is nowhere to be found? Will we have to stop her from going on a frantic search through playgrounds and malls for children that grew to adulthood? I hope not. I hope Phil can talk John into doing the right thing; it isn't easy for him with John slowing him down and Elly trying to set him up. Getting the two of them the help they need will make everyone's lives better.
Ah, well. I have to cut this short; that's because it's Phil's shift at the Pattermanse. As he put it, "Elly shall shave no sheet before its time". I'll get back to you with the the aftermath of the vacation next month. Until then....
Yours,
Mira.