Jo Noonan’s secret investigation of the TR turns a seemingly local history project into a challenge to the community’s practiced silence: her research uncovers a history of racialized violence and concealment that official town accounts leave out. Jo does not live to explain her findings to Mike, but she leaves behind calendars, notes, clippings, and a hidden archive that make her investigation legible after her death—and show why she feared Sara Laughs.

From local history to a private investigation

Jo began researching the township for an article, at first treating the work as a lark: reading books, talking with residents, and coaxing old letters and diaries out of people. Frank Arlen remembered her as particularly good at listening to stories about the old days. What began as a surprise she intended to share with Mike instead acquired a more dangerous purpose as she kept asking questions that made some locals uncomfortable.

One source was Edward Osteen’s privately published history, Dark Score Days. Osteen’s book covered local stories—the Micmac Drive, General Wing’s trick horse, an 1880s tornado, and the fires of the 1930s—and included an old photograph of Sara and the Red-Tops, believed to have been taken at the Fryeburg Fair in 1900. Yet this printed history offered only a partial route into the past. Later, the clippings and notes Jo collected would expose what the town histories did not say.

Her research continued even after she had formally left the organizations whose meetings appeared on her calendar. Jo had served on the boards of Soup Kitchens of Maine and Friends of Maine Libraries, and her terms with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters ended in late 1993. She resigned from the other two boards in October or November of that year. Nevertheless, calendars sent to Mike showed dozens of meetings in 1993 and 1994. The apparent appointments concealed a different itinerary: on the days marked as meetings, Jo had been at the TR.

The calendar entries gave Mike a specific lead. One listed “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” for Tuesday, November 16, 1993. Ward Hankins established that this referred to a Soup Kitchens of Maine board meeting in Freeport. The discovery confirmed that the calendars could not be read as straightforward records of Jo’s movements. It did not explain why she had misrepresented those visits, but it made the pattern of her secret trips unmistakable.

The final visit to Sara Laughs

In February 1994, around the time Frank’s son Patrick had an appendectomy, Jo was making day trips to the TR. Frank later recalled that she called him from a turnpike rest area while traveling to Sara Laughs and asked him to meet her there. She told him to park in the driveway if he arrived first and not to enter the house, although he knew where Mike kept the spare key.

Jo described the house as dangerous. When Frank arrived, he waited outside on one of the railroad-tie steps. He did not find it entirely empty; instead, he felt watched. Jo eventually arrived, hugged him, and kept her eyes on the house. She would not explain what she was doing or allow Frank to tell Mike about their visit. As she put it, Mike might discover the truth on his own, but she could not tell him yet because she needed his full attention, not the attention he gave while working.

Jo went inside alone and instructed Frank to stay outside unless she called for help. Frank understood that she wanted someone nearby in case she got into trouble, but also needed someone who would not press her with questions. By the time they returned from the softball game, the change in her was unmistakable: she was no longer laughing. Looking at the house, she told Frank she was done with it and would never go through that door again. Neither sibling entered on that later visit.

Frank knew that Jo was writing something, but not what she had discovered. He believed her investigation had begun innocently as research for an article, and that her initial secrecy was meant to preserve a surprise for Mike. Jo told him she would explain everything when she was ready. Her last request was that he not disclose their visit to the lake house; after her death, Frank kept his promise for four years, leaving Mike without an important part of the story of her final years.

The archive and the history it contests

Mike eventually found the materials Jo had hidden in a small tin box marked “JO'S NOTIONS.” The box contained folded papers, two wirebound steno books, and a photographic negative showing Jo in a gray two-piece bathing suit on the swimming float. The negative made the cache intensely personal, but the papers connected her private investigation to the recorded history of the county.

Most of the loose papers were photocopied clippings from the Castle Rock Call and its predecessor, the Weekly News, with dates written in Jo’s neat hand. The oldest clipping, from 1865, concerned Jared Devore, a thirty-two-year-old returnee. Reading it, Mike realized that the generations in the story did not fit as he had assumed: by the time Sara and the Red-Tops settled on what became Tidwell's Meadow, Jared would have been about sixty-seven or sixty-eight, still hale and a Civil War veteran. The age discrepancy became a clue to the history Jo was trying to reconstruct.

The newspaper coverage of Sara and the Red-Tops revealed another kind of evidence. Its descriptions called the group “our Southern blackbirds” and “our rhythmic darkies,” and described Sara through racist stereotypes even while praising her as a performer. The reviews were favorable by the standards of their time, but their genial tone did not undo their dehumanizing language. Nor did the clippings explain the circumstances in which the group left. The archive therefore preserved both what local newspapers had chosen to print and the limits of what their accounts would disclose.

Jo’s notes also preserved evidence that public town histories omitted altogether. According to Frank, there was “not a whisper” in those histories about the community’s breakup and the harassment that followed. By Labor Day, active harassment had begun; it grew uglier and more frightening as the summer continued. Son Tidwell refused to leave until he learned what had happened to his sister and nephew, and kept his blood family at the meadow after others had departed for safer, more welcoming places.

The investigation thus shifted the question from what the archive said to what it excluded. Newspapers documented the performers through racist public language, while local histories left out the persecution that helped dismantle their community. Jo’s notes and collected materials preserved a counter-record of those silences and connected the apparently separate pieces of TR history that Mike later had to assemble.

Discovery, grief, and the investigation’s afterlife

The hidden materials explained why Jo had returned to Sara Laughs in July 1994. Mike understood that she had gone there to gather and hide the evidence as carefully as she could. She had removed the plastic owls from the deck and carried them away, concealing the tin box inside one. Frank had heard the door outside bang, but had remained where Jo asked him to wait. Mike could not know every reason for her actions or exactly what she had believed, but the hidden archive suggested she expected him eventually to find his way to it.

The investigation also changed the meaning of Mike’s memories. He had already understood that Jo was dead, but the ordinary objects and unfinished questions she left behind kept the relationship active in his life. Her concealed records were not a complete explanation or a message that answered everything; they were the material trace of work she had chosen to do without him, and of a confidence she had entrusted to Frank. The truth came to Mike through a delayed chain of testimony, calendars, and physical evidence rather than through a final conversation with Jo.

Jo’s research ultimately intersects with the supernatural danger at Sara Laughs. During the climactic confrontation, Mike sees Jo as a dim, exhausted figure standing among dead birch leaves after the Outsider has disappeared. He understands her presence as a form of help that has endured beyond her death. The moment gives emotional force to the investigation’s delayed disclosure: Jo’s work was not simply an abandoned article, but an attempt to confront what had happened at the house and leave evidence that Mike could use.

The investigation’s significance lies in both what it recovers and how it survives. Jo’s secret calendar entries expose the false appearance of ordinary board meetings; Frank’s silence preserves her explicit request but postpones the truth; the hidden box brings private research into view; and the clippings reveal how public memory can record a community while refusing to record the violence done to it. Mike’s understanding remains incomplete, but the archive makes that incompleteness meaningful: the missing history was not merely lost. It had been kept out of the official account, and Jo had worked to preserve another record.