Jo’s investigation into Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops turns an apparently modest local-history project into a challenge to the official memory of the TR. Conducted largely without Mike’s knowledge, it drew on residents’ stories and scattered documents to recover the history of Sara and her son, the community’s response to their murders, and the silence that followed. Jo did not leave a finished account; she left an archive whose fragments let Mike recognize what the town’s histories had concealed.

A local-history project kept private

Jo’s research began as work for an article about the township around the Noonans’ summerhouse. Bill Dean later told Mike that Jo had considered writing about Sara and the Red-Tops for a local paper, and might also have mentioned Yankee magazine. Bill had warned her that local people had sore points and asked her not to tread on them. Jo said she understood, but, according to Bill, continued asking questions. The warning did not end the inquiry; it made its social stakes visible.

The research was more extensive than Bill’s first account suggested. He remembered it extending from fall 1993 through winter and spring 1994, and said Jo went around the TR and as far as Motton and Harlow with a notebook and a small tape recorder. She listened to older residents’ stories and asked them to look for old letters and diaries. Frank later described the work as beginning with an article and characterized Jo’s initial secrecy as an effort to preserve a surprise for Mike. He emphasized her skill at eliciting stories and locating private correspondence. The investigation thus depended not on a single authoritative source but on conversation, memory, and materials that residents had kept.

Mike learned about the project in stages, after Jo’s death. Bill’s account at a gas station brought the first shock: Jo had been asking about the history of Sara and the Red-Tops, and Bill had spoken with her on the same day she came to collect plastic owls. Bill said he had raised the subject because other people had reported her inquiries. His unease, and his insistence that the questions could offend locals, revealed that the research touched a history the community preferred not to reopen. Mike also recognized that Bill was lying poorly about what he knew, leaving him to wonder what Jo had uncovered and why she had kept it from him.

Dates, calendars, and the hidden archive

A calendar entry helped Mike place Jo’s movements. Ward Hankins found a notation for the second week of November 1993: a meeting of Soup Kitchens of Maine in Freeport at 11 a.m. on Tuesday, November 16. Jo had served on the organization’s board since 1992. The entry established a documented appointment but did not explain the rest of her day; Mike inferred that she may have driven roughly seventy miles to the TR afterward to collect two plastic owls. The schedule offered a clue, not a complete explanation, illustrating how the investigation had to be reconstructed from incomplete records.

Mike subsequently obtained photocopied pages from Jo’s appointment calendars. The call to Bonnie Amudson accompanying their arrival also clarified what Mike was trying to establish: whether Jo had discussed her writing or shown Bonnie a draft. Bonnie remembered Jo sharing photographs and herb samples, but not writing. These recollections did not resolve the purpose of the inquiry. Instead, they sharpened the distinction between Jo’s visible interests and the historical work she had kept private.

The most consequential materials were concealed in a small tin box inside a plastic owl. Mike found folded papers, two wirebound steno books, and a photographic negative. The negative showed Jo in a gray two-piece bathing suit on the swimming float at Sara Laughs. Mike understood the cache as evidence that Jo had returned to the property in July 1994 to gather and hide the materials. He inferred that she had hidden the box inside an owl and taken it below the house, and that she had expected he might eventually find it. The surviving objects establish the concealment and its contents more securely than they establish every reason behind Jo’s actions.

What the records preserve—and omit

The loose papers included photocopied newspaper clippings from the Castle Rock Call and its predecessor, the Weekly News. Jo had marked the dates in her handwriting; the oldest clipping, from 1865, concerned Jared Devore. Reading it alongside later information helped Mike make sense of the generations connected to the history of Sara and the Red-Tops. The archive therefore reached beyond the band’s performances, placing the events in a longer local chronology.

The contemporary press accounts of Sara and the Red-Tops were not neutral records. Their reviews praised the performers through explicitly racist descriptions, presenting the Black musicians as amusing, exotic figures for white readers. The papers preserved their public appearances while framing them through the racial attitudes of the period. Their cheerful tone sits uneasily beside the violence and exclusion that Jo’s notes helped recover; the newspaper archive documents both the band’s visibility and the limits of the recognition it received.

The gap in the record was itself significant. Mike found no clipping explaining why the Red-Tops left the area. Jo’s notes, by contrast, recorded that by September 1901 most people on the TR knew Sara and her son had been murdered, and many had a good idea who was responsible. The notes traced the resulting breakdown of the band’s community: by Labor Day, harassment had begun, and members left for safer places. Son Tidwell stayed with his family in the meadow while seeking answers about Sara and the child. This account of communal knowledge and retreat was absent from the town histories, making Jo’s privately assembled record a counter-history to public silence.

The investigation’s legacy

Jo’s research also connected the murders to the earlier fate of Reg Tidwell Jr. According to the account Mike later related from her notes and Royce Merrill’s knowledge, Reg spent much of August pressing the county sheriff first to search for Sara and her son, then to find their bodies and identify their killers. He believed they had been murdered. The materials further described how the TR’s initial sympathy gave way to collective protection of its own members when the implications of the crime became clear. Jo’s work recovered not just an individual mystery but the social process by which knowledge was contained.

The investigation’s consequences extend beyond the documents’ historical content. Its clues helped Mike understand why Jo had returned to Sara Laughs, what she had concealed there, and why the surviving archive mattered. In the present, the tin box and its contents also became part of the struggle against Sara’s supernatural presence: Mike used a message Jo had helped communicate to act against the remains of Sara and her son. The inquiry therefore links historical recovery to immediate danger, while preserving the distinction between what the records prove and what Mike can only infer about Jo’s private intentions.

The book presents Jo’s investigation through delayed disclosure. First come an appointment notation and the plastic owls; later, Bill’s hesitant explanation reveals that Jo had been asking around; finally, the hidden papers and steno books make the scale and subject of her research legible. This sequence makes the reader, like Mike, assemble a past from incomplete evidence. Jo’s unfinished work matters because it exposes the distance between the town’s published history and what its residents knew, while leaving some of her motives—and the full extent of what she discovered—uncertain.