Jo’s secret return to Sara Laughs in 1993 was a small, carefully concealed journey that Michael only reconstructed after her death. A calendar entry places her in Freeport for a Soup Kitchens of Maine board meeting on November 16, then Bill Dean’s recollection places her at the lake that same day to receive two mail-order plastic owls. The apparently ordinary delivery becomes an early clue to Jo’s private investigation and, eventually, to the archive she hid at Sara Laughs.

The November 1993 visit

The surviving clues establish a precise date and an unusual itinerary. Bill remembered Jo arriving at Sara Laughs during the second week of November 1993, while he was putting up storm doors. A UPS truck arrived during their conversation; Bill carried the package into the entry, and Jo opened it to show him the owls. She left less than ten minutes later. Her visit seemed so specifically organized around the delivery that Bill later wondered whether she had driven from Derry for that errand alone.

The date came into focus when Michael asked Ward Hankins to check Jo’s appointment calendar. Its sole entry for the second week of November read “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” Ward identified the appointment as Tuesday, November 16. Michael knew that S-Ks meant Soup Kitchens of Maine, where Jo had served on the board from 1992 until her death, and that Freep meant Freeport. The meeting likely concerned plans to feed people in need over Thanksgiving; afterward, Jo appears to have made the roughly seventy-mile trip to Sara Laughs to take delivery of the owls.

A visit Michael did not know about

Michael’s surprise at Bill’s account gives the event its private character. He said that he and Jo had not used Sara Laughs in the fall of 1993, and he did not remember being told about the owls. He considered the possibility that she had mentioned them and he had forgotten, but the explanation did not resolve why she wanted them or why she collected them at the lake. Bill’s memory was unusually concrete: he recalled the package, the conversation, and the short interval before Jo departed. Michael’s calendar check supplied a date that matched Bill’s recollection, turning an isolated anecdote into evidence of a trip Jo had not shared with him.

The owls initially had an ordinary practical purpose. Bill explained that plastic owls deterred crows, which avoided the deck when they saw them. That explanation accounted for their use as decoys, but not for Jo’s hidden reason for arranging their delivery. The objects would reappear years later as part of the means by which she concealed materials at the house.

From delivery to concealed archive

Michael eventually learned that Jo had returned to Sara Laughs in July 1994 to gather and hide research materials. A later discovery in the owl exposed how the otherwise puzzling 1993 delivery belonged to a longer pattern of secrecy. Jo had converted one of the plastic decoys into a hiding place for a small tin box, placing papers, notebooks, and a photographic negative inside it. The cache included an image of Jo at the swimming float and material connected to her investigation of Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops.

The discovery transformed Bill’s recollection of the November visit. The owls were not only lawn ornaments delivered for their apparent effect on crows: they were objects Jo had acquired at Sara Laughs, then later used in concealing evidence there. Michael understood that the hidden materials explained Jo’s later visit to gather and conceal them, although he could not know all her reasons or state of mind. Her arrangement left him a trail that could be followed, but not a complete explanation.

The history the clues lead toward

Jo’s concealed research addressed a local past that had not been openly confronted. Among the materials Michael found was a newspaper clipping about the 1933 wildfire at Halo Bay, which recounted the danger to the settlement and the failure of people there to escape the advancing fire. Other records concerned Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops. Michael later explained that Jo’s notes began with the story of the crying boy, Reg Tidwell Jr.; by September 1901, many people in the TR knew that Sara and her son had been murdered and had a strong idea who was responsible.

The appointment, delivery, and hidden cache thus connect Jo’s unannounced trip to a broader investigation of what the community knew and what it had left unaddressed. Her papers assembled evidence from calendars, photographs, notes, and clippings rather than offering a single authoritative account. Michael’s discovery of the box made the 1993 visit legible as one early step in Jo’s effort to preserve and investigate that history.

Meaning after Jo’s death

The episode also changes the shape of Michael’s knowledge of Jo. In life, her charitable work and their shared routines had not made her private inquiry visible to him. After her death, a calendar entry and a caretaker’s memory reveal a journey that she undertook without his knowledge; later, the objects associated with that journey disclose a further layer of concealment. The story makes bereavement an encounter with unfinished records: each answer gives Michael a firmer date or object, while leaving some of Jo’s motives unresolved.

Jo’s investigation also persists through its physical traces after she can no longer explain it. Michael finds the owl, the tin box, and the documents, then uses them to understand why she had returned to Sara Laughs. Her preparations do not remove the uncertainty surrounding her choices, but they allow her work to continue beyond her death. What began as an unexplained delivery becomes a link between Jo’s secret research, the town’s buried history, and Michael’s eventual recognition of how much she had undertaken alone.