Mike investigates Jo’s unexplained plastic-owl delivery

Mike Noonan investigates Johanna Noonan’s unexplained plastic-owl delivery by reconstructing a small, long-overlooked errand from Bill Dean’s memory and her 1993 calendar. The inquiry turns an apparently ordinary purchase into a mystery about what Jo was doing at Sara Laughs—and about how the fragments left by the dead can sharpen, rather than settle, the questions of the living.

The delivery Bill remembers

Bill raises the owls while warning Mike to stay out of other people’s business, explaining that with Jo gone he is the only caretaker Mike has. His warning becomes an unexpected lead: two plastic owls had arrived by mail order the fall before Jo died, and might still be in the basement or her studio. The delivery had taken place at Sara Laughs, not at the couple’s home in Derry.

When Mike asks whether Bill means the fall of 1993, Bill confirms it. The date surprises Mike because he and Jo had not used Sara Laughs that autumn. Bill recalls being there to put up storm doors when Jo arrived; they talked, and then the UPS truck came. He carried the package into the entry and had coffee while Jo unpacked the owls and showed them to him. They looked convincingly real. Jo left less than ten minutes later, making her visit seem like a special trip to receive the parcel in person.

Bill can place the visit more precisely: it was during the second week of November. He remembers because later that afternoon he and his wife drove to Lewiston for her sister’s birthday, stopping at the Castle Rock Agway on the way back so his wife could buy their Thanksgiving turkey. The ordinary details give the recollection a firm place in the day, even as the reason for Jo’s brief visit remains obscure.

From a practical object to a personal question

The owls have an obvious use. Bill says they keep crows from fouling the woodwork: the birds see the decoys and veer away. But this practical explanation does not explain why Jo ordered them for Sara Laughs, why she went there to accept the delivery herself, or why Mike knew nothing about it. Bill finds that ignorance peculiar; Mike wonders whether Jo told him and he forgot.

Mike considers the possibility in light of his own habits. Jo used to say that when he was in the writing zone, information went in one ear and out the other. She sometimes pinned reminders to his shirt, like a first-grader’s notes. Perhaps, he thinks, he missed an invitation to accompany her because he was absorbed in work. Yet even that possibility leaves the central question intact: if she needed the owls, why not have them delivered to Derry, or ask someone already near the property to meet the truck?

Mike names several people who could have received the package at the lake, including Kenny Auster, Mrs. M., and Bill himself. The abundance of easier alternatives makes Jo’s personal appearance more striking. He decides that he needs to see an actual plastic owl, but the object’s ordinary purpose cannot account for the attention the errand has acquired in his mind. What begins as a question about a bird deterrent becomes an attempt to understand a choice Jo made without him.

Checking the calendar

To test Bill’s memory against a separate record, Mike contacts Ward Hankins, who handles his taxes and other business affairs. Mike asks Ward to look up Jo’s 1993 desk calendar and check what she had scheduled during the second week of November. Because neither Jo nor Mike kept diaries, the calendar is among the practical records Ward can use to cross-reference receipts and expenses. Mike’s request turns that administrative archive into a means of recovering a piece of Jo’s past.

Ward finds a single entry for Tuesday, November 16: S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M. Mike recognizes S-Ks of Maine as Soup Kitchens of Maine and understands Freep as Freeport. Jo had served on the organization’s board from 1992 until her death, so the notation most likely records a board meeting. The calendar independently establishes an appointment in Freeport on the morning of the day Bill remembers her at Sara Laughs.

That entry does not resolve the puzzle. If Jo attended the meeting, she still appears to have driven roughly seventy miles to the lake to receive two plastic owls, though Bill was already there and could have taken the delivery. The record provides a sequence of plausible facts—board meeting, travel, package, brief visit—without explaining the link among them. Its compressed shorthand makes the evidence concrete while preserving the motive as unknown.

The questions left by bereavement

The discovery lands in a larger pattern of searching after Jo’s death. Looking for an explanation, Mike recalls sitting at his kitchen table in Derry on his first night as a widower with a box marked Norco Home Pregnancy Test in his hands. That memory accompanies his question about what he is seeking now, nearly four years after Jo was buried. The owl inquiry therefore sits beside another, more intimate unanswered question rather than appearing as a detached bit of household history.

Mike recognizes that even a useful answer about the calendar cannot close every gap. He reflects that questions arise in the wake of losing someone, and that there is no statute of limitations on when they may surface. The episode’s force lies in the contrast between the smallness of the object and the magnitude of the absence: the owls can be explained as crow deterrents, the meeting can be located in a calendar, and Bill can reconstruct the delivery, yet Jo’s reason for making the trip remains beyond the surviving evidence.

The investigation also shows how the past reaches Mike through mismatched forms of memory. Bill remembers a parcel, coffee, a brief conversation, and a birthday trip; the desk calendar preserves only an abbreviated appointment; Mike supplies the questions those fragments cannot answer. Together, the recollection and the notation recover the outline of November 16, 1993, but they do not make the day transparent. The errand remains both ordinary in its details and charged by the fact that Jo undertook it without Mike’s understanding.