plastic owls

The plastic owls are a pair of mail-order ornaments Johanna Noonan brought to Sara Laughs in November 1993, ostensibly to keep crows away from the lakeside deck. Their discovery in Michael Noonan’s recollections becomes more than a question of where a household item was stored: the delivery places Johanna at the house during a period Michael had not connected with a visit, and the same day becomes associated with her inquiries into local history. The owls’ mundane purpose makes their role in the narrative quietly unsettling, as an ordinary object exposes how much of Johanna’s life Michael may have failed to notice.

Identity and Intended Use

The owls were a couple of plastic decoys delivered by UPS to Sara Laughs in the fall of 1993. Bill Dean remembered Johanna opening the carton and showing them to him after he carried the box into the entry. He thought they looked remarkably real. When Michael asked why she would want them, Bill offered a practical explanation: the decoys were meant to deter crows from fouling the woodwork, including the deck.

That explanation gives the objects a simple domestic function, but not a settled history. Michael initially could not reconcile Bill’s account with his own understanding of their use of the house: he and Johanna had not used Sara Laughs in the fall of 1993. The discrepancy makes the delivery itself evidence of a visit he had not registered, rather than merely a purchase whose location had slipped his mind.

Delivery and the Hidden Visit

Bill’s memory supplied a precise date range and an unusually detailed sequence. Johanna arrived while he was putting up storm doors; they talked, and the UPS truck came. He carried the package inside and drank coffee while she unpacked the owls. Johanna left less than ten minutes later. Bill remembered the day as the second week of November, and anchored the recollection to a trip he and his wife made to Lewiston later that afternoon, followed by a stop at the Castle Rock Agway for a Thanksgiving turkey.

The brevity of Johanna’s visit sharpened rather than resolved the mystery. Bill could not explain why she would have driven from Derry just to take delivery of two plastic owls. Michael, who had not known about the objects, suggested that Johanna might have told him and that he had forgotten. Even so, the small fact continued to matter to him. The owls connected Bill’s firm recollection to a gap in Michael’s own account of his wife’s movements.

Search and Further Evidence

After Bill mentioned that the owls might be in the cellar or Jo’s studio, Michael asked an unseen presence in the house whether they were downstairs and whether it knew where they were. The answering knocks indicated that the owls were not in the cellar. Michael searched there anyway, finding stored household items and an old photograph album but no owls. The failed search turned their absence into a confirmation: the presence had been right about where they were not.

The search also gave the objects a particular narrative form. They remain physically unlocated, while their history grows more definite through other people’s memories and Michael’s attempts to reconstruct it. Their significance thus lies not in any unusual power attributed to the ornaments, but in the trail of questions they leave behind: when Johanna visited, why she made the trip, and what else she did without Michael’s knowledge.

The Owls and Johanna’s Research

Michael later considered asking Ward Hankins about Johanna’s calendar and speaking with her friend Bonnie Amudson. He wondered whether Johanna had visited the TR after a meeting elsewhere and whether she might have met an old friend there. He also recognized a less accusatory possibility: during an intense stretch of work on a novel, he could have heard Johanna describe a visit and failed to pay attention. The evidence does not establish what she did during the trip or whether she told him about it.

A later conversation with Bill tied the owls’ delivery day to another concealed strand of Johanna’s life. Bill said that he himself had raised the subject of local history because people had told him Johanna was asking around. Michael was surprised that she had not mentioned an interest in writing local history, and Bill clarified that he had not called her inquiries prying. The same day therefore links her arrival with research activity, though it does not explain its purpose or establish everything she investigated.

A Pattern of Undisclosed Knowledge

The owls acquired an additional resonance because Michael had already learned that an item Johanna carried when she died was a Norco Home Pregnancy Test, which she had not told him she intended to buy. He places that undisclosed purchase beside the mail-order owls as another instance of an ordinary object revealing that Johanna had kept something from him. The comparison does not prove that the two purchases had the same significance; it deepens Michael’s uncertainty about what else he had not known.

The narrative leaves that uncertainty open. Michael recognizes that he may have been inattentive, and that Johanna could have spoken without his registering her words; he also considers that her friend might not disclose private conversations. With Johanna dead, the owls cannot provide a complete explanation. They remain a modest household object with an outsized evidentiary role: a parcel, a short visit, and an unlocated pair of ornaments that make the distance between marriage and knowledge newly visible.