faxed appointment calendars

The faxed appointment calendars are a documentary thread through Mike’s effort to understand what Jo was doing in the final months of her life. Their importance lies in a discrepancy: the pages appear to record a busy schedule of civic meetings, yet Jo had resigned from several of the organizations, and Mike realizes that on the supposed meeting days she had been at the TR. The calendars provide clues, but not a complete explanation; their dates help uncover Jo’s hidden activity while leaving her motives and state of mind partly unknown.

Discovery and first clue

Ward Hankins obtains the calendar information from the file room and tells Mike that the sole entry for the second week of November 1993 reads “S-Ks of Maine, Freep, 11 A.M.” He identifies the date as Tuesday, November 16. Mike recognizes S-Ks of Maine as Soup Kitchens of Maine, whose board Jo had served on from 1992 until her death, and understands Freep to mean Freeport. The entry seems to point to a board meeting, perhaps about Thanksgiving food for people experiencing homelessness, followed by Jo’s drive to the TR to collect two plastic owls.

That early interpretation makes the calendar useful without making it conclusive. Mike can connect an abbreviation, a place, and a time to a plausible itinerary, but the record does not explain why the owls mattered or why Jo made the trip. The pages supply a route into the mystery, not its answer.

The faxed pages and Jo’s public commitments

After returning to Sara Laughs, Mike calls Ward and then speaks with Bonnie Amudson. While they talk, Ward’s fax begins printing photocopied appointment-calendar pages, with his note that he hopes they will help. The ten sheets cover November 1993 through August 1994 and are covered in Jo’s neat handwriting. The quantity and span of the pages unsettle Mike: he cannot even remember whether they had a fax machine before Jo died.

The entries show a woman with a crowded public schedule. They refer to Soup Kitchens of Maine, Woman Shelters, Teen Shelters, and Friends of Maine Libraries. Jo attended two or three meetings a month, and at some points two or three a week. Mike recognizes that he had scarcely noticed this work while absorbed in his own writing. The calendars thus preserve not only dates but a dimension of Jo’s life he had failed to attend to.

The contradiction in the record

Mike asks Bonnie whether Jo had hinted at what she might have been investigating in the township where their summerhouse stood. Bonnie says Jo never showed her writing, though she shared photographs and herb samples. When Mike asks whether Jo had been seeing someone, Bonnie is bewildered by the suggestion; to her, the idea of Jo having a boyfriend is foreign, and she affirms that Jo loved Mike. Her response eases one suspicion, but it does not resolve the question of what the calendars mean.

Bonnie then supplies the decisive correction. There had been no long drives with Jo during the final nine or ten months; they spoke by phone and once had lunch in Waterville. Jo had quit. Her terms with Woman Shelters and Teen Shelters ended in late 1993, and she resigned from Soup Kitchens of Maine and Friends of Maine Libraries in October or November of that year. Yet the faxed pages continue to mark meetings of those boards in 1993 and 1994. Mike concludes that on all those supposed meeting days Jo had been at the TR.

What the calendars can and cannot establish

The mismatch turns the pages from a straightforward appointment record into evidence of concealment. Their repeated meeting entries provide a pattern against which Bonnie’s account can be tested: Jo had left the organizations, but the calendar still associated her with their meetings, while Mike remembers her being at the TR. The record does not say who made every entry, or establish the precise purpose of each visit. It does, however, make clear to Mike that the public schedule cannot be read at face value.

The calendars also sit within a larger, incomplete archive. Later, Mike finds Jo’s hidden tin box at Sara Laughs, containing papers, stenographic notebooks, and a photographic negative; he understands that she came there in July 1994 to gather and conceal materials. Her notes concern the history of Sara Tidwell and the Red-Tops, including the account that Reg Tidwell Jr. sought the sheriff first to find Sara and her son alive, then to locate their bodies and killers. That discovery gives the calendars a wider context: Jo’s unexplained TR visits were connected to an investigation whose evidence she hid. But Mike doubts he will ever know all her reasons or what frame of mind led her to act as she did. The calendars chart the boundary between what he can reconstruct and what remains beyond the reach of a surviving record.