“Did Mrs. Gallant leave any diaries or letters among her possessions?”
“There were no possessions, except for the clothes she had. Usually by the time they get to us they don’t have much left.”
She made it sound like a charity she was running, as if the state wasn’t paying her nearly enough. I asked my next question on a wing and a prayer. “Is there a worker there who took care of her regularly? Somebody she might’ve told about her family?”
“We have volunteers who come in from the community. Some of them form very close friendships with the residents.” She paused awkwardly, as if she had said too much, and finally she finished her thought. “In Josephine’s case, that would be Ms. Bujak.”
“Ah. Would it be possible for me to speak to Ms. Bujak?”
She thought about that. I sensed she didn’t like it but there was no good reason to stop me.
“Wait a second, I’ll get her number for you.”
I waited through some elevator music. It seemed to take a long time and I figured she was calling the volunteer and covering her bases.
“I’m back,” she said suddenly. “Sorry for the wait.”
She read off a phone number. “Her name is Bujak. B-u-j-a-k.”
“You have a first name?”
“Yes, it’s Koko.”
She answered on the first ring, like she’d been sitting over the phone waiting for me to call. She said “Hi,” not “Hello,” and her voice was gentle and soft. She might have been twenty or fifty.
“Is this Koko?”
“And you would be Mr. Janeway.”
“I take it Mrs. Perkins told you what happened.”
“Yeah, she did. Not the best news I’ve had all year. Jo was a good person.”
“I didn’t know her long, but I sure liked her spunk. That was some trip she took on alone. Apparently nobody at Perkins had any idea.”
“They’re all pretty uptight this morning. I think they’re concerned about losing their standing with the state.”
“Over one incident?”
“Oh, there’s always something. All those places are understaffed. That’s why I volunteer. I go out there twice a week. It’s not their fault when something like this happens—at least it’s not all their fault. Actually, I like Mrs. Perkins. She tries, which is more than I can say for some of them.”
“But there’ve been other incidents?”
“Mr. Janeway.” Now there was a slight edge to her voice. “Are you putting together some kind of file for someone, like maybe for a claim? That’s how it’s beginning to sound, and I just want to make sure we both understand why we’re having this conversation.”
“Let’s start over. Forget the questions about the facility; I’m not out to sandbag anyone. What I want to talk to you about is Mrs. Gallant. And her grandfather.”
“Charlie,” she said, and I sat up straight in my chair at the real affection in her voice.
“You sound almost like you knew him. Like she sounded when she talked about him.”
“I do know him.”
“You talk as if he’s still alive.”
“That’s how he seems. I’ve spent a good deal of time digging through her memories of him. I’ve got lots of tape—the two of us, just talking.”
“Tape,” I said densely.
“I’m writing her story,” she said, and I felt my heart turn over.
She said, “I taped everything,” and my battered old heart flipped back again.
Then she said, “We used extensive hypnosis to get at what she knew.”
“Hypnosis,” I said in the same inane tone of voice. “You hypnotized her?”
“Does that bother you?”
“No, it just surprises me a little. Did it work?”
“I guess that would depend on how you define work. If you’re asking whether she could be put under, then yes, it worked wonderfully. Hypnosis is actually an old technique, goes back two hundred years. I’ve used it all my adult life: self-hypnosis, age regression, autosuggestion. I used it to quit smoking years ago. I quit cold, and I was a three-pack-a-day addict. Now I use it to record their stories. The old people.”
“You do this for what, a hobby?”
“If you want to call it that. I retired two years ago and this seems to be worth my time.”
“You don’t sound old enough to retire.”
“Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m probably old enough to be your mother.”
“I doubt that. So what did you do? In your career?”
“I was a librarian. In my last ten years I was head librarian in a smallish suburban branch. I moved over here when I retired.”
“Where’s over here?”
“I live in Ellicott City now. It’s just across the river, a few miles from Mrs. Perkins’s house.”
“And you hypnotize the old people and record their stories. That’s fascinating, you know. Can you tell me about it?”
“We could be here all day. I’ll tell you this much: a good subject can be sent back to almost any part of her life. She can relive it and describe everything that went on. People have been known to remember letters in detail, even from their childhood. There’s nothing supernatural about it, it’s all stored right there in the brain. This is all very well documented and I shouldn’t be defensive about it. Take it or leave it.”
“I’m not doubting you, just being educated. So Josephine was a good subject?”
“She was great. She got to where she could go under almost as soon as she sat in my chair.”
“You did these sessions at your place?”
“Oh, sure. It would’ve been impossible to do it there, so once or twice a week I’d go over and pick her up. She loved coming out and she came to love our sessions. Afterward I would play the tapes back for her and she’d laugh and say, ‘My Lord, I’d forgotten that.’ So from that standpoint, it worked very well. Now what I’m trying to do is get hard evidence that what she told me was real.”
“How’s she holding up?”
“Amazingly well. We’ve done the same session a number of times and I haven’t caught her in a discrepancy yet. And we’re not talking about something you could write out and memorize. These were lengthy sessions, an hour or more at a time. You’d expect her to trip up somewhere if she were trying to pull a fast one, wouldn’t you, Mr. Janeway?”
I took in a deep breath. I couldn’t believe my luck.
“Aside from her memories,” she said, “I’ve gone through many pages of records that tell who the people in her family were. How they lived.”
“Ms. Bujak—”
“Call me Koko.”
What a great name, I thought. Koko Bujak. A great and elegant name indeed.
I told her the long version of the story I had given the social worker, beginning with Josephine’s arrival in my bookstore the day before. She said nothing while I flashed back to my own infatuation with Richard Burton, the auction, and how Mrs. Gallant had discovered me. Then she said, “I knew something was going on with her. I wish she had told me about it, I’d have taken her to Colorado myself.”
“Why would she not tell you?”
“Who knows? Maybe she was afraid I’d try to stop her. We had a good working friendship but I think I still represented the state to her.”
“For what it’s worth, I think she’d have died anyway. Whether you had come or not.”
“Yes, she sensed the end coming and so did I. She had lost a lot of ground in the past six months. I was working hard to get her memories transcribed, so she could see what I had.”
“What are you going to do with it now?”
“Finish it, of course. I didn’t get into this just to patronize her.”
“What happens when you do finish it?”
“Depends on what I’ve got and how good it is. If it’s good enough I might try to find her a writer to put it into a book. Otherwise I’ll leave it with the state historical society. They’re always interested in records that tell about local people.”