I rented a car while Koko bought a street map, a guidebook, and a pictorial history. A few minutes later she navigated me out to Interstate 26 and turned me south toward the city. “We should stay at the Heart of Charleston,” she said, leafing through pages. “That’s a motel they built in the sixties on the site of the Charleston Hotel, where Burton and Charlie stayed. Won’t that be cool? Maybe their ghosts are still lingering there.”
I thought this unlikely, but if I couldn’t share her view of the afterlife, at least I could agree that it would be cool to stay there.
The highway swerved down the Neck and Koko provided a running commentary. In the Civil War, batteries had been built across the peninsula to fight off an attack from the north. The city limit then was far south of here and this was mostly country. Like all cities, Charleston had spread far from its core and the sprawl was still going on. We passed through a grim industrial area and a few minutes later I saw the harbor, ablaze with lights to my left, and a spectacular pair of bridges spanning the river. I got off on Meeting Street and ten minutes later we reached the motel. We took two rooms on opposite sides of the motel and were lucky to get them. There were three conventions in town and rooms of any kind were hard to come by.
By then it was well after ten. We were tired: we had to be after last night—but we were still in the throes of an artificial high, like a Coke sugar rush after a heart-sapping marathon. We met out on Meeting Street five minutes after check-in and found a pub a block away. Koko surprised me by having a beer. I said, “That’ll put hair on your chest,” and she laughed. “What else can I get in a place like this? One won’t kill me.”
She took her first cautious sip. “So what did you think of the tape?”
“I liked the feel of it. If the old lady was conning us she was a very skilled operator. We have to assume it’s real until we learn otherwise.”
“Wait till you hear the others. My case for real gets much stronger then.”
“How much more do you have?”
“Hours and hours.”
“Can you summarize it?”
“You won’t need to listen to the other age-regression sessions. It’s just duplication, repeated just for consistency. Jo tells it without any errors every time.”
“I’ll take your word for that and pass up the repetition. What about the others?”
“It’s still a lot of tape.”
“I didn’t fly down here to sit in a motel and listen to tape, Koko. Where do we start?”
She shrugged. “We’ve got different goals. I want to prove Jo was authentic, you want to find the books.”
“Those things aren’t mutually exclusive, you know. They do have common roots.”
Koko took a big gulp of her beer. I sipped mine and said, “I don’t know why but I feel like my part of the hunt got suddenly warmer.”
“What does that mean?”
“Just a gut feeling. Makes no sense at all. It doesn’t seem logical that the books would be here.”
“I don’t know why not.”
“For one thing there’s the humidity. Humidity like this does terrible things to books. If they were here for any length of time, I’d expect to see some evidence of that on the pages. In a hundred years the paper would’ve become badly foxed unless they’ve been kept in an airtight bookcase all these years. In severe cases, foxing can eat up a book. The ones I bought at auction didn’t have any of that.”
I thought about it some more, then said, “So much for hunches.”
“Don’t lose faith. Please, we haven’t even started yet.”
“I never had much faith to lose. Remember, I just came here on a flyer with you. There never was any reason to think the books might be here, except they’ve got to be somewhere. If they’re in Baltimore, none of those thugs knows where.”
“There you are, then.”
“Where am I? They seem to be divided into two camps: Carl and his gangsters, Archer and Dean. They’re all hunting pretty hard. That must mean none of them knows any more than we do. They’ve got some reason to think they’re in Baltimore, but that may just be because of that book Jo took into Treadwell’s that day.”
“Wouldn’t it be a kick if they were here all along? Right in Archer’s backyard.”
I grinned maliciously. “That would be a real kick, Koko. Hey, your glass is empty. Want another beer?”
CHAPTER 21
We were still up at midnight, fiddling with tapes in her room. She snapped a cassette into the machine and said, “This was done right after that session you heard on the plane.”
Suddenly I heard Josephine say, in her natural voice, “Koko? Where’d you go?”
“Nowhere, dear. I’m right here.”
“I saw him again.”
“Your grandfather?”
“No. I mean yes, I always see him. But that stranger was with them.”
After a long gap, Koko said, “Jo? Are you all right?”
“Yes, of course. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“You’ve gone pale on us. How are you feeling?”
“What difference does that make? Holy Christmas, I’m almost a hundred years old, how do you think I feel?” A moment later: “I’m sorry. Bad temper doesn’t become me.”
“Don’t let it bother you,” Koko said. “Can I get you something?”
“Not unless you can rig me up so I can see again.”
Koko adjusted the microphone. “Try that. Why don’t you tell me what you remember and I’ll try to be your eyes.”
“That never works.”
“Let’s give it a try. Unless you’d rather not.”
Another gap: forty seconds to a minute. Then: “I saw three of them. They were standing in some kind of fog, talking. Their faces were hidden by the swirling gray. But every so often it would clear up. Just for an instant a breeze would come through and lift the fog, almost enough to make their faces clear. But they were never clear enough.”
“You recognized Charlie, though.”
“By his voice more than anything. He was much younger than I had ever seen him in life. In my childhood, you know, he was always an old man.”
“Did you get any kind of look at him in that awful fog?”
“Just for a few seconds…less than that. But enough to know him, I guess.”
“What did he do?”
“He smiled at me and nodded.”
“You must’ve seen him very clearly, then, at least in that split instant.”
“No, I felt him smile.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Yes,” said Josephine, obviously pleased. “He was so happy to see me again.”
“I can imagine. Then what?”
“He said something to Burton.”
“Ah. So one of the others was—”
“Richard. Charlie only called him Richard, but of course it was Burton. In a while I could see him, too. A fierce-looking man with mustaches and those awful scars.”
“What did they say to each other?”
“I don’t know. I couldn’t hear.”
But almost at once she said, “They were discussing what to do about the third man. It was fairly severe. Then they all moved back in the fog and that’s all I saw.”
“And you never did see the third man?”
“No.”
“You know nothing about him?”
“I didn’t say that. I know his name.”
“How did you learn that?”
“Richard pushed him away and called him by name.”
Again the tape seemed to finish there. It must have been two minutes later when Koko said, “What was his name, Jo? What did Richard call him?”
“Archer,” Josephine said at once.
I heard her take a deep, shivery breath. “His name was Archer.”