So where was I? I reached for straws and came up only with wild unlikelihoods. Lee was buying the book back for someone who had lost it, maybe years or decades ago. He was righting an old wrong. He was…what? What the hell was he doing?
It was late by then. I went to the table and looked at Koko’s note. I thought I’d read it in the morning but there was an air of breathless excitement in her opening words that drew me in. She had already found proof of something. One of the inns that Burton and Charlie had stayed in upstate had existed. It had been a notorious story: an old woman and her two sons had run a veritable homicide hotel, murdering and robbing wayfarers for God knew how long before they’d been caught and hanged in 1861. The inn had been just about where Charlie had described it—in the middle of nowhere—and the accounts she had read conformed exactly to Charlie’s memory of it. The woman’s name was Opal Richardson and her sons were named Cloyd and Godie. The only name Charlie had heard that night, huddled with Burton in the dark, was Cloyd, but how many Cloyds could there be in the world? To Koko this was proof that they had been there.
But slowly my own initial excitement was tempered by doubt. The fact that it had been so easy to uncover worked against it. That Koko, even with her long experience in libraries, had found it in one afternoon was not a good sign. It meant anyone set on promoting a fraud could also have found it. The thought that Josephine might have just come through Charleston to get background for some tall story was so unlikely it bordered on the absurd. But what if she had been here years ago, found the story of that old inn then, and saved it for another day? She might even have come to believe it. People do such things. When the stakes are great enough they will sometimes believe their own lies. I had a vision of Josephine at forty, hunting feverishly through old documents and newspapers, building the tale in her mind, then chasing it in vain for the rest of her life. But how did that explain the books? So far we had just two, my Pilgrimage and Jo’s First Footsteps. To me this was strong proof, but for Koko to publish anything serious we would need more than that.
I looked through the photocopies Koko had left. Just as I thought, writers had had their way with Opal Richardson and her dimwit sons for a hundred years. It had become a piece of Carolina folklore, with newspaper rehashes every few years for a new readership.
At the bottom of the last page Koko had written, Where ARE you? Call me when you come in. I don’t care how late it is, I won’t sleep till you do.
So I called her and got no answer. That old uneasy feeling began again.
I went outside and crossed the motel to her room. Knocked on the door.
Unease blended into anxiety and became worry.
I went to the desk. A man there told me she had been in and out all evening, asking for me. But he hadn’t seen her for at least two hours.
I called her room from the lobby and let it ring ten times.
By then I was alarmed. Where would she go after midnight? Maybe she was giving me a dose of my own medicine: If you want to keep in touch, picklepuss, you need to stay in touch.
There is nothing quite so helpless as a situation like that. You’re in a strange town. Suddenly you lose someone. There are reasons to be concerned; potentially, there are alarming possibilities, though it is unlikely that your enemies could have found you this quickly. You can’t go to the cops when someone’s been gone just a few hours. But you know something’s wrong.
All I could do was wait.
I walked out into the pungent Southern night and stood on the sidewalk looking up and down Meeting Street. Finally I retreated to my room, where I tried to watch the TV.
I stared at the screen.
At two-thirty my telephone rang. I picked it up with a feeling of dread and was overjoyed to hear her voice. She said, “Hey,” but her voice was flat. I could hear her tremble as she took a breath.
“What’s going on?”
She didn’t say anything.
“Hey, Koko, where are you?”
“In my room.”
“Where you been?”
“Walking around.” She sniffed. “Listen, I’ve got to go home.”
Uneasily I said, “Okay.”
But it wasn’t okay. Something was wrong with her. “I’ll go with you,” I said.
“Cliff…”
“I’m coming over.”
“I’ve got to go home,” she said again.
Then she sighed, very deep, and said, “They’ve burned my house down.”
CHAPTER 26
We talked for an hour: Koko in her sadness, me as a release from the hot wrath I felt boiling inside me. Everything she’d had was in that house. Furniture handed down from her mother, books from her father and the books she herself had bought for years. Pictures, documents, the love letters of her parents: everything that told who she was and where she’d come from. I didn’t argue with her: I listened to her plans, knowing I couldn’t possibly let her fly back to Baltimore. It would be better if she realized that on her own, but I would restrain her if I had to.
She had called a friend, a woman she knew in Ellicott City. That’s how she’d learned about her house. “I needed her to water my plants. Now there aren’t any plants.”
“Koko…”
She looked at me.
“It’s a little late for me to ask you this,” I said. “Do you wish now you had never heard of Charlie or Josephine or Burton? Or me?”
“No way.”
I took heart from that, but I didn’t push it. I let her see on her own what it meant and how it had inevitably led to this point.
“No,” she said again when she did see it. “No way.” Then she smiled and said, “Well, there are times when I can do without you.”
I reached over and squeezed her hand. “You see what this means now.”
“I can’t go home.”
“Not for the moment. It’s a chance we can’t take.”
“What about the police? I could have them arrest those people.”
“If they left any evidence. My guess is, they had a torch do it. A professional fire man who leaves no trace. And they will all have alibis for the time when it happened.“
She just stared at the floor.
”It’s hard being a cop,“ I said. ”People don’t realize. We’ve got to play by all the rules while thugs like Dante can do what they want. Unless they make a mistake.“
“Won’t the police at least protect me?”
“I’m sure they’ll try. But they can’t watch you around the clock forever. There’ll come a time when you’ll be vulnerable.”
A moment later she said, “You’re the one they really want.”
I nodded. “They’ll use you to get to me. But they won’t be able to let it go at that.”
“Then what can I do?”
“Let’s take it one thing at a time. How’s your insurance situation?”
“The house is covered. It’s all my other stuff that’s lost.”
“Do you have a lawyer? Someone you can trust?”
She nodded. “My lawyer drew up my will. His father knew my father.”