“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.”
