someone who had lost it, maybe years or decades ago. He was righting an old wrong. He was…what? What the
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
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,
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:
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.
