Clifford Penrose arrived in the staff room with a clipboard already in his hand. I have never figured out where he keeps it. He does not carry a bag. The clipboard simply appears, like a sheriff's badge.
"What's the incident?" he asked.
"My jacket," Mavis said.
Clifford looked at the empty hook. He looked at Mavis, in her gray cardigan, at 3:16 on a Monday afternoon. I watched him do the math. In nineteen years as her manager, he had never seen her shoulders.
"Oh," he said. Then, more softly, "Oh, Mavis."
He clicked his pen. It was the gentlest pen click I have ever heard.
"This is a Form 11-B," he said. "Incident, Miscellaneous. I'll need a description of the item."
"You've looked at it every day for nineteen years, Clifford."
"For the form."
Mavis closed her eyes. "Black leather motorcycle jacket. Osprey Moto Garments. Four patches, one pin, one bent zipper."
"Initials A.P. inside the collar. Left elbow scuffed. Seam at that elbow starting to split. I noticed it last week."
"You noticed it was splitting and you kept wearing it?"
"I was going to deal with it," Mavis said. "It's on my list."
I had seen her list. It was an index card in her desk drawer. The first item had been written in 2011.
We searched the building. All six of us, plus a patron named Wilbur who was eighty-one and wanted to help. Wilbur searched mainly the large-print section, where he also happened to be reading.
We checked the supply closet. We checked the book sale room, in case someone had mistaken the jacket for a donation. We checked the meeting room, where the knitting circle had left behind a scarf, three needles and a strongly worded note about the thermostat.
We checked Lost and Found. At Ludlow Avenue, Lost and Found is a large plastic bin under the circulation desk. Rollo calls it the Bin. As far as anyone can tell, it contains four hundred umbrellas and one single glove from every winter since 1998.
No jacket.
"I'll call the police," Clifford said. "Procedure."
Mavis said, "It's a jacket, Clifford. They have actual crimes."
"Procedure," Clifford said again, but he said it to the floor.
While we waited, Rollo went quiet. Rollo going quiet was like a refrigerator stopping. You didn't notice the hum until it was gone.
I found him by the loading dock door. The 1962 unabridged dictionary sat on the floor beside it, wedging it open about six inches.
"I propped it at noon," Rollo said. "Same as always. Took my break, came back in. Didn't close it."
"Rollo, you've done that every day for twenty years."
"And for twenty years, nobody walked in." He rubbed his face with both hands. "That door's right next to the staff room. Anybody could've just walked in and walked out."
"It's not your fault."
"It's partly the dictionary's fault," he said. "But mostly mine."
He picked the dictionary up off the floor and held it against his chest like a man holding a cat that had disappointed him. The door clicked shut. It was the first time in four years I had heard it close.
Officer Dorian Quarles arrived at 4:30. He was forty-four, tall and polite, with the specific weariness of a man who had already responded to two stolen lawn ornaments that day.
He took out a small notebook. He was a pen-and-notebook man, like Clifford, and the two of them regarded each other with immediate professional respect.
"Approximate value of the item?" Officer Quarles asked.
Mavis thought about it. "I paid a hundred and forty dollars for it in 1987."
He wrote that down.
"It was my whole first paycheck. I ate rice for two weeks."
She paused. "It's been to eleven states. Under it, I've worn four different hairstyles and one regrettable perm. It has been rained on in every month of the year."
He stopped writing.
"So the value," he said carefully, "is a hundred and forty dollars."
"The value," Mavis said, "is not a number you have room for."
Officer Quarles looked at his notebook, then at her. Then he turned to a fresh page and wrote, in large letters, SIGNIFICANT. I saw it upside down. I liked him a great deal after that.
He asked if anyone suspicious had been around. We tried. Patrons at a library are mostly suspicious-looking, in the sense that they're quiet and carry bags.
Rollo mentioned the man who sat at the Route 9 bus stop across the street most afternoons. He read a newspaper there and never seemed to get on a bus.
"He's been there all month," Rollo said. "Old fella. Nice hat."
"Sitting at a bus stop isn't a crime," Officer Quarles said.
"It is if you don't take the bus," Rollo said. "Philosophically."
Officer Quarles wrote down NICE HAT, and then, after a moment's reflection, crossed it out.
At closing time, it was cold. October in Sable Harbor comes in off the water like it's late for something.
Mavis stood at the front door in her cardigan. She looked smaller than I had ever seen her look. She was the same height. It was just that the outline was wrong.
Clifford came out of his office holding something from the Bin. It was a fleece pullover, lime green, with a cartoon whale on it. It said WHALE HELLO THERE.
"It's clean," he said. "I checked. There's a form."
Mavis looked at the whale for a long time. Then she put it on. The whale smiled across her chest at all of us.
"Not a word," she said.
Nobody said a word. Rollo said several words, but only inside his own head. You could see them happening.
"I'll walk you to the bus," I said.
"I am sixty-one, Audra. I have walked to that bus stop several thousand times."
"I know. I'm walking with you anyway."
She allowed it. At the stop, there was nobody on the bench. No newspaper, no nice hat. The Route 9 bus came at 6:12, which Mavis noted was three minutes behind schedule.
She got on. Then she looked back at me through the folding doors.
"Overdue," she said, about the bus, or the day, or both. The doors closed.
I should explain what I did next, because I have been forgiven for it, but only recently.
I ran the branch's social media account. It had two hundred and twelve followers, most of them other libraries. Three were Clifford, on three different accounts, one of which he used exclusively to like our posts about late fees.
Our most popular post ever was a photo of a pigeon that had walked in during Story Time. It got forty-one likes.
That night, I went through the branch archive and found the 1987 staff photo. Eleven people stood on the front steps in squinting sunshine.
On the end, twenty-two years old, chin up, stood Mavis Rusk in a brand-new black leather jacket. The patches hadn't arrived yet. The leather looked like it had never been rained on in its life.
Beside it I put a photo from last spring. Same steps. Same chin. Same jacket, nearly forty years darker, with the Larkfield patch hanging on by its three loyal threads.
I wrote: Have you seen this jacket? It belongs to our reference librarian, Mavis, who has worn it every day since 1987.
It was taken from our staff room today. No questions asked. Please share.
I almost didn't post it. Then I thought about the whale.
I posted it at 9:47 p.m. and went to bed.
At 6:30 the next morning, my phone was so hot I could have warmed a muffin on it.
The post had been shared forty-one thousand times. That's one thousand times as many as the pigeon. I checked the math twice.
The comments ran to the thousands, and people remembered the jacket. A man said Mavis had found his grandmother's naturalization papers in 1996, wearing that jacket. A woman wrote that she had learned to read at Ludlow Avenue and had thought, until age nine, that all librarians wore leather.
Somebody named Sully Thorpe, with a little blue check mark, had written: Talking about this on the air at seven. Sable Harbor, let's find this jacket.
I got dressed in four minutes. I drove to the branch. I turned onto Ludlow Avenue at 8:30. Then I stopped the car in the middle of the street, because I could not see the library.
There was a line in front of it. It went down the steps, along the sidewalk and around the corner onto Fourth.
At least two hundred people were waiting for the doors to open. Nearly every one of them was holding a leather jacket.
Up next: The Lineup
Continue to Part 3 →