The morning after Mavis Rusk's jacket vanished from our staff room, two hundred people were standing outside the Ludlow Avenue library holding leather jackets. I was standing in the middle of the street, holding my car keys.
A man in a camel overcoat knocked on my driver's side window. He was forty-eight, with silver-streaked hair and a voice that arrived a full second before the rest of him.
"Good morning, Sable Harbor," he said. To me. Through the glass.
I rolled the window down.
"Sully Thorpe," he said, offering a hand. "Harbor 98.3, mornings. You're Audra Tillery. You wrote the post."
"I read it on air at seven. I read it again at seven-thirty. At eight, I read it in a slightly different voice for the commuters who missed the first two."
"Why is everybody holding a jacket?"
"Well, Audra, that's a great question for our listeners." He paused. He seemed to be waiting for a commercial break. "I may have said, 'If you've got a leather jacket you're not sure about, bring it down to Ludlow Avenue.'"
"Not sure about how?"
"You'd be amazed," Sully said, "how many people aren't sure about their jackets."
Clifford had arrived at seven. By the time I parked, he had already done three things.
He had found the red ticket dispenser from the old deli counter at Central. He had kept it in his gray cabinet since a 2012 renovation. He had numbered two hundred and sixty slips. And he had printed a sign that read JACKET IDENTIFICATION — PLEASE TAKE A NUMBER — NO ROLLING UP SLEEVES.
"Why no rolling up sleeves?" I asked.
"I don't know yet," Clifford said. "But I want it on record before I find out."
Rollo had set up a folding table in the lobby. On it was a box of tissues, a pitcher of water, and the 1962 unabridged dictionary. He no longer trusted himself to leave it near the back door. Now it went everywhere he did, like a support animal.
At 8:41, exactly, Mavis walked up the front steps in the lime-green whale fleece.
The crowd went silent. Two hundred people looked at the whale. The whale looked back at them, delighted, as it always would be.
"Good morning," Mavis said.
Somebody near the front started to clap. Somebody else joined in. Within a few seconds the whole line was applauding, and the sound bounced down Ludlow Avenue like a marching band.
Mavis stood there and let it happen. Her chin went up a quarter of an inch. Then she held up one finger, and the clapping stopped as if she'd pulled a plug.
"This is a library," she said. "Number one, please."
Number one was a woman with a jacket in a dry-cleaning bag. She held it out the way you'd hold out a casserole to a new neighbor.
Mavis unzipped the bag. She looked at the jacket. She leaned in and smelled the collar.
"Vinyl," she said. "This has never been near a road. This has been near a mall."
"It was my ex-husband's," the woman said. "I just wanted to get rid of it, honestly."
"The Bin is under the circulation desk," Mavis said. "Number two."
Number two was a man in his eighties whose jacket was brown and fit him like a sail.
"Not yours," he said immediately. "I know that. Mine's from 1971. I just wanted you to know you're not the only one."
Mavis nodded at him. It was a real nod, the earned kind. He walked away about three inches taller.
Number seven brought a jacket with fringe. Number twelve brought a jacket clearly made for a medium-sized dog, and was not embarrassed about it.
Number nineteen brought a jacket that had once belonged, she said, to a drummer. His band, the Lugnut Philharmonic, had played one show in Sable Harbor in 1983. She did not want Mavis to identify it. She wanted somebody to finally ask her about it.
I asked her about it. It took twenty minutes. The drummer had borrowed her lighter and never given it back.
She had kept the jacket in exchange. It was the fairest thing in the whole story, as far as I could tell.
Around number forty, the Tuesday Riders arrived.
You heard them before you saw them. Nine motorcycles came up Ludlow Avenue in slow formation and parked along the curb with tremendous ceremony. The riders took off their helmets. Not one of them was younger than sixty-five.
Their leader was a small woman named Marlene Szymanski, who was seventy and introduced everyone by their machine.
"This is Ernie, he's a '78 four-cylinder," she said. "Pat, she's a '91 twin. Lou's a sidecar."
"Don't ask Lou about the sidecar. He'll tell you."
"What's in the sidecar?" I asked.
"Lou," said Marlene, with feeling, "told you not to ask."
The Riders had heard Sully's broadcast at breakfast. They had a plan. They would split the city into nine zones and ride every street, looking for a black jacket with four patches. Marlene had already printed maps.
"Every pawn shop, every thrift store, every consignment place in the county," she said. "We find things. Last year we found a missing parakeet in a car wash."
"That's very generous," Mavis said.
"You rode, didn't you? Back in the day." Marlene squinted at her.
"I remember a girl in a black jacket on Route 9. Fast. No, not fast, correct. She took every corner like she'd filed paperwork about it first."
Clifford, who was standing behind them with his clipboard, looked unexpectedly moved.
Mavis didn't answer for a moment. "I sold the bike in 2003," she said. "I kept the jacket."
"Course you did," said Marlene. "The bike's just how you get there."
By noon we had seen a hundred and eighty jackets.
None were hers. Mavis knew each one inside three seconds, the way she could tell you whether a book was a first printing by the weight.
But she did not send anyone away fast. She looked at every jacket. She listened to every story. She was, I realized, running the most extended reference interview of her career.
People told her things.
A man said he'd bought his first jacket in 1990 because he'd seen her on the bookmobile and thought, if a librarian could, he could. A woman said she wore her mother's jacket to job interviews for luck. A bus mechanic said he did not own a leather jacket at all. He had brought her a sandwich, because he'd heard she'd had a bad day.
Mavis ate the sandwich. It was egg salad on rye. She said it was the best sandwich she'd had since 1987, which was the highest compliment she was known to give.
Sully Thorpe broadcast live from the lobby until a little after eleven. He did it in a whisper, because Mavis had looked at him once. It turned out his whisper had the exact same carrying power as his speaking voice. Patrons four rooms away could hear him say, "This is Sully Thorpe, coming to you quietly."
Officer Quarles stopped in at lunch, looked at the line, and wrote something in his notebook. I didn't see what. I suspect it was WOW.
At two o'clock, number one hundred and ninety-four was a young dentist. She was thirty-two and nervous, holding a jacket her late father had worn. She did not think it was Mavis's. She just thought her father would have liked this.
Mavis was halfway through telling her about the stitching when the front doors opened.
Rollo came in from the street. He had his windbreaker on and the dictionary under one arm. In his other hand, held carefully between two fingers like a pressed leaf, was a small oval of faded cloth.
He'd stopped whistling halfway through bar three. I noticed it before I noticed anything else.
"I went across to the bus stop," he said. "To look, just in case. It was under the bench, back by the trash can. I almost didn't see it."
He laid it down on the table in front of Mavis.
The edges were frayed. It was faded to the color of weak tea. And there were three short threads still hanging from one side of it, loyal right to the end.
It said LARKFIELD RALLY 1988.
Up next: Route 9
Continue to Part 4 →