By Wednesday morning, the whole of Sable Harbor knew three facts. Mavis Rusk's jacket was missing. A patch from it had turned up under the Route 9 bus stop. And Sully Thorpe had a plan.
"Ride the Nine," he announced at seven, on Harbor 98.3. "If you have a bus pass and a heart, get on Route 9 today."
"Look under the seats. Look at your neighbors. Look, Sable Harbor, with love."
Officer Quarles called the branch at 7:20 to ask, politely, whether we could ask Sully to stop saying "look at your neighbors." Three people had already reported their neighbors.
Clifford put the patch in a plastic sleeve and attached it to a fresh Form 11-B. The form was now nine pages. He had added a cover sheet. The cover sheet had its own form.
"It's evidence," he told me. "Also, it's been through a lot."
Mavis arrived at 8:41 in the whale fleece. She had worn it three days running. By now, two patrons had asked if it was a new reading program.
The strange thing was that people did not recognize her without the jacket.
A regular named Mr. Tibbs, who had been asking Mavis for crossword help every Wednesday since 2009, came up to the reference desk. He looked straight at her. Then he asked, "Is Mavis in today?"
"I am Mavis," said Mavis.
He studied the whale. "Well," he said, "you look very well rested."
Ten minutes later a woman asked her to find a book on whale migration. She meant it kindly. Mavis found the book in under a minute, handed it over, and then sat very still for a long time.
"I could buy another jacket," she said to me, when the desk was quiet. "I've thought about it. There are stores. It would be black, and it would be leather."
"But it wouldn't be yours."
"It would be a jacket," she said. "Mine was a library."
Rollo volunteered to cover the desk. He did this by sitting in her chair with the dictionary on his lap and saying, "Have you tried the dictionary?" to every question. He was surprisingly effective.
Mavis and I took the 10:05 Route 9 from the stop across the street.
The bus was full. I mean full the way a stadium is full.
People were standing in the aisle, looking under seats, gently lifting each other's coats to check the linings.
A man in a suit was crawling along the back row with a flashlight. Two women from the knitting circle were going seat to seat with a laminated photo of the jacket.
Everyone was looking for the jacket. Nobody looked at the woman in the whale fleece.
The driver was a woman named Wanda Sorrell. She was fifty-eight, had driven Route 9 for thirty-one years, and narrated every stop like a tour guide who had seen too much.
"Fourth and Ludlow," she said into her microphone. "Library. Nobody gets off here in a hurry. They come back out slower than they went in."
At the next stop: "Harbor and Main. Watch your step. The step has been there since 1971 and it has opinions."
"I like her," Mavis whispered.
"You'd like anyone who calls a step overdue."
"She didn't."
"She was about to."
We sat near the back. The bus went down toward the water, past the fish market and the old cannery. Mavis looked out the window the whole time.
"I drove this route," she said. "Not this bus. The bookmobile."
I knew about the bookmobile patch. I didn't know the rest.
"I was twenty-two. Fresh out of a two-year program, hired as a clerk. They gave me the bookmobile because nobody else wanted it. The heater didn't work and the brakes were a suggestion."
"And the jacket?"
"First week. The branch head then was a woman who had been in charge since before color television. She told me I was too quiet to last a winter. She said patrons would walk all over me."
She smiled a little at the window.
"I took my first paycheck down to Dock Street. Osprey had a factory store in the back of the building, and I bought the jacket off a rack."
"The man who rang me up said it would outlast me if I treated it right. Then he told me it was the best one on the rack, because he'd sewn it himself."
"Did you get his name?"
"I was twenty-two and busy being brave. If I got it, it went straight into a ledger and out of my head."
She turned the plastic sleeve with the patch over in her hands. "I put the jacket on and drove the bookmobile through the worst winter on record. Nobody walked over me once."
"So the jacket made you brave."
"No," Mavis said. "The jacket reminded me that I'd decided to be. Every morning. It's a lot to remember on your own."
She was quiet for a moment.
"And then you keep wearing it," she said. "And after a while it isn't a reminder. It's a record."
"The scuff and the zipper are from the guardrail in 1994. The elbow is thirty-nine years of leaning on a reference desk."
She shrugged. "When it went, I didn't lose a jacket. I lost the index."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't a form for it.
At the end of the line, everyone else got off. We didn't.
Wanda turned around in her seat. She looked at the plastic sleeve in Mavis's hands, and at the whale, and back again.
"You're her," she said. "The jacket lady."
"I was," said Mavis.
"Honey, you still are. A jacket's not a passport."
Wanda leaned on the steering wheel. "I've been thinking since the radio this morning. There's a man who's been riding with me most of the last month."
"Older, nice hat. Gets on at Dock Street, gets off at Fourth and Ludlow. Sits on the bench a while, then rides right back."
"Every day?"
"Most days. I figured he was lonely. Lot of folks ride just to ride."
"Monday?" I asked.
Wanda nodded slowly. "Monday he got on at the library stop around ten to one. He had a garment bag."
"He was holding it in his lap like it was a sleeping baby. Didn't put it down once. Got off at Dock Street."
Mavis was holding the patch so tightly the plastic crackled.
"Dock Street," she said.
Dock Street was a dead end.
I mean that in two ways. It literally ended at the water, and the old Osprey Moto Garments building had become loft apartments in 2006. The lobby had a fountain, a doorman and a framed photograph of the old factory floor. That photo was the only sign it had ever made anything at all.
The doorman was named Quentin and was twenty-six. He had never heard of Osprey. He'd never seen an older man in a nice hat. He had seen Sully Thorpe's broadcast on his phone and wanted to know if Mavis was "the jacket lady."
"Apparently," Mavis said.
We stood in front of the photograph for a long time. Thirty-odd people sat at sewing machines in two long rows. The faces were too small and too old to make out.
Marlene and the Tuesday Riders spent the afternoon going door to door down Dock Street. Sully broadcast from the corner. By evening, nobody had found a thing.
Mavis went home on the 6:12 bus. She did not say "overdue." That worried me more than anything.
Thursday morning was quiet. Even Sully seemed out of ideas. He spent the seven o'clock hour asking listeners to send in photos of the jacket from over the years.
At 1:04 that afternoon, Clifford came out of the workroom.
I had seen Clifford calm, thorough and deeply affected by a revised fire code. I had never seen him pale.
"The Quarantine Cart," he said. "Monday's returns. The seventy-two hours ended four minutes ago. I was checking them in."
He held up a library book. It was a thin hardback with a faded orange cover. Sticking out of the top was a folded sheet of paper.
On the outside, in neat old-fashioned capitals, it said: FOR THE LADY IN THE JACKET.
Up next: Processed
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