I took the report. I didn't know what else to do. Agnes Nygaard owned the building, and Pairly wanted her lease, and she was standing at my counter with one navy sock.
"Description?" I said, pen ready.
"Navy wool. White anchors. Size large." She spoke in the clipped tone of someone dictating to a typist.
"They were my husband's. He was a harbor pilot for thirty-one years. I keep them in the cedar chest, and I have them laundered every other Sunday."
"Do they need it?"
"That is not the point, Miss Lindgren."
I wrote it down. Her nephew did the laundering here, she explained.
Three weeks ago, one anchor sock hadn't come home. He'd told her there was a book. She had read about the book on the message board.
"I don't use the board," she added. "My nephew printed it out."
I gave her an entry number. Then I turned to the found column, because I always check, and ran my finger back three weeks.
There it was.
Entry 512. Navy wool, white anchors. Found: Machine 3. Finder: H. Navarro. Status: finder holding, handoff pending.
I looked up. So did Tamsin. So did the man at Machine 12, who had been following events closely since the coral ticket.
Hector Navarro was very slowly raising his newspaper back up in front of his face.
"Hector," I said.
"Mm."
"Entry 512."
"Partly cloudy," said Hector, from behind the sports section.
"You've been holding it for three weeks."
The newspaper came down. Hector looked, for the first time since I'd known him, like a man without a forecast. He reached into the inside pocket of his tweed jacket. He took out a navy sock with white anchors, folded neatly into a square.
"I was going to call," he said. "Every Thursday, I was going to call. Then I'd get to the phone, and I'd think about the five-day outlook. Then I'd sit down again."
"You've had it in your jacket," said Mrs. Nygaard.
"It's a very good jacket," said Hector. "Very secure."
"How did you know it was mine?"
"Your nephew folds by the window," said Hector. "He held up the other one and said, 'Aunt Agnes is going to disinherit me.' I didn't need a radar for that."
They looked at each other across the laundromat. It was a long way, past the folding tables and the giant coral sock.
"Why didn't you just put it in the box?" she asked.
Hector glanced at the Sock Drop with real contempt. "Because the rule," he said, "is hand to hand."
He stood up. He crossed the floor, a little stiffly, the way men his age cross floors when they're trying not to look like they're crossing floors. He held out the sock.
Agnes Nygaard took it. "Thank you," she said.
"I did the weather on Channel 9," Hector said, all at once. "For thirty years. You wrote in once, in 1998. You said I'd called for sun on the Fourth of July and it rained on your husband's boat."
She stared at him. "You remember that?"
"I remember all my mistakes," said Hector. "It's an occupational hazard. I never wrote back. I should have written back."
There was a pause. It was a very old pause, from a very long time ago, finally getting its turn.
"There's a coffee shop across the street," said Mrs. Nygaard.
"There is," Hector agreed. "I've been told it's very good for this."
They left together. She didn't take his arm. But she walked close enough that she could have.
Tamsin watched them go through the window. She opened her mouth to say a number. Then she closed it again and wiped her eyes with a dryer sheet.
"I'm not rating that," she said. "I can't. It's off the scale."
I stood at the counter for a long time after they'd gone. I had the ledger open in front of me. The Sock Drop hummed beside the change machine, its heart rotating cheerfully at nobody.
Solveig's red ink was right there on the inside cover. No drop boxes. The sock goes back hand to hand. And underneath it, in my memory: Because otherwise nobody learns anything.
I'd thought the rule was about socks. It wasn't. It was about the walk across the floor. The rule just made sure you took it.
Hector had carried that sock for three weeks because there was no easier way to give it back.
If the Sock Drop had been there first, he'd have dropped it in the slot. Mrs. Nygaard would have gotten a stamped envelope. Nobody would have remembered 1998.
I closed the ledger. I walked over to the Sock Drop. I found the plug, behind the change machine, and pulled it out.
The heart froze. Then the screen went black.
The man at Machine 12 started a slow clap. Nobody joined in, but he finished it anyway.
I called Sloane. I told her the pilot was over, and that she could have the last week's money back. She was quiet for a moment.
"You'll lose the laundromat," she said. She didn't say it like a threat. She said it like a weather report.
"Maybe," I said. "Come on Saturday anyway. Seven o'clock. Bring your tablet."
Then I asked Silas to open the kiosk.
"It's not my machine," he said.
"I know. I'm asking anyway."
He looked at me for a second. Then he got his toolbox. He had the side panel off in four minutes, which made me think he had been planning it for a while.
Inside, in a coral bin, were three hundred and nine socks that had never gone home.
Tamsin and I logged every one of them by hand. It took two nights and a lot of sunflower seeds. We matched a hundred and forty pairs in the ledger. Then we called every finder and every owner, one by one, and invited them to the laundromat on Saturday.
"What do I tell them it is?" Tamsin asked.
I thought about it. "Tell them it's a handoff."
Saturday night, The Gentle Cycle was full.
Not with laundry. With people.
They stood between the washers and sat on the folding tables, which you're still not supposed to do. Odette brought sourdough. Wallace brought a tray of sausages. Rosalind parked the 14 at the curb on her break and came in wearing the brown-and-orange scarf.
Ferris and Mrs. Okada brought two jars of pickled tomatoes, labeled in matching handwriting.
I stood at the counter with the ledger. Every few minutes I read out an entry number. Two people would come forward from opposite sides of the room.
One held out a sock. The other took it. Most of them said thank you. A lot of them said something after that.
Sloane stood by the dead Sock Drop with her tablet. At first she was typing notes. After an hour, she was just counting.
"Fourteen," she said to me, around nine. She sounded bewildered.
"Fourteen of them have gone across the street. I watched them. They just go."
"That's coffee," I said. "You should track it."
Silas spent the whole evening leaning against Machine 7 with his hands in his pockets. He didn't come forward for anything. But every time I read out a number, he looked up.
It was as if he were waiting for one in particular. I read a hundred and forty entries. None of them was the one.
"Who are you waiting for?" I asked him, during a lull.
"Nobody," said Silas. He patted the lid of Machine 7. "Keeping her company. It's a big night for a washing machine."
"It's not the machine," I said, before he could.
He almost smiled. "Don't steal my line."
Hector and Mrs. Nygaard sat together by the window. She was wearing the navy coat, unbuttoned, which Tamsin and I agreed was a major development. On her way out, she stopped at my counter.
"I'll have my answer on the lease by Monday," she said. "In writing."
"Of course," I said, and didn't breathe again until the door closed.
The last guests left after eleven. I was stacking chairs when Machine 7 made a sound I had never heard a machine make.
It was a long, low grinding, like a filing cabinet falling slowly downstairs. Then a clunk. Then silence.
Silas was across the room in about two seconds. He put his palm flat on the lid. He listened. Then he got down on the floor, took the flashlight out of his toolbox, and shone it into the narrow gap under the drum.
He was quiet for a long time.
"Pippa," he said finally. "I need to take it apart. All the way."
"Is it the bearing?"
He didn't answer right away. When he did, his voice sounded strange, as if the words cost him something.
"I think," Silas said, "it might be the machine."
Up next: Entry One
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