My name is Marjorie Pell, retired newspaper archivist. Ten days before Founders' Day, I found a 2009 clips.com video of someone stealing our clock hands. Now the person who posted it had woken up.
At 3:17 the afternoon before, the uploader of "test test" had logged into clips.com for the first time in seventeen years.
At 9:02 the next morning, the video was gone.
The page still loaded. But where the video used to be, there was a gray box. It said, This video is no longer available.
I sat and looked at the gray box for a long time. Then I called Dot. Then I emailed Teddy.
They deleted it.
Yeah, I saw. I'm sorry. The uploader can delete their own videos. That's allowed.
BUT. Deleting removes the public copy. It doesn't touch the tapes. Nobody touches the tapes but me, and I'm still looking.
Also, small thing. Did you tell anyone about the video? We've had a lot of new signups today.
I had told Dot. Dot had told Bunny. Bunny, apparently, had told no one. But forty people had been in the diner when Dot told her.
By noon, it was all over Harrow Falls. By one, people were checking clips.com on their phones in the bank line.
By two, the clips.com homepage had a little banner. Welcome, new users! By evening, Teddy had emailed me again.
Thanks for being one of our 412 active users!
I've had to explain to Gary what a spike is.
Nobody had seen the video but me, Dot, and four mystery viewers. That did not stop anyone from describing it.
By dinnertime, the figure on the catwalk was six feet tall. By breakfast the next day, it had a beard and a limp. Someone at the hardware store swore it had been carrying a cat.
The only detail everyone kept was the jacket. And everyone in Harrow Falls knew who had the jackets.
The first person to come to my garage was Hollis Drummond. He is sixty-seven and used to cover high school football for the Courier. He arrived in his car, because his knees no longer go anywhere voluntarily.
"Marge," he said, through the window. "I hear I'm a suspect."
"You're a card," I said. "It's not the same thing."
"I haven't climbed a flight of stairs since 2008. I had to be carried out of my own retirement party."
"I remember. I have the photo."
"Of course you do." He sighed. "Look. I came to tell you something."
He leaned out of the window. "That windbreaker in the video. Was the zipper yellow?"
I closed my eyes and replayed it. Rain on the lens. A navy shape. A flash of yellow at the collar.
"Yes."
"Then it was a 2001 jacket. In 2004 they ordered more. Same color, but those had black zippers. Russell said the yellow ones looked like a bumblebee in mourning."
"There were more jackets?"
"Twelve more. In 2004. But only the first nine had yellow zippers."
I knew this. Some part of me must have known it. I had probably filed it. But it made the list very short again.
"So it's me, you, or Pruitt," I said.
"And I can't climb," Hollis said. "And Pruitt was at a chicken dance."
He did not say the rest. He didn't have to. He drove away slowly, the way people drive past an accident.
The town council met that Thursday. It was supposed to be about Founders' Day. It was about me.
I sat in the third row with Dot. Arlo Quist sat in the front row with his arms folded, the way he always does. He did not look back at me once.
Gil Haverkamp went through the agenda. The bandstand. The parking. The cake.
Then he cleared his throat. "And on the subject of the clock," he said, "I want to address the rumors."
Fifty heads turned toward me. I could feel them, like weather.
"There's been talk," Gil said. "About a video, and a jacket. Now, Marjorie Pell has served this town for thirty-four years. She is the last person who'd do something like this."
"Thank you, Gil."
"Is there anything you'd like to tell us, Marjorie?"
It was very quiet. Somebody's chair creaked. I stood up.
"I didn't take the clock hands," I said. "I don't know who did. I'm going to find out. I'd ask the council to wait on the new hands until I do."
"The aluminum hands are paid for," Gil said, gently. "They arrive Monday. Founders' Day is a week from Saturday."
"Then I have until a week from Saturday."
I sat down. Dot patted my hand.
Arlo, in the front row, got up and walked out, the way he had at the last meeting. I told myself it was the parking meters again. There were no parking meters on the agenda.
The next week was the longest of my life, and I have read every edition of the Courier from 1952 onward.
People were kind about it, mostly. That was the worst part. At the post office, Lorraine gave me my stamps without making small talk.
At the diner, Bunny gave me a free slice of pie. She did not look at me while she did it.
"It's guilt pie," Dot said. "She's giving you guilt pie."
"Why would Bunny feel guilty?"
"Not her guilt. Yours. It's a pie for a guilty person. You've been pie-profiled."
I went home and opened shoeboxes. I am not sure what I was looking for. Possibly I wanted proof that I was a person who did not do things like this.
The proof was not there. You cannot file an absence.
Dot came over every evening that week. She brought soup, and her recipe box, and an opinion about everyone in town.
"Hollis looked shifty at the pharmacy," she said on Wednesday.
"Hollis was buying knee cream."
"That's what a shifty person would buy."
She was trying to cheer me up. It was working a little. It's hard to feel like a criminal while someone is accusing a man of knee cream.
On Friday, Hollis sent me a card in the mail. It said Thinking of you, which is what people send when someone is sick. I filed it anyway.
I read the clock file instead, all four shoeboxes of it. I read my own clips of my own town, looking for my own name. It was in there forty times. Every one of them was a byline.
On Monday, the aluminum hands arrived. They came in a long cardboard box and were placed in the courthouse lobby, where people could look at them.
People mostly looked at them and then at the tower. Then they looked at me.
On Monday night, Teddy emailed.
I found it.
Tape 2009-C, slot 14. It took eleven tries. The tape drive made a noise like a goose. But the original file is intact.
It's sharper. I'm sending it now. You might want to sit down.
Gary is sitting down. Gary is a plant, so he's always sitting down, but still.
The file came through at 11:48 p.m. Dot came over in her bathrobe. She had a flashlight, though every light in my kitchen was on.
"For atmosphere," she said.
The original was still grainy. It was still raining. But now I could see the catwalk railings, and the bolts on the clock face, and the shape of the ladder.
At thirty-six seconds, the figure turned. I paused it.
I zoomed in on the collar. There was a small square of white inside the navy fabric. A label.
It had black marker on it, slightly smeared by the rain. But I could read it. I could have read it in the dark.
It said MP-2001-007.
I write those labels myself. I put them on my casserole dishes, my snow shovel, and the garage. I had sewn that one into the collar of my Courier windbreaker in 2001.
It was my jacket.
I had absolutely no idea who was wearing it.
Up next: The Lending Log
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