Six days before Founders' Day, I proved that the person who stole our clock hands in 2009 was wearing my jacket. I'm Marjorie Pell, the town's old newspaper archivist. The proof came off a backup tape at clips.com, and it had my own handwriting on it.
Dot sat in my kitchen with the flashlight pointed at her own face. She does that when she's thinking.
"Marjorie," she said, "I have to ask."
"I know."
"Did you lend it to someone?"
I opened my mouth to say no. Then I closed it, because I had just remembered who I was.
I keep a lending log. I have kept one since 1979.
Every time I lend something, I write it down. The item, the accession number, who has it, when, and the weather. I added the weather in 1986, after someone returned my umbrella and claimed it hadn't rained.
My mother calls the lending log the reason I have so few friends. My friends call it the reason they return things.
The log for 2009 was in shoebox 2009-001. It was a green notebook with a rubber band. Dot held the flashlight. I turned to October.
October 3: casserole dish to the Lutheran church, sunny. October 9: ladder to Hollis, which explains why Hollis no longer climbs ladders. October 12: three folding chairs to the library, drizzle.
October 16, 9:40 p.m.
MP-2001-007 (windbreaker, navy) lent to A.Q. Raining hard.
Returned Oct. 19, dry, folded. Folded better than I fold.
Dot read it twice. Then she clicked her pen.
"A.Q.," she said.
There is only one A.Q. in Harrow Falls. He has a key, a brass plaque, and a crank the size of a tire iron.
"Arlo," I said.
I remembered then. It came back the way a smell does.
It had been pouring that night. I'd been working late on the centennial edition, the one that never ran. Arlo knocked on the Courier door at twenty to ten, soaked through.
He said he had to check something on the tower before the ceremony. He asked if I had a coat.
I lent him my windbreaker. I wrote it in the log. Then I went home and forgot about it.
Three days later, the whole town was talking about stolen clock hands. A windbreaker that came back folded did not seem like news.
"You never put it together," Dot said.
"I never had a reason to. He's the clock keeper. Of course he went up the tower."
"At two in the morning?"
I did not have an answer for that.
"I'm making him a card," Dot said. She took out a fresh one.
"He's already in there," I said. "You told me once. Card one."
Dot stopped with her pen in the air. She looked, for a second, almost embarrassed.
"Card one is just alphabetical," she said. "Don't read into it."
Quist does not come first alphabetically. I let that go.
The next morning, before I could decide what to do about Arlo, Bunny Szabo came to my garage.
She was holding a pie. It was a chocolate pie with a blank face. She held it in front of her like a shield.
"I filmed it," she said.
I took the pie. It seemed like the polite thing to do.
"I start the pies at two," she said. "I always have. That night I went out back for some air."
She set her keys down on a shoebox. "There was somebody on the catwalk."
"At two in the morning."
"In the rain. I had a new phone. I'd never filmed anything with it. So I filmed that."
"You put it on clips.com."
"My nephew had shown me the site. He said you could keep videos there. I didn't know how else to keep it."
She shook her head. "I thought I'd made it private. There was a button. I pushed it."
I emailed Teddy while she stood there. He answered in under a minute.
Oh no. Was it uploaded in October 2009?
There was a bug on clips.com that fall. The private button saved your choice, then ignored it. We called it the Toggle Incident.
Around six hundred videos went public by accident. I'm so sorry. I wasn't here yet, but I'm still sorry.
"Why didn't you say anything?" I asked Bunny. "Seventeen years."
She looked at the floor. "Because I saw the jacket, Marge."
"On a video that looks like soup?"
"On my phone, the next morning, I zoomed in. I saw the yellow zipper. I knew whose it was."
"You thought it was me."
"I thought you must have had a reason. You always have a reason. You have a reason for numbering your garage."
She swallowed. "I wasn't going to be the one to turn you in. So I said nothing. And I made a pie with no hands on it, so I'd have to look at it every day."
"The Missing Minute."
"I'm not proud of it. It's my best seller."
"And you logged in last week."
"I heard the archive was closing. I watched it again, to see if I'd been wrong. Four times."
She wiped her eyes. "Then I heard Dot in the diner, and I panicked, and I deleted it. To protect you."
"You were the four views," I said.
"I was the four views. I'm sorry. I was wrong, wasn't I?"
"About the jacket, no," I said. "About the person, yes."
Bunny went very still. "Then who?"
"I'm going to find out on Sunday," I said. "Bring a pie."
After she left, Dot came out of my kitchen. She had been listening through the door with a glass, which she claims is an investigative technique.
"Well," she said. "That's Bunny's card done."
"You had Bunny?"
"I have everybody, Marjorie. That's the point of having everybody."
She went home. I sat in the garage for a while. I thought about Bunny, carrying my guilt around for seventeen years like a tray. I thought about the guilt pie.
Then I emailed Teddy one more time.
The uploader was a friend of mine. She deleted the video to protect me. She thought I was the thief.
That might be the nicest reason anyone has ever deleted anything on clips.com. Most people delete their old haircuts.
Thanks for being one of our 731 active users. Gary says hi.
On Sunday, at five to nine, I was standing at the bottom of the courthouse tower when Arlo came across the square.
He saw me and slowed down. He did not stop. He unlocked the door and held it open, as if he'd been expecting me for seventeen years.
"Stairs are steep," he said. "Hundred and twelve."
"I know. I have the blueprints."
"Course you do."
We climbed. At the top, the clockworks filled a small wooden room. There were gears the size of dinner plates and a long pendulum, swinging behind glass. Arlo fitted a heavy crank into its socket.
He wound it. Forty turns. I counted. He didn't say anything until it was done.
Then he wiped the crank with his rag and looked at me.
"Your shoeboxes," he said. "I wondered when they'd get me."
"It was in the lending log," I said. "October sixteenth. Raining hard."
He almost smiled. "You wrote down the weather."
"I always write down the weather."
"Most people would have forgotten a jacket."
"Most people don't own a jacket with a serial number."
He sat down on a wooden crate next to the mechanism. The pendulum ticked behind him. For a while he just listened to it.
"I didn't steal them, Marge," he said at last. "I need you to know that before anything else."
"Then where are they?"
He looked up at the blank inside of the clock face. The morning light came through it, white and empty.
"That's the thing," he said. "I don't know. I had them for one night. I've been looking for them ever since."
Up next: Lot 44
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