Please Advise

Chapter One: The Eleven Percent

The Valley Metro Lost and Found occupied a room beneath the downtown transit hub that had been, at various points in its life, a boiler room, a Civil Defense supply closet, and — for eleven months in 1978 — a place where two men tried to run a sandwich shop despite the total absence of stairs, windows, doors visible from the street, or customers.

There were no windows now either. There was one door, one desk, one counter with a bell on it that rang about six times a day, and there was Lori Puckett, thirty-four years old, who had worked down there for four years and said maybe forty words a shift, most of them the word "describe."

The room held, as of that Tuesday in late March, four hundred and six umbrellas.

It held nine urns. Lori had named none of them, which she considered a personal victory, since she had named almost everything else. There was the badger, a taxidermied badger mounted on a plank, left on the 22 in November, whom she called Hubert because he looked like a Hubert and because no one was coming for him. There was a bridesmaid dress in a garment bag with the tags still attached, size eight, the color of a cough drop. There was a full set of dentures in a Tupperware container with a piece of masking tape on the lid that said, in ballpoint, DAD.

There were ninety-one single gloves. Not forty-five pairs and a spare. Ninety-one solo gloves, which meant that somewhere out in Montgomery County there were ninety-one people with one cold hand.

There was a prosthetic arm that had come in holding a pen.

There were forty-four Bibles, which was fewer than people assumed and more than Lori found comfortable.

And there was the ledger: eight and a half pounds of green-bar paper, ruled and columned, in which Lori Puckett wrote down every object that came through the door, what route it came off, what it looked like, and whether anybody ever came to get it.

Eleven percent. That was the number.

Eleven percent of everything the city of Dayton left on a bus went home again. The other eighty-nine percent sat on Lori's steel shelves in the dark with little manila tags on strings, aging quietly, waiting for somebody's memory to work.

She had done the math on a slow Thursday and never fully recovered from it.

At 9:14 that morning, the intercom on the wall crackled, and the voice of Leon Sweeney came down from dispatch like a man reading racing results.

"Basement. Basement. We got a walk-in coming down, white female, mid-sixties, described her item as, quote, a bag."

Lori pressed the button. "Copy."

"She says it's a bag with stuff in it."

"Copy."

"I'm just relaying what came over the wire, Puckett. I don't editorialize."

Leon had been a dispatcher for twenty-six years and had editorialized continuously for twenty-five of them. He was sixty-one, built like a fire hydrant that had given up on fitness, and he had covered for Lori since her first week, when she had come in at 6:40 in the morning and sat in the stairwell for forty minutes because she could not make her hand open the door. He had never once asked her why. He had simply come down the stairs with two coffees, sat on the step below hers, and told her a twelve-minute story about a driver named Pudge who had once gotten a city bus into a Taco Bell drive-through and — this was the part Leon savored — out of it.

The woman came down. She wanted a bag. Lori asked her to describe it. The woman said it was a bag. Lori asked what was in it. The woman said, "Stuff, honey," and then, after some prodding, "Two cans of pears and a curling iron," which was specific enough that Lori walked back into the stacks, came out ninety seconds later with a Kroger bag containing two cans of pears and a curling iron, and slid the log across the counter for a signature.

The woman wept. People wept down there constantly. It was very rarely about the object.

"God bless you," the woman said.

"Sign on the line with the X," said Lori.

That was the whole shape of it. Describe, retrieve, sign, leave. Lori Puckett had built a life out of the space between a question and an answer, and the life fit her like a coat off the wrong rack, which is to say it covered her.

There were exactly three people in Dayton who knew that seven years ago, for about nineteen months, Lori Puckett had been the funniest person in the Miami Valley.

There were about four hundred thousand people in the metropolitan area who knew what she had done at the end of those nineteen months, though most of them didn't attach a name to it, the way you don't attach a name to weather. They remembered a Saturday night in June of 1989, a children's hospital telethon broadcast live out of a studio on Wilmington Pike, a woman in a borrowed blazer, and four minutes that ended with the phone bank going silent as a church.

The number the hospital gave the paper afterward was eleven thousand dollars. That was what the pledges dropped by, comparing that hour to the same hour the year before. Eleven thousand dollars' worth of sick children's money, evaporated by a joke that was, in Lori's professional and unwanted opinion, extremely well constructed.

She had not been onstage since. She had not been in a room with a microphone in it since. She could not hear a bar of fanfare music without her hands going cold.

Eleven thousand dollars. Eleven percent. She had noticed. She tried very hard not to make anything of it.

At 4:40 in the afternoon, forty minutes past the point where Lori started counting tiles, a driver named Arnetta came down the stairs with the end-of-shift haul in a plastic tote. Arnetta drove the 9, which ran from the hub out through the east side and up past the industrial park and the mall, and which produced, by a wide margin, the strangest lost property in the system.

"Sweater," said Arnetta, laying things on the counter. "Sweater. Retainer, and I want it noted for the record that I am not touching that one twice. Lottery tickets, all losers, I checked. And this."

She set down a microcassette recorder.

It was black, about the size of a deck of cards and a half, scratched to a dull pewter along the edges where it had lived in somebody's pocket. There was a sticker on the back from a hardware store. The little window on the front showed a cassette inside, wound about two-thirds of the way through.

"Third time this month somebody's left one of those," said Arnetta.

"Third time it's this one," said Lori. She'd logged two others in February, same model, same scratches. They'd both been claimed within the week by a person who called ahead, which was the one procedure nobody ever followed.

"Then he'll come get it." Arnetta was already going. "That retainer, Puckett. Gloves. Both gloves."

The door closed. The fan in the ceiling did what it did. Lori looked at the recorder for a while.

Procedure on electronics was in the manual, Section 4, which she had read the way other people read their horoscopes, which is to say seriously and privately. Section 4 said: WHERE AN ITEM CONTAINS RECORDED MEDIA, STAFF SHALL REVIEW SAID MEDIA FOR IDENTIFYING INFORMATION SUFFICIENT TO EFFECT RETURN.

Shall. That was the word. Lori Puckett had spent four years in a basement obeying a document written in 1974 by a man who was almost certainly dead, and she was not going to start ignoring it now.

She wrote the time in the ledger. She wrote RECORDER, MICROCASSETTE, BLACK. She left the disposition column empty, which she always did until she was sure, and she never noticed that she left it empty, and that empty column was going to cost her her job, her privacy, and a certain amount of her dignity before Labor Day.

She rewound the tape to the beginning. She turned the volume down, because the room had a bad echo and she disliked the sound of other people's voices bouncing off the urns.

Then she pressed play.