Reporters lined the back wall as I stepped into the chamber, and I had a spiral notebook under my arm that the harbor director did not know existed.
I have written down the serial number of every motor on that dock since 1999.
It started because a fellow named Denny Kopchak had a Merc stolen off a Bayliner in the spring of that year and could not tell the deputy anything about it — not the number, not the year, nothing, and it was gone for good in about an hour. So I started walking the docks in April with a notebook, writing down slip number, boat name, motor make, and serial, and I have done it every spring for twenty-six years, and every boat owner in that marina knows I do it because half of them have called me for the number when they filled out an insurance form.
Twenty-six notebooks. My handwriting, dated.
What I did the day after that man said the words without your help, I sat at my kitchen table with a magnifying glass and read serial numbers into a phone to a detective in Erie County, and then I typed those numbers into the same places anybody can look — the boat trader sites, the classifieds, the auction listings.
Two of the three came up in eleven days. A dealer’s consignment lot outside Monroe, Michigan, listed with photographs clear enough to read the plate on the transom bracket.
The dealer had bought them off a man with a trailer and a bill of sale that turned out to be nothing. The sheriff up there matched my numbers to the ones stamped on the blocks, and it went from there, and there were four other marinas on that lake involved before it was over.
The man they arrested had never once had a key to our gate. He came in from the water at three in the morning with a jon boat and a cordless impact, which is how it is always done, and which anybody who has stood on a dock at three in the morning could have told that director for free if he’d asked one question.
They read the recovery report at that meeting. Then they read the serial numbers, off my notebook, into the public record of the city of Sandusky.
A councilwoman asked whose notebook it was. The detective said it belonged to the man the harbor director had accused, and that without it there would have been no case at all.
The director apologized at that microphone. It was not a good apology and I took it anyway.
They gave me my keys back on a Friday. The boat owners had a cookout on the launch ramp that I could not talk them out of, and somebody had a hat made that says HARBOR MASTER on it, which is not my title and which I wear.
Docks open at five-thirty. Notebook twenty-seven starts in April.