12 episodes · 4h 35m
Lost and Found
One thing somebody left on a bus, and the person it belonged to. A brown tag, a ledger number, and a clerk with a telephone and ninety days.
Read the back cover
From nineteen fifty-three to nineteen eighty-eight, Vesta ran the lost-and-found window at the bus depot in a county-seat town in northern Iowa. A little window with a shelf and a bell, in the back corner by the rest rooms, and behind it a room the size of a big closet with shelves to the ceiling.
Everything anybody left on a bus came to that room. She tagged it, wrote it in the ledger, and put it on a shelf, and if nobody came for it in ninety days it went to the Salvation Army or the auction or the incinerator. Gloves, umbrellas, hats, eyeglasses. Fourteen sets of false teeth. One live chicken.
Each episode is one thing, and how she found out whose it was, or did not, and what it turned out to mean. She is not a detective. She is a clerk with patience, a telephone, and a very good memory for what people are ashamed to come and ask for.