The Detective of Missing Sundays

The first client walked into Ines Marlow's office on a Tuesday that felt suspiciously like a Wednesday. He held his hat in both hands the way people do when they've misplaced something they don't yet know the name of.

"I can't find my Sunday," he said.

Ines gestured to the chair opposite her desk. She kept two chairs in her office: one for people and one for the coat she never wore. She poured tea into a cup that had lost its saucer a decade ago and pushed it across the wood.

"Tell me what you remember," she said.

The man — a piano tuner named Bellamy — scratched behind his ear. "Saturday, I remember. I ate a pear over the sink. I clipped the hedge. I meant to call my sister. Then it was Monday and my shoes were by the door but they weren't muddy, and I always walk to the reservoir on Sundays, and my shoes are always muddy."

"And your sister?"

"I never called."

Ines wrote pear, hedge, unmuddied shoes, unmade call in her notebook. She had a whole notebook for small hours. Underneath, in a smaller hand, she added: third one this month.

Ines had been a detective of ordinary things for eleven years. She had found a woman's laugh after it had gone missing for a winter. She had located a boy's patience in the pocket of an old coat. She had once, memorably, recovered an entire Thursday afternoon from beneath a couch, along with two hair clips and a receipt for parsley.

But Sundays were harder. Sundays were slippery by design.

She began, as she always did, by walking. She walked past the bakery where the woman with the flour-dusted forearms was rolling out something for Monday. She walked past the launderette, where a man was folding a shirt with the concentration of someone defusing a bomb. She walked past the little park with the crooked bench, and the crooked bench was empty, which felt, somehow, like evidence.

By evening she had five more clients. A schoolteacher. A widower. A pair of twins who had lost the same Sunday between them, like a coin that had rolled under a shared bed. A young man who kept insisting he was fine, he was fine, only he had bought flowers on Saturday and by Monday they had already begun to turn, and where had that gone, that whole soft middle of things?

Ines wrote it all down. Then she went home and sat at her kitchen table and looked at her own week.

She could not, if she was honest, remember last Sunday either.

The Hours That Nobody Kept

The library kept a room in the basement for old newspapers, and old newspapers, Ines had learned, were the closest thing a city had to a diary. She read Sundays backward. The Sundays of forty years ago were fat with them — church notices, and picnic weather, and long soft essays about nothing in particular. Somebody's grandmother had won a prize for her plum jam. Somebody's uncle had taught a dog to shake hands.

The recent Sundays were thinner. Then thinner. Then blank spaces where the paper hadn't been printed at all, because who read a paper on Sunday anymore, and anyway there was nothing to report.

She sat with this for a long time. Then she went to see Odalie.

Odalie sold clocks out of a shop that always smelled faintly of lemon oil and older weather. She was ninety-one and had opinions about everything, especially time, which she believed had been mishandled by every generation including her own.

"Sundays," Ines said.

Odalie clicked her tongue. "Sundays. Yes. They've been going for a while."

"Going where?"

Odalie shrugged in the enormous, weather-worn way of very old women. "Where do any hours go when nobody keeps them? Sundays used to be kept. You woke slow, you ate slow, you sat on a porch and didn't do a single useful thing until dusk. That kept them. Now." She waved a hand at the street. "Now Sunday is just a Monday you haven't started yet."

"So they leave."

"So they leave," Odalie agreed. "Hours are like cats. They stay where they're fed."

Ines stood in the shop a long time, listening to a hundred clocks disagree politely about the hour. Then she asked, "Can they be called back?"

Odalie smiled. She had three teeth missing and it did not diminish the smile at all.

"You can try," she said. "But you'll have to feed them."

Ines went home and wrote a letter to every client. It was a strange letter for a detective to write. It did not describe a suspect. It did not name a thief. It contained, instead, a set of instructions, which she copied out by hand seven times because she believed handwriting carried a small weight that typing did not.

The instructions were as follows.

On Sunday, do one slow thing. Peel an orange without hurrying. Sit somewhere and do not check the hour. Call the person you meant to call last week. Walk to the reservoir even if your shoes get muddy. Make the tea and drink the tea and do not, while drinking the tea, think about anything else.

The Sundays are not lost. They are only hungry. Feed them and they will come home.

She sent the letters on a Friday, which felt correct.

On the Monday that followed, Bellamy the piano tuner came back to her office. His shoes, she noticed, were muddy. He set them carefully on the mat before sitting down.

"I called my sister," he said.

"And?"

"She cried a little. Then she laughed. Then she said I should come for lunch next week." He turned the hat in his hands. "I remembered it, this time. The whole day. I ate a pear. I walked. The light on the water was — " He stopped. He looked embarrassed, the way people do when a small ordinary thing has moved them more than they expected.

"Yes," Ines said. "That's how it works."

She poured him tea. He did not check his watch while he drank it. Outside, somewhere, a bell was ringing, and it was ringing slow, the way bells used to when the week had all its parts.

Ines opened her notebook of small hours and, on a fresh page, wrote: One Sunday, recovered. Location: kitchen sink, reservoir path, telephone. Condition: excellent. Slightly warm.

Then she closed the book, because it was time, she decided, to go home and peel an orange.