"Neither did I," said an elderly rider with a lined face and steady eyes. Silas identified him as Reyes, the oldest living charter member. Reyes gave Nolan a solemn nod and added, "Elias could be stubborn enough to make you want to throw a wrench at him. He wasn't a thief."
"Then why didn't you look for him?" Nolan asked. The question came out sharper than he intended, but he did not take it back. Silas accepted it without flinching.
"We did look. We looked in the ways we understood then, and some of those ways weren't good enough. Men said they'd seen him in another county. Someone reported a truck like his on the interstate."
"The leads evaporated. Meanwhile the accusation split people who'd trusted each other for years, and I made choices to keep this club from tearing itself apart." He paused. "You can decide later whether those choices were right."
Nolan opened the metal box again. "There's more," he said. He lifted the dark cloth and placed the wrapped object on the table, carefully, the way he might set down a machine part whose use he did not understand. Silas stopped speaking. For the first time since Nolan entered, the president looked truly afraid. "Open it," he said, and his voice had become almost gentle.
The cloth was stiff at the folds, smelling faintly of old leather and the dry interior of a sealed box. As Nolan lifted it away, an old motorcycle cut emerged, heavy and creased, its black surface polished smooth at the edges by years of use. The same raven spread its wings across the back. There were smaller patches Nolan could not interpret, names of roads and rides, marks of a history accumulated one difficult mile at a time. On the front, above a worn pocket, the title SERGEANT-AT-ARMS was stitched in white thread.
A man near the middle of the table stood so suddenly his chair scraped the floor. He remained standing with both hands braced on the tabletop, staring. Decker's mouth had gone tight. Silas reached out, then stopped before touching the leather, giving Nolan an opportunity to decide whether he wanted other hands on it. "May I?" he asked. Nolan nodded and watched Silas run two fingers along the cut's left shoulder, where the leather had been repaired with a strip of darker material.
"He caught this on a broken fence during the river ride," Silas said. "Wouldn't replace it because Carla stitched it back together, and he said her work would last longer than the factory seam." His thumb rested on the repair.
"I saw him wearing this the night before he vanished. I thought it had gone with him." Nolan looked at the stitches, tiny and even, and pictured his mother's hands bent over the thick leather. The object had moved from being a clue to being evidence of a life shared in a room Nolan had never entered.