Tammy Hauser is reunited with the missing snowshoe that disappeared from her shop window more than two years ago. Tom Morphet photo.
A single snowshoe that went missing from a Main Street storefront for more than two years mysteriously returned last week.
“Who steals one snowshoe, right?” Talia’s Treasures owner Tammy Hauser said this week. And who returns it?
Hauser said she put the classic, gut-and-rawhide snowshoe and its match in her consignment store window in the winter of 2019 or 2020 with a price listed at $55.
When one of the shoes disappeared a few weeks later, Hauser initially thought a customer may have taken it down to look at, then set it down elsewhere in her store. “I looked high and low for it.”
Hauser moved the orphaned shoe from the display window to an inventory room at the back of the store. When she gave up searching for its match, she paid the shoe’s owner the consignment fee but kept the lone shoe, thinking that its match might still turn up or perhaps she’d sell one shoe as a décor item.
About two weeks ago, a customer using the inventory room to try on pants spotted the orphaned snowshoe and asked about it. Hauser said they had a conversation and a chuckle about the missing shoe but she didn’t give it more thought until March 9, when she was putting out some winter hats at the front of the store.
There, in a laundry basket used for odds-and-ends, sat the long-missing snowshoe with a note that said “Return 2 Owner.”
“I was taken aback,” she said.
Hauser checked a security camera and found grainy footage of a man in a long coat shuffling about near the display window the previous day, apparently pulling an object from his coat.
She said she’s not interested in prosecuting the person returning it, in part because she’s not sure the same person pilfered the shoe. Perhaps the person who returned the shoe had overheard her conversation with the pants customer and knew the location of the missing shoe, she said.
Or perhaps the pants customer mentioned the story of the missing snowshoe to someone else who knew its whereabouts.
“I’m just chalking it up to another interesting Haines story,” Hauser said.
She said she plans to finally sell the shoes, but she won’t be displaying them again in her store window.