The curious case of the $10 mystery

Bleary-eyed from hours of lilypad-leaping online, I was just about to close the laptop when i noticed a FB post from Narrative Urge, the curious spirit behind the delicious communal riddle known as the $10 art mystery:

♥ A Lost Boy on Ponce waits for rescue now
This rhyme by Frederica is meant to tell you how
Paging Charles McNair! 980 on the door
Find it find it find it please, the Bob-A-Lou on 44 ♥


My heart hopped.
I'd given up hoping one of the coveted envelopes (containing a $10 bill, a note and a snippet of prose from someone else, often an Atlanta writer) might land in my mailbox, since I'm practically invisible anymore compared to my successful writer pals Jessica Handler, Kate Sweeney, Gina Webb and Suzanne Van Atten – all of whom had either been sent a letter or had their work quoted in one.
But if I could figure out the clues ..... I could be part of the game too!
My inner Harriet the Spy purred to life. Hmmm. Ponce and Frederica? The library! It's at 980 Ponce de Leon. Charles McNair's brilliant novel "Land o' Goshen" has a club called the Bob-A-Lou!
Breathless, I threw on a ballcap and glasses and grabbed the keys. I could have walked there and back in 15 minutes but felt the pressure of time – the clues were already 20 minutes old!
Once there, I hurried back to the fiction stacks, scanned the shelves of Mc names for Charles and boom, I cradled his book in my hands. It fell open to Page 44, where a white envelope, folded in half, had been tucked between the pages.
Two words were written neatly in blue marker on the front – "for you" – just over the envelope window where Alexander Hamilton's sharply etched chin peeked through.
I stuffed the fat white square in my pocket and peered around to see if anyone was watching. Maybe Narrative Urge herself was here, waiting to see who solved the riddle?
If she was, I couldn't tell –  so I raced back home to open envelope #77.
It contained the hand-written letter I'd seen quoted before:
"Thank you for opening the envelope. The money is real. This is not an ad campaign or marketing ploy. It's an art project. Please use the hints and find us!" Signed Henri Rechatin, Oct. 5, 1966. A purple marker squiggle set off the lines "a site to see: haiku for you" and "robotic cranes dance in singapore. in taiwan appears tornadoes!"
Little black hearts enclosing tinier magenta ones opened and closed the missive.
My literary snippet – "Right, I'm classically trained. And I draw on that, but also I rebel against it, when I think it's important to tell the story" – turned out to be from an interview with Atlanta music legend Bill Taft, whose mournful horn solos helped lodge Smoke's "Another Reason to Fast" in my car's cassette player for months after it came out in 1995.
I spread the pieces out and studied them, surfed the Web to get up to speed on the unfolding story, took a few pictures.
"Follow your narrative urge!" exhorts the mystery sender in looping blue marker script across the bottom of the envelope.
Which made me wonder if this puzzle wasn't screaming so much to be solved as joined.

The whole delicious adventure made me want to round up as many participants as possible over drinks, line the literary snippets up, end to end – and see what kind of new story we could make from the mystery bits.