I meet Elena at the dumpling place that opens before the city even checks its phone. Steam fogs the windows in soft rectangles, and every table smells like ginger and luck. We don’t sit. We stand shoulder to shoulder at the rail near the register, chopsticks resting on paper lids, tea searing our palms.
“No email,” I say, because it’s our off-book rule, our détente. “Just soup and facts.”
“Soup and facts,” she echoes, tearing a dumpling in half to let it cool. “Vendor first, then whoever their paperwork points to. You don’t speak unless I nod.”
“Copy,” I say, even though my tongue wants the kind of righteous speech that gets people ringing doorbells and making mistakes. The creek behind the studio has left a high-tide gloss along the curb outside; morning light splits on it like glass. I can taste the burnt sugar that rides in from the factory, sweet over the ginger, a city mood I can’t wash off.
Elena holds out a napkin. “You’ve got ink on your thumb.”
“Catalog number,” I say. “Iris gave me a supplier ID. The cap that makes curls like the one you bagged.”
She nods once. “Good. Let’s keep it a number, not a post.”
We drive with the heater on low and the radio off. The van’s old insulation stores last night’s voices like trapped lightning. I turn my Night Choir pin backward on my lapel so the enamel cherub faces me, not the world, and I remind myself why I’m here: not for a dramatic knock, but for a receipt with a trail.
The rental warehouse still has Halloween glitter in the cracks of its loading dock. Inside, rows of shoes sit toe-to-heel on metal shelves—black character, soft jazz, a rainbow of scuffs rubbed into a uniform dark. Rubber caps wink where light hits them. A floor fan pushes air that smells like leather and acetone and coffee that’s learned to be bitter.
A clerk in a denim apron squints at us over a ledger. Elena does the nod; I keep my voice zipped.
“Morning,” she says, badge bent open just enough to be persuasive, not theatrical. “We’re here about inventory—specific product code GRT-2190, and the clients you ship bulk to. We’re not here for names we don’t need.”
The clerk glances at a manager in the office cube. The manager—a woman with a key ring heavy enough to anchor a boat—slides open the plexi window. “You’ll need a subpoena for the complete list,” she says, bored and careful at once, “but I can tell you who uses them most. Safety reason.”
Elena waits. The silence in her hands is a tool; I watch her wield it better than my microphone ever did.
“Community theaters,” the manager says at last. “School musicals. And the Little Larchmont Playhouse buys them by the carton, for rentals and to glue new caps before returns. They’ve been doing a capital repair since last spring. Donor gave them a trimmer to replace that old screamer that would shred the edge.”
Old screamer. Rotary sings. My notes click into a measure I recognize.
“We’ll stop there,” Elena says. “Appreciate the cooperation.”
The manager lifts a shoulder. “We keep people’s feet on the stage,” she says, almost tender. “We don’t want trouble.”
Micro-hook #1: As Elena signs a business card for reference, a man in the back room drops a shoe; the rubber cap hits the concrete with a tiny, neat tick. It sounds exactly like a metronome’s first breath.
I swallow and follow Elena out. We step into air that feels rinsed. The creek scent has drifted up the block to meet the warehouse’s solvent tang, and now the city tastes balanced on my tongue—sweet, sharp, awake.
“Larchmont,” Elena says, as we slide into the car. “That’s twenty minutes north if traffic is kind. Playhouse has a board that believes in brass plaques and donor newsletters.”
“LC Arts,” I say before I earn it. The letters make my mouth feel like I’ve bitten foil. He loves initials. He loves mirrors.
She cuts me a side-eye. “Let’s see the wall before you write the ending.”
The Little Larchmont Playhouse is brick and earnest. A cherry-red bench sits under a poster for a summer Shakespeare that definitely didn’t break even. The front doors are locked; the side door is propped with a sandbag and a sign that reads LOAD-IN — PLEASE DON’T STEAL OUR PENS. Inside, a volunteer with a lanyard and a sweater the color of applause greets us with a smile that collapses when Elena lifts her badge.
“We just need the office,” Elena says. “Fifteen minutes. I’ll be polite, you’ll be honest, and no one gets a subpoena for breakfast.”
The volunteer bobbles their head and leads us past a storage nook where racks of costumes smell like talc and old laughter. I spot a cherub face in gilt, half-hidden behind a coil of rope and a paint tray—someone’s prop from a show that broke hearts. The motif keeps following me, a chorus I can’t unhear.
In the office, the manager on duty is a man with kind eyes and a clipboard. He gestures at mismatched chairs and offers us peppermint tea like he’s been trained to disarm.
Elena passes; I take the cup just to have something hot in my hands. “We’re tracing a donor-related equipment purchase,” I say softly when she nods to let me speak. “Rotary trimmer for rubber caps, possibly the same caps you put on rental shoes. We’re trying to verify shipping and donor details.”
The manager thinks, pen tapping his clipboard in a rhythm that could teach a heartbeat bad habits. He winces, catches himself. “We do have a new trimmer,” he says. “Came with a donation last spring. The donor’s representative was… memorable.”
Elena leans an elbow on the desk. “How so?”
“He stood right there,” the manager says, pointing to a scar across the wood. “Tapped his ring on the counter while I explained our safety needs. Tap-tap between sentences, steady as a clock. He didn’t look at my face so much as—past me. He said he liked small houses because the stakes are higher when you can see every eyelash. He signed the gift ‘LC Arts.’”
My skin goes cold in a clean stripe down my spine. “Do you remember the ring?” I ask. “Shape? Metal?”
“Plain,” he says. “No stone. A little scuffed. Sounded… hollow.” He blinks at his own memory, surprised it shows up with sound. “He wore it on his right hand. The tapping—sorry, it drove me nuts. I put down a brochure to stop it.”
Elena’s pen doesn’t move. “We’ll need the receipt for the donation,” she says. “And any contact email or address.”
He fumbles in a drawer, extracts a manila folder full of neat chaos, and slides a photocopy across. I catch the details like a net: LC Arts in clean sans-serif, a donation line item for “Tooling: rotary trimmer,” and an email written by hand on a printout: supply@lightcue.org.
The word hits me between the ribs: light cue—his language. My tea tastes like paper for a second.
“We also have a plaque,” the manager says, almost apologetic. “Board insisted. Out in the lobby.”
We step out to see it because of course we do. The brass square is shiny with recent touches; patrons polish donor names with their hopeful fingers like they’re rubbing a worry stone. LC Arts gleams near the bottom, and next to it, a tiny engraved cherub mask tips its head with ruined sweetness.
I put my hands in my pockets to keep from wiping it clean.
“Can I photocopy the receipt?” Elena asks. “Or you can email it to my work account, but paper is faster.”
He takes the copy back and hesitates. “I don’t want trouble,” he says. “I just want kids not to break their necks on our stage.”
“Then you want this,” I say, and I make my voice a steady place to step. “We’re trying to understand why someone buys a trimmer for a small house while staging harm in the dark.”
He nods and walks the paper to the aging machine. It coughs and warms and spits out a copy that smells like electricity and old office supplies.
Micro-hook #2: As he lifts the lid, the overhead fluorescents flicker once—harmless ballast stutter—but a memory slams me: half-light, tunnel, recorded voice. Dusk can be installed. So can generosity.
Back in the office, Elena rests the copy on the desk and slides her phone from her pocket. She doesn’t connect to the theater’s Wi-Fi. She doesn’t connect to mine. She opens a carrier tool that looks like a calculator if you’re not paying attention and types with brisk, non-showy hands.
“What are you doing?” I ask, quiet.
“Looking at the domain trail,” she says. “Lightcue dot org—registered last year through a privacy service, but cheap. Cheap services leave drips.” She eyes the screen, then writes a sequence on the corner of the copy and taps again. “There we go. Name servers point to an old shared host. Someone parked a portfolio there in 2014 and forgot to harden it. Archive snapshots still reference the A record.”
I lean over, and she tilts the screen away, a reflex that reminds me how much she and I have had to unlearn. “Don’t read out loud,” she says. “I want you not to know the registrar until I’ve got a warrant going. But I will tell you the domain the snapshot coughed up: lc-corcoran dot com.”
My jaw works once, no sound. My chest has room suddenly, dangerous room, the way the studio feels after I kill a feed and the world rushes in to fill it.
“You got there on a drip,” I say.
“Drip to drip,” she says. “You don’t build a case on vibes and cleverness. You build it on a boring chain of custody no one can break with a speech.”
I want to hug her, and I don’t, because she is exactly the shape of professional I’ve learned not to bruise. I settle for a nod that unknots something in my back.
“We’re still at arm’s length,” she adds, as if I need the cold water, and I do. “LC Arts could be a shell inside a shell. The ring tap could belong to a paid surrogate with notes. The email could be a one-way drop. But we just moved from rumor to route.”
“Route,” I echo. “As in: where he walked, where he gave, where he pulled the door for himself.”
The manager clears his throat, points to a photo on the office wall—two teenagers in satin jackets smiling under a cut paper garland. “Drama club,” he says. “They built that. They cried when the trimmer arrived. Said it meant we were real.”
The words land hard enough to make my fingers splay on my tea cup. Exposure heals and harms. Confession liberates and implicates. The same gift that keeps a kid from falling on a slick stage can grease the door for a man who loves to watch people teeter.
Elena pockets the copy and leaves her card, the blue stripe on it as bland as sky. “I’ll be in touch,” she says. “If anyone with a ring calls, don’t answer. If they show up, call me first.”
We step out into a lobby that smells like paint drying in a clean can. The brass plaque catches me again. I stare at the cherub face until it stops being cute and goes honest: a chipped mouth that knows what a spotlight can do when no one dims it.
Outside, the air has warmed just enough to smell like sidewalks waking up. A kid on a scooter zips by chasing his own reflection in a puddle, and for a second I see my sister at eight, knees dirty, hair a banner for whatever she wanted. I press my tongue to the roof of my mouth to stop the ache from walking out.
“Satisfied?” Elena asks as we reach the car.
“Satisfied we’re not chasing smoke,” I say. “Sobered by how well he buys keys. Determined to turn the locks anyway.”
She allows herself half a smile. “Write it down for yourself,” she says. “Not for the feed.”
I climb into the van and pull my notebook into my lap. I write:
- GRT-2190 → vendor → Larchmont.
- Office manager: ring tap, hollow sound, right hand.
- LC Arts donation → rotary trimmer → receipt shows supply@lightcue.org.
- Elena: domain drip → lc-corcoran.com.
- Plaque: cherub mask—branding echo.
Under that, I add, Philanthropy as access. It looks tidy and terrible on the page.
“This won’t hold by itself,” Elena says, reading over the list without asking. “It gets us a warrant for the rental client list. It gets me a judge who won’t roll her eyes.”
“And the hard proof?” I ask.
“Somewhere that ring has brushed the wrong thing,” she says. “A card reader, a camera that didn’t get blinded, a receipt he forgot to wash. We find it or we make him reach for it.”
I look back at the theater. The volunteer waves through the glass like we’re leaving a potluck early. In the far corner of the lobby, a bulletin board shows kids in rehearsals, cheeks flushed, feet in black shoes with new rubber that will keep them upright. I want them to dance without anyone’s myth to hold them still.
We pull away and the plaque’s cherub shrinks in the mirror until it’s only a fleck of light pretending to be holy. I flick on the wipers to clear mist I didn’t notice gathering. The van smells like coffee now, and a little like the dumplings I didn’t finish.
Micro-hook #3: My phone buzzes once. A text from an unknown number: “Check the Orpheum’s donor wall. Lower left corner. It didn’t used to have a mask.”
I don’t answer. I forward it to Elena and watch her jaw set. The creek will flood the sidewalks again tonight, and every reflection will be a double asking me who gets the light and who gets the shadow. I tighten my grip on the wheel and set a course for the next lock that needs turning.