The workshop lives below streetline, a basement bite cut into a rowhouse spine. When I push through the metal door, the air changes—cool, mineral, layered with plaster and rubber and the faint sweetness of release agent. Dust floats in the one pane of high window like it learned choreography. Wall racks shoulder molds in gentle, uncanny ranks: cherubs and comedy masks, half-faces with closed eyes, jawless profiles, a nose-and-brow that could belong to anyone.
“Hands in pockets,” Elena murmurs behind me. Her voice lands soft but leaves no room for exceptions.
“Copy,” I say. I tuck my fingers deep and let my eyes do the touching.
A woman with a buzzed gray crop looks up from the bench. Her apron is a smock of old manufacturers’ logos stained to an abstract painting. She watches me watch the molds, then flicks a glance at Elena’s badge.
“I keep records,” she says before either of us asks. “I also keep my clients’ trust. If this is about a custom run, you’ll need a warrant.”
Elena steps forward, posture like a well-folded blueprint. “Detective Park. We have a narrow warrant for transactional records related to masks and face molds with cherub motifs, dates spanning the past decade.” She slides the paper across the bench with two fingers. “We’re not here for your trade secrets.”
I take a slow breath. The workshop smells like school art class if the school had a guild hall’s budget. The city’s burnt-sugar tang rides down the stairs and faintens, caught by clay and time.
“I’m Mara,” I say. “I run the show that keeps ending up at theaters with plaster angels. We found a molded face—blank, cherubic—reworked into an icon. I’m hoping it started life here.”
Her gaze sticks to my name, to the shape of it in whatever file cabinet keeps score. “You’re the microphone,” she says. “You make people louder.”
“Sometimes,” I say. “I’m trying to make the right people louder.”
Her mouth tics. She flips the warrant, scans the judge’s signature, and nods once. “I’m Nessa.” She sets her palm flat on the table, and I see fine plaster dust silver the creases. “You’re looking for a baby-face with cheeks too smooth to be marble, small mouth, no pupils. Grease-pencil marks around the hairline from someone tracing a line for saw cuts. He carved it wrong.”
A tight sound escapes my throat, hope keeping its voice down. “You remember it?”
“I remember the buyer,” Nessa says. “He came after a death. Sister. He said he wanted to stage something redemptive—his word, not mine. Commissioned blanks. Not many people want a cherub that isn’t cute.”
Elena’s pen is already out. “Name?”
Nessa taps a toe on the concrete, thinking with her whole leg. “He had a quiet mouth and noisy hands. Did this ring-tap thing,” she says, miming—tap, tap, tap on the bench, a metronome I can’t ignore. “He paid deposit with a card, balance in cash. Kept talking about an Orpheus myth like he could muscle grief into good. Said the public needs choreography to care.”
“Lyle Corcoran,” I say, not a question, the name like a pulled thread that tightens every—previous scene.
Her eyes tick to mine, then to the badge. She doesn’t smile. “Card said L. Corcoran. I keep signed receipts because small lawsuits happen to craftspeople more than you think.”
“Can you retrieve them?” Elena asks.
Nessa points to a rolling set of drawers welded from two misfit tool chests. “Third down on the left. Alphabetical. Don’t smudge the carbon.”
I look to Elena, get a nod, and kneel. The drawer slides with a squeal like a weak violin. I pass tape spools, rubber spatulas, the fossilized edge of a foam brush, and then the file folders, each in a plastic sleeve. C starts clean—Cabrera, Cain, Callow, Capone, Carrowden—and then Corcoran: a sleeve fat with extra copies and a paperclip half-rusted like it’s bled into the cardboard.
I stand and slip the sleeve onto the bench. Nessa unbuttons it with care and fans the stack: quote, invoice, final bill, scanned driver’s license, a square of receipt paper glued to a letterhead sheet. The printed line reads CARD ON FILE: L CORCORAN—LC ARTS, a timestamp, last four digits. My heart knocks against my ribs like it’s in the drawer too.
“May I photograph?” Elena asks.
“Under your paper, yes,” Nessa says. “No angles that show client notes. I sand down the corners on names for a reason.”
I step back to keep from hovering. The dust hangs more densely near the window, dancing to some truck’s rumble on the street. The molds on the wall watch with blind perfect eyes. My throat tastes of chalk. I think of the Night Choir’s pins, enamel cherubs genderless and sweet, traded at pop-ups like communion. The same motif, split into devotion and harm by use.
Micro-hook: Nessa slides a small, banana-shaped silicone piece from under a rag. Its upper right brow bears a clean crescent bite—no, a chip, cured that way, not broken later. “This,” she says, tone both apology and edge, “is why I remember him.”
I lean in. The chip kisses the brow at two millimeters deep, crescent-shaped like a thumbnail. A stuttered ridge runs to the temple.
“This is a mold flaw?” Elena asks.
“A late cure with a temp drop,” Nessa says. “He rushed me, and I told him I’d re-pour. He said imperfections make the story human. I kept this as a reminder not to bend deadlines to grief.”
Heat climbs at the back of my neck. I see the locker shelf in my mind—our locker 318 cache from weeks ago—and the edge of the molded cherub face in the box: a tiny chip kissing the right brow. Jonah and I argued about whether it happened in storage.
“I have to show you something,” I say, throat rough. I pull out my phone, scroll to the evidence album, and pick the close-up of the locker prop: a cherub face sawed at the chin, paint cracked to bone. I drag two fingers to zoom the brow and tilt the screen so it catches the window light.
Nessa leans close, breath notched. “That’s my chip,” she says. Not pride. Not horror. A recognition note, pure and low.
Elena takes the phone, bracketed by her hands in latex. “The curvature matches,” she says, and her voice loses the cushion it saves for civilians. Work voice. “We can correlate the chip vector to your mold’s negative. That’s physical linkage.”
“Chain?” I ask, because chain is the word that keeps courts from chewing truth down to taste.
“Chain,” Elena echoes. She looks at Nessa. “Will you provide a statement? Purchase records, this mold, any emails or voicemails in which he describes intention—particularly his phraseology around redemption or staging?”
Nessa doesn’t answer at once. She folds the rag over the chipped mold, then opens it again, like she’s checking whether the flaw will move. “He wasn’t the first person to come here and dress a wound in art talk. He was, however, the first to ask me to hurry destiny.”
“He lost his sister,” I say, because pity is a reflex I don’t entirely trust. “He turned that into a pedagogy.”
“He turned it into theater,” Nessa says. “And then asked me for extra programs.”
Elena smiles with only half her face. “That’s a yes?”
“That’s a yes,” Nessa says. “You can take the receipts as copies. The mold goes with you under evidence seal. And you owe me a decent cup of tea that isn’t made from shop sink water.”
“We can do dumplings,” I say, because détente has a menu. “Off email, obviously.”
“Obviously,” Elena says, dry as drywall, already snapping photos with a ruler for scale. The click-snap cadence steadies the room.
Nessa shifts to another drawer and pulls out a small white box. Inside: ring scribe, calipers, a bag of enamel pins. She plucks one free and holds it up, a cherub with a fractured halo. “An artist friend made these years ago for a Night Choir pop-up,” she says. “I hated them. Now I’m grateful for the anger that made him crack the halo instead of a skull.”
I take the pin without touching her skin and pocket it next to my own. The metal warms against my thigh through denim. I think of the creek behind the studio, how it floods the sidewalk every full moon, making the world reflective and precarious. We stand in a similar tide here—public patience rising, evidence accumulating grain by measurable grain.
Micro-hook: Elena’s phone vibrates on the bench and she checks it. “Lab confirms the paint on the warehouse cue cards has a signature additive often used to harden acrylics on silicone surfaces,” she says, eyes on me now. “It’s a small circle getting smaller.”
“Boxes all the way in,” I say.
“Boxes all the way in,” she echoes.
Nessa slips the chipped mold into a clean plastic bag and seals it, her hands practiced, gentle. “I don’t save every bad pour,” she says. “This one I saved because when I called to insist on a re-pour, he said a flawed face preaches better. Then he said he had plans for a ‘redemptive staging’ in a neighborhood theater with angel kitsch. I wanted the reminder not to play delivery girl to destiny.”
“He named the theater?” Elena asks.
“He didn’t,” Nessa says. “But he tapped his ring and said, ‘Where innocence looks down and does nothing.’ That sounded like those tired cherubs on… what’s the one with the cracked balcony?”
“The Orpheum,” I say, my mouth dry. “He keeps pointing us there.”
“People tell you what shrine they need,” Nessa says. “They just don’t say it in nouns.”
Elena nods, thoughtful. She lifts the mold bag, then the receipts, and hands me the photo of the locker prop back like a postcard from a place we’re done visiting. “We’ll catalog this at the precinct. We’ll get a digital copy of your receipt stack now. We’ll pick up tea on the way back for Nessa—no dumplings in a silicone shop.”
“You learn,” Nessa says, mouth softening. “Good.”
While Elena sets the evidence seal, I drift along the wall of molds. One cherub has a different smile—corners turned tight, not sweet. Another bears a raised line along the temple where a sculptor’s wire once snagged. Identities live here in millimeters. I close my eyes and feel how slow the chain builds when the public wants fireworks.
“A question,” I say without turning. “Did he ever mention a tunnel? Service passages, catwalks, any back way that made him sound proud of his knowing?”
Nessa thinks with the toe again, taps, then opens a tall flat file near the door. “He didn’t,” she says, “but an architect doing a restoration consult dumped these on me three months ago—wrong address on the label, and then she never came back to get them.” She pulls out a cardboard tube scabbed with tape. A pencil scrawl across the cap: Orpheum—Service Plan (arch.). She sets it by the door like a gift she isn’t sure I should open.
Elena’s face stays neutral, but her hand pauses on the seal. I feel my body lean of its own accord.
“Not covered by the warrant,” Elena says gently to me, not to Nessa. “We’ll come back with the right paper.”
My palms tingle with the want. The artifact is right there—rolled certainty, a map to whatever bones the building hides. I imagine unrolling it on the workbench, the dust settling into the lines like graphite rain. I imagine calling the Choir and saying look, look, we have a path. The aquarium hum from the studio in my memory steadies me. Last night, I promised the slower path.
“Hold them for us,” I say to Nessa. “Don’t let anyone else rehome history.”
“History isn’t a stray cat,” she says, but she slides the tube behind the tool chest where it tucks in like a kept secret. “Come back with paper.”
Elena shoulders the evidence tote. I help, parceling responsibility one sealed bag at a time. When we reach the stairs, the window brightens—the street has sucked the cloudbank thinner. The scent of sugar burns rides stronger again, sweet rot threaded with steam. I hear water guttering in a downspout, the creek lifting itself toward another slick mirror, and I picture my reflection there: smaller than I want to be, a person who stands still long enough to do this right.
“We’re slower than a rumor,” I say on the steps. “But we’re heavier.”
“Heavier holds,” Elena answers.
At the threshold, Nessa calls after us. “Mara,” she says, and I turn. Her hand rests on the bench near the pin box. “You said you make the right people louder. Remember that includes the ones who don’t want mics. Don’t turn blueprints into a trailer.”
“I won’t,” I say. The promise tastes like chalk and tea. I glance at the cardboard tube peeking from behind the chest, then back at Elena. “We file and return.”
“We file and return,” she says.
We step into the day. The factory sighs another sweet exhale. The sidewalk damp shivers up my ankles where the creek has kissed the curb. I look at the evidence bag in Elena’s grip—the chipped mold winking through plastic—and feel the chain link to the locker prop like a sound more than a sight.
“One more,” I murmur. “One more link.”
The basement door swings shut behind us with a hollow theater thud. I stand on the wet step, rolling the Night Choir pin in my pocket with the cracked-halo one Nessa gave me, and I let my eyes climb to the cloud break above the block. Somewhere under those clouds sits the Orpheum and its blind angels, keeping their mouths shut. I lift my phone, open a blank note, and type three words I know I’ll argue with until the paper comes:
Back door first?