The warehouse breathes in metal and wet cardboard. Somewhere a forklift backs up and chirps, and the roll-up door frames a slice of Graypoint sky the color of the underside of a gull. I run my fingers along the seam of my tote and remind myself I am not here to steal; I am here to read what paper says when power assumes no one will.
“You sure about this?” Jonah asks, low. He wears a visitor badge the clerk slapped down without looking. His hair holds the morning’s salt air, whorled by wind off Widow’s Teeth. The harbor’s crescent isn’t visible from here, but I carry it inside me, a bruise-shaped map that keeps me pointed home.
“We ask to confirm a delivery,” I say. “We don’t lie. We don’t film. We photograph what’s in plain view.”
“And if plain view bites?” he says.
“You distract,” I answer, and I try to smile.
The receptionist raises a finger without looking up from a monitor. “Dispatch is through the blue door, second right,” she says, voice dry with printer toner and boredom. I catch a whiff of lemon oil from my coat—the smell refuses to leave since the cliff cracked and the bell rang itself hoarse. The scent rides with me into fluorescent light.
Micro-hook: The dispatch board hangs crooked, like someone yanked a line and forgot to even the myth.
I find the blue door and push. Buzz and hum and paper. Clipboards line a rail above a dented desk: INVOICES, ROUTES, RETURNS. A cork board mushrooms with carbon copies held by bent pins. My pulse climbs my throat. The napkin in my pocket feels newly hot, numbers ready to call their cousins.
A woman in a fleece vest looks up. “Help you?”
“Mara Ellison,” I say, and watch her eyes flinch at the name the town wears like weather. “I’m following up on a question about a late-night delivery years ago. A foundation event. Your driver might have—”
“Records in the cage,” she says, already on her feet. “If they didn’t get sent to storage.” She keys a wire closet open. The mesh rattles like a net with a fish that knows the boat.
Jonah hangs back by a wall calendar, hands visible, voice ready. I step inside the cage. Boxes labeled by month and year sit on metal shelves that bow like tired backs. My fingers trace the spine labels: 17—Q3, 17—Q4. I pull a banker’s box forward. Dust lifts, tastes like chalk on my tongue.
“You have a date?” she asks.
I recite the night Beatrice logged her swap, the night Greeley counted foghorns and watched taillights become rain. The woman flips a lid and slides stacks of invoices out with professional impatience. “Vendor catering, hospital, club,” she narrates. “Here’s your sweet spot.”
My phone lives in my palm before I know it. I toggle to camera. “May I take reference photos?” I ask. “For counsel.” The word buys time.
“Don’t care if you do,” she says. “As long as the paper stays.” She moves to a second box. “We bill in triplicate. The devil loves copies.”
I kneel on cold concrete. The invoice paper is stiff, not glossy. Ink has sunk enough to mean it’s real. I scan with my eyes first—Client: Ellison Foundation Events. Line Item: catering supplies and platters—late night service. Notes: after-hours load-in, dock entrance, medical campus. Route: GP—> RT-12—> Sable—> Wayfield. Wayfield. Two towns over. A women’s shelter sits in Wayfield behind a painted fence four shades lighter than hope. I’ve driven by it and pretended not to be looking.
I start snapping photos in bursts, corners and centers, overlaps for stitching. The shutter sound is small but nerve-bright; each click is a tiny bell. “Jonah,” I say, not looking up. “Route detail, lower right.”
He steps closer. “Sable turnpike, Wayfield south access,” he reads. “Time stamp—23:47 departure. 01:12 arrival.” He huffs a breath. “That’s generous for weather.”
I flip to the next invoice. Same client header, new day, same week. Line Item: beverage tubs, linens. Notes: driver to wait offsite until called by ‘kitchen contact.’ Kitchen contact. I look for a name. There isn’t one, but there’s a scrawl in the margin no clerk would write for fun: a tiny wrapped candy with a looping tail. The outline buzzes my skin. I’ve seen that doodle curling around the margins of Lark’s diary pages, sugar-sketches she drew when she needed to keep her hand busy while courage cooled.
“You’re seeing it,” Jonah says. He doesn’t reach; he knows better.
“Candy,” I say. My voice lands too quiet. “She marked her own exit like a private joke.”
The woman tilts her head. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say, and I take the photo. I take three, then one close enough to catch the indent from pressure. If I print it later, I’ll be able to feel the groove with a fingertip. I move faster. Invoice, manifest, route slip. The truck number repeats. The partial plate matches the napkin’s stubborn digits. There’s a route sheet with a hand-drawn map arrow from the medical campus to the service road and then the long line south. Next to the arrow: the candy again, smaller, like a whisper.
Micro-hook: My heart throws a rope across years and the knot holds—paper to paper, doodle to doodle, girl to road.
I let the camera drink the paper. Click, align, click. I line the invoice stack back square with the desk stamp in the corner. No one can say I took more than light. The woman in the vest watches me with a kind of neutral mercy reserved for the legally curious.
“Do you track destination signatures?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” she says. “Hospitals sign with codes. Shelters don’t always, for privacy. We record a call time or gate log. That box is returns.”
I stand and pivot to a clipboard hanging by a chain on the cage’s mesh. The top sheet lists trips finished and notes scrawled by men who write like weather—ragged, fast. A coffee ring crowds the corner with sugar granules stuck in a little constellation. Halfway down, two lines jump:
Job 4719 — After-hours drop — K facilities / kitchen contact texted — hold at corner by blue fence — DO NOT HONK.
Under it, the candy again—three strokes, wrapper tail just so. I feel the diary under my fingertips, the burnt-sugar smell coming off pages that lived in a locker nobody visited.
“Mara,” Jonah murmurs. His eyes are on the far door. A security guard in a navy jacket has stepped into dispatch, hand on his belt, face set to bored authority.
I snap the clipboard page and two beneath it. My breath narrows; the room’s hum grows teeth.
“Can I help you folks?” the guard asks, stretching help into leave.
The woman in the vest answers before I do. “They’re with counsel,” she says. It buys me ten seconds. He glances at Jonah’s badge, then mine, then the phone.
“Counsel needs an appointment,” he says. His radio crackles, static smelling like tin. “And supervision.”
Jonah slides between the guard and me with the grace of someone who’s been told to be charming and resents the assignment. “Great,” he says, smiling where his eyes don’t. “Let’s make one. I’d love to talk to your operations manager about safety signage on the service road. Last night a forklift nearly clipped us at the turn coming in.”
The guard blinks. “Last night?”
“We were here after the storm,” Jonah says, voice pitched to informal complaint. “That bend by the dumpsters is blind when the bay door’s raised. I’d hate to have to mention it to the town safety board. They’re prickly. You know how they get about liability near the harbor.”
Liability. Harbor. The words are bait. His uncle’s skill with nets is genetic. The guard leans a fraction toward Jonah to correct a thing that doesn’t matter. “Those are contractor lanes,” he says. “Marked per code.”
“Per which code?” Jonah asks, and does his slow blink that makes people fill silence with information. “I only ask because the foundation’s legal counsel—”
The guard cuts him off with a hand flick—enough. The guard’s body turns to Jonah’s voice. I become background: woman by a clipboard, guest fog on glass. I take three more images—clipboard, route board, sign-out sheet with the repeated truck number boxed in a calligraphed rectangle that doesn’t match any other driver’s hand. I slide my phone flat against my thigh and feel my pulse beat on the case.
“Lady,” the guard says, remembering me. “Phone down.”
I put the phone in my tote. My fingers leave damp crescents on the canvas. “Down,” I echo. “We’re finished.” My voice is too bright; I lower it. “We appreciate your time.”
He studies me for a beat like I am an item on a shelf he’ll have to count later. “Finished means out,” he says.
“Of course,” Jonah says, friendly again. “And if I need to drop that safety note, where should I address it? Operations? Legal?”
“Operations,” the woman says, already writing an email on a sticky note, bless her procedural soul. She presses it into Jonah’s palm. “Ask for Carmen.”
We walk. My legs move like I’m new to land. The roll-up door yawns bright with a slice of day. Outside, the air tastes like iron filings and ocean. A truck beeps in reverse, and the sound drills the back of my skull.
“Don’t come back without an appointment,” the guard says to our backs.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Jonah says, and his breath fogs in a perfect, insincere cloud.
Micro-hook: At the threshold, a pallet of tubs skids and rattles, a noise like a thrown chain; I glance and catch a logo corner peeling—Wayfield Shelter Partners—stamped small near a recycling instruction nobody obeys.
We don’t run. We don’t saunter. We walk the exact pace of citizens who belong in the light. In the parking lot, the wind knives through my coat and lifts printer-dry dust into my mouth. I taste paper again, and under that, sugar.
“Show me,” Jonah says, once the guard’s figure is just a habit left under fluorescents.
I step behind his car door and flip my phone alive. Photo thumbnails bloom: invoices with the Ellison Foundation header, routes with Wayfield circled by a pen I recognize from the diaries—pressure heavy on the downstroke, impatient on the lift. I pinch to zoom on the candy doodle. The three strokes sit like a signature my body knows before my mind consents.
“She left alive,” I say. My teeth tap together once like a bell clapper knocking rust. “She left toward a shelter. She marked it so I’d find it, or so someone like me would.”
“Or she marked it so she’d feel real while she ran,” Jonah says. He points at the timestamp. “This run is the bracelet night. This route runs the next day. It wasn’t a one-off. Somebody covered tracks with volume.”
“Catering supplies cloak anything,” I say. “Platters over diapers, ice over fear.”
He watches my face. “You good?”
“Exhilarated and nauseous,” I say, honest. “The perfect cocktail for committing to a door with a buzzer.”
He nods at the photos again. “We can bring this in clean. No trespass. We stood where public stands, took what eyes could take.”
“But if the vendor tells Vivienne we were here,” I say, “she files something shiny and angry about interference with operations. Injunctive relief with a bow on it.”
“Then we move before the bow gets tied,” he says.
I lock my phone and slide it deep into my tote. The candy doodle glows behind my eyelids. It matches the diary margins where Lark wrote grocery lists for dreams: sugar, flour, a life that doesn’t ruin other lives. I swallow against a grain in my throat.
“We go to Wayfield,” I say. “We don’t bring cameras. We bring respect.”
Jonah squints toward the industrial strip where old-line families hire local fishermen in the winter to watch their empty estates, same way this vendor hires guards to watch their paperwork. “We’ll be called ghouls or heroes,” he says. “Depending on who pays the caterer.”
“We’ll be called worse if I’m wrong,” I say. The bell at Sea Ledger rings in my blood, indistinguishable, donation or death. The cliff still eats yard by yard. Somewhere a reporter drafts a line about curses. I don’t care about curses. I care about signatures that turn children into inventory.
We get in the car. The heater smells faintly of damp upholstery and coffee spilled weeks ago. He starts the engine. The radio coughs static, then the local weather: tides, gusts, warnings about the shoal. Widow’s Teeth isn’t done with us.
I run a finger over the phone screen without unlocking it, memorizing where the candy lives. “When we hit that buzzer,” I say, “who do I ask for? The truth or the name she was wearing when she knocked?”
Jonah glances at me, then at the road. “We let the door decide,” he says.
The car rolls forward. The warehouse shrinks in the rearview into a geometry of corrugated memory. The candy curl stays big in my mind, big enough to sweeten and to cut. Ahead, the highway splits: one branch back toward Graypoint and its bell, one toward Wayfield and a fence painted four shades lighter than hope. I press my palm flat to the phone, and the numbers on the invoices press back. The question waits at the shelter’s threshold: will the receptionist say Lark—or will she say a name I’ve never met?