They Stole My Songs

Chapter 16

The courier caught me at the top of Fieldnote's wooden stairwell on Monday morning. He wore a canvas messenger bag and held a clipboard toward my chest before I had my keys out of my pocket.

I signed for the heavy cream envelope, carried it down into the smell of solder and stale coffee, and tore the seal open beside the upright piano.

Dana looked up from the mixing console, her white grease pencil paused above a reel box. Noah stood by the live room baffle with a coiled microphone cable in his hand.

"Read it out loud, honey," Dana said.

I read the first page to the room. Sterling Records had terminated my employment effective immediately, terminated for cause: unauthorized removal of company materials. Clipped behind the notice was a second sheet from their legal department demanding the immediate return of all notebooks created during my tenure at the front desk.

Noah set the cable down on a stool. He walked over, took the termination letter from my fingers, and pulled a brass thumbtack from the corkboard beside the booth window. He pressed the tack through the heavy letterhead, pinning it directly into the unpainted wood above the upright piano.

"Levels are perfect, Maya," Noah said, stepping back.

I took Dana's grease pencil from the console ledge, turned the cream envelope over, and wrote the date across the back flap, the way I used to log a courier delivery at the front desk. Monday. Then I pulled my phone from my cardigan pocket and dialed Elena.

She picked up on the second ring and listened while I read the two paragraphs over the line.

"Good," Elena said. "From this morning on, every note you write belongs to you by any reading of any paper. Bring the original to my office at two. We have a tape to audit before we file."

At two o'clock, Elena's battered leather briefcase lay open near the edge of her oak desk. A small black speaker sat beside a legal pad, wired to her desktop computer. Noah sat in the corner chair with his arms crossed, watching the playback bar crawl across the monitor, while Elena tracked the elapsed numbers with the cap of her pen.

It was the recording from the outdoor café off the lot, the Tuesday I returned Dylan's check. We had turned a copy over in discovery, and Elena wanted the three of us to hear the whole file straight through before anyone argued about it in a courtroom.

Café noise filled the office. Cups clinked against saucers, an espresso steamer hissed somewhere behind our table, and Dylan's voice came through low and clipped.

With less than a minute left on the timer, his voice dropped.

"You stupid girl," Dylan's recorded voice said. "I am the machine."

Then my own voice answered him, flat and close to the microphone inside my bag: "Then the machine should be able to sing its own bridge."

Four seconds of spoons against porcelain followed. Then the playback bar reached the right edge of the window at 11:42 and stopped. The conversation had gone on for forty minutes. What he said after that, standing over the table with my envelope in his jacket—that they were good because I wrote them—was not on it.

Noah looked from the dark waveform to my face.

Elena clicked the mouse to close the player and set her pen down on the legal pad. "We have him calling himself the machine. We don't have him calling you the writer."

I looked at the silent speaker, then at the draft motion sitting beside Elena's keyboard.

"Then he'll say it again," I said. "Where it counts, with a court reporter typing."

Elena studied me for a second, then pulled the draft motion across the blotter. The preservation filing from the night of the archive drive covered only the metadata on that hardware. This new stack was a motion to compel production. She read down the numbered demands: a forensic image of Sterling's internal mail server to trace the leaked Tuesday email, and the system administration logs from the night the remote purge stopped at sixty-one percent.

"Wait," I said, leaning over the desk. I pointed to the third paragraph, where she had drafted a demand for electronic correspondence held by Dylan Cross. "Add one word there. Make it say printed copies."

Elena tilted her head, her pen hovering over the margin. "In a public filing?"

"In the public docket where his lawyers will read it to him the hour it gets served," I said. "Ask specifically for printed copies of internal correspondence in the custody of Mr. Cross."

"If you name the paper in the motion, Maya, you tell him we know about the box Scarlett saw," Elena said. "He'll carry it out of the building before a judge signs an order."

"The dock camera doesn't feed Sterling IT," I said. "It feeds Brightline Security, off-site, ninety days. I called them thirty-one times in three years, every time the lobby feed froze. He'll move that box, and he'll move it through the dock, because he thinks the dock has no ears."

In the corner chair, Noah uncrossed his arms.

Elena looked from me to Noah, then uncapped her pen and wrote the words into the margin in heavy black strokes.

"While we're pulling threads," Elena said, flipping a page in her correspondence folder, "I got the sponsor's production file this morning from Margit Lindahl. That's why your name was on the Burbank audition list after they suspended you. The sponsor asked for you by name as the stand-in vocalist, and Sterling's lawyers spent two days of emails trying to get you taken off before they gave up."

I nodded once, reaching into my cardigan pocket. I pulled out my phone, opened the recording from the night Scarlett had stood in my doorway in her grey hoodie, and set the device on the wood in front of Elena.

"There's one more," I said. "I recorded her in my doorway."

Elena didn't press play. She looked at the date stamp on the screen, plugged a thumb drive into her computer, and copied the audio file off my phone. Then she dropped the thumb drive into a small manila envelope, licked the gummed flap, and sealed it shut with the heel of her hand. Across the front, she wrote DO NOT USE in thick block letters.

"California two-party consent," Elena said, sliding the sealed envelope into her bottom desk drawer. "Private conversation, her and you, no third party. We don't need the tape. We need her."

She locked the drawer. Before she could pull her key from the brass cylinder, the black landline on the corner of her desk rang.

Elena glanced at the caller ID display, raised her eyebrows, and pressed the speakerphone button instead of lifting the receiver.

"Mr. Hines," Elena said. "You're on speaker with Maya Reed."

The dry, paper-thin voice of the man who had spent nineteen years in fifth-floor copyright administration came through the small plastic grille.

"That email they're calling a forgery, Miss Reed," Walter Hines said. "It was sent to me. And I kept my answer."