They Stole My Songs

Chapter 12

Walter Hines met me in a coffee shop in Burbank with his hat in his hands.

He had the worn, careful posture of a man who had spent nineteen years in copyright administration filing other people's work into metal cabinets. He brought what he had carried out of the building on his final afternoon: a brown paper grocery bag, tucked under his arm because a briefcase would have looked too formal. He had kept it in a hall closet for fourteen months.

"I processed the filing," he said, setting the grocery bag on the vinyl booth between us. "That's why it's me. Plenty of people knew. I'm the one whose initials are on the paper. There's a difference, at my age. It keeps you up."

The song he pulled from the bag was called "Harbor Light."

I wrote it when I was twenty, long before I ever set foot in Sterling Records, before the employee badge and the telephone headset. In those days I played Tuesday nights to nine people and a pool table in a bar on Western Avenue that has since been torn down for a parking structure. It was a leaving song: a girl at a kitchen window watching a man's truck lights shrink down a winter road, who leaves the porch light on not for him but so she can find her own way back inside.

I had performed it perhaps forty times in that bar. I had never recorded a studio demo, and I had never sent the lyric sheet anywhere. It predated my employment contract at Sterling by two full years. Even under the aggressive language of page fourteen, paragraph nine, the company's claim could not reach backward into my life. It should have remained completely mine.

Walter slid a registration printout across the laminate table. It listed track seven on Scarlett Vale's debut album, released the spring I was hired: "Ultraviolet" — S. Vale / D. Cross. A different title. The second verse had been scrubbed clean of the kitchen and the pickup truck, replaced with generic pop imagery, but the underlying chord structure and melody were identical.

"How did Dylan get it?" I asked.

"The bar recorded its Tuesday sets as house tapes, for the liquor license," Walter said, his voice quiet across the table. "Dylan used to scout there before he was Dylan. He kept tapes from those nights. When the debut needed one more mid-tempo, he didn't write one, Miss Reed. He went shopping in your past." Walter smoothed the edge of the printout with his thumb. "My office changed the title, split the publishing to Vireo Lane, and filed it as an original work by two people who had never heard it in that bar. I know. I filed it."

At that sticky table, over two cups of black coffee that neither of us drank, the ledger expanded.

Five songs I already knew about: "Neon Heart," "Glass Halo," the three vault tracks. Walter's printouts added four more off her debut, retitled and rewritten past recognition — "Static Bloom" and two other songs from my bar years, lifted off the same Tuesday house tapes, and "Harbor Light," stolen clean out of my life before I ever had a badge to be stopped by.

Not five. Nine.

Nine songs. Everything I had written between the ages of nineteen and twenty-five, itemized on registration printouts with someone else's name in the author box.

Walter reached back into the grocery bag. From the bottom, beneath the yellowing legal folders, he produced an older item: a black-and-white photograph, printed on heavy fiber paper and foxed at the corners.

The picture showed a young man standing in a studio doorway behind a seated songwriter, resting one hand on the back of the songwriter's chair. The seated man was about twenty-five, leaning over an open spiral notebook and laughing. The man standing behind him was Victor Sterling, forty years younger, wearing the same small, patient frown he wore in Scarlett's dressing room.

"His name was Daniel Okafor," Walter said. "Wrote like an angel falling down stairs. He was the first one it worked on that I know of. There may have been others before him." Walter tapped the edge of the print. "Victor keeps the photograph's twin in his office, behind the door where visitors don't look. If you turn it over, there's writing on the back."

I turned the print. In light pencil, in a hurried hand, someone had written: Studio B, spring. V. says we're going to be famous.

"Daniel signed his stack of papers too," Walter said softly. "For the insurance. His girl was sick too, I believe. Find what a person loves more than their name. Then take the name."

Six nights later, I took the stage in Silver Lake.

The venue was a low-ceilinged listening room that held two hundred people tightly packed against the brick walls. Elena's nephew's friend had handled the booking, and the production costs were covered by a collection passed around online after my address was leaked. Above the entry, someone had set the marquee by hand, letter by letter: MAYA REED — HER SONGS, HER NAME.

I carried an acoustic guitar to the microphone and performed all nine, starting with "Static Bloom" and saving "Harbor Light" for last. Two hundred people remained standing through the entire set, pressed shoulder to shoulder. During "Neon Heart," I looked toward the front row and saw a teenage girl wearing a Scarlett Vale tour shirt, crying under the glare of her phone screen as she sang every lyric back at the right singer. By dawn, the audience recordings had spread across social feeds, and the comment sections beneath Scarlett's official accounts had shifted against the label.

I noticed him only after the final chord faded, while the room was applauding and the stage lights began to come up.

He sat in the last row, in the very last seat by the exit. Victor Sterling was alone, wearing a tailored dark overcoat that cost more than the sound system in the ceiling. He was applauding slowly, evenly, like a man applauding an investment.

Victor stood up. He did not step toward the stage; he remained by the door, allowing the patrons between us to move aside.

"Young lady," he called out, pitching his voice clearly for the phones held up across the room. "That throat is a genuine instrument. Treasure it." He paused, offering a mild, grandfatherly nod. "But do study up on copyright law, won't you? A voice is only an instrument." He lowered his hands to his sides. "Paper is forever."

I stepped up to the microphone stand, pulled the dynamic capsule from the clip, and looked straight at him across the room.

"I kept the paper, Victor," I said through the speakers. "Every single page."

Victor Sterling looked at the microphone in my hand for a long second, as if pricing it. Then he pushed the exit bar and stepped out into the night.