They Stole My Songs

Chapter 14

Victor Sterling did not sue me that month. He did something quieter.

He made phone calls.

I learned how the pressure worked as each booking unraveled. The low-ceilinged room in Silver Lake that had billed my name on its hand-set marquee called to cancel my second night. The manager claimed there were sudden problems with their insurance rider, their performance calendar, and their municipal licensing, offering explanations that shifted twice during one phone call.

Elena's nephew's friend, who had arranged the date, told me the truth standing on his front porch: an executive from Sterling had stopped by the venue. There were no threats. The man simply asked which distributor supplied the room's independent label partner, and noted which corporate conglomerate owned that distributor.

A rehearsal space in Nashville that had offered me an industry showcase withdrew the invitation in an email containing no concrete nouns. Two independent labels in Los Angeles stopped returning Elena's calls on the same afternoon. A club promoter in Austin sent a single sentence by message: Not this year, kid. Nothing personal.

There was no official blacklist that an attorney could subpoena or an investigator could photograph. There were only quiet phone conversations, long-standing favors, and an industry where Victor Sterling had been lending executives and venue owners their careers for forty years. Across the circuit, doors shut without discussion.

Overnight, the plaintiff had no stage.

The paper, at least, was holding. We beat the Copyright Office's fourteen days with two to spare: Walter's cover memo showed exactly when "Neon Heart" left my hands and whose hands it went into, the session logs did the same for the rest, and the bar's old owner still had a shoebox of Tuesday house tapes with a date on every spine.

"No stage, no story," Elena said, reading the Austin message over my shoulder in her office. "He can't stop the Copyright Office, so he's stopping the air. If you can't sing anywhere, Maya, the story dies of quiet. That's the play."

That night I parked my car across from the darkened Silver Lake venue. The street lamps threw long shadows across the pavement. Overhead, the marquee was dark. The staff had climbed up on an aluminum ladder and pulled down my hand-set letters, leaving faint, cleaner rectangles where the dirt on the plastic faces had settled around my name.

A knuckle tapped against the driver's side window.

A woman stood outside in the street lamp glare, fiftyish, with grey streaks through her brown hair, wearing heavy boots and a dark canvas jacket with oversized pockets. She held two cardboard cups of coffee, extending one toward my lowered glass.

"Dana Whitaker," she said, leaning against the door frame. "Fieldnote Records. We're eleven people and a dog, out of a building in Highland Park that the health department has opinions about." She gestured toward the empty marquee with her cup. "I've watched Sterling lean on every booker in town this week."

"He's making sure nobody hires me," I said, taking the warm cup.

"Honey." Dana took a sip from her own cup with the easy posture of someone who had survived three separate industry transitions. "Nobody blacklists a fraud. Nobody makes forty phone calls about a nobody. Victor Sterling just spent real capital, favors he will never get back, to keep you off stages. In this business, that's not a warning. That's an appraisal."

She looked through the windshield at the blank sign. "He told the whole industry what you're worth, Maya. He just doesn't know he did it."

I looked down at the coffee cup in my hands, then looked back at her. "What kind of record do you want to make, Dana?"

"A real one," Dana said. "The nine songs you wrote, tracked straight to tape in my basement before Victor Sterling finishes locking up the city."

"Let's make it," I said. "Tomorrow morning."

Fieldnote's recording room sat directly beneath their Highland Park offices, reached by an unpainted wooden stairwell that smelled of solder, old vacuum tubes, and stale black coffee. It had one acoustically treated live room, one upright piano with a chipped middle C, and an analog mixing console older than me. Dana ran her palm along the wooden armrest of the board, checking the fader tension with a flick of her wrist.

We began tracking at nine the next morning. It was not a pop album designed for commercial radio. It was a formal record of authorship: my nine compositions, performed by me in chronological sequence, exactly as they were composed. We tracked "Glass Halo" with the coat in the hall closet restored to its second verse, and recorded "Harbor Light" with the acoustic guitar carrying all the way through to the final chord. Dana marked each master tape box with a white grease pencil. Beneath the title on every tracking sheet, she wrote the credit:

Written by: Maya Reed.

There was a third line. There had always been a space for it.

Noah Bennett walked through the basement door on our second afternoon, carrying a cardboard box under his arm.

He had left the Sterling Records building at dawn, carrying out his personal effects without asking for an escort. He had resigned that morning by delivering a single typed paragraph to Dylan Cross's desk. Eight years in that building ended before nine o'clock. Noah set his cardboard box on the lid of the upright piano.

"The dock has no ears, Maya," Noah said, resting his hand on the cardboard flap. "And I am done working in rooms with no ears."

He opened the box. Beneath a pair of studio headphones and a framed photograph of a vintage mixing desk sat a black foam-lined hard case. Inside was Elena's examiner's verified working copy of the Sterling archive drive, released to us for exactly this purpose, with the chain of custody signed in triplicate. Beside it lay Noah's own secondary backup drive, retrieved from his dock locker where he had kept it since the night of the system purge.

"Day one of the rest of it," Dana said, adjusting the studio monitors. "Let's make the versions they'll have to argue with."

We began cataloguing the original session tracks that afternoon, matching my acoustic references against the stems Dylan had archived. Noah cued a deleted vocal pass from three years earlier, tracking the waveforms across his laptop screen. A recorded vocal came through the studio monitors: my twenty-two-year-old voice humming a melody, followed by the metallic click of a studio door unlatching.

A man's voice came through the left channel, speaking close to a live room microphone.

"That's Dylan," I said, leaning toward the console.

He did not know the fader was up. He was doing what Elena said men like him cannot resist doing. Explaining the world.

—no, listen, the registrations don't go through Sterling. They never go through Sterling. You put the originals into Vireo Lane, you hear me? Vireo Lane Publishing. That's the whole point of Vireo Lane—

The playback cut off abruptly. It was an orphaned audio segment buried in the tail of an abandoned session file, overlooked by every one of Dylan's wiping ceremonies.

Noah pulled his hands back from the console. Dana stared at the monitors as if the speakers had caught fire.

"He named it," Noah said quietly. "On tape. He named the shell."

For three years Vireo Lane had been a name on government certificates. Now it was in Dylan Cross's own voice, on a drive with a chain of custody.