The Auction Microphone Stayed Open While The Public Picture Went Dark

I was listening for a lot number when Orson Mott told a missing man what would happen to his sister.

The auctioneer had set his microphone beside a box of brass door handles. Its green light stayed on.

Mott thought the lunch break had made the room private.

“Ellis, you bring those yellow receipts back,” he said into his phone. “Your sister parks behind her building at six. Don't make me send somebody to explain.”

My right finger tapped twice against my thumb. A colon. Something was coming next.

I had done that since captioning school. Silent punctuation helped me hold a sentence until I knew where it ended.

My name was Pa Houa Xiong. I was a thirty-year-old Hmong American woman who worked as a freelance live-event captioner.

I had a broad face, dark brown eyes, and straight black hair that I wore in a thick braid down my back.

That morning, I sat beside a loading door in a municipal storage building in Rockford, Illinois. Cold air came under it. Outside, a truck rattled over salt left from winter.

My job was to turn speech into readable lines for people watching the surplus auction. I marked speakers, corrected names, and kept the captions close behind the sound.

My fee was $720. My chair had one short leg.

Mott ran the auction under a city contract. He also owned Mott Recovery, a salvage yard with enough trucks to fill the block.

Orson Mott was a broad white American man with silver hair, pale blue eyes, and soft pink cheeks above a brown wool coat.

He was fifty-five. He greeted buyers like favorite cousins and called every worker “my people.”

Earlier, he had rested a hand on my chair.

“That's our little subtitle girl,” he told a bidder. “Types it, sends it, gone. Wish my paperwork was that easy.”

“The captions go out,” I said. “The source audio stays on my recorder.”

He was already shaking someone else's hand.

My equipment belonged to me. One cable carried the house microphone feed to my caption software. A second carried it to a separate recorder. The city had approved both in my work order.

Signs at each entrance said the microphones were being recorded. The auctioneer had read the notice aloud before lot one.

I recorded because bad sound happened. A bidder coughed over a dollar amount. Somebody knocked a cable loose. Later, I could check the original and correct the transcript.

At lunch, the public video showed a gray card. The viewer count in my monitor window stayed at twenty-three. The sound meter still moved. My house feed kept running because the microphone stayed live.

Now Mott ended his call.

“Put the blue pump under forty-six,” he told someone near him. “The rusty generator can wait. Use the pink release. Berrin will fix the inventory.”

Another voice said, “The pump still has their plate.”

“Then stop looking at the plate.”

I pressed a time marker on my recorder. I didn't touch the file.

Across the room stood a blue pump on a trailer. Someone had tied a card to it: LOT 46, PORTABLE GENERATOR.

I had loaded the lot list that morning to build my caption dictionary. Forty-six had been a gray generator with a cracked wheel.

The blue pump wasn't in the list.

I knew Ellis Venn's name, too. His sister had posted flyers at the grocery store. He was a city inventory clerk who had been missing eleven days.

Mott looked toward my table.

“You heard some private business.”

“Your microphone is open.”

He took it from the door handles and switched it off.

Then he called the man at the video desk.

“Delete that break. Whole stream, if you need to. We'll give buyers the final prices.”

The man clicked through a menu. Mott watched until he nodded.

“There,” Mott said. “Nothing happened.”

He smiled at me as if we shared a joke.

“Don't type things you don't understand, sweetheart.”

I saved my caption log. Then I wrote the time on the paper equipment sheet I always carried.

At 1:14, the auction resumed. The blue pump sold for $4,200 to a bidder wearing number thirty-one.

I captioned the price exactly. I also kept the bid sheet the auction clerk handed me for name corrections.

Before I left, I called the state investigator whose number was printed on Ellis's flyer. I reported the threat and gave him the time, wording, and sister's name from the flyer.

“Are you somewhere safe to speak?” he asked.

I walked into the public lobby.

“Now I am.”

He said officers would check on her. Then he asked me to keep the recording unchanged.

As I packed, a message appeared from Mott's office.

Payment held pending deletion of unauthorized material.

A man came through the lobby door carrying a plain notebook.

“Pa Houa Xiong?” he asked carefully. “Gabriel Santos. I believe you have something that didn't get deleted.”