My Workshop Key Failed While My Husband Sold Our Sound

My key went into the workshop lock, but it would not turn.

Through the glass, I saw my blue paper flags above the pipe rack. I used them to mark notes that still needed work. There were eleven left from Friday.

My lunch sat warm against my hip. Inside, someone had moved my stool.

I called Colin.

“You changed the lock.”

“We needed better security.”

“Then give me a key.”

He sighed as if I had asked for a pony. “Come home. We can talk when you're calm.”

I was calm. That had always made him angrier.

I was a white woman of twenty-nine, with pale freckles, brown hair cut at my chin, and a small burn mark on my left wrist. I wore work shirts with soft elbows. Most people who came into our organ shop asked me where the owner was.

I usually pointed toward Colin's office.

That morning, I wished I had stopped doing that years before.

I was a pipe-organ voicer. I shaped the sound after a pipe was built or repaired. A little nick in the wrong place could make a note spit. A foot hole opened too far could turn a flute harsh.

Sometimes I found a fault by humming above the pipe's main note, matching its overtones until the rough sound stood out. Colin called that my little trick.

Churches paid us because of it.

Our shop stood east of downtown Fort Wayne, in a brick building where the winter wind found every old window. We were six weeks from finishing Saint Brigid Cathedral's restored organ. The last payment was $42,000.

My tools were inside. So was the cathedral's final rank of pipes.

My husband, Colin Whitcomb, came to the door in his good gray coat.

Colin was a white man of thirty-three, tall and lean, with neat blond hair and a smile that stayed fixed when his eyes went cold.

He opened the door just wide enough to stand in it.

“You missed breakfast,” he said.

“I was checking wind pressure at the cathedral.”

“Without telling me.”

There it was. The real broken rule.

He used to kiss my forehead after I agreed with him. If I pushed back, he could go three days without touching my hand. I had learned to call those days busy.

“I need my tools.”

“Owen can handle the shop today.”

Behind him, our apprentice looked down at a packing bench. Owen Voss had trained beside me for nineteen months. He knew which drawer held my tuning knife.

He would not meet my eyes.

“What happened?” I asked him.

Colin stepped farther into the doorway.

“You work at a bench, Darcy. I handle what we own.”

Then he closed the door.

I sat in my car and opened our distributor account. My password failed there, too.

But the saved royalty statements were still on my phone.

The latest statement named a new payee: Quay Light Licensing LLC.

Two payments. $31,180 and $32,060.

I had never heard of that company.

I called Della Price.

At fifty-six, Della was a Black woman who could find a missing cent in a stack of music accounts while eating lunch. She had warned me about loose contract pages long before she became our outside rights accountant.

“Read the payee again,” she said.

I did.

Her chair creaked over the phone.

“Bring your blue folder.”

“You remember that?”

“I remember every client who listened to me once. It's a small club.”

The folder was in a bank box rented in my own name. Colin thought it held my mother's papers.

It held those, too.

Before we formed the firm, I had made recordings of my own organ studies. Later sessions followed the same rules. The churches gave site permission. Every hired recording engineer signed the finished master over to me personally. Our firm received a limited license to handle sales.

Della had made me keep the signed originals away from the shop.

“Being married isn't a filing system,” she had said.

I drove past the courthouse, then turned toward the bank.

While I waited for the box, Colin sent a photo of two dinner plates.

Come home sweet, and we can fix this.

Below it came another message.

Do not contact our business partners.

I put the phone facedown.

In the bank's small viewing room, I opened the folder. Under the master assignments lay an agreement with Three Reeds Audio Distribution. My signature sat beside Colin's on the last page.

I remembered the section Della had underlined. If anyone challenged the right to receive income, the distributor would hold the money until the named owner gave instructions or a court ruled.

My name appeared in that space.

I had signed another promise in the same agreement. Back then, finishing Saint Brigid had seemed as certain as spring.

My phone rang before I reached that page.

“Quay Light belongs to Avery Sloane,” Della said. “And a buyer just asked me to confirm that your husband can sell your masters for $420,000.”