We Opened The Cabinet And Found Two Sets Of Books

I reached for the cabinet handle, then stopped.

"Photograph it first," I said.

The lab technician, Gail Mercer, set down her case. She took pictures of the door, both labels, and the shelf beside it. Then she asked Dorian to open it.

"It's just overflow," he said.

His lawyer nodded toward the handle.

Inside were twelve jars, six filter bags, and a cardboard box of printed labels. Some jars wore my culture codes. Others had blue lids I'd never ordered.

I tapped one sealed jar twice before lifting it toward the light.

Alma watched my face.

"Is it yours?" Celia asked.

"The code is mine. I can't identify a strain by looking at it."

That mattered. A healthy white growth could hide a poor strain or the wrong mushroom. A clean appearance wasn't a family record.

One jar had green growth at the edge. Gail photographed it without opening it in our clean room.

"We'll sample under controlled conditions at the lab," she said.

She numbered each container, sealed it for transport, and wrote down who had handled it. Dorian received a copy of the list. The remaining stock stayed marked and untouched under the court order.

"You're making theater out of grain," he said.

I looked at a label bearing SF-6, one of my shiitake crosses.

"Where did this come from?"

"A backup."

"Who made it?"

"We had orders."

His lawyer said, "Let us collect the records before we answer."

The records were in the office, beneath a stack of shipping sleeves.

My safety glasses still hung on their nail. I put them and my old notebooks into a box, then added the box to the inventory sheet.

My production binder still ended at CS-214. Beside it sat a new notebook with a black cover. Dorian had written QUICK TURN across the front.

There were no sterilizer cycle sheets for the lots inside it. No transfer dates. No source jar numbers. Just pounds received, bags packed, and invoices sent.

Gail turned a page with a gloved hand.

"What does 'blend down' mean here?" she asked.

"Cost control," Dorian said.

I read the next line.

Return stock, 28 bags. Add fresh grain. Relabel 221.

My stomach tightened.

"Those were returned bags?"

"Not all returns are bad. Some people order too much."

"They'd left our control. You couldn't know where they'd been stored."

"I used the machines."

"You can't clean up a finished spawn bag by mixing it into something else. And if you sterilized it again, you'd kill the mushroom culture, too."

I pointed to the empty space where the source should have been recorded.

"This line needed a jar number. The next one needed a date. Without them, nobody could follow a bad bag back to where the trouble started."

"You always wanted more forms," he said.

"One page per batch. That's what you skipped."

He looked toward his lawyer instead of me.

The notebook listed another source: a retired grower's unscreened cultures and grain spawn. Dorian had paid $2,940 for the mixed stock. A handwritten note said, Use house codes for continuity.

"Continuity," Alma repeated.

She said the word gently. It sounded worse that way.

We found a second sales sheet on the office computer. The copied files showed that twenty-six shipments, worth $18,600, had gone out under codes absent from my binder. Some had used old returned material. Others had used the outside stock.

The number of customers stayed seventeen. Some had ordered more than once.

Celia asked for copies of the purchase invoices, messages, and label files. Dorian objected to the time it took. The court order allowed the copying, so we stayed.

At noon, I ate crackers in the parking lot. Rain had filled a crack in the asphalt beside my shoe.

Alma sat next to me on a low concrete step.

"You don't have to look composed for me," she said.

"I keep thinking about the growers."

"Then keep the records straight. It will help them."

"He put my initials on it."

She handed me a napkin.

"Initials are easy to print. A release log takes more work."

Inside, the removal contractor measured the loading door and checked the floor. My machines weighed too much for anger to move them. Each would need to cool, drain, disconnect, and travel upright on proper equipment.

His estimate was $2,350. I signed it.

Near the end of the day, Gail found a shipping sleeve taped beneath the cabinet shelf. It held the invoice for the outside cultures.

Behind that invoice lay a certificate made with Creekstep's letterhead.

It called the cabinet stock the original Farzan breeding collection. It said the collection had been checked against the culture bank's records.

The bottom line read: Released And Verified, Shirin Farzan.

There was no signature. There was a date, two days after my key stopped working.

Alma put on her glasses and leaned closer.

"He sent this to the bank, too," she said. "I brought his request with me."