The New Lock Turned While My Auction Cards Sat Inside

My key stopped halfway into the lock on Thursday morning.

I tried the side door next. Through its window, I saw my green work shirt hanging above the bench. One cuff held a drawing of the switch chain for River Queen. I had left a gap beside the right flipper, where the fault still was.

Warren opened the front door just far enough to fill it.

“We need to clear up your role before Sunday's auction,” he said.

I held up the key. “My role came with half the rent.”

“Keep your voice down. Customers.”

Behind him, two men studied the six pinball machines lined along our brick wall. Their lot cards were already clipped to the glass.

Warren was a white man of forty-three, broad through the shoulders, with sandy hair, a neat beard, and a smile that showed his upper gums.

He used that smile on the men.

“Merritt helped with the bench work,” he said. “My apprentice has good hands. Still learning the business end.”

I was twenty-six, a white woman with pale freckles, a blunt brown bob, and blue circuit paths sketched on the cuffs of my work shirts.

I restored pinball machines. I could wind a coil, set a switch gap, and mend split cabinet wood without hiding its grain under thick paint. I also knew how to read a receipt.

“Business partner,” I said. “Merritt Aldridge. That's what our agreement says.”

Warren stepped onto the sidewalk and pulled the door shut behind him.

Our shop stood west of downtown Davenport, where delivery trucks shook the windows and river fog sometimes reached the loading alley. A barge horn sounded beyond the blocks of old brick.

“You're making us look bad,” he said.

“You changed our locks.”

“I changed my locks.”

He said it gently, as though I had missed a simple lesson.

We had opened the shop eighteen months earlier. Warren handled bookings and sales. I handled repairs. We split the shop's net service income after bills. Each of us could keep personal machines there, with a separate list showing who owned what.

That last rule had been mine.

“The auction machines stay,” he said. “They were restored here. That makes them shop stock.”

“No, it doesn't.”

His smile went flat.

“Try explaining that to a room of collectors. They know me.”

He went inside before I could answer.

I stood with my useless key in my hand. I had paid $18,750 for those six cabinets over three years. Some had arrived with mice in the coin boxes. One had a swollen bottom panel that smelled like wet cereal.

Now they were ready for the collector's auction Warren had helped arrange. Their estimated sale total was close to $50,000.

I had planned to use my proceeds for a down payment on a small house. Warren had called that sweet, in the voice people used for a child saving coins.

My phone buzzed.

It was a picture from a customer: Warren's new auction handout.

RESTORATIONS BY WARREN PIKE.

My name was gone.

I sat in my truck until my hands stopped shaking. Then I opened the folder marked CABINETS on my phone.

Six purchase receipts. Six serial numbers. Photos from pickup days, before any of the machines crossed Warren's threshold.

There was another folder, too. I did not open that one yet.

A tap came at my window.

Nadine Ellis stood beside the truck with a canvas bag under one arm. She was fifty-nine, a white woman with silver hair cut close at the neck and reading glasses on a red cord. She had come to do the final auction appraisal.

“You waiting for somebody?” she asked.

“Apparently, permission to enter my business.”

She looked at the new lock.

“Oh,” she said.

I showed her the handout.

“He told you I was his apprentice?”

“He said you'd moved on.”

“Since yesterday?”

Nadine studied my face. “Come tell me over coffee.”

At a counter two blocks away, she laid her appraisal pad between us.

“River Queen,” she said. “You repaired the split below its coin door.”

“With a wedge cut along the old grain.”

“I could see where it grew back together. He said he did that.”

I looked down at my bare wrist. Without the work shirt, I felt oddly unfinished.

“Do you have proof of ownership?” she asked.

“Receipts. And something he signed.”

“Bring both. I'm not calling ownership from a nice repair.”

That was the first thing anyone said that morning that made me breathe easier.

Then her phone rang. Warren's name lit the screen.

She answered on speaker after I nodded.

“Don't let Merritt confuse you,” he said. “All six belong to the partnership. I've got a fresh inventory right here.”