My Partner Locked The Barn While The Audience Found Their Seats

Garrett turned the key while my coat was still inside.

I heard the bolt slide through the hasp. Behind him, our white screen glowed between two old beams. Beyond the barn, cars were turning off the wet road, their tires hissing through fallen maple leaves.

"You can collect your things tomorrow," he said.

"My things are the show."

He smiled as if I had made a small joke.

I was a Japanese American woman of forty-one, short and broad-shouldered, with a blunt black bob and a silver streak above my left ear. I carved shadow puppets and worked their rods behind a screen. After twenty years, I could make a wooden bird seem to breathe with one finger.

That evening, I could not get a door open.

Garrett Boone was a white man of forty-four, tall and pink-cheeked, with sandy curls and the broad smile of someone greeting a full house. People liked to stand near him. He made every room feel like a party he had arranged.

"Lantern Fold is mine now," he said. "The festival bought Garrett Boone's production. I'm the name they know."

"You sold three performances of our show."

"You're very good with the little figures, Emi. Nobody disputes that."

His hand rested on the door. My hands smelled of walnut dust and the orange I had eaten instead of dinner.

We had been business partners for eight years. I made the figures, built scenes, wrote the show, and performed. He booked dates, drove when I was tired, and spoke to crowds. We divided earnings equally after costs.

Lately, he had stopped saying my name during bows.

That afternoon, he had handed me a new program. It said, A Garrett Boone Creation.

"That's not what we agreed," I had told him.

"We'll talk after opening."

Now opening was twenty minutes away, and he had put me outside the rehearsal barn in Brattleboro, Vermont, with my phone, my car key, and an unfinished otter.

The otter was called Not Yet. I gave every unfinished figure a temporary nickname. A bird might be Spare Button until its wings worked. A fox had spent two weeks as Bad Idea.

Not Yet needed one loose elbow pin replaced. I had carried him outside to test his outline against the last daylight.

"Who is working my side?" I asked.

"Tess can cover."

"Tess has rehearsed the sound cues. She hasn't worked the flood scene."

"Then perhaps you should have been more flexible about the program."

He had already found a way to make the locked door my fault.

A volunteer in a green raincoat approached with a box of paper cups.

"Everything all right?"

Garrett opened his arms.

"Creative changes. You know theater."

She glanced at me, then down at the cups.

I knew that glance. For years, people had thanked the man in front while I packed the work behind him.

"My coat," I said.

He brought it out without letting me cross the sill. My wallet was in its pocket. So was the small brass key to my ledger drawer.

When we formed Lantern Fold Theater, Garrett had laughed at my records.

"Are we selling tickets or running a bank?"

Still, he had signed the equipment schedule. I had kept the original, along with the ledger and every receipt for the touring rig. He used photocopies when a venue needed an equipment list.

He had always liked copies. They were light enough to leave behind.

"I'm taking my equipment," I said.

His smile thinned.

"The company owns that."

"Read Schedule A."

"Go home, Emi. You're upsetting people."

He closed the door.

Through the boards, I heard him call, "Places, everyone!"

I stood beside a rain barrel while a girl in yellow boots walked past with her grandfather. She carried a paper ticket in both hands.

I wanted to bang on the door. Instead, I took a picture of the locked hasp and checked the time: 6:42.

Then I called Helena Frost.

She was sixty, a white woman with gray braids pinned over her ears, and she ran the Riverglass Arts Festival with the care she had once brought to her job as town clerk.

"Dear, are you at the barn?" she asked. "Garrett says you've gone home ill."

"I'm outside. He locked me out. I haven't agreed to let him use my equipment without me."

Her voice changed without growing louder.

"Whose equipment?"

"Mine. There is a signed schedule."

"His contract says he has authority to provide the entire production."

I looked at Not Yet. His loose arm had slipped across his chest.

"Then you need to see his proof. And mine."

Inside, the music stopped halfway through its first bright phrase.

Helena said, "Stay where you are."

Three minutes later, my phone lit with her written request: Original Ownership Documents. Festival Office. Seven Thirty Tomorrow Morning. Both Partners Required.