The Investigator Arrived While I Was Mending The Painted River

Vaughn Rusk called me the temporary paint girl while I was holding a river together.

It was a river on linen, twenty feet wide, with a split through its brown water. The Bellweather Theater had hired me to mend six old backdrops before its winter show. Outside, real water rolled past Astoria's pilings, dark under the November rain.

I was a thirty-year-old Native American woman with brown skin, dark eyes, and black hair I wore in a low braid.

My name was Maren Nez. I was a scenic-art conservator. That meant I saved old stage pictures instead of making them look new.

I tested a green on my thumbnail. Too bright. I added raw umber.

"You listening?" Vaughn asked.

"I heard you. The loading door stays clear after four."

"Good girl."

Vaughn was a white American man of forty-six with silver at his temples, a neat blond mustache, and spotless brown shoes.

His shoes were what I watched. Nobody kept shoes that clean by carrying freight.

His company, Rusk Shore Freight, handled the theater's borrowed scenery. He also chaired its freight committee, which seemed like a grand name for two men and a clipboard. He had paid for a new loading-office camera and liked to mention the $4,600 cost.

"We all contribute," he said.

"The theater owes me $8,400," I said. "I contributed six weeks."

"Invoices take time."

He remembered every person who had made him wait. I had watched him cancel a carpenter's gate pass after the man pressed him about an unpaid $85 bill.

After he left, Tessa Wren came down from the office with my contract.

"One more signature," she said. "You keep the condition archive?"

"Original photos, treatment notes, color cards. Seven years. It's on page four."

"Why keep all that?"

"Because fresh paint can hide an old problem."

She signed. I put her copy in a clean envelope. Mine went into the flat case under my worktable, beside the memory cards I never erased on a job.

My camera ran without a wireless connection. Each picture included a numbered board and a gray card. At lunch, I copied the files, checked them, and wrote the file numbers in my bound book. Boring work. Useful work.

The old linen could tear under its own weight. I supported it with strips of clean cotton, then laid small patches along the back. Nothing strong enough to save the cloth should be stronger than the cloth itself.

That afternoon, I set up to photograph the river's lower edge. Behind it stood sheets of stage mirror from a closed dance hall. Their silver backing was worn, but they still threw light into the dark loading bay.

Vaughn's foreman, Cal Danner, rolled in two crates marked COAST SCENERY LOAN. Each had blue tape across one corner.

I took three pictures.

Vaughn came in through the side door. He spoke softly to Cal. They moved the blue-taped crates behind the mirror rack and brought out two others with the same printed labels. These had black metal straps.

"Need this space," Vaughn said.

"Two minutes."

"Now, Maren."

I capped my brush. He smiled as though I had agreed with him about the weather.

The next morning, a man waited by my table without touching anything.

"Maren Nez? Elias Mercer. I'm an investigator with the state freight theft unit."

He showed me his card and badge. He was a thirty-five-year-old Black American man with close-cut hair and a raincoat dripping into a cardboard tray he had found by the door.

"I was told you repair the scenery."

"Only the parts that hold still."

"Then your job has better limits than mine."

I smiled before I meant to.

He asked about a missing shipment from a small maritime collection near the coast. A brass ship's clock, a survey compass, and other old instruments. Insured value: $63,700.

"Did any crates arrive here yesterday?"

"Scenery crates. I didn't open them."

He wrote that down exactly. No push. No look that said I must know more.

"Could I speak with whoever handles deliveries?"

I pointed upstairs.

Vaughn met him halfway down. His voice warmed at once.

"We have a camera. Happy to help."

Later, I heard a crash from the loading office.

When I stepped into the hall, Vaughn stood over the recorder. Its case lay open beside a tipped cup of coffee. He held the little drive in one hand.

"Terrible timing," he said.

Then he dropped the drive into the steel bin and struck it twice with a dock hammer.

"Customer information," he told me. "Can't leave it lying around."

My thumbnail had dried green.

"Of course," I said.

That night I enlarged my river photographs. In the stage mirror, reversed but sharp, Cal held a crate lid open while Vaughn lifted a brass clock wrapped in red cloth.

Below the clock was a white card with six clear numbers.

My phone lit up beside the keyboard.

It was Vaughn.

"Bring me your camera before work tomorrow."