The New Lock Hung Where My Brass Key Belonged

I gave the unfinished salamander a county clerk's voice before I left home.

"Window three," I told my empty kitchen. "Bring proof of rain."

That was how I worked. Every bare puppet head got a temporary voice while I carved it. The voice helped me find the jaw. Sometimes it helped me face the day.

I was thirty-six, a Jewish American puppet maker, and I had a narrow face, brown curls clipped above my neck, and a pale scar across my left thumb.

My name was Leah Rosen. In Eureka Springs, people knew me as the woman who carried talking heads uphill in grocery bags.

Our workshop sat below Spring Street, tucked into a stone building where the back door opened onto a higher street than the front. Rain ran down the steps that Tuesday. I reached the door and found a shiny silver lock.

My brass key stopped halfway in.

Through the glass, I saw Marlene Cobb putting price cards on my puppets.

Marlene was a tall white woman of forty-eight, with a blunt blond bob, square red glasses, and a cream coat that never seemed to collect sawdust.

She turned a card toward the window.

MOSS THE RAIN KEEPER. CHARACTER PACKAGE. $12,000.

I knocked with the bone of my thumb.

She opened the door three inches, keeping her shoe behind it.

"Your tools will be boxed," she said.

"Why would my tools need boxes?"

"We need a cleaner business structure."

Behind her stood a man with a tablet. He looked at me, then at the puppet on its stand.

"Is this the artist?" he asked.

"An assistant," Marlene said. "She handled the bench work."

I had spent four months finding Moss's walk. Two leather hinges, a loose hip, and a bent control rod made him look like someone listening for water under stone.

"I designed him," I said.

Marlene smiled at the man.

"Artists get attached to inventory."

She had booked our tours for seven years. I had built the puppets, written their stories, and played two voices behind a striped curtain. We owned Lantern Hollow Puppet Company together, sixty percent mine and forty percent hers.

She had started calling me replaceable in July.

First it was, "We can replace a voice."

Then, "We can replace a builder."

Now she had changed a lock on a door paid for by our company.

"The children at Fern Hall are expecting us next Saturday," I said. "Eleven days."

"The booking is covered."

"By whom?"

"A practical person. Go home, Leah."

She closed the door before I could ask about the sale cards on Nell the cave cricket and Aunt Slate the limestone turtle.

The unfinished head in my bag pressed against my ribs.

In its clerk's voice, very softly, I said, "Please keep your receipt."

It kept me from crying on the steps.

I took pictures of the lock, the cards, and the company name painted on the door. Then I walked to the covered bench by Basin Spring Park and opened our shared booking folder on my phone.

ACCESS REMOVED.

Our bank account still opened. It held $1,840.

Three school tour payments I had expected were missing. Marlene had said the schools paid late. I had believed her because I was busy sewing six tiny raincoats.

I called Fern Hall, a small theater outside town.

Its director, Ruth Bell, answered over the sound of chairs scraping.

"We paid our $6,000 deposit Friday," she said. "Please tell me nothing is wrong."

"Which account did you use?"

"The one on Marlene's invoice. Same company name. New payment instructions."

I asked her to email the invoice. I didn't tell her the performance was canceled. I didn't know enough yet to say anything that large.

Then I called Soren Lind.

At forty-two, Soren was a soft-spoken white stage carpenter who could make a trapdoor close without a click. His best jokes arrived after everyone else thought the conversation had ended.

"She changed the locks," I said.

He waited a beat.

"Bold choice for someone who sells doors opening."

"Do you still have the rehearsal binder? The blue one?"

"Under the fake well."

"Including the business papers?"

He stopped joking.

When we formed the company, Marlene had insisted that we were too small for lawyers. I had paid one anyway. We had signed an operating agreement at the rehearsal table, with copies for each member and one in the stage binder.

Marlene had used her copy to level a projector that afternoon.

Mine was in a cabinet behind her new lock.

"Every page," Soren said. "Even the schedule with your drawings."

I looked across the wet street. In the workshop window, Marlene was taking Moss off his stand.

"Bring the whole binder," I said.

Before Soren could answer, a white cargo van pulled up outside my workshop, and its back doors swung open.