Chapter Fifteen C: The Trucks Before Sunrise
At five the next morning, the exhibition hall looked like a dark ship grounded in an empty parking lot.
A row of delivery trucks waited beside the loading dock.
Their drivers stood beneath the overhang with paper cups of coffee and increasingly irritated expressions.
Priya met Evan, Claire, and Becca at the service entrance.
She had slept less than three hours.
“Nobody unloads until I know what they think they purchased,” she said.
The first driver represented a company that sold handmade furniture.
He produced a delivery slip showing a premium corner booth inside the east wing.
The second driver had a different document for the same corner.
The third driver had been promised an entire row that did not exist.
Priya spread the papers across a folding table.
“Who sent these?” she asked.
The drivers named different contacts.
Each contact worked for a separate booking service Nolan had recommended.
Becca examined the papers and pointed to the small print at the bottom.
“These aren’t invoices from the hall,” she said.
“They’re loading instructions.”
Priya turned one page over.
A handwritten note instructed the driver to wait for a representative wearing a green cap.
Evan remembered the cap in Iris’s recording.
He felt the same sudden chill he had experienced when he first watched Nolan hand Marla the axe.
“He planned to be here,” Evan said.
A horn sounded at the far end of the dock.
Another truck had arrived, and its driver was arguing with a guard about an entrance that had been blocked by temporary barriers.
Priya walked toward them before the argument could become a confrontation.
Claire followed her and asked the driver to show his instructions.
He held out a message on his phone.
The message said that a late arrival would result in the loss of his booth and the forfeiture of his fee.
“I drove four hours,” the driver said.
“I can’t turn around with a truck full of furniture.”
Priya explained that his assigned booth did not exist.
He stared at her as though she had spoken another language.
“Then who took my money?”
Nobody answered immediately.
Becca moved beside him.
“I know a storage yard ten minutes away,” she said.
“I can help you park your truck while we sort this out.”
The driver shook his head.
“I need customers, not parking.”
Priya studied the official floor plan.
She could offer him a space vacated by a seller who had canceled the previous evening.
The space was smaller and farther from the entrance, but it was real.
“I can offer this booth at the regular rate,” she said.
“I will not pretend it is the corner you paid for.”
The driver looked from the plan to the empty hall.
“Can I see it before I decide?”
“Yes,” Priya answered.
She walked him inside and let him measure the floor himself.
When they returned, he accepted the smaller space and asked how he could dispute the original charge.
Priya gave him the booking service’s contact information and the hall’s written confirmation of the discrepancy.
She did not promise a refund she could not personally authorize.
Evan watched the exchange and understood why Nolan’s scheme had survived the first festival.
The people affected had been forced to solve urgent problems one by one.
By the time anyone could compare their experiences, the crowd had dispersed.
Claire suggested that Priya gather the affected vendors together before the doors opened.
“Let them hear the same explanation at the same time,” she said.
Priya looked at the growing line of trucks.
“That will make a very angry room,” she replied.
“They’re already angry,” Claire said.
“At least they can be angry about what actually happened.”
Priya agreed.
She asked Becca to help organize the waiting vehicles and told Evan to bring additional chairs from the storage room.
The hall was beginning to fill, but not with the celebration Nolan had advertised.
It filled with people who had driven through the night expecting a fair chance to sell their work.
