“He could have asked me.”

“He wanted to be certain. Then he hurt his hand and lost his nerve.”

Lily turned the key in her palm. It was stamped with a tiny number fourteen.

“I’m not the person you’re looking for,” she said. “My family is from Pennsylvania. My mother has never mentioned a theater in Ohio.”

“I don’t know whether you are. My father said not to pressure you.”

Daniel reached for the photograph, but Lily stopped him. The woman in the picture had one hand raised to shade her eyes. Her smile was crooked and broad. Something about the painted moon behind her stirred a memory that Lily could not place: a dark ceiling scattered with pinpricks of light, and a low humming sound like distant machinery.

“Can I take a picture of this?” she asked.

“Keep the original. June wanted you to see the back.”

Lily turned it over. Written in fading blue ink were three words: THE WALL LISTENS.

Colin appeared from the office. “Are you ordering, sir?”

Daniel said he was not. Colin told Lily she had two minutes before her shift began. The envelope went into her bag. Daniel left a phone number, but before he walked out he added something that made her uneasy.

“June won’t talk to my father anymore. She says he owes her the truth about one particular night. He says she’s right.”

“What night?”

“The night the theater went dark.”

3. A NAME IN A DRAWER

Lily called her mother during her lunch break. Marianne Hart worked at a dry-cleaning counter in Erie and answered with the clipped patience she used for customers demanding impossible stain removal.

“Bellweather?” Marianne said. “Why are you asking?”

“Have we ever been there?”

A pause. Then, “You were little.”

“How little?”

“Four, maybe five. Your father took us to see a show.”

Lily sat on an overturned milk crate behind the diner. “You told me he never liked theaters.”

“He didn’t, afterward.”

“After what?”

Marianne exhaled. “There was an accident. Nobody in our family was hurt. We came home. That’s all.”

Lily had been eleven when her father died after a sudden illness. She remembered his heavy boots beside the kitchen door, his habit of humming while fixing a hinge, and his insistence that every bedroom have a working flashlight. She did not remember him talking about Bellweather.

“Do you know a woman named June Vale?”

The silence on the line became long enough that Lily checked whether the call had disconnected.

“Where did you hear that name?” Marianne asked.

Lily explained the photograph and the key. Her mother told her not to travel to Ohio. When Lily asked why, Marianne said she had to return to work and ended the call.