Chapter 48: The Yellow Stripe
Tess arrived Sunday with a portfolio that smelled faintly of dust and old paper.
She placed the anonymous photograph beside her original doorway drawings.
The stripe was not decorative.
It marked a route that crew members could follow when the working lights went out.
“We changed the corridor twice during that production,” Tess explained.
“The first version had a release on the left, and the second had one on the right.”
Elena showed her the date on the black case.
Tess examined the photographs from Friday’s inventory.
“That case wasn’t used for scenery,” she said.
“It held the removable release plates and the test log.”
Luis, who had come to measure the damaged floor, listened from the doorway.
“Does removing it change the building?” he asked.
“Not this building,” Tess replied.
“But somebody may have installed its contents in another one.”
Tess explained that a moving wall could be safe only if workers knew which releases were functional.
A drawing could not substitute for a physical test.
The old log should record each change, the person who approved it, and whether the exit had been checked before an audience entered.
Elena asked why the case would appear at her house after so many years.
Tess said Westbridge had been acquiring pieces of the original production from private storage.
Bell had claimed to be restoring the design exactly.
“He couldn’t restore it exactly unless he knew which version was actually used,” she said.
A knock interrupted them.
Lorraine Pike stood outside carrying an envelope from the bank and a receipt for the first repair payment.
Elena met her on the porch.
Lorraine handed over the papers without trying to look inside.
“There is something else,” she said.
“I saw the delivery driver who came Friday.”
Elena corrected her.
“That was a removal crew.”
“I know who he is,” Lorraine replied.
“His name isn’t Daniel Price.”
Elena waited for evidence rather than a dramatic accusation.
Lorraine said she knew the man from the volunteer committee that had reopened the old theater archives.
“His name is Caleb Doran,” she said.
“He worked for Bell’s first production company, and he asked me about that black case years ago.”
Elena called Hsu before Lorraine had finished speaking.
The woman who had smashed her window might finally have provided something useful without breaking anything.
Chapter 49: A Supervisor Without a License
Hsu verified the identification through the removal company’s employment records.
The man who presented himself as Daniel Price had supplied documents under that name, but the listed address belonged to a closed mail shop.
The company suspended him pending an investigation.
Hsu asked Elena to make a statement about the attempted removal of the unlisted case.
“Will he be arrested?” Elena asked.
“That decision belongs to the investigators who establish what he did,” Hsu said.
“Right now we have a false employment identity and a questionable instruction to collect property.”
Elena disliked how ordinary the facts sounded compared with the fear they produced.
Somebody had entered her yard using a borrowed name and tried to take an object linked to a childhood disappearance.
A second anonymous visitor had left a photograph pointing toward an altered exit.
Neither event proved who was behind the other.
Lorraine offered to write down everything she remembered about Caleb.
Elena agreed on the condition that she stick to incidents she had personally witnessed.
Lorraine described a meeting from seven years earlier when Bell hired volunteers to sort abandoned stage equipment.
Caleb had spent most of the day searching cabinets rather than carrying scenery.
When Lorraine asked what he needed, he said an inspection folder had been misfiled.
She remembered his irritation because he had accused her of hiding it.
“Why didn’t you tell anyone then?” Elena asked.
“I thought he was trying to protect the theater’s reputation,” Lorraine said.
“And I didn’t want people mentioning Peter again.”
Peter heard the account that evening.
He asked a question none of them had considered.
“Was Caleb working there on the night I left?”
Lorraine admitted she did not know.
Tess checked an old crew roster and found the name C. Doran beside the lighting assistant position.
The record proved only that someone with that initial and surname had been assigned to the production.
Peter stared at the page for a long time.
“I remember a man near the exit,” he said.
“I don’t remember his face.”
June started to speak, but Peter shook his head.
“Please don’t fill in the rest for me.”
June stopped immediately.
Elena recognized how difficult that request was for everyone who cared about him.
They wanted answers badly enough to make every uncertain memory into a clue.
Peter wanted the chance to be accurate, even if accuracy meant saying he did not know.
