Chapter 8
Odette called at ten past eight on a Monday morning and said, "Are you sitting down or are you standing up?"
"I'm making coffee."
"Sit down and then don't make it. Come here. Now, if you can."
Savannah was in the lot behind the coffee shop in twelve minutes.
The box was on the desk when she got there. Redweld, the flap folded over, a rubber band around the whole thing that had gone chalky. It had the same look as everything Holt's office produced, which was expensive and slightly out of date.
"You didn't get that from Holt," Savannah said.
"I did not." Odette pulled the band off.
"I quit asking Holt in April. The administrator has to keep a certified copy with the exhibits attached, because the exhibits are what they administer off of.
So I asked them, on your behalf, as a party to it.
They sent it in four days and charged me sixty dollars. "
"Four days."
"Four days." Odette set her glasses on. "Sit down, Savannah."
She sat down.
"You've read the front of this thing. Everybody has.
Four pages of it says exactly what you thought it said.
Fifty-fifty on the catalogue, writer's share and publisher's share, husband and wife, plain as a fence post." Odette turned to a tab she had flagged in green.
"The exhibits are where the work is. Exhibit C is definitions. "
"Definitions of what."
"Of everything. Including this." She turned the page around and put one finger on it. "Primary songwriting contribution."
Savannah read it twice, because apparently that was still who she was.
Where a Composition is credited to two or more Writers, the Writer designated first in the registration filed with the applicable performing rights organization and mechanical licensing agent shall, for the purposes of allocation of mechanical income hereunder, be deemed to have made the primary songwriting contribution, and such income shall be allocated sixty-five percent (65%) to the primary Writer and the remainder pro rata among the other Writers, notwithstanding any equal apportionment of credit appearing on any physical or digital release.
She read it a third time.
"Say it in English," she said.
"Whoever's name is typed first in the box gets sixty-five cents on the dollar of the mechanicals. Not the credit. The credit stays fifty-fifty. Everything printed on the record stays fifty-fifty. It's the money underneath it that moves."
"Whoever's typed first."
"Whoever's typed first."
The window unit rattled on.
"How many of our releases is he typed first on," Savannah said.
Odette did not look at a page for this one.
"All of them," she said.
There is a moment in a bad mix when you finally find the thing.
You've been hunting a buzz for an hour, and you pull one fader, and there it is, and it has been there the entire time at a level you could hear but not name, and you feel two things at once.
Relief, because it's real. And a kind of sickness, because you have been listening past it for an hour and telling yourself you were being sensitive.
Savannah sat in a chair in Berry Hill and had both of those.
"How much," she said.
"I won't give you a number I can't stand behind."
"Give me the one you can't stand behind."
Odette took her glasses off.
"Nine years, on this catalogue, with the streaming after year four.
" She said it evenly. "Somewhere between seven and nine hundred thousand dollars.
If you make me guess, I guess closer to nine.
I'd want a full accounting before I put it in a letter, and a real accounting takes six weeks and costs money. "
Savannah put her hand flat on the arm of the chair.
"Say the rest," she said.
"What rest?"
"You've been talking for ten minutes without saying his name. You don't do that by accident."
Odette put her glasses back on and turned to a different tab. This one was orange.
"There are file notes," she said. "The administrator keeps them.
Two months after you signed, somebody at Sennett Media sent a standing instruction to the administrator about how registrations from that office were to be filed.
Writer order. There's a note in the margin in a hand I've now compared against four other documents.
" She turned the page. "It says: keep DH first on everything, consistent across catalogue, avoids confusion later. "
"Holt."
"Holt."
"And Deacon."
"Deacon almost certainly did not know." Odette said it flatly, the way she said everything, and did not soften a single edge of it.
"I've been at this thirty years and I don't hand out that opinion.
He's not copied on the instruction. He's not copied on anything the administrator sent for nine years — his statements went to the office and the office sent him a summary, and the summary has one line on it that says publishing, with a number after it.
I've got six years of those. The split is nowhere on them.
There is nothing he saw, ever, that would have told him. "
"So it wasn't a decision," Savannah said.
"No."
"Nobody made it."
"Somebody made it. Holt made it, once, in a margin, nine years ago, and then it just ran." Odette closed the folder. "That's what a structure is. It's a decision somebody makes one time so that nobody ever has to make it again."
Savannah looked out the window at the roof of the coffee shop.
She had been braced for a villain her whole way over here.
She had gotten in the truck ready for it.
And there wasn't one, exactly — there was a forty-eight-year-old man who had been thirty-nine once and had written nine words in a margin to save his office some trouble, and had called the whole arrangement a wedding present, and had probably not thought about it again since.
"I wanted it to be a decision," she said.
"I know."
"If he'd sat down one time and chosen it, I could hate it clean." Her voice came out perfectly level, which was worse than if it hadn't. "This is nine years of a man not noticing money coming toward him. That's not a betrayal. That's weather."
"It's a breach of the agreement's implied covenant, is what it is," Odette said, "and I'm going to enjoy the letter."
"Don't write the letter yet."
"I wasn't going to."
She drove home and did not put the radio on.
At the rental she took the copy shop printout out of her bag — the confirmation from Wednesday, the ten songs, thirty cents — and put it on the counter next to the certified copy Odette had made for her.
Two pages. One with her name typed in the first box ten times. One with a definition on it that explained, in one sentence written by somebody else, what the first box had been worth for nine years.
She got a pen and did the arithmetic on the back of the printout, because she did not believe a number until her own hand had made it.
Nine years. Say eight hundred thousand.
She wrote down what it would have bought, not because she wanted any of it, but because a number is nothing until you put a thing next to it.
A house she owned outright with nobody's name on the deed but hers.
The four years she had spent saying yes to background sessions in Januarys because the money was honest and the money was needed.
A record of her own, cut properly, ten years ago, with players she picked.
She put the pen down.
It wasn't even the money. She had money. She had turned down two and a half million dollars in a lawyer's office in a pair of boots.
It was that in the year she was twenty-five, in a conference room with a bowl of mints in it, a man had explained a piece of paper to her and told her it was the simplest thing for both of them, and she had read four pages and stopped reading, and every day since then a machine had been running in a basement somewhere sorting her work into two piles, and the smaller pile was hers, and nobody had ever had to think about it again.
Kinsley Wexler was five months old. This was nine years.
She sat down on the floor with her back against the cabinet, which she had not done since she was twenty, and stayed there a while.
At two she called Silas Rourke, because there was one thing she could still do something about.
He answered on the fourth ring with a guitar audible behind him and did not stop playing.
"It's Savannah."
"I know who it is, it says so."
"I need more time."
"Take it." He kept playing. "Was that the whole call?"
"No." She got up off the floor. "It's out. People are talking about it. A bass player at a session had it Thursday and my husband's manager had it Friday, and I haven't said yes to you, and I want you to know I didn't put it out there."
The playing stopped.
"Well, sure it's out," Silas said. "I told my publisher I wanted paper drawn. That's four people, and one of them's got a wife who sells real estate. This town is a party line, honey, it always was."
"It doesn't bother you."
"Should it?"
"It'll get told wrong. It's already being told wrong. Ten songs and a record and both our names, and I haven't answered you."
"Then it'll get told right in about a year, when the record comes out." He made a small noise, the sound of a man shifting on a stool. "Savannah. I'm fifty-eight years old and I've been in more rumors than most people have been in rooms. Nobody ever got hurt by talk about work."
"Somebody did today."
He was quiet a second.
"Then that's a different problem," Silas said, "and it isn't mine, and I'm not going to ask you about it. The slot's open. Call me when you've got an answer or call me when you've got a line, either one."
He hung up first, which she was grateful for.
Then she picked up her phone, because she was going to tell him.