Chapter 13
The phone was face down on the kitchen table and it went off hard enough to walk itself a half inch across the wood.
Ten after eight on a Monday. Odette Callahan.
"Come sit down."
"Is it the accounting?"
"It is not the accounting. The accounting has ten more days on it and I'm not going to say one word about it until a man in Brentwood signs the back page.
" Paper moving. "Something came in Friday.
Signature required. I've had it on my desk since, and I want you to see how it came in before I tell you what it is. "
Savannah was on the road in nine minutes.
The window unit in Odette's front room kicked on when she sat down, the way it always did, like it had been waiting on her.
There was a cardboard mailer on the desk, opened along one edge with a letter knife and not torn, which was how Odette opened everything. The label was printed. The counter stamp was a courier place on Charlotte Avenue.
The sender line was blank.
"No letter," Odette said. "No card, no cover sheet, no note. I turned it inside out and shook it over the trash can, which I want you to picture."
"Somebody paid for signature required and didn't put their name on it."
"Somebody paid for signature required so that there'd be a record it got here," Odette said, "and didn't put their name on it. Those are two different things and the second one is what interests me."
She slid the mailer across.
Savannah reached in and came out with a folder in a blue backer, a ribbon down the spine, the corners soft the way paper gets when it's been in a drawer for nine years and handled maybe four times.
She knew what it was before she opened it.
She opened it anyway and turned to page fourteen, and there were two signatures on it, and one of them was hers, twenty-five years old, careful, with the loop on the S she had spent five years teaching herself to make because she'd thought a woman with a name in a record store ought to have a signature.
Behind page fourteen were the exhibits. Exhibit A. Exhibit B. Exhibit C, Definitions, one page and a third, sixty-five percent to the writer designated first in the registration, notwithstanding equal credit on the release.
And behind that, clipped, not stapled, the file note. Two months after a wedding. Nine words in blue ink in the margin in a hand she had been reading on set lists and airport napkins for nine years.
keep DH first on everything, consistent across catalogue, avoids confusion later
"That's the original," Savannah said.
"That is the executed original with exhibits attached. There is one of them." Odette folded her hands. "And it does not live in a mailer. It lives in a fireproof cabinet behind the door in a corner office in the Gulch, and it has lived there since before you had a record out."
"Then somebody took it out of the cabinet."
"Somebody took it out of the cabinet," Odette said, "and walked it into a counter on Charlotte Avenue, and paid for a signature, and left the sender line blank."
Savannah sat with her hand flat on page fourteen.
"Does it matter?" she said. "Legally. Do I need it? You've got the certified copy."
"I've got a certified copy a clerk pulled for sixty dollars, which any decent lawyer on the other side spends a day and a half muddying up.
" Odette tapped the blue backer twice. "This is the paper the man signed.
That's his note in his own ink on his own file copy.
There's no argument left about whether it's real.
Only about what it means, and I'll take that one every day of the week.
" She sat back. "It's worth six weeks and forty thousand dollars in expert time.
Somebody handed it to me in a cardboard envelope. Anonymously."
Savannah looked at the blank sender line for a while.
"Am I supposed to ask who?"
"You're supposed to notice that there are four people on earth who could have gotten into that cabinet," Odette said, "and that three of them work for the fourth."
The trade came through at 11:20 while she was in the truck in the lot behind the coffee shop, and she read it with the engine off and the windows down.
TEMPO: Deacon Holloway, Sennett Media part ways after fifteen years — Long Field Tour production continues under label, business manager
The split, confirmed by both parties Friday, comes less than two weeks before the tour's May 14 kickoff at Cordelia Hall in Nashville, a fourteen-hundred-seat warm-up date ahead of the arena run's first building in Fort Worth.
Sennett Media had served as management of record on twenty-two of the run's thirty-one dates and is a signatory on the touring company's business account.
Two promoters, speaking on background, described the transition as "unusual this late" and said guarantees are being repapered.
There was a statement from Holt.
"I'm proud of every one of those fifteen years and I'd do them again the same way," said Sennett. "Deacon's got a hell of a record coming and I'll be in the building on the fourteenth if he'll have me."
Three sentences, generous, no edge on any of it. Holt Sennett was going to be gracious about this in public until the day he died. It was the smartest thing about him.
There was no statement from Deacon.
Savannah went back up to the top and read the date. Confirmed by both parties Friday.
Friday was the counter stamp on the mailer.
She sat in a hot truck with her phone in her hand and did the arithmetic twice, and it came out the same both times, and she still did not know what it meant.
A man fires his manager of fifteen years two weeks out from a thirty-one city run, and the same day, a document walks out of that manager's cabinet and shows up on her lawyer's desk with no name on it.
She had learned four things in a week and had gotten every one of them off a piece of paper.
Not one of them had come out of Deacon Holloway's mouth.
Trish Gormley from Ridgeline called at four, and she was good at her job, which meant she spent ninety seconds being warm before she got to it.
"—and I want to say up front, nobody here is asking you for anything you don't want to give."
"You're about to ask me for something."
"I'm about to ask you for something," Trish said, and laughed, which Savannah gave her credit for. "Two sentences. From the both of you. We're proud of the work and we're looking forward to the run. Nothing about the marriage, nothing about the accounting. Two sentences that let a building open."
"Whose two sentences."
"I'd write a draft. You'd both change it."
"No."
"Savannah—"
"No, and I'm going to tell you why so you don't have to call back and try a different way in.
" She put the phone on the dash on speaker so she had both hands.
"Nine years, every word that went out about me went out over somebody else's desk, and I never once saw it first. The last one said SH not participating on a run-of-show sheet at nine in the morning.
So there's not going to be a joint statement, because there's not going to be anything joint that I didn't build myself. "
The line was quiet a second.
"That's fair," Trish said. "Can I tell you where I am, off the record?"
"Go ahead."
"The first four buildings are soft. Not dead.
Soft. The management exit spooked people and the accounting story spooked people, and when a room gets spooked twice it starts hunting for a reason to stay home.
" A door shut on her end. "There's a version of the fourteenth that's a great night and everybody exhales.
There's a version that's fourteen hundred people watching a man who lost his manager. "
"I'd guess he'd like the first one too."
"There's also a version," Trish said, "where you come out for one song."
"Who told you to ask me that?"
"Nobody."
"Nobody at all."
"Nobody at all," Trish said. "Which is the part I'd think about, if I were you.
I have asked that man's office for a Savannah Holloway sentence four times since March and I have never once gotten a no.
I've gotten nothing. There's a difference, and I've been doing this twenty years, and I don't like what the difference means. "
Savannah looked out the windshield at the back of a coffee shop.
"Send me anything with my name in it before it goes out," she said. "Anything. A caption. A seating chart."
"I can do that."
"Then we're fine."
She wrote the terms on Tuesday morning at a rented kitchen table too small for a table, on the back of an envelope, because that was how she found the thing that was wrong.
Then she copied them onto a clean page, because an envelope is not a document, and she had learned that the hard way in a conference room with a bowl of mints in it.
Odette read the page twice without saying anything and then took her glasses off.
"One is expensive," she said. "One is just arithmetic with a lot of zeroes on it, and he'll do it, because he's already—" She stopped. "He'll do it."
"Already what?"
"Read me two."
Savannah read two.
"Two is mine," Odette said. "That's my Rourke language, word for word, and I'll thank you to notice you didn't change a comma."
"I didn't want to change a comma. It works."
"It works." She put the glasses back on and looked at the page again and her mouth got flat. "Three, nobody signs."
"Read it out loud."
"I've read it."
"Read it out loud, Odette, because I've had it in my head for six days and I want to hear what it sounds like in a room."
Odette picked up the page.