The man at the gate remembered Leah. That made her feel recognized for the wrong reason.
“Found her, then.”
Kit leaned over. “Hi, Mel. She's with me.”
“She's been with me already. Didn't like it.”
“Nobody likes it. That's why you're so good.”
He smiled. “Put the truck in the staff field. Don't block the ambulance space. Somebody did yesterday and I nearly got a day off for murder.”
He gave Leah a visitor wristband. A pink piece of paper, nothing more. She looked at it too long before putting it around her wrist.
Beyond the gate the festival had become a town. The bare spaces she had seen last night were full of people, awnings, carts, bins and the astonishing number of things people could sell on a stick. Music came from two directions. She could smell frying onions and sunscreen, and beneath that the wet mineral smell of the lake. A woman in sequins walked past carrying a box of trash bags.
Kit directed Leah into a field behind the concession trailers, got out, and was immediately stopped by three different people.
“One at a time,” she said. “I can disappoint all of you. It doesn't have to be now.”
The first was a tall man with a headset and a clipboard. He said a delivery had been left at the wrong end of the site. The second, a woman in a yellow shirt, had lost two volunteers. The third was a boy holding a cable in each hand. He was looking at the ground as if he hoped it would open.
Kit dealt with the boy first.
“Did you pull it or did somebody drive over it?”
“I don't know.”
“That's not a third thing. Which end did you find?”
He showed her. She looked without touching.
“Okay. Don't plug it into anything. Go get Devon. Tell him we have a dead one. Say it like that. He enjoys bad news if you name it properly.”
The boy grinned, relieved to have an instruction that didn't include being fired, and went off.
Leah stood beside the bin of equipment, watching Kit point the clipboard man toward a service lane and tell the woman in yellow where to get two replacements. She did not apologize for arriving late until she had made everybody move. Then she looked at the woman and said, “I know. I'm sorry. My morning went wrong.”
“Your morning can fill in a time sheet.”
“I will.”
The woman left. Kit took one handle of the bin.
“You coming?”
Leah took the other.
They carried it between trailers. A concession owner was shouting that he had ordered four crates of lemons and had been sent one crate of lemons and three of limes. Kit stopped long enough to say she'd get somebody to find the delivery sheet.
“I don't want a sheet,” he said. “I want a lemon.”
“I'm working my way toward the lemon.”
Leah put her end of the bin down before her fingers gave out. “Are you getting paid by all these people?”
“No. I look as if I know where things are.”
“Do you?”
“About half the time. Don't tell them.”
They reached a tent behind the smaller stage. Devon was there, sitting on a flight case with a screwdriver between his teeth. When he saw Kit he took it out.
“Wednesday.”
“I know.”
“Wednesday was when we were moving this.”
“I know.”
“I don't want you to know. I want Wednesday back. Could you do that?”
“I brought your splitter.”
He looked at the bin, and some of his anger had to make room for relief.
“Where's the other one?”
“At my place. This is the one we fixed.”
“We didn't fix it. We looked at it until it got scared and worked.”
Kit knelt beside him and lifted the lid. They talked about the little black boxes in a language Leah could follow only in pieces. It was not especially technical. It was worse than technical: the language of two people who had already had most of the conversation somewhere she wasn't.
Devon glanced at her. “You find out about the car?”
“I bent it,” Kit said.
“I noticed.”
“Not badly. Well, badly enough.”
“Are you okay?”
Kit nodded. He held her gaze a moment, then put the screwdriver down.
“You're carrying the heavy end later.”
“I always carry the heavy end.”
“You're shorter. That's not the same thing.”
Leah moved back to give them room. A young woman in a sleeveless work shirt came through the tent carrying a stool. A strip of tape across the back of her shirt read IZZY, in black capitals. She stopped beside Leah.
“Are you Kit's mom?”
Leah nodded.
“Thank you for making her. She knows where everything is.”
“Half the time,” Leah said.
Izzy grinned. “That's twice as much as anybody else. I'm going on break. When he asks, tell him I died.”
“You died,” Kit said from the floor. “Got it.”
A noise came from the little stage, followed by a burst of applause. A band had started its sound check for a scattering of early arrivals who were applauding everything. Izzy put the stool down and left. Kit sat back on her heels.
“You want to see it?” she asked Leah.
“What?”
“The thing you're paying so much attention to.”
She took out her phone. Leah expected another picture of a stage, like the ones Kit had sent in December. Instead there was a video: a compact trailer parked on an uneven patch of grass, one side opening out, the roof rising slowly. A man in coveralls walked around it talking, his voice nearly lost in wind.
Kit paused the video. “It needs work. Not pretend work. Actual work. But we can do most of it.”
“Where would you keep it?”
She heard herself ask, and stopped.
Kit looked tired again.
“We have a place. I told you.”
“Right.”
“He's getting out of it because he's sixty-three and his wife's had enough of weekends. He'll sell the sound gear with it. We don't need everything he's got. We can sell some.”
Devon stood up. “Don't tell her the list. The list is how she gets you.”
Leah's face heated.
He looked at her, then back at Kit. “I need to go check the other stage.”
After he left, Leah watched the paused image. The little stage had ugly skirting and one wheel cover missing. It was a business in the unflattering way businesses looked when nobody had tidied them for a loan officer. She understood that better than the colored forecast. She could imagine Kit unlocking it in the morning, annoyed with Devon, pulling on gloves, making something work.
“Play it,” she said.
Kit did.
They watched the roof rise to its full height. At the end the seller's wife came into view carrying a bucket. She noticed the camera and walked backward out of the shot, laughing.
“She sounds happy he's quitting,” Leah said.
“She's extremely happy.”
A voice behind them said, “That's a good little setup.”
Walt stood at the tent opening with a cardboard tray of cold drinks. He was wearing a visitor band like Leah's. Kit had evidently told him where to come. Or he had asked Mel, who was not a guard at the gates of a secret city. He held out the tray.
“Rosa's gone to buy herself something she doesn't hate. I thought I'd find you two.”
Kit took a drink. “She's going to be gone a while.”
He smiled and helped Kit carry the broken cable to the equipment tent. He asked where she wanted it rather than choosing a place. Kit showed him. When he set it down, she handed his drink back with the straw unwrapped.
Leah watched from the aisle. She had brought Kit's equipment and stayed to see what she did all day. Now her hands were empty.
Devon returned as they were stacking the empty bin and broken cable out of the aisle. He glanced at Walt, then at Kit.
“Friend?”
“Old friend of Mom's,” Kit said.
Walt held out a hand. “Walt.”
Devon shook it. “If you like music, you're early. If you like people shouting about cables, this is the headline act.”
“I like being early,” Walt said. “You get to see what everybody's like.”
Devon was already turning toward someone calling him. “Mind the red cases. We're moving those next.”
They let him go. Kit checked the time and swore. She had an hour of work left before somebody took over her shift, and the first band had arrived with more equipment than they had told anyone about. She went toward them with her face already arranged into patience.
The lead singer was carrying a garment bag. He kept looking toward the bigger stage, then down at the space in front of this one. Leah knew the expression. A customer staring at a tow bill, looking for the part that didn't apply to him.
“We were told main,” he said.
Kit asked who had told him. He gave a name. She went through the papers on her clipboard, found the name, and showed him something. He did not look at it.
“We drove four hours.”
“I know. You want to put that in the tent while we work it out?”
“I don't need a tent. I need to talk to somebody.”
“You're talking to me.”
He stared at her. Kit waited, not smiling now. Behind him his bandmates had begun unloading, their faces carefully blank. One of them had a small girl with him. She sat on a case wearing pink ear protection and reading a book upside down.
“Who's this?” Kit asked her.
The man with the guitar case said, “My niece. Her mom's coming in half an hour.”
Kit nodded. She didn't turn the girl into a reason for the man to behave. She showed the singer the stage times, explained that the festival's second-stage booking was what his agent had confirmed, and offered to get the booking manager on the phone if he wanted. It would take some time. He looked at his watch. He looked at the band. He finally looked at the paper.
“We need a proper sound check.”
“You've got one. If we start.”
They started. His shoulders lowered by degrees as people asked him the ordinary questions he had expected someone to ask. Kit found a chair for the girl and had her uncle put it where he could see her. Then she moved a stack of empty cases out of the way herself. Leah went to take one end.
“Not that one,” Kit said. “The red.”
Leah took the red one. Nobody had to explain to her that she wasn't in charge. She knew. Her daughter had a stranger's bad mood in one hand and the next half-hour in the other, and somehow neither was spilling.
The band began playing. Without the microphones the singer's voice was small and thin in the open air. He looked angry about that too until Devon made an adjustment and suddenly the voice was enormous, coming back at them from the speakers. The man stopped, startled, then laughed at himself. The rest of the band laughed with him. Kit stood beside Leah with her arms folded, listening.
The little girl put her book down. She knew the song. Leah could tell by the way her mouth moved before the words arrived. Her uncle saw it too. He turned toward her, still playing, and for a minute the whole noisy site seemed to arrange itself around that private little performance.
Leah had been useful in all kinds of places. She had never made anything like this happen. She looked at Kit. Kit was watching the time, enjoying the music and already waiting for the next thing she would have to do.
Walt watched her.
“She's good,” he said.
“I know.”
He looked at Leah, not unkindly. That was the worst of it.
Leah took her drink and went to find something she could carry.
She was outside the tent when Nell called. The music was too loud to hear, and Leah walked away with one finger pressed against her free ear. She passed the band's niece in her chair, serious now about a page in her book.
“They aren't letting me move it,” Nell said.
“The wagon?”
“They've put somebody beside it. They told Denny not to touch it when he gets back. There's another officer here now. He wants to know about the work we've done at that bank.”
Leah stopped at the back of a concession trailer. Through a square window a man was scrubbing a pan. Water ran white down its side.
“What did you tell him?”
“What work we've done. What else would I tell him?”
She shut her eyes. “I know.”
“They asked for our booking records. I said I needed to speak to somebody before I handed over customers' information. They said they could arrange that. I'm not refusing. I'm trying to understand what I can give them.”
“I can call the accountant.”
“I already did.”
Leah put her cup down on the ground. Her hand was too cold around it.
“Where's Denny?”
“On his way. He's got a man stranded in a hospital parking lot waiting for him, and now I need to tell him not to bring the truck in until we've worked out where to put everything. That side of the yard's closed.”
Leah could see it: the narrow passage between workshop and fence, the wagon sitting precisely where Nell had put it, in everybody's way. She had thought leaving it was putting one part of the morning down. Nell was still carrying it.
“I'll call Henley again.”
“No. He's taking the call. I asked.”
A pan clattered in the trailer. Leah stepped away from the window.
“Can I at least speak to Denny?”
“What would you tell him?”
She waited. Nell did too. No music reached this patch of gravel clearly; only the bass came through, beating against the back of Leah's jaw.
“I don't know.”
“Then don't call him to make him tell you it's fine.”
Nell sounded tired. She did not sound pleased to have found the right thing to say.
“They're going to keep it,” she said. “Whatever paper they're getting, they've said we aren't using it tonight. You heard me?”
“Yes.”
“You need to call Bell. He asked if I expected you home.”
“What did you say?”
“That I don't live with you.”
The line stayed open for several seconds. Leah heard the business phone again, a familiar noise she had come to resent in a way that frightened her. All those people had places to be, as if she hadn't already given them enough years.
“I'll speak to him,” she said.
“Then do it.”
When she turned, Kit stood at the end of the trailer. Leah had not heard her come. Her radio hung silent against her hip.
“They have the wagon,” Leah said.
Kit looked toward the staff field. “Are they coming for the flatbed too?”
“They haven't said.”
“Do they know you're here?”
Leah shook her head. “Nell doesn't know.”
Kit's face had lost the heat of work. She looked toward the gate, then back at her mother. Leah wanted her to say they should go. She wanted her to mean home, as if a home remained an answer they could choose together.
“Devon needs me until six,” Kit said.
Leah bent to pick up her drink. Ice had melted in it, turning the sweet taste weak.
“Then finish.”
“What will you do?”
“I'll be here.”
Kit checked her phone before returning to the tent. A call she did not make, or a message she couldn't answer yet. Leah took out her own phone and found Deputy Bell's number. She stared at the digits until the screen darkened. Then she woke it and pressed call.
This time he asked her to come to the station. He said they had identified the wagon as a vehicle they needed to examine. He asked whether anybody else had used it that morning. Leah heard herself breathing into the little space below the microphone.
“I'm going to get advice before I answer more questions.”
“You're entitled to do that,” he said. “I'm still asking you to contact us. And I need you to understand we aren't returning the vehicle to service.”
“I understand.”
She had meant to ask for a lawyer's number. Instead she ended the call and stayed by the trailer until Kit came to find her. The band started the song again. It was better this time.