Cel Block 6: A Studio Mystery

• Chapter 1 Ink, Acetate, and Dust
• Chapter 2 The Vault on the Second Floor
• Chapter 3 Barnaby Beaver Goes Missing
• Chapter 4 Wet Paint and Cold Coffee
• Chapter 5 The Midnight Shift
• Chapter 6 Tracing the Master Line
• Chapter 7 Turpentine Suspicions
• Chapter 8 Missing Keys and Empty Drawers
• Chapter 9 The Animatronic Boardroom
• Chapter 10 Shadows in Cel Block 6
• Chapter 11 Scratched Negatives
• Chapter 12 A Smudge of Indian Ink
• Chapter 13 The Voice Actor’s Confession
• Chapter 14 Lightbox Revelations
• Chapter 15 A Visit to the Cutting Room
• Chapter 16 Rival Studio Whispers
• Chapter 17 The Storyboard Secret
• Chapter 18 Color Palette No. 9
• Chapter 19 Trapped in the Drying Racks
• Chapter 20 Erased Evidence
• Chapter 21 The Producer’s Ledger
• Chapter 22 Frames per Second
• Chapter 23 The Soundstage Setup
• Chapter 24 Caught in the Projector Beam
• Chapter 25 The Original Beaver
• Chapter 26 The Final Exposure

The smell of fumes hit you before you even reached the door of Building B. It was a thick, volatile mixture of pure gum turpentine, rubber cement, and the sour, vinegar tang of degrading cellulose acetate, seasoned with forty years of stale tobacco smoke and cheap percolator coffee. In the summer of 1955, the sun beat down mercilessly on the corrugated tin roof of Masterpiece Animation Studios, turning the Ink and Paint department on the ground floor into a literal pressure cooker.

Maeve Miller wiped a bead of sweat from her upper lip with the back of her forearm, being careful not to let her skin touch the pristine sheet of clear cel pinned to her lightbox. In her right hand, she held a size-zero red sable watercolor brush, tipped with a precise droplet of Black No. 4 India ink. On the frosted glass frame in front of her, the sketchy, blue-pencil lines of Barnaby Beaver—plump, cheerful, and mid-stride—waited to be permanently captured in black enamel.

"Don't breathe, girls," murmured Dotty, two desks over. "If I sneeze on this cycle again, Mr. Gable is going to demote me to scrubbing the glass in the camera room."

"Gable wouldn't demote you, Dot," Maeve said, her voice steady as her hand glided along the curved arc of Barnaby’s oversized snout. The black line laid down crisp, dark, and perfectly uniform. "He’d just lock you in the drying vault over the weekend. Less paperwork for him."

A dry chuckling rippled across the back row of desks, where twenty-four women sat under the buzzing glare of overhead fluorescent tubes. They were known collectively as the Ink-and-Paint girls, though few of them were under thirty and most had hands as calloused and steady as precision machinists. They sat in long rows, angled toward the north windows to catch what little natural light filtered through the haze of the San Fernando Valley.

To the outside world, Masterpiece Studios was the magical birthplace of colorful woodland creatures that danced across silver screens from Boston to Boise. To the women who actually built those dreams, frame by individual frame, it was a assembly line. The animators—all men, sitting in their air-conditioned offices upstairs—drew the rough pencil sketches. The clean-up artists smoothed the lines. Then the heavy wooden trays of paper were marched down the stairs to Building B, where Maeve and her crew transferred those lines onto clear sheets of plastic and slathered opaque paint onto the back.

It took sixteen individual cels to make one second of film. Barnaby Beaver was currently walking across a log, whistling a tune that wouldn't be recorded for another three weeks, for a five-minute short titled Timber Troubles. That meant nearly five thousand sheets of plastic had to be hand-inked, hand-painted, dried, inspected, and stacked before the end of the month.

"Look at this," Dotty sighed, holding up a completed ink sheet to the light. She was a woman in her late thirties with a permanent smudge of cobalt blue on her knuckles and hair pinned up in a strict, utilitarian bun. "He’s missing his left eyebrow on frame eighty-two. Upstairs boys are getting lazy again. That kid Tommy from Chouinard drawn him with four fingers on his left hand and five on his right."

"Fill it in and don't make a fuss," Maeve advised, dipping her brush into the ink pot. "If you send it back up to the cleanup boys, Gable will dock the whole department fifteen minutes for lost production time."

"Gable’s got his eye on the clock because the bank’s got its eye on his desk," said Bernice, the eldest painter in the room, who sat nearest the fan. Bernice had been at Masterpiece since 1938, back when Barnaby Beaver was just a black-and-white blob who threw pies at silent movie villains. She was currently mixing a vat of burnt sienna for Barnaby’s leather vest. "Word from the front office is that the distributor pushed back the advance on the winter slate. If Timber Troubles doesn't wrap by Friday, they're laying off the night shift."

A heavy silence fell over the room, punctuated only by the rhythmic hum of the oscillating fan and the crisp scritch-scratch of pen nibs on slick film. Layoffs were no longer just a rumor in the summer of '55. Every studio in Hollywood was feeling the squeeze. People weren't going to the movie palaces on Saturday afternoons like they used to. They were sitting at home in their living rooms, staring at twelve-inch black-and-white television screens, watching cheap syndicated cartoons that looked like they were animated by puppets.

Masterpiece Studios was fading, its pastel paint peeling off the stucco walls of the lot, its backlot sets rotting under the California sun. The studio had survived the war, it had survived the strike of '41, but no one was sure if it could survive television. Barnaby Beaver was their only bankable star left, and even he was looking a little long in the tooth compared to the sleek, fast-talking characters coming out of the newer studios over in Burbank.

The heavy wooden door at the front of the bullpen swung open with a bang, rattling the glass panes.

"Miller!"

Maeve didn't flinch. She set her brush down across the glass rim of her water jar, wiped her fingers on her ink-stained apron, and looked up.

Haskell Gable stood in the doorway. He was the production supervisor, a man who looked like he had been constructed out of gray cardboard and tightened with a wrench. His shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbows, showing pale, hairy forearms, and a half-smoked Lucky Strike dangled from the corner of his mouth, trailing a thin ribbon of blue smoke across his bald head. Studio rules strictly prohibited smoking around the flammable nitrate and acetate stock, but Gable considered himself above studio rules, mostly because he was the only one who knew where the keys to everything were kept.

"Yes, Mr. Gable?" Maeve asked smoothly.

"In my office. Now," he grunted, not bothering to hold the door. He turned on his heel and squeaked away down the linoleum hallway in his thick-soled shoes.

Dotty raised an eyebrow. "What did you do, Maeve? Put an extra button on Barnaby’s trousers?"

"Probably used the wrong shade of brown," Bernice muttered without looking up from her paint pot. "Color palette nine is supposed to be three drops yellow, one drop shade thirty-two. I saw him measuring it this morning like he was building a bomb."

Maeve unbuttoned her work apron, draped it neatly over the back of her wooden stool, and gave her hands a quick rub with a rag soaked in solvent. She stepped out of the bullpen into the cooler, dim hallway of the basement level.

The Ink and Paint building was divided into strict zones. The big main room was where the girls sat, organized by rank and speed. Down the corridor were the pigment mixing tanks, the chemical storage lockers, and the dark, climate-controlled drying racks affectionately known as "Cel Block 6." The name was an old studio joke—once you got assigned to ink three hundred frames of background bushes in Cel Block 6, you felt like you were doing five to ten at Sing Sing.

She walked up the short flight of concrete stairs to Gable’s office, which was little more than a glassed-in box overlooking the secondary ink room. Through the window, she could see Gable pacing behind his steel tanker desk, which was piled high with brass film cans, ledger books, and half-eaten sandwiches.

Maeve knocked on the doorframe. "You wanted to see me, Mr. Gable?"

Gable didn't answer immediately. He shoved a stack of storyboards out of the way and sat down, leaning his forearms on the desk. He glared at her through the haze of cigarette smoke. Maeve was twenty-eight, sharp-featured, with dark hair tied back with a yellow ribbon, and eyes that didn't drop when authority looked her way. She had worked at Masterpiece for six years, starting as a brush-swapper and moving up to head inker through sheer speed and an uncanny ability to fix bad line work without throwing off the registration marks.

"Miller," Gable began, his voice raspy. "How long have you been handling the key-frame inks for the Beaver shorts?"

"Three years, sir. Since Mr. Henderson retired."

"Right. So you know the character. You know the model."

"I know Barnaby’s construction down to the thousandth of an inch," Maeve said plainly. "Three-head tall proportion, ear tilt at fifteen degrees, five whiskers per cheek, snout curved at the third registration hole."

Gable grunted, reaching for a manila folder on the edge of his desk. He opened it, flipped through a few yellowed sheets of paper, and then slammed it shut. He looked around his office, then at the glass walls, as if suddenly suspicious of the light fixtures.

"The front office is having a walkthrough tomorrow morning," Gable said, lowering his voice. "Some hotshot bankers from New York. Mr. Stern wants everything spit-shined. He wants the original master model sheets out of the vault for display in the boardroom."

Maeve nodded slightly. The master model sheet was the holy grail of any studio character. Drawn by the studio founder back in 1936, it was the definitive reference document—the single piece of paper that showed Barnaby Beaver from every angle, with exact measurements, expressions, and color breakdowns. Every animator, inker, and merchandise licensee worked from photostatic copies of that original drawing. The master itself was kept locked away upstairs in the main studio vault, tucked inside an acid-free leather casing alongside the original studio charter and the master negative of their first feature film.

"They want to show off the history," Gable continued, rubbing his temples. "Show the investors that Barnaby isn't just a cartoon, he's an asset. A twenty-year-old brand."

"Sounds like a circus," Maeve said. "What does that have to do with Ink and Paint?"

"Mr. Stern wants you to take the master sheet out of the vault, bring it down here, and mount it in the display case by the main lobby before eight o'clock tomorrow." Gable reached into his trousers pocket and pulled out a heavy, brass ring holding three silver keys. He detached one long, bit-keyed steel implement and dropped it onto the metal desk. It landed with a heavy clink.

Maeve looked down at the key. It was the master key for the second-floor vault—the dark, reinforced room right behind Mr. Stern’s executive suite.

"Why me?" she asked, not picking it up. "That's usually a job for the vault custodian or Mr. Vance."

"Vance is off today. His kid’s got the measles," Gable barked, waving his hand impatiently. "And the vault custodian bumped his head on a light fixture in the prop warehouse and went home early. I'm busy with the schedule for month-end, and Stern said he wants someone who actually respects the art to move it. He specifically mentioned you, Miller. Said you were the only one down here who doesn't treat the acetate like scrap paper."

Maeve looked at the heavy steel key. It glinted under the harsh fluorescent bulb. There was something off about Gable’s tone. He was normally a tyrant about chain-of-command; letting an ink-girl handle the key to the vault was entirely out of character, even if Stern had requested it.

"Just bring it down, put it in the velvet display case in the lobby, lock the case, and bring the vault key straight back to me," Gable instructed, picking up his pencil as if the matter were settled. "And don't get ink on your fingers before you touch it. If there's so much as a thumbprint on that original board, Stern will have both our heads on pikes over the gate."

"Understood," Maeve said. She reached out, took the cold metal key from the desk, and slid it into her skirt pocket.

"And Miller?" Gable added, without looking up from his ledger.

"Yes?"

"Don't go lingering upstairs. The boys in the storyboard department are trying to finish the third act of the winter picture, and they don't need girls wandering around distracting them."

Maeve allowed herself the smallest, driest smile. " wouldn't dream of it, Mr. Gable. The smell of fresh air upstairs always gives me a headache anyway."

She turned and left the office, her heels clicking briskly down the hallway toward the heavy door that led out of Building B, leaving the smell of solvent behind her as she headed toward the grander, stone-fronted administration building across the courtyard.

The sun hit Maeve like a flat iron the moment she stepped out through the heavy fire door of Building B. The studio lot stretched out before her, a patchwork of baked gravel walkways, sun-bleached stucco, and towering wooden soundstages that held the heat like giant kilns. In the distance, beyond the backlot’s sagging western town set and the fake Venetian canal that now grew a healthy crop of algae, the dry brown peaks of the Santa Monica Mountains baked under a relentless sky.

Maeve crossed the asphalt court, keeping to the narrow strip of shade cast by the overhang of the cutting room. A couple of prop guys in greasy coveralls were pushing a rack of plaster gargoyles toward Soundstage 3, arguing over whether the director of the low-budget sci-fi picture currently shooting inside wanted them painted silver or bronze. Down by the commissary, a young woman in a yellow polka-dot dress was running lines with a juvenile lead whose hair was slicked back with so much Brylcreem it gleamed like greasy slate in the sunlight.

Masterpiece Animation Studios had been built in the late 1920s, back when silent features were dying and talkies were the terrifying future. The layout reflected that golden, chaotic transition: massive, boxy soundstages flanked by Spanish revival offices, complete with wrought-iron balconies and faded red clay roof tiles. But thirty years of California sun and skimpy maintenance budgets had worn away the illusion. The red tiles were chipped, the white plaster was stained with rust from overflowing rain gutters, and the manicured palms that lined the central avenue looked thirsty.

Maeve climbed the low stone steps of the Executive Building. The front entrance was meant to impress bank managers, union reps, and film distributors. Double mahogany doors with heavy brass handles opened into a cool, carpeted foyer that smelled faintly of lemon polish, expensive tobacco, and refrigerated air.

The contrast between Building B and the executive suite was absolute. Downstairs in Ink and Paint, the heat was an accepted working condition, fought only with metal desk fans that rattled like sick lawnmowers and blew dry dust across fresh acetate. Upstairs, hidden vents blew continuous, ice-cold air through the carpeted hallways, paid for by the front office to keep the top brass and the key animators comfortable enough to create.

Maeve checked her shoes as she stepped onto the plush maroon carpet. She had rubbed the ink off her fingertips, but she knew the sharp-eyed administrative secretaries at the front desk could spot a stray drop of burnt sienna from twenty paces.

Behind a high, polished walnut counter sat Miss Gable—no relation to Haskell Gable, though she possessed an equally formidable glare. She was a woman of fifty with severe cat-eye glasses suspended from a silver chain around her neck, her hair set in immaculate silver waves. She was typing on a heavy green IBM typewriter with rhythmic, metallic violence.

"Afternoon, Miss Gable," Maeve said, stopping at the desk.

The typewriter paused. Miss Gable lowered her glasses down the bridge of her nose and peered at Maeve over the top of the lenses. Her gaze drifted down to Maeve’s yellow ribbon, her modest cotton blouse, and the lingering shadow of graphite on her knuckle.

"Maeve," Miss Gable said, her voice dry as a desert wind. "What brings Ink and Paint out of their cellar on a Tuesday afternoon?"

"Mr. Gable sent me up," Maeve said, pulling the heavy steel bit-key from her skirt pocket and resting it on the polished wood. "I have the key for the vault. Mr. Stern wants the original Barnaby Beaver master model sheet retrieved for the board meeting tomorrow morning."

Miss Gable looked at the key, then back up at Maeve. Her eyebrows twitched up a fraction of an inch. "Mr. Vance didn't do it?"

"Mr. Vance is out with his kid. Measles."

"And Arthur?"

"Bumped his head on a light fixture in prop warehouse two," Maeve explained smoothly. "Mr. Gable said Mr. Stern requested someone from the ink department handle the sheet directly."

Miss Gable leaned back in her leather swivel chair, her wooden desk creaking under the movement. She eyed Maeve carefully. In a studio as tight-knit and gossipy as Masterpiece, everyone knew everyone’s rank. Ink-and-paint girls didn't just walk into the second-floor vault unescorted. The vault was where the studio kept its crown jewels: the original nitrate master negatives, the foreign distribution contracts, the corporate ledgers, and the early character blueprints that established copyright ownership.

"Mr. Stern is in a budget conference with the west coast sales reps," Miss Gable said, gesturing vaguely toward the closed double doors at the end of the hall. "He is not to be disturbed under any circumstances. The vault is down the East Corridor, past the storyboard room. You know where it is?"

"I know," Maeve said.

"Don't touch the negative racks," Miss Gable warned, pointing a long, scarlet-nailed finger at her. "And lock the iron grate behind you while you're inside. Studio rules. I don't care if you're only in there for thirty seconds. If the door isn't clicked shut, the insurance inspector will throw a fit."

"I'll lock it," Maeve promised.

She picked up the brass ring, the heavy key clinking cold against her palm, and walked down the quiet, wood-paneled hallway.

The East Corridor was where the studio’s creative elite worked. The doors here were heavy solid oak, frosted glass panels bearing gold-leaf lettering: CHIEF ANIMATOR, STORY DIRECTOR, BACKGROUND SUPERVISOR.

As Maeve walked past, she heard the distinct sounds of cartoon creation happening behind closed doors. From the story department came the sound of raised voices arguing over a gag sequence—something about a anvil falling onto a pinecone. From the clean-up room came the soft, rhythmic click of wooden lightboxes flicking on and off as artists tested the action of paper flips.

Unlike the inkers downstairs, who worked in assembly-line silence under Gable's watchful eye, the animators upstairs lived in a world of cushioned privilege. They had radios playing jazz low in the background. They had sofas for afternoon naps when the creative process stalled. They had assistants who brought them coffee in ceramic mugs instead of paper cups.

At the far end of the hallway, past the final office, the plush carpet ended and gave way to heavy white linoleum. The air grew noticeably colder and drier.

Here stood the entrance to the Vault.

It was built like a bank safe, set flush into the reinforced concrete spine of the building. The outer door was a heavy slab of fireproof steel painted dark green, with a polished brass dial and a heavy T-bar handle. Beside it was a second door—a thick, forged-iron security gate with heavy round bars, designed to allow air circulation while keeping unauthorized personnel out when the main steel door was banked open during working hours.

The outer steel door was currently propped open with a heavy brass doorstop shaped like Barnaby Beaver sitting on a log—a bit of dark studio irony, using the character to keep open the door that protected his own birth certificate. The inner iron gate, however, was shut tight, its heavy mortar-mounted lock waiting for the bit-key in Maeve’s hand.

Maeve stood before the iron bars for a moment, letting the cold air from inside the vault wash over her face. Through the bars, she could see down the central aisle of the vault. It was a long, narrow room, dimly lit by wire-caged incandescent bulbs hanging from exposed conduit along the ceiling. The walls were lined from floor to high ceiling with heavy steel shelving units, packed tight with dark grey film cans, thick black binder ledgers, and oversized flat metal map drawers.

She slid the long steel key into the heavy lock on the gate. It took a firm wrist to turn it; the tumblers were thick and dry, clicking over with a sound like a small pistol cocking. She pulled the iron gate open. It moved with a heavy, oiled silence on its ball-bearing hinges.

Remembering Miss Gable’s strict instruction, Maeve stepped inside and pulled the heavy iron gate shut behind her until she heard the latch catch with a solid clack.

The vault had its own smell, entirely distinct from the rest of the studio. It didn't smell like ink, turpentine, or cheap coffee. It smelled like ancient paper, cold dust, steel polish, and the faint, sweet, deadly odor of old nitrate stock.

While the studio had switched to safe cellulose acetate film three years ago, the deeper shelves at the back of the vault still held thousands of feet of old nitrate camera negatives from the late 1930s and 1940s. Nitrate was notorious: unstable, highly flammable, and capable of burning underwater if it caught fire. The room was equipped with heavy copper sprinkler pipes overhead and thick rubber seals on the outer door to suffocate any potential blaze.

Maeve walked slowly down the central aisle, her rubber-soled shoes silent on the cold linoleum.

The vault was meticulously cataloged. Each metal shelf bore a white porcelain label slid into a brass frame.

SECTION A: FEATURE NEGATIVES (1937–1948) SECTION B: SHORT SUBJECT MASTERS – SILENT SECTION C: SHORT SUBJECT MASTERS – SOUND (BARNABY BEAVER) SECTION D: LEGAL, CHARTERS, AND ASSET MODEL GRAPHICS

Maeve stopped at Section D.

This section didn't hold film cans. Instead, it was dominated by a tall, green-painted metal cabinet filled with wide, shallow drawers designed specifically for storing oversized artwork without folding or rolling it. Each drawer was roughly four feet wide and three feet deep, heavy enough to require two hands to slide out.

The drawers were labeled by year and character.

1934–1936: EARLY CONCEPT SKETCHES & SILENT ROUGH MODELS 1936: BARNABY BEAVER – MASTER CHARACTER CHARTER (ORIGINALS) 1937–1940: SECONDARY CHARACTERS (BARNABY & FRIENDS)

Maeve stepped up to the second drawer down. It had a small, bronze pull-handle and a keyhole in the center. She checked the keys on her brass ring. There was a smaller, flat nickel key attached to the main ring alongside Gable’s master key.

She inserted the nickel key into the drawer lock. It turned smoothly with a soft click.

Maeve braced her feet and pulled the drawer out. The heavy metal runners groaned under the weight, gliding forward to reveal a wide, shallow interior lined with thick, blue acid-free paper sheets.

She carefully lifted the top sheet of protective blue paper.

There it lay.

The original 1936 Barnaby Beaver Master Model Sheet.

Maeve took a slow breath, her eyes scanning the board with the practiced, critical eye of an artist who spent eight hours a day studying line quality.

It was drawn on a thick piece of heavy-grade Steinbach illustration board, sixteen by twenty inches, yellowed slightly around the edges by twenty years of age, but still remarkably vibrant.

At the top of the board, written in crisp, hand-lettered Indian ink caps, was the title:

BARNABY BEAVER – MODEL NO. 1 APPROVED BY: H. STERN & E. VANCE – OCT 14, 1936

Below the title was the character as he was originally conceived by the studio's legendary founding animator, Silas Vance.

Unlike the modern Barnaby—who was currently being inked downstairs in slick, commercial red lipstick hues and simplified curves—this original Barnaby was a masterpiece of classic draftsmanship. The line work had been done with a flexible steel dip pen, producing variable, lively line weights that gave the character an incredible sense of volume and weight.

The sheet showed Barnaby from four distinct angles: full front profile, three-quarter turn, side profile, and a dramatic back-angle view showing the construction of his broad, cross-hatched beaver tail. Around the main figures were detailed anatomical breakdowns:

A detail box showing his eye construction: two overlapping oval eggs with small, offset white highlights. A detail box showing his snout curvature: three distinct wrinkles at the bridge when expressing surprise, two when laughing. A color guide table down the left margin, listing hand-mixed pigment numbers from the original 1936 lab: Beaver Brown No. 1, Vest Crimson, Teeth Ivory, Nose Charcoal.

At the bottom right corner was Silas Vance’s personal signature, written in dark sepia ink, accompanied by a small, sketched thumbprint of Barnaby lifting his hat in a jaunty bow.

Maeve leaned closer, her nose inches from the board.

To anyone else, it was a piece of nostalgic studio memorabilia, a clever piece of marketing art to impress bank managers from New York. But to Maeve, who had spent six years filling in the spaces between those lines, it was a living technical blueprint.

She traced her fingers through the air an inch above the ink lines, following the curve of the belly.

"Look at that back-line," she whispered to herself in the quiet vault. "No breaks. One continuous stroke."

Modern cleanup boys upstairs couldn't draw a line like that if their lives depended on it. They drew in short, sketchy overlap strokes, leaving it to the ink-and-paint girls downstairs to smooth out the jitter with their sable brushes. Silas Vance had drawn this entire key-turn with a single, confident sweep of his wrist.

She reached into her skirt pocket and pulled out a pair of clean white cotton gloves that every ink girl kept tucked away for handling pristine film or clean glass. She pulled them onto her hands, smoothing the cloth over her fingers.

She carefully lifted the heavy illustration board by its edges, raising it out of the drawer.

The reverse side of the board was blank, except for a purple rubber-stamp impression near the top left corner:

PROPERTY OF MASTERPIECE ANIMATION STUDIOS, INC. DO NOT REMOVE FROM VAULT WITHOUT WRITTEN AUTHORIZATION OF FRONT OFFICE.

Maeve held the sheet in both hands, feeling the rigid weight of the cardboard. It was remarkably heavy for a piece of paper, thick as a piece of pine board.

She looked around the dim vault. The wire-caged bulb overhead cast long, slatted shadows across the metal storage racks. The air conditioner hummed softly from a wall vent near the ceiling, a steady, low drone that made the quiet of the room feel even deeper.

Maeve walked back toward the front gate, carrying the master model sheet flat against her chest with both gloved hands.

She reached the iron gate. Through the heavy round bars, she could see out into the brightly lit linoleum hallway. Everything was quiet. The doors down the corridor were closed. The distant clatter of Miss Gable’s typewriter had stopped, replaced by the faint sound of a radio playing an instrument orchestra piece in one of the producer offices.

Maeve set the master model sheet down for a moment on a flat metal utility table beside the gate. She took the vault key ring from her apron pocket, inserted the key into the inner keyhole of the iron gate, and unlocked it.

She pushed the gate open, picked up the illustration board with her gloved hands, and stepped out into the hallway.

She pulled the gate shut behind her. The heavy latch dropped into place with a loud, metallic thunk that echoed down the quiet corridor.

Maeve turned around, holding the priceless piece of studio history flat in her hands, ready to walk it down to the main lobby display case.

As she turned the corner toward the administrative foyer, she noticed something peculiar.

On the small mahogany side table near the corridor entrance—where the studio visitors signed the registry book—sat a small, empty ceramic paint cup.

Maeve stopped.

It wasn't a coffee cup. It was a standard, three-ounce white glass palette cup from the Ink and Paint department downstairs. The kind used exclusively for mixing ground pigments.

She leaned down to look at it.

Inside the cup, clinging to the dry glass rim, was a faint ring of thick, dark wet residue.

It was Color Palette No. 9—Barnaby Beaver’s vest brown. And it was still wet enough to shine under the hallway lights.

Maeve frowned.

No one from Ink and Paint was allowed upstairs with wet paint pots. The pigments were mixed exclusively in the basement compounding room and carried straight to the lightboxes in sealed metal trays. If a painter carried an open cup upstairs, Gable would have docked her half a week’s pay.

She looked down at the master sheet in her hands, then back at the small glass cup.

A strange, quiet coldness—different from the air-conditioned breeze—settled into the back of her neck.

She picked up her pace, carrying the board toward the lobby, her rubber heels clicking sharply against the hard tile floor.