I don’t blink until the second ping lands on the glass. The pirate mesh overlays white letters in the lower third—Understudy rehearses at dawn—and then the picture drops like a trap. The dock fills the frame: wet boards, tape crosses placed where we used to set our foam bait-buckets, a flash-burn circle haloing a scuff.
“No,” I say to the empty van and the very present night. “No understudies.”
The creek behind the studio taps twice against the curb, precise and cheerful, and I hate it for keeping time. The city breathes burnt sugar into the air vents until my tongue goes to molasses. I full-screen the photo and drag the scrubber.
“Elena,” I say on direct line, “on the mesh overlay now.”
“I’m in,” she answers, voice crisp as unlabeled tape. “Give me a still.”
I freeze on the scuff and hit enhance—not TV magic, just brutal contrast, edges sharpened until grain threatens to riot. A toe box appears, half-moon, tread like little chevrons. The plank has puckered where pressure hit. I measure with my cursor against the tape width. My breath ricochets in the headset foam.
“You seeing this?” I say.
“Print and tape spacing,” Elena says. “Not a boot. Theater flat? That chevron looks commercial.”
“You want brand guesses?” I ask, already hating the answer I want to give.
“Later,” she says. “Send the raw. I’m calling county and state. You stay put.”
“I don’t stay put,” I say, and the honesty costs me a second I can’t spare. “He put marks where we stood when we were kids.”
“Mara. Listen to me,” she says, dropping into that voice that pinches panic into a usable wire. “You call your sister now. Put her on with me. I’ll dispatch deputies to the road and the path. Do not stream the address. Do not say the town. Keep the mesh quiet.”
“Copy,” I say, and my throat fights me. I open my favorites and hit Tessa.
She answers on the first ring, because we were raised to answer when water’s involved. “Hey,” she says, voice clogged with sleep. “You okay?”
“No,” I say, and I keep my muscles still so my fear doesn’t shake into her ear. “Go to Mrs. Beattie’s. Now. Don’t go outside alone. Don’t open the door to anyone you didn’t watch grow up. Elena’s on. I’m adding her.”
“I’m here,” Elena says. “Tessa, do you know your neighbor policy?”
“One knock, one name, one porch light,” Tessa recites. She learned the mantra when we were small and wanted to wander past curfew. “Is it the Director?”
“It’s a photo of the dock,” I say. “Tape marks and—”
“—and a shoeprint,” she finishes, because she knows my brain before I do. “Is it the same tread as the coin night?”
“We don’t speculate,” Elena cuts in. “We act. Tessa, grab your phone, charger, coat, and shoes. Leave lights on inside. Don’t lock the deadbolt from the outside; lock it from the inside and go out through the mudroom. Mrs. Beattie’s porch camera has IR; you’re going to wave at it. On your way, look at the ground once and only once—scan for any device or wire. Don’t touch anything.”
I listen for movement: drawer glide, breath, the soft clack of the mudroom light chain I know by teeth. The van hums like an aquarium around me; every diode is a fish eye. I pinch the bridge of my nose until stars dance, then I let go.
“I’m outside,” Tessa whispers, which is simultaneously wrong and right, because she’s supposed to be quiet but I want to hear her life in air form. “Porch light—on. I’m waving. Oh.”
“What ‘oh’?” Elena asks.
“Nothing hurt-me,” Tessa says, reading Elena’s mind. “A click. Like a wind-up bug. On the steps. I’m still moving.”
“Eyes front,” Elena says. “Feet steady. Talk to me about a non-danger thing.”
“Mrs. Beattie’s begonias died,” Tessa says, voice climbing and then calming. “She kept watering the plastic ones. She said grief likes habits.”
I try to be a habit. “What do you see now?”
“The camera’s little red eye,” she says, breath leveling. “I’m at the door. I’m knocking. I’m saying my name. I’m saying I need the porch for ten minutes.”
A lock turns loud. I hear a startled, familiar voice, and then the door pulls the world down to a safer octave. I lean into the steering wheel and feel my pulse shake the horn just enough to make the van consider.
“I’m inside,” Tessa says. “I’m okay.”
I let myself exhale. “Stay there. Don’t argue.”
“Not arguing,” she says. “But you’re coming.”
“I’m coming,” I say, already slotting the keys into the column. “Elena, patch me into county. I’ll be fifteen past midnight if I push and don’t break anything expensive.”
“I can give you state police radio at the interchange,” Elena says. “Do not speed through the floodplain. The creek’s been flirting with the sidewalk all night.”
“Copy,” I say, and I hear the creek flirt again, tapping my bumper in memory. “Put a car at the trailhead. Keep your people off the dock until I’m there.”
“You are not first entry,” she says, every syllable a measured brick. “But I hear you.”
Micro-hook #1: The shoeprint isn’t the only mark; the click on the step keeps time for a scene that hasn’t started—yet.
I swing the van away from the curb. The Night Choir is still awake on the mesh, posting hearts and stop signs and little crescent pins embossed in ASCII. I kill the overlay; I don’t give him the audience he ordered. The factory backwinds one last caramel breath through the window and then the city sheds me like a coat.
“I hate leaving you,” Tessa says through the Beattie landline Elena coaxed into speaker mode. “But I also hate you being here while he’s—whatever he is.”
“We’re not giving him a rehearsal,” I say. “We’re pulling the lights on his cue before he touches the dimmer.”
“You don’t run lights,” Tessa says, automatic sibling jab, and it steadies me enough to think like a producer: logistics, chain of custody, microphones that stay off until they are on for good reasons.
“Elena,” I say, “if deputies see anyone with a handheld metronome, treat it as a device, not a toy.”
“Already in the BOLO,” she says. “Description?”
“Black box, brass arm, old-school,” I say. “He likes relics with edges.”
“He likes symbols with teeth,” she corrects. “Keep your phone on mount. Call me at the county line.”
I drive through low neighborhoods that remember water where water isn’t, skid marks fossilized in curves, fluorescent flags marking pothole mouthes. The creek—and it’s ridiculous to call it the same creek this far north, but in my mind it is—has bullied its ditch into a ribbon of gloss. I take the bridge with the caution I reserve for apologies and wakefulness.
The van smells like hot wire and gum. I crack the window for pine air that won’t arrive for an hour. Every mile is a beat I can’t edit. My hands have forgotten softness; they are machines made to hold a wheel and a microphone and nothing that breathes.
“Talk to me,” Tessa says from the Beatties’, and I catch the way the plural hurts. We lost our Beattie last winter; the house kept his name and his labels the way the fridge kept our raccoon-eyed photo from lake summers. “Tell me something untrue so I can correct you.”
“I invented radio,” I say.
“Guglielmo Keene,” she snorts. “Not bad.”
“I once pied a senator,” I say.
“You’d eat the pie first,” she says, and Mrs. Beattie laughs in the background, thin and brave.
“We’re keeping you on the line,” Elena says. “Deputies are en route. State trooper ten out. County tech has a kit, and yes, I told them to bag the metronome before curiosity kills something we need.”
I picture the dock. The tape Xs are precisely where our feet went when we did our first “stage play” for mosquitoes and the moon. The underplank photograph I took last month to memorialize the chip from the cassette’s nail—that chip is now a locator for someone else’s scene. I press harder on the accelerator.
The two-lane unspools to black glass. The van becomes confession again: honest in motion, true in its limitations. I talk with my body; the steering wheel answers.
Micro-hook #2: When I crest the ridge, a new ping arrives—no coordinates, only a timecode like a curtain call. He wants the dawn beat. He has already set the tempo.
I hit the county line and answer Elena’s call before it finishes its first syllable. She patches me to a clipped voice—Trooper Alvarez—who says, “Unit on your approach. We’ll shadow with lights off until you turn down the drive.”
“No sirens,” I say. “He loves them.”
“Copy,” he says. “Deputies on foot at the trailhead. We’re not spooking anything.”
I describe the shoeprint again and feel my jaw shift into reporter lock—the safe anger that makes data. “Toe box half-moon, chevrons close together. Clean sill curve.”
“That’s not a snow boot,” Alvarez says, echoing Elena. “We’ll cast if the weather lets the mud hold.”
Wind inserts a small word through the window frame; pine and pond scum preface the lake by five miles. I pass a pop-up table where kids sell vinyl pins by day and conspiracy by night. The display sign is gone, but I imagine moons and cherubs trading hands, Night Choir charms pinned to denim jackets that never touched a crime scene. Cherubs. He keeps tattooing them onto everything—the Orpheum’s cracked angels, the ledger page, now the dock with its taped marks like baby halos underfoot.
“Mara,” Elena says, softening a notch, “don’t narrate this one to yourself. Just drive.”
I drive. I count breaths on a four-beat, same as I made a thousand callers do. The hypocrisy blooms and I punch it down; tonight is not about my arc, it’s about a line that cannot be crossed by a man who thinks staging is a form of justice.
The mailbox tilt appears, then the gravel mouth. I kill my headlights a driveway early and roll. Trooper Alvarez slides in behind me, a dark whale, patient. I cut the engine at the apron and listen.
Crickets, not many. Water, slow. The Beattie wind chime, a low apology. And underneath, faint but trained, a tick.
I open the door and the tick resolves into measure: click…click…click. My body makes a mistake and matches it before I wrench myself free.
“Do not step on the path,” Elena says through my ear. “Wait for eyes. Alvarez is with you.”
“I’m not stepping,” I say, and my foot lies by leaning toward the gravel’s lip. “Tessa?”
“Still at the Beatties’,” she says. “Watching Mrs. Beattie pretend not to watch me.”
“Good,” I say. “Stay a performance the Director can’t book.”
Alvarez appears at my elbow, a dark shape with breath that smells like cheap coffee and mints that gave up. “We go slow,” he says. “You say where to look; I keep you upright.”
“There,” I say, pointing to the first stair down the slope. “He likes center stage marks but hides toys in the wings. Sweep left.”
The deputy’s flashlight—a narrow, careful blade—reveals what the click promised. A metronome sits on the second stair, braced with gaffer; the brass arm is mid-swing. A tiny lav mic peeks from its base like a tooth. No wires. Probably a transmitter with a time gate.
“Bag it,” Elena says. “Photo first.”
Alvarez steps aside so I can shoot the angles. The flash throws the stair into surgical focus and leaves the trees offended. I catch a smear on the third step—a heel kiss. I switch to low ISO and breathe steady. The photos stack like a deck.
“You see that?” I whisper. “Heel, chevron, same curve.”
“Print team’s three minutes out,” Alvarez says. “We hold.”
I hold. The tick continues, indecent in its confidence. I want to knock it off with my hand and feel the tiny violence echo the big one. I keep my hand at my side.
“He wants you to hear it,” Elena says. “He wants the beat in your blood.”
“He already has it,” I say. “I was raised on beats. We paced ourselves by red lights and shower timers and mom’s shifts. He’s not special.”
“He’s not,” she says. “But he’s proximate. And proximity makes people say yes to cues they hate.”
“Then we unlearn the yes,” I say, and I realize my teeth are pressed so hard I might brand the word onto enamel. “We do not go on when he calls places.”
Micro-hook #3: The metronome stops, not because we touched it, but because something beyond the trees interrupts the signal. A new rhythm starts—soft tread on boards.
I lift my head. The dock is a mouth laid open to black water. I can’t see the taped marks from this angle; I don’t move to get them. The tread repeats—soft, careful, then gone. Alvarez leans, then stills. The deputy’s radio whispers a code I can’t parse.
“Talk to me,” Elena says. “Describe what you hear in shapes.”
“Edges,” I say. “A shoe that didn’t want to squeak. Weight held on the inside of the foot. Someone trained to walk past microphones.”
“Stagehand,” Alvarez murmurs. “Or someone who wants us to think so.”
My phone vibrates, a ridiculous domestic insect against my thigh. The mesh overlay, dormant for an hour, wakes without my consent. My screen blooms with a new line, designed to fit between ribs.
Cue: Dim your house lights.
I bite the inside of my cheek until copper arrives. “He wants me to turn off the studio,” I say. “He wants darkness he controls.”
“We stay lit,” Elena says. “Work light only. No house.”
A footfall answers her from the dock and the metronome, faithful to its small heart, starts again, tick stubborn and righteous. I stand at the top of the steps and feel my body choose a shape I didn’t know it had—one that blocks a path with soft things: breath, voice, promise.
“Tessa,” I say into the open call, “if you hear three knocks, do not answer, even if the third is our old rhythm.”
“Copy,” she says, a soldier for once.
I look at the tape Xs I can’t quite see and at the water that remembers every whisper we gave it. I taste sugar that isn’t here and hear the city’s creek ghosting in the woods, tapping some impossible curb.
The metronome keeps time for a performance I refuse to attend. The dock waits. Alvarez waits. Elena breathes into my ear like a partner planted in the wings.
I take the smallest step forward I can call not moving, and I ask the dark the question that will decide the next scene: where is the understudy standing, and what will I have to give up to cancel his dawn?