The Harbor Barn always breathes like a docked animal—ropes creak, boards answer with tired throats, and the café lights hum over stacks of other people’s years. I step in with my recorder sleeping in my tote and a hand-sanitizer bottle that used to be a miniature whiskey. Lemon oil rides over wet rope and old varnish. Somewhere behind the counter, Shep coughs into a polka-dotted handkerchief and says, “If it ain’t tagged, ask me. If it’s tagged, ask me nicer.”
“I’m always nice,” I say, because this is Ashgrove, and politeness is a currency with change counted in favors. The lake slaps the pilings under us in a weird rhythm—close chop, then a swallowed hush. Seiche day. Sound travels in strange ways when the water sulks.
I drift the aisles with my fingers half a beat behind my eyes. That’s the way to do it—don’t pounce; let the thing you need think it’s choosing you. Crocks, a lace-curtained lamp, a tin of buttons the color of bruised grapes. I’m flipping for the show, sure, but I’m also flipping to keep the lights on, to keep my mom in physical therapy twice a week, to keep “Second Lives” breathing after one very public egg-on-face mistake with a war medal.
“New lot just came in from St. Brigid’s rummage,” Shep calls.
The words hook behind my ribs. St. Brigid’s means bells; bells mean donors; donors mean stories with expensive lawyers. I smile anyway and follow the smell of church coffee that’s permeated a banker’s box near the register. Inside: jewelry tangles, a belt buckle stamped with a heron, a velvet ring box with nothing but lint and a safety pin.
I find the heart under a snarl of chain. Brass, or plated. Thumbprint of tarnish like a bruise across one curve. I rub the pad of my finger over it and a thin seam of light peeks where the hinge meets. The front carries a shallow hand-engraving that a polishing wheel would eat in a second. I tilt it under the café bulbs. Two letters wink through grime: C and B, standing too close, distrustful of space.
“What’s the damage?” I ask. I keep my voice airy. I tap the recorder in my tote so it feels like I’m telling the truth even when I’m playing it slow.
Shep squints at the locket like it owes him rent. “That box came from the church. Call it fifty.”
“Fifty for a maybe-brass heart with a stuck hinge and a mystery inside?” I laugh, and then soften it with, “Bless their rummage, but that’s donor markup.”
“Forty-five,” he says.
“I host a podcast. If it turns into a story, I’ll run a Barn mention and a link on the episode page.” I angle my phone toward him with my show’s page open, a wall of modest stars and one angry comment from months ago that still nails my throat when I forget to swallow. “I can do twenty-five and the plug. I’ll clean it, check for maker’s marks. If it’s fancy, I’ll bring it back.”
“You never bring back,” he says, but he grins. He loves the theater of the haggle. We both do. “Thirty,” he says. “And you tag us first words out your mouth.”
“Thirty,” I say, and we shake. His hand smells like rope. Mine smells like lemon oil and hope.
I tuck the locket in my palm on the walk home, the brass warm from the Barn’s thick air. Outside, the lake is slick and gray, the pennants on the club masts across the inlet hanging like wet tongues. On regatta weekends the bells at St. Brigid’s baptize new crews, one ring per rookie, two for legacies. Facebook swap groups go wild posting boat photos and “good families” congratulate one another with coded blessings. I mute them and keep walking.
My apartment sits over a bait shop that sells coffee nobody should drink and worms nobody should name. Inside, the studio corner glows on low: foam tiles like charcoal waffles, my mic on the arm, my headphones folded like a sleeping insect. I place the locket on a microfiber cloth and pull my kit from the second drawer: cotton swabs, mild solvent, jeweler’s loupe, a toothpick, a little tube of brass polish I treat like cologne.
“Okay, heart,” I say. “Show me your second life.”
I hit my recorder’s red circle, out of habit. “Second Lives, working tape,” I say softly. “Object intake, one: heart locket, brass or plated, engraved C.B., Harbor Barn purchase, thirty cash. Cleaning test.”
The first swab of solvent wakes a whiff of pennies and old hand lotion. The tarnish lifts like dusk off a pond. The hinge, though—sticky, reluctant. I touch the toothpick to the seam and feel resistance, a tiny shiver from deeper in the case. Not a gemstone catch. Not standard. I nudge again.
The hinge lets go with a sigh I feel in my wrist bones, and something inside rattles, a brittle click like a fingernail on a glass rim. I stop breathing. The locket opens in my hand: left side a thin oval recess that should hold a photo; right side shallow, edges scored with fine crosshatching. In the right, tucked where no picture would sit, a hair-thin strip of copper peeks from a slot, coiled like a trimmed ribbon.
“You’re kidding me,” I whisper. “Who put you there?”
I set the halves down like they might bite. The copper whispers when I move it, a dry rasp. The inside back bears a scratch I first read as wear, but under the loupe the lines resolve into numbers. I read them out loud because reading makes it real on tape. “Two…zero…zero…eight.” My tongue sticks. 2008. The year my class stopped going to the tower because the tower got a fence. The year a girl named Celia Brighton vanished after a regatta party and the bells rang too long the next morning, or the water made them carry strange, and nobody could agree which.
My stomach drops a rung. I swallow air that tastes like coffee burned an hour ago in the bait shop below.
“Okay,” I tell myself. “Keep it neat.”
I don nitrile gloves. The copper strip sits in a tiny bracket that’s part of the locket’s inner frame, not glued, not an afterthought. I tease one end free. A faint, powdery smell rises—dust and a breath of old perfume with a citrus bite. Orange blossom? Cheap hand soap from a church bathroom? I hate that my brain is already writing it. I clear the slate.
“Recorder note,” I say, steadying my voice. “Hinge released with solvent, interior contains micro-copper strip coiled in bracket. Engraving inside back reads ‘2008’ scratched by hand. Initials ‘C.B.’ on front.”
The seiche slaps the shore outside like a slow handclap. I set the locket near my mic and angle a contact mic from the kit against the inner frame. If there’s sound embedded—if that copper strip is anything like the ridiculous DIY music boxes I’ve torn apart—maybe the friction of opening made a noise for a reason.
I fold my headphones over my ears. The world shrinks to two padded rooms and my blood. I press the copper strip with the tip of the toothpick and drag it gently along the scored inner edge.
At first, it’s just hiss. A shoreline of noise, saltless but insistent. I pull the toothpick back a hair and drag again. The hiss does something on the right channel, a shallow step, then a thin harmonic rides up through the floor of sound—like a bell’s third overtone trying to stand in a crowded room.
“Come on,” I breathe. My breath fogs one ear pad, warm and human.
I reposition the contact mic and roll the strip again, slower, the way you read a name carved shallow so the light has time to catch. The harmonic blooms clearer, joined by a duller body—the weight of a bigger bell with wood in its throat. My fingers tremble and the copper strip chatters against the frame in a way that isn’t accidental. There’s a rhythm here, short-long, long-short, not music, not tuning, more like footsteps counted under a held breath.
Then I hear it.
Not loud. Not theatrical. A human sound thin enough to run through a keyhole. It knifes between the overtones and lays itself under the ring, a single syllable pulled up from the bottom of a throat: the front edge of a scream.
My hands freeze. The toothpick skids, the strip slips, the sound smears into hiss again. I take my fingers off everything and forget to inhale until my chest insists.
“Recorder,” I whisper, and my voice shakes like a line under a fish. “Subjective moment: I heard a… a vocalization under bell overtones. Repeating test.”
I don’t want to keep going, and I want nothing else. I re-seat the strip, realign the contact mic, and adjust gain. I roll again, slower, exacting, letting the copper slide across the scored edge like it’s reading braille. This time I don’t blink. The bell’s overtone climbs, windless and clinical, and then the scream comes again—thin, higher now that I expect it, clipped short, as if the mouth making it met a hand.
“Jesus,” I breathe, and pull the headphones half off one ear in a movement that has saved me from bad takes and bad news. The world rushes back: the bait shop’s refrigerator kicking on, a gull’s insult, the lake’s handclap. I push the phones back down because escape won’t undo knowing. I drag one more time. The scream returns, syncs with the bell tone in a way that means the bell isn’t background. It’s the room. The room is ringing.
My chair squeals as I lean forward and tag the file. Fingers fly, not graceful: “SL_WT_EP0_HeartLocket_RAW01.” I add a markers lane and drop flags: “Harmonic A,” “Scream A,” “Scream B.” My mouse shakes, stupid mammal body giving up the game. I force my breathing to match the lake chop—short wave, longer swell, slack—and I keep working.
“Second Lives, working tape,” I say, and I hear my voice settle into the shape it wears when I’m steadying a guest through a hard memory. “Initial observation: embedded audio event under bell-like harmonic. Physical source: copper strip interacting with scored inner frame of locket. Hypothesis one: intentional micro-etch; hypothesis two: incidental roomprint from resonant environment.”
I stop and heard that teacher voice slip out, presumptive, too smooth. The mistake before—the medal episode—started with that voice. I reach into my tote, where a folded printout of the angry review still lives. I don’t pull it. I let it sting from memory and keep me honest.
“New marker,” I tell the DAW. “Inside engraving reads two-zero-zero-eight.” I tilt the locket toward the desk lamp to photograph it. The scratch shows up better in oblique light, the numbers messy, the hand not practiced. I shoot three angles, then a macro of the C and the B on the front. The letters aren’t machinist clean. They’re earnest, slightly off—like the person with the graver learned on the job, not in a class, or cared more about getting it on the thing than in the perfectness of lines.
“Why would anyone hide a strip like this?” I ask the room. I hate how theatrical it sounds, but I keep it, because I want the question on tape where it can accuse me later if I start to shave its teeth.
The bait shop bell downstairs dings, a real bell with a cigarette burn in its rope pull. Footsteps, a laugh, a door thud. I hit spacebar and stare at the waveform of the scream, a spear of thin gray wintering on the screen. I solo the moment and listen again, not for the scream—my body has already memorized it—but for the room around it. There’s tail after the bell like no drywall ever made. There’s wind not in air but in resonance. The scream rides a decay that says high ceiling, hard stone, narrow space. I know exactly one place in Ashgrove where bells shoulder wind that way.
I record a new line with my breath under control. “Note: decay profile suggests tall, reflective volume. Local suspect: St. Brigid’s bell tower.”
The words taste hot, like I’ve said a name in the wrong room.
I look back at the locket on the cloth. The copper strip glints with a hungry look that isn’t magic; it’s metal and light, and I’m the one feeding it. I slide the strip into its bracket and close the heart’s halves gently enough to feel the hinge’s gratitude. When I tip it, the strip whispers again—just a ghost of motion, dry, like a secret practicing.
“One more pass,” I say, because greed dresses in good intentions. I open the locket and take a last careful roll. The bell’s harmonic blooms. The thin voice climbs. I hear a shape of a word without vowels, a stop in the back of a mouth. It doesn’t ask for me. It doesn’t care if I listen. It’s not an invitation; it’s evidence, and evidence doesn’t need me to be pretty.
I stop the tape. I don’t hit save because my hand is already there, automatic, but I look at the red circle lit steady and I understand the stakes with fresh edges. If I rush this and get it wrong, I don’t just lose a story. I lose the kind of trust a town extends in teaspoons. I lose the right to ask anyone’s mother for coffee.
I open my browser and type “Celia Brighton 2008 Ashgrove” and then I close it, because that road is asphalted with other people’s grief and my show refuses to be a scavenger. I pick up the recorder instead and speak to future me with the voice that will keep me from becoming the worst version of me.
“Next steps: verify physical mechanism. Seek independent audio lab confirmation. No public posting beyond intake photo. Protect chain-of-custody. Contact mentor about cold case protocols.” I swallow. I add, quietly, “And ask permission before telling a dead girl’s story.”
The lake slaps the shore with that slow handclap again. My headphones hang around my neck like a question. I roll the locket in my palm. The front catches the desk lamp and the C and the B wink like they know I’ve read them. My eyes pull back to the inside scratch on the photo—2008. My mouth says the numbers without sending them to tape.
I sit with the waveform, the bell-shaped hill, the needle of the scream, and the knowledge that some rooms keep singing long after the doors lock.
I don’t know yet whose voice I caught.
I do know where bells shoulder the wind in this town, and I know who paid to keep them ringing.