I hit record when the clock on my laptop turns 12:06 and the lake breath outside decides to pull, not push. The red dot glows on my desk like a pilot light I’m responsible for. I pull the locket from its felt and set it on the foam coaster I use for anything that matters. The metal gives my fingertip a cold kiss, then learns me.
“Tape notes,” I say to the room, and to the part of me that wants to sprint. “Tonight I’m going to list what I won’t air yet.”
The studio smells like solder and paper. The neighbor’s dryer vent coughs static-lint through the alley, and somewhere a truck idles—diesel, a thin bitterness at the edge of my tongue that makes me think of church parking lots on rummage mornings. I keep my mouth close enough to the mic to hear the little seas between words. The seiche has the harbor lines humming; the windowpane ticks.
“I won’t air Lydia Brighton’s voice,” I say. “She gave me room tone and names. That’s all. I will not publish her sighs while she flips a page, or the scratch of her finger on a photo sleeve, or the way her radiator knocks like a boat gently lying.”
I take a breath and let it filigree the room. The waveform on my screen lifts, careful, no spikes. My spine does a small reset, a click like a muted metronome.
“I won’t air the scream yet,” I tell the recorder. “Not the raw, not the processed. I won’t put a countdown in anyone’s feed.”
The locket waits, closed. I roll the felt edge between thumb and forefinger and feel the groove a previous owner made, a nervous path across time. The brass is honest about the touch it keeps.
“I won’t air the church-sale volunteer code,” I say, “until I talk to that person in a living room, not in comments. CH-3 is a human, not a clue token.”
My phone lights the desk. A tweet draft glitters like a lure: Chain confirmed from Crane House volunteer lot to St. Brigid’s rummage to Harbor Barn. #Roomprint lives where money launders memory. I leave the phone faceup and keep talking because talking slows me down and exposes the places I’m sharp for the wrong reasons.
“I won’t publish Mr. Del Toro’s photo of the jig yet,” I say. “It implicates teenagers who were just trying to make art, and it implicates an adult who taught them that precision is survival. I will not hand our swaps forum a chew toy and call it justice.”
My mouth goes dry. I sip the weak coffee I made at ten and abandoned at ten-oh-seven. It tastes like the big metal pot in a church basement—burned at the seams, forgiving everywhere else. I can almost hear Father Mikhail’s shoes on the tile, the sound that says authority practices its lines before a crowd arrives.
I lean toward the pop filter and make my voice smaller. “I won’t share the spectrogram ladder or the partials alignment. Not yet. I will not send people to the tower with clap tests because I wanted to beat a Friday algorithm.”
For a beat I listen to silence. It is not empty. The hall clock downstairs ticks like a second hand that smoked three packs a day in the eighties.
“I will say this,” I add, and my pulse quickens at the urge to turn that into a thread. “I will say the roomprint hypothesis has legs that can stand. I will say the chain-of-custody for the locket is stronger tonight than it was this morning. I will say thank you to Shep and still blur his electric bill.”
My phone blinks again, thirsty bird. The tweet draft shivers with potential applause. I pick it up, thumb hovering. The dopamine grammar pours itself: thread emoji, lock emoji, bell emoji. I picture the swaps group, those zealot aunties who can dock your reputation for a chipped rim and absolve a donor for a broken girl. I imagine the Marina Club scanning, deciding whether to lean in with faux concern.
“Don’t,” I tell myself, directly, like Ruth taught me. “Draft, then delete.”
I read the tweet aloud into the tape, line by line, hearing it sound less like information and more like theater. My throat tightens at the performative rhymes—lot/shot, ring/thing. I backspace until the letters become noise, then long-press the trash can. The screen asks if I’m sure, as though it can’t imagine me letting any glory go.
“I’m sure,” I whisper. I lock the phone and slide it under the notebook where I keep my chain-of-custody logs, so the weight of procedure sits on top of the weight of impulse.
Micro-hook: The lake hits the breakwater once, like a hand over a mouth.
I open a new document and start the most comforting thing I know: a list.
WHAT I WILL NOT AIR (YET):
- Lydia’s house sounds, any of them.
- The scream in full or in tease form.
- The CH-3 code until I’ve verified the person and their context.
- The jig photo with the zigzag, until I’ve reached out to all students on the missing roster, if I can ever find their names.
- The spectrogram alignment beyond a verbal “partial match.”
“What I will do,” I say to the red dot, “is send an anonymized clip to an independent lab. I will strip identifiers, time-stamp my process, and include hash values. I will include impulse-response estimates from the tower test without naming the tower.”
I open the audio project and select a ten-second segment that contains neither the name splice nor the raw scream, just the room’s breath: a faint hiss with bell partials rising like ladder rungs into air. I mute a click of my own swallowing. I paste in my chain-of-custody tag as metadata: MK-LOK-10SEC-IR-CANDIDATE-V1. I export to WAV, then FLAC, because redundancy is a religion and I am letting it convert me.
“Hashing,” I narrate. “SHA-256 for both versions.” I let the terminal spit its rows. I copy the strings into the notebook with slow hands that make fewer mistakes.
The inbox glows. I pull up the lab’s intake form—independent, no local ties, the kind of people who keep their signatures off press releases. I write the cover note out loud:
“Hello. I’m requesting blind analysis on a ten-second clip suspected to contain environmental acoustic markers consistent with a bell tower. The clip has no human vocal content. Please provide: impulse-response estimation, harmonic partial mapping, and any signs of splicing or time-stretch artifacts. I ask for delay of public mention until I authorize release. This inquiry is for potential evidentiary use.”
I attach the files. I attach the hash notes as a PDF I print to my desktop—paper, but not paper. I pause with my finger over send. The locket, silent on its coaster, reflects my monitor as a red smear.
“If I hit send,” I tell the tape, “I give away control. That’s good. That’s the point.”
The seiche slackens; the dock lines mutter relief. I hear a late bell from St. Brigid’s carry across the water, one note someone must have pulled by habit or by accident. It flattens against the night and comes back thinner—proof that distance edits everything, including devotion.
I hit send. The whoosh is small and final, a paper boat leaving the kitchen sink for larger water. I lean back. The chair complains like an old pew.
“Okay,” I say. “Now the other list.”
WHAT I WILL SAY (NOW):
- I have engaged a lab. Results pending.
- I will protect Lydia’s privacy and any other survivor’s dignity.
- I am preserving chain-of-custody on the locket and all copies.
- If you have firsthand information about St. Brigid’s rummage sale procedures, contact me privately; do not post names.
I spin the locket under one finger until the hinge lines up with the desk lamp. The scratch I missed on day one flashes a razor of light. The cut is shallow and stubborn, like the town’s conscience.
I reach for the recorder again and drop my voice into the space where listeners someday will live. “I know stories save,” I say. “I know they also pin people down and label them. I will not lay Celia Brighton on a display table and call it community healing. I will not polish her pain for the donor wall.”
The air in my studio changes temperature, just a degree, the way rooms do when a promise makes them witnesses. I tilt my head and listen to the hum under the hum—the power strip’s tiny whine, the refrigerator doing its round, the harbor’s tired violin.
“Regatta season is the town’s favorite costume,” I say, gentler, because I grew up clapping for those boys and I know what it cost me. “We ring bells to baptize new members, we bless boats, we post photos of good families. We call it safety. And every kid learns which sounds get you welcomed and which sounds buy you trouble.”
My phone tries to get my attention from under the notebook. It vibrates against cardboard, a muffled growl. I lift the cover and catch it halfway through an alert. A swaps group thread I follow is lighting up: PSA: Podcasters need to stop harassing volunteers. No names, lots of subtweets, the familiar perfume of vanilla righteousness.
I put the phone back to bed. “I hear you,” I say to the tape and to them. “I will not make harassment my brand. I will knock, not bang. And if a door stays closed, I will say so without guessing why.”
Micro-hook: I save the project, and the save bar crawls like a boat through winter water.
I open my email again and draft a short, clear update to my audience newsletter—a place with fewer strangers and more patience. “Tonight,” I read as I type, “I sent a non-identifying audio segment to an independent lab for analysis. I will share results when it’s ethical and safe. In the meantime I’m building a timeline and verifying consignment documents. If you volunteered at St. Brigid’s rummage in the late 2000s, I would value a private conversation.”
I do not mention Crane House. I do not tease the estate tag. My fingers itch to make a clever line about wealth and tarnish, but I swallow it and let the sentence stay square.
The house settles, a small shift like shoulders relaxing after a weight moves. Down the hall, the radiator starts a rhythm. I let the sound teach me my pace.
“Chain-of-custody log entry,” I say, clicking the body cam of my life back on. “22:47, MK, export of anonymized ten-second clip from master file; SHA-256 hashes computed; files transmitted to Lab K. No other distribution. Physical locket remains in evidence pouch in locked desk drawer.”
I do the motions, each more grounding than the last: pouch, drawer, key. The brass heart is back to being a small cool animal asleep in safe fur.
The screen brightens with two new emails. The first, from the lab, confirms receipt and assigns a case number I write on a sticky and stick to my monitor, then retype into the log because stickies are whim and logs are law. The second has no subject, no body—only an attachment icon and an address that is not a person but a weather report: northpierwatch@—something I don’t recognize. The paperclip glows like a warning buoy.
I breathe through my nose to keep words from escaping without permission. The harbor is quiet in a way that means it’s not. I slide the cursor over Delete and don’t click. I slide it over Open and don’t click. I move the email into a quarantine folder named DO NOT TOUCH WITHOUT GLOVES.
“I won’t air you either,” I tell the nothing I can’t see, and I stop the recorder, leaving the red dot dark and the question alive.