The glass goes with a scream I don’t record, because the recorder is already running and pointed at my mouth. Wind knifes through the studio, cold and lake-brined, and something black and dense slams the desk hard enough to rattle the drawers. The microphone pops. My coffee skates, sloshes, drowns a sticky note that says D-Row cleats = bruise ladder. I don’t breathe for two seconds, maybe three, waiting for a second object, a second ruin.
Then the room catches up to me: the metallic tang, the tiny tinkle of settling shards, the bite of air that tastes like diesel and wet rope. A scrap of paper rides the breeze and lands in my lap with childish neatness. HEAR NO EVIL, it says in block letters that don’t bother to tremble.
“Hey!” Ms. Fazio from next door shouts through the wall. “You okay? I’m calling 911!”
My mouth is dry enough that the word comes out paper-thin. “Do it,” I say, and I stand because sitting feels like praying. The window is a jagged grin. Beyond it, the lake has heaved into one of those sudden seiche moods—the kind that drags sound sideways so footsteps sound behind you when they’re ahead. Somewhere down the street a loose halyard claps a mast like a slow applause. Bells don’t ring; they wait.
The thing on my desk has a shape I know from standing under towers and looking up until my eyes watered: a bell clapper, iron core, brass skin rubbed bald where it kisses metal. It looks like a stolen tooth. Under the glare of my desk lamp the strike face shows two polished flats at a strange angle, the way St. Brigid’s tenor bell prints its partners when the rope gets whipped too hard.
My hands shake so fast they make their own small weather. I force them still by pressing my palms to the desk and counting six slow beats into the recorder mic. “Time: 9:43 p.m. Event: window shattered inward, object—bell clapper—arrived with note, quote, HEAR NO EVIL, end quote.” My voice sounds like someone carrying a tray.
“I’m here,” Ruth calls from the hallway, and then she is, coat half-zipped, breath clouding. She takes in the glass, the clapper, the paper, me. Her pupils go cop wide and then kind. “Don’t touch,” she says. “Hands up, palms out.”
I hold them where she can see them. Tiny glitter bits stick to my sweater like frost. “It landed like it knew the address,” I say. “Note’s the caption.”
She steps back to the door and yells to the hall, “We’ve got broken glass, possible projectile. Door’s open for PD.” Then she pulls nitrile gloves from her pocket the way other women pull lip balm. “Where were you standing?”
“There.” I point with my chin to the chair I left warm. “Mic was live.”
She glances at the recorder, nods at the red LED like it’s a friend’s hand. “Good.” She picks her way toward the desk with dancer feet, eyes scanning for tool marks, shoe prints, any smear. She moves the lamp with two fingers on the base, then crouches to study the clapper. “See the strike flats?” she murmurs. “Two planes, not one. That’s not a novelty. That’s worked metal.”
“Worked where?” I whisper.
“A tower,” she says, and the word is an organ stop pulled open in my chest.
Knock-knock-knock. The neighbor’s voice again, closer. “They said they’re on their way. You want me to stay?”
“Stay in your apartment,” Ruth calls. “Away from windows.”
I tilt the note toward the lamp without touching it. It’s torn from a legal pad. The top edge still frets with paper teeth. No fingerprints I can see, but the block printing carries a rhythm—two crossbars faintly thicker, like the writer presses harder on E’s than on H’s. Ritual habits, everywhere.
Micro-hook: I only realize I’m bleeding when Ruth says my name twice. A thin ribbon on my wrist, not dramatic, glass-kiss shallow. “Wrap,” she orders, and rips the tail off a clean rag hanging on a mic stand. I tie it to my own pulse.
“Chain-of-custody,” I say because if I say fear I’ll shake the whole shelf down. “Start it.”
She’s already there. She unrolls a paper evidence bag she keeps for grocery store negotiations and writes in careful block letters: DATE, TIME, LOCATION, ITEM—BELL CLAPPER—REMARKS: ARRIVED THROUGH WINDOW WITH NOTE. She photographs the clapper from three angles, then the note, then the relationship between them, her phone rotating like a slow planet. “I’m going to lift it,” she says. “You’re going to film my hands.”
I take the phone and frame her gloved fingers as they find the widest part of the clapper, where a careless person would grip. She uses the sides instead, pinching it like a heavy egg, and lays it in the bag so the note stays visible through the mouth. She doesn’t even breathe on the paper.
“Does it smell?” I ask.
She leans in, cautious. “Metal, old polish, a hint of rope oil. Not harbor diesel. Church basement.”
The room is suddenly full of church. Percolated coffee. Bulletin paper. Stacked folding chairs. Brass polish that never quits the air. I swallow. “They had to get it from somewhere.”
“From there,” Ruth says, not wanting to, but saying it anyway. “Or from someone who knows there.”
Siren burr in the distance. I step away from the desk to make space for uniforms and catch my reflection in the dark TV—wild eyes, tiny glitter crown in my hair, a smear of blood that looks like lipstick in the wrong place. The locket under my shirt presses a small cold coin into my sternum like it’s trying to pay for the noise.
Ms. Fazio knocks again. “They’re outside!”
Ruth straightens, seals the bag, signs the flap, and hands me a Sharpie. “Sign and time,” she says. “Then don’t talk first.”
The patrol officer who enters wears the exact face you put on for raccoons in trash cans. His nameplate reads BLAKE. He shines his flashlight at the window like light fixes holes. “Evening,” he says. “We got a call about a broken window.”
“And a felony,” Ruth says, silk over wire. “Someone launched a metal projectile through a residence window.”
He tilts his head toward the bag. “What is it?”
I answer because it’s my house, my show, my window. “A bell clapper. With a note. The note says ‘HEAR NO EVIL.’”
Blake writes on a pad without flipping a page. “Any enemies?” he asks, the way the town asks any allergies—routine, not caring about the answer.
I breathe in slow. “I run a podcast. The current investigation involves St. Brigid’s, a missing girl, and donor influence. My window breaking is not a coincidence.”
He looks at Ruth for help identifying me. She doesn’t give him the courtesy. “We want a full report,” she says. “We want evidence collection. We want you to take the projectile in for prints and comparative tool mark analysis.”
“Our lab’s backed up,” he says, like that’s a medical condition. “You can hang onto it if you want, as long as it’s, like, secure.”
“Your lab can get in line,” I say. “Chain-of-custody is not a choose-your-own.”
He squints. “You could’ve staged it, too.”
Ruth’s face doesn’t change. “Officer Blake, your body cam sees a broken window and two women standing in glass. Do you want to file the kind of report that survives discovery, or the kind people read out loud at council meetings for laughs?”
He fishes for professional. “Do you have cameras,” he asks me, “like, outside?”
“Doorbell,” I say. “Angle’s bad for the studio window.”
He nods, relieved by a technical dead end. “I’ll take a look anyway.”
He does a lap with the flashlight beam making tantrum shapes on my walls, then points at a low bookshelf where glass has laced itself into my paperbacks. “You’re gonna want to sweep that,” he says. “You could cut yourself.”
“I already did,” I say. “I’ll add it to the report.”
He hesitates at the bag. “You said church?”
“I said clapper,” I correct. “Your job is to write what is, not what might make someone with a plaque uncomfortable.”
His mouth twitches. “People prank, you know. Regatta kids. Local tradition.”
“Regatta tradition baptizes new crews with bell rings at St. Brigid’s,” I say. “Legacy crews bring their families to watch. The clapper on my desk isn’t a prank; it’s a message in a dialect this town pretends is Latin. Do your job.”
His pen finally scratches for real. He takes the bag from Ruth reluctantly, like it could stain, and writes TEMP EVIDENCE across the top as if adding temp to evidence matters. “We’ll log it,” he says. “You want a case number?”
“I want an arrest,” I say. “Case number as an appetizer.”
He tears the slip and hands it to me. The numbers look tinny. Outside, wind pushes lake smell through the broken mouth of my house, and a gull makes the sad little bark they do when they’re hungry to be forgiven.
He leaves with the clapper tucked under his elbow like a football. The cruiser idles curbside, blue wash slapping my ceiling. The siren’s a lazy yawn of power. I shut the studio door to keep heat in and feel the cold pool at my ankles anyway.
“You okay?” Ruth asks, low.
I nod too fast. The rag at my wrist has gone dull with diluted red. I untie it, throw it in a clean bag, label it with the same Sharpie—GLASS WETTING / POSSIBLE DNA—because I’m not giving the stalker my cells for free.
“They’re going to put your thing on the swap group,” Ruth says, glancing out at phone screens lighting the sidewalk. “Broken window, ‘prayers,’ likes for the good families who say they’ll donate a baker’s dozen cookies if you ‘move on.’”
My jaw clamps. “Let them bake,” I say. “I’ll post my case number. Then I’ll post silence.”
“Silence is not nothing,” she reminds me. “It’s a tactic.”
Micro-hook: The recorder, still on, has captured the glass’s first scream and the clapper’s desk-thud. I rewind and listen to the exact pitch the metal makes when it lands. It isn’t a clean strike. It’s a heavy knock followed by a small, high ting—a bell overtone ghosting without its body. When I boost that band in my headphones, the tower’s roomprint peeks up like a bruise through makeup. This object grew up near a bell.
“Access,” I say. “This isn’t from a gift shop.”
Ruth nods. “Either they stole from St. Brigid’s or from a bell that knows her. Or someone fabricated a twin with someone’s measurements. Either way, that requires hardware access and friends who don’t mind sins that smell like polish.”
“They want me to hear no evil,” I say. “So I’ll listen harder.”
We sweep glass with baking sheets and an old street broom because the hardware store closed at seven and the online marketplace sellers want porch pickups and gratitude. Every piece tinkles into the pan like cheap wedding favors. The lake wind nudges our trash bags; my curtain breathes like a frightened animal. I bag the note last, after photographing the pressure dents where the writer stabbed each letter. The E’s are angrier than the H’s.
“Episode schedule?” Ruth asks. She means: Do we pause? She means: Do we get you safe first?
I look at the calendar I’ve Scotch-taped over the desk. Red circles mark draft days. The next one reads EP1—HOLD? I’ve already added the question mark. “I’ll shift to interview tape,” I say. “No tower acoustics until the lab signs off. No clapper audio until we own the chain. I’m not giving the town the show it wants. I’m giving the case the show it needs.”
She studies me for cracks and then takes my phone to text a locksmith. “Tonight,” she says. “And film on the glass tomorrow. You aren’t sleeping in the front room until we make the window a lie.”
I start to answer—I’ll be fine—but the words rot in my mouth. The clapper had the coordinates of my desk. Whoever sent it knows the map of my house better than whoever enforces the map of my town.
The cruiser pulls away. The block exhales. Ms. Fazio shouts through the wall again, “You need anything? I made coffee!”
“Save me a cup for morning,” I call back. The smell of percolated church coffee hangs in my head like a memory that chose this night to move in.
My phone hums against the desk wood, buzzing a slow, insect rhythm. Unknown number. Ruth gestures: Speaker? I nod and swipe.
“Ms. Keane,” a woman’s voice says, tired professional threaded tight. “This is Mercy General. Your mother’s monitor flagged an irregularity. She’s stable, but we’d appreciate your presence if you’re able.”
The lake wind pushes hard enough to make the broken frame moan. The locket at my collarbone goes cold.
“I’m able,” I say, and the recorder on my desk hears the bell metal answer the phone’s vibration with a low, wrong hum that sounds like a promise not to stop.