I patch the hotline message onto my session and watch the waveform draw itself like a confession that’s tired of waiting. Hospital coffee clings to my tongue; the room smells like disinfectant and warmed plastic. Lydia sleeps behind the curtain, her breath syncing with the monitor’s pacer, while the lake shoves the vents with a low, damp sound that nudges everything toward quiet.
“Rolling,” I whisper to my recorder, and I click Play.
The voice arrives veiled in the hiss of a cheap phone mic and a moving car. “Don’t use my name,” the caller begins, gender blurred by fear and compression. “You asked about the bells. The game is real. They call it Countdown.”
I lean toward the laptop like proximity could sweeten fidelity. The locket at my collarbone kisses cold against skin.
“They pick a girl during regatta week,” the voice says. “One of the crew says, ‘Meet us by St. Brigid’s, we’ll ring you in,’ like it’s baptism. Three rings—like the lake blesses new members. Only it’s not that.”
My stomach tries to fold itself into smaller shapes. I clamp the headphones tighter.
“They count down with the bells—‘One, two, three’—and you’re supposed to prove you can hang. Sometimes it’s a dare on the stairs. Sometimes it’s a run to the dock, touch the cleat before the third ring. They say it’s tradition. They say it’s safe.”
I hear a turn signal tick like a metronome. The voice lowers. “The one who runs it, the one who smiles in photos—he likes the word order. Everyone calls him E.”
I pause the tape. The silence in my ears is louder than the clip. I can smell the church-basement coffee from every rummage sale I worked as a kid, the tang of percolator metal and powdered creamer that never dissolves. I taste that memory and whisper, “We hear you,” into the room, then punch Record again so the tape carries it.
“E was there my year,” the caller continues. “He joked about a watch set to tower time. He made them start on three. And when somebody said ‘Not her,’ he said, ‘We protect our own by checking them first.’”
The phrase lodges like a chip of glass. I annotate the timeline: “E” + watch + protect our own. The lake throws one hollow thud into the duct, a seiche breath that distends the hospital curtain and returns it to flat like the room is nodding.
“Three years,” the caller says. “Same week. First it was just stairs and laughs. Then it was running to the dock. Then—” The line shakes with a held-back tremor. “Then it was, ‘Don’t make it ring on three.’”
“What does that mean?” I speak to the waveform, uselessly. The call has no return path. I re-run the sentence and hear what I missed: a metallic chime under the word three, the ring tone of a seatbelt alert. I drop a marker: incidental chime—car.
The voice hurries now. “Check the incident reports. Hospital. Campus security. They bury them as horseplay. I can’t help you on paper. I can tell you this: there’s a note in a ledger. The priest keeps it locked, and someone else checks it.”
The message cuts with the digital click that always feels like a door shutting. I let the room breathe while the monitor ticks its green ladder. I save the project, hash the audio, email the checksum to the account only Ruth and the lab can see.
“You got one?” Ruth texts.
I call her. “I got Countdown,” I say, voice gravelly with adrenaline and no sleep. “And an E.”
“Meet me at the Annex in twenty,” she says. “Bring coffee that can fight back.”
Micro-hook: I pass a waiting room TV offering b-roll of sailboats and sponsorship banners over a chyron about “Festival Season Kicking Off.” The anchor smiles with a good-family smile. My ribs tighten. I slip out into air that smells like lake iron and wet rope and the floral cleaner that pretends to be mercy and isn’t.
The Annex greets me with humming fluorescents and that tile floor that always feels one mop away from stories. Ruth is already there, gray hair in a knot, cardigan misbuttoned, thermos sweating caffeine. The milk crates crouch behind her like well-behaved dogs.
“What a morning,” she says, handing me a thick manila folder. “Pulled ER incident logs and campus security notes from regatta weeks. Not official—my copies. You never saw them.”
I flip pages: Laceration, stairs, possible intoxication. Slip, dock, minor head injury. Admitted for observation, release next day. Three years stack themselves like cursed nesting dolls: 2006, 2007, 2008. Same week. Different girls whose names the town pronounced once and then folded away.
“Smell this?” Ruth asks, lifting a page up to my nose. “That copier powder. I swear it’s the same recipe they used in ‘98.”
I catch toner and dust and underneath, a ghost of lemon cleaner from someone’s careful hands. The sensory layer does what memory needs; I see Celia’s grin in a school hallway where bells are just between classes, not weapons.
“Walk me through the pattern,” Ruth says.
I slide the reports into columns. “First year, stair tumble, bruises. Second, dock slip, concussion. Third, missing two hours, later found crying near the breakwater—no tox screen taken because Dad’s a donor.” I press hard on the word donor until the pen leaves a dent. “All regatta week. All at night. All near the tower or docks.”
“Now add our caller,” Ruth says. “And the nephew. And the donor wall. And Boat Seventeen.”
“And E,” I say, my tongue going dry on the consonant. “The ringleader with a watch and a need for order.”
Ruth drags a legal pad toward her and writes COUNTDOWN in block letters that look like they could prop a door. “I checked old officer texts on my dinosaur flip from back then,” she says. “The boys had a nickname for the week: ‘Baptisms.’”
I gag on that word and steady my hand on the table edge. “They stole the church’s ritual and turned it into a filter,” I say. “Who counts. Who stays.”
“Power loves a ritual,” Ruth says. “Makes it look clean.”
I pull out my phone and scroll the Facebook swap group I mute and unmute when I need to measure the town’s weather. The top post asks for volunteers to polish the donor plaques before regatta. The comments read like a hymn: So grateful to our benefactors. Good families keep us safe.
“They’ll fire us from the town if we say this out loud,” I tell the tabletop laminate as if it were a mic. “They’ll ostracize Lydia at the pharmacy. They’ll call my mother ungrateful for her care.”
Ruth sets her thermos down carefully, like she’s placing a grenade she owns. “And if we don’t say it, girls keep getting counted and pushed,” she says. “Your caller used the word tradition. That puts it on the calendar.”
The fluorescents hum louder for a second, or my nerves do. I crack the window. A gull’s cry rides a gust, distorted by a seiche surge that pushes wind into a shape bells love. Sound is a substance here; it moves around corners like water.
I lay the three years’ reports side by side and draw lines between times. Midnight, one-ten, two-oh-three. “They favored the small hours,” I say. “They needed the pier empty and the priest asleep.”
“Or complicit by omission,” Ruth says, not smiling.
“My anonymous caller said there’s a ledger note,” I say. “Locked. Checked by someone else.”
“We know which ledger,” Ruth says. “You saw me reading its stitches. He’ll stonewall. That’s his training.”
I rub my thumb against the locket’s edge until it warms. “I need voices who lived it,” I say. “Not all on tape. Some will only let me paraphrase. But I have to show the pattern carries harm, not just rumor.”
“Which is why you opened the hotline,” Ruth says. “Play me the part where they said ‘E’.”
I cue the audio and let the car-tick voice fill the Annex office. When order and E spill out, Ruth flinches like a person who’s been hit in a soft place and knows it’s not mortal but is going to bruise ugly.
“He liked the word order,” she repeats. “He would.”
“Say his name,” I whisper, but I don’t put it on the tape. Not yet. I keep the algebra where it belongs: E equals Everett until proven otherwise.
Micro-hook: The ER paging system from across town bleeds into my phone’s background because I forgot to shut something off; the tone bounces once, twice, three times in miniature, and my skin prickles with the shape of the word three. I almost record it for later but stop. I need discipline, not a folder of good chills.
“What do we do first?” Ruth asks.
“We map the countdown across all known years,” I say. “We overlay reports with bell schedules, regatta heats, and Boat Seventeen’s altered log. We comb the town for any whispers of ‘baptism’ that week. We ask choir girls where sound goes when the lake pushes back.”
“And we prepare for the counter,” Ruth says. “He’ll release something shiny. A safety video. A scholarship post. A prayer for unity.”
“Stories save and stories exploit,” I say. “So we tell ours slowly enough it can save.”
I phone my voicemail and record a new hotline intro that sounds like someone who has slept: “You can leave your story without names. I will not air details that risk you. If you say ‘countdown,’ I’ll know what you mean. If you say ‘three,’ I will listen longer.”
We work for an hour in a low growl of printers and fluorescent ballast. I mark the years in a timeline, color-code incident types, then add sensory footnotes because sound is my instrument: wet rope smell present, seiche reported on 7⁄18, diesel smoke near Boat Seventeen, percolated coffee in parish hall during cleanup. The details tie me to bodies and rooms; without them, I float and the story turns into a graph, which is a kind of lie.
“Look at this,” Ruth says, tapping the 2007 report. “Bruise pattern on the thigh, three small crescents spaced like a dock cleat. That photo I pocketed—the training bulletin—had the same spacing. Your caller said ‘touch the cleat before the third ring.’”
The air in the Annex tastes like paper. I feel bile and then a clearer liquid—grief, not acid—rise and settle.
“I’m going to say the word,” I tell Ruth, and I brace my tongue. “Predation. Wrapped in tradition. Counted with bells.”
Ruth answers by writing another door-stop word on her pad: PATTERN. “And the priest?”
“Next,” I say. “We ask for the ledger. We accept the refusal and ask again in public. We film the door. We document the denial.”
“The town will hate that,” Ruth says, not warning me so much as placing the truth on the table between us like a plate we both have to eat from.
“The town already hates the woman with the locket who won’t be polite,” I say, and I hear my mother’s breath from memory when she used to separate laundry on the kitchen floor, piles of color like offered proof that small order could defeat chaos. “I can carry the hate. Lydia can’t.”
Ruth’s mouth softens. “We’ll build a screen,” she says. “We’ll call it procedure.”
I close the folder and stack the three years with a rubber band so fat it protests. The files thud like a gavel when I set them down. Outside, wind slaps a street banner that shows oars and smiles and the word WELCOME in a font invented to look like someone expensive is safe.
My phone vibrates with a blocked number. I answer and say nothing, letting the silence invite confession.
The same car-voicemail voice whispers, smaller now. “He knows you’re looking at the ledger,” they say. “He’s already asked for it back.”
I press Record with my thumb, feeling brass under skin, and reply in the softest version of my radio voice, the one I use when I’m holding open a door that doesn’t swing easily. “Who checked it out?” I ask. “Tell me only what protects you.”
“E.C.,” the voice says, and I can hear the engine breathe. “The initials. In the margin.”
The call ends. The room shrinks and then widens like a lung. Ruth meets my eyes across the table.
“We’re on the clock,” I say.
“Three,” Ruth answers, and we both look toward the church we can’t see from here, imagining a ledger line that someone underwrites with money and we will underline with ink and air.