The club hangs a screen like a temporary moon and orders extra percolators. Diesel breath drifts from the marina’s workboat slip, braiding with wet rope and coffee into the town’s favorite cologne. I stand outside the velvet rope with Ruth, my lanyard tucked into my jacket like a secret I need to protect. A seiche has slid the soundstage askew; voices feel too close, and the gulls sound pitched a half-step high.
Everett steps into the light-bleed beside the screen, jaw smooth, cufflinks winking with the patient confidence of someone who knows where the donor wall keeps its polish. “We’ve all heard about recent sound hoaxes,” he says, voice soft enough to make the crowd lean in. “Tonight we talk safety.” Applause warms the air. Phones float like small lanterns as the town starts to record itself approving its own concern.
I raise my recorder just enough to catch the room’s tone—not his words, not yet. Ruth mutters, “His vowels go silk when he fundraises,” and I nod, recording the silk.
The video opens with drone footage: the breakwater, the clock face of St. Brigid’s, the regatta starting line buzzing with old money and sunscreen. A woman near me sighs: “What a gorgeous town.” Onscreen text: FESTIVAL SAFETY: COMMUNITY FIRST. Then the sound design leans in—oceanic whoosh, a bell ring scrubbed clean of room. I taste aluminum on my tongue, the flavor my brain tags as “overproduced.”
A montage clips by: a slow-motion life jacket zip; a teenager laughing while a bell rope sways; a patrol skiff idling. Everett narrates: “Don’t let bad actors exploit how sound travels.” The bell tone repeats, this time panned wide, an auditorium trick, not a tower fingerprint. I feel the locket at my collarbone cool against my skin, like it’s listening too.
“You seeing that?” I whisper.
Ruth tilts her head, hound-dog attentive. “And hearing it,” she says. “That bell’s neutered. No overtone 5 at 2.7k. Somebody bought a royalty-free chime and ran it through a smile EQ.”
A block text hovers: UP TO $10,000 REWARD FOR INFORMATION. Murmurs swell—admiration disguised as civic duty. The Facebook swap admin angles her phone for a story and says, “Finally, leadership,” and three women around her echo the sentence in different registers, like a chorus trained in polite echo.
Everett reappears in B-roll, kneeling to help a kid fit a PFD, the camera planted low to flatter his shoulders. He says, “We’re in this together. Report hoaxes to the Marina Club hotline or the parish office.” He lets the words parish office float like absolution. The crowd exhales.
Micro-hook: Onscreen, a wave clamps the breakwater with a clean slap; the sound lands early against the visual. I catch the tick of bad sync the way I catch a lie in a voicemail: a micro-second of arrogance.
The video ends with his face and a phone number, the digits in council-approved navy. He smiles the way a surgeon smiles before telling you they got it all. Applause purls. A bell rings once inside the clubhouse, just decorative enough to deny intent.
“Cornered?” Ruth asks quietly.
“Pinned,” I say, and my jaw pops where I clench. “But the pin’s plastic.”
We duck to the Annex to watch again on my laptop. I scrub frame by frame, and the room smells like paper and a radiator that gave up negotiating with winter twenty years ago. The soundtrack is a gel; it coats the footage in virtue.
“Pause,” Ruth says. She leans so close her breath fogs the screen a heartbeat. “That tower shot’s not ours. Look at the clock hands.”
“Ten past. Our clock died at seven-twenty-two last winter,” I say, clicking. “Different town, different sky. Stock.”
Ruth taps the bottom corner. “Getty watermark smear. They missed a pixel.”
I rewind. In a cutaway to a bell rope, the fibers look new, unburned. I zoom and catch a plastic clip on the safety line that our rope never had. A second later, a close-up of hands tying a bowline on a rail that isn’t our marina’s profile. Whoever edited this stitched other people’s safety into our story and named it proof of care.
“He’s laundering legitimacy,” I say. “Also: offense disguised as a PSA.”
Ruth grunts. “Look at the operations permit banner. Font mismatch. Whoever composited it spaced the kerning like a ransom note.”
“So we go technical, not personal,” I say. “We diagram how PR bakes mistrust into the room. We don’t feed his lawsuit hobby.”
She watches my face and finds the tightness I don’t want to name. “You draft,” she says, “and I’ll give you the cop version of footnotes. Also, we need a screenshot of the hotline number and a note that reporting to private clubs isn’t chain-of-custody.”
I open a new script and talk to future listeners under my breath so my hands keep up. “Tape five, Marina Club PSA breakdown,” I say into the mic. “We’re going to talk about why the room sounds wrong when somebody says safety. I will not say names today. I will say methods.”
I write a cold open: the bell tone from Everett’s video, then the real St. Brigid’s impulse from my tower clap, then the two overlaid until the counterfeit gloss turns to smear. I let silence stand in its socks for three beats—the only honest pause I can give in a week of noise.
“Convolution reverb,” I say into the mic. “When you apply a room’s signature to a dry sound, you get a mimic of place. It can honor memory. It can also borrow credibility.” I don’t lecture; I let a small sound demo do the sermon: I play my breath through a tower impulse and then through a generic hall. The difference is in the dust, and my listeners know dust.
Ruth points at my screen. “Drop in credit headers on each audio asset,” she says. “We show receipts. Also highlight the stock clip IDs for the rope and the clock. We’ll blur the vendor labels and still make the point.”
I add a section called Where to Report. I list the Annex’s public line, the county tip portal, and the hotline for survivors that bypasses the marina altogether. “If you heard or saw something on regatta week,” I say quietly, so the whole town has to lean toward the mic, “you don’t owe a club your story first.”
Micro-hook: My phone lights with shares. The club video colonizes feeds—cousins, teachers, the coffee hut. “Finally speaking up,” one caption says. “Good families don’t do hoaxes,” says another. I feel the floor tilt—not seiche now, but influence.
Everett posts a selfie under the screen with the caption: Grateful to serve. Let’s keep our town safe from fear. The comments swing perfumed and sharp: “Bless you.” “Don’t let the podcaster profit off tragedy.” “Reward is generous!” The swap group pins the hotline number under a photo of new bell polishers smiling on a ladder.
I swallow hard and click Record again. “Here’s what safety sounds like,” I say. “It sounds like redundancy, like reporting paths that don’t run through donors, like timestamps and non-destructive edits. It does not sound like a bell with its fifth harmonic removed to make a horror beat.”
Ruth snorts. “Too spicy?”
“Just right,” I say, though my hands shake. “I’ll keep the metaphors; I’ll lose the vinegar.”
“Do not lose all the vinegar,” she says, dry as good toast. “A town this slick needs grip.”
I assemble the episode like a careful sandwich, fat on the outside, acid in the middle, a warm slice of humanity at the end. At no point do I say Everett’s name. I say things like a certain PSA. I say a private hotline. I say a rope that doesn’t match our rope. I place the ledger screenshot—E.C. in the margin—onto my desk and do not put it in the episode. Not yet. Power wants me to jump; I will not jump on command.
I text Lydia to ask how she’s doing and get back a heart and the word nap. I breathe easier. I text Eileen a thank-you and a photograph of the bread sleeve we put her ledger in. She replies with a picture of two loaves cooling and the caption Proof is literal. I laugh, and the laugh unclenches my throat.
Then my email pings—a press release from the club: Community Reward Doubled After “Copycat” Stunt. Attached is a clip of a staged scream in a distant city garage, cropped and grainy, labeled “Example of Recent Hoax.” It’s not our pier. It’s not our wind. It’s bait.
“They’re pre-bunking,” Ruth says, peering over my shoulder. “Claim the stunt before you do it, even if you weren’t going to.”
“I was going to reenact timing, not screams,” I say. “They’re trying to steal the definition of experiment.”
“Then you define it first,” she says. “File our controlled-test plan with the Annex timestamped. Then publish your methodology.”
I pull up a blank doc: Tower-Dock Controlled Capture: Protocol v1. I write it like I’m writing to a future cross-exam. Devices, dates, positions, wind logs, bell intervals. Ruth signs the bottom with letters that look like law. I photograph the sheet beside today’s paper and upload a checksum to a public repo that doesn’t care about small-town donors.
Micro-hook: A DM slides into my show account from a fresh handle: quietwake. Three words: their bell was dirty. I stare. Ruth tilts her head like a dog hearing a distant whistle. I type back, Which bell? The typing dots appear, disappear, return: the rope burned. I screenshot and archive. I do not engage further. My episode timer blinks: 00:31:14.
I step outside the Annex to breathe diesel and lake air and hear the seiche slacken. The breakwater shivers with a different rhythm than the video’s drone shot told. I count the flags on the club mast; they’re half-furled against wind they didn’t bother to predict in their safety montage. Sound behaves like people: it resists being told where to go.
Everett walks out of the clubhouse across the lot in his coat with the expensive quiet. A couple peels away from a group to congratulate him. He accepts their gratitude with the palms-up posture of men who’ve rehearsed magnanimity. He spots me and gives a curatorial nod, the museum of this town arranging its displays.
“We’re aligned, Mara,” he calls, using my name like a charity. “I appreciate your commitment to accuracy.”
I measure my answer syllable by syllable until I can carry them without spilling. “Accuracy is heavy,” I say. “But I’ve got help.”
His eyes flick to Ruth and back. “I worry about how stories scare donors,” he says. “Donors keep lights on.”
“Lights also expose,” I say. “It’s a risk-benefit analysis.”
He smiles a private smile meant for men with oak desks. “Keep your listeners safe,” he says. “We’ll keep the town safe.” He moves on, and the crowd stitches itself back around him like fabric trained not to wrinkle.
I return to the Annex and export the counter episode to a simple page: How to Hear a PSA. I add transcripts, alt text, and a resource list. Before I push it live, I call out loud to my recorder—not a prayer, not exactly: “I will honor the dead while not pinning them in place.” The machine records the promise without applause.
I publish. Shares are smaller than his, but they arrive in clusters I trust: the librarian, the teacher who installed the school’s sound booth, the pier fishmonger who hates liars. The swap group allows my link after two pending hours; the admin adds a warning label: Please be respectful. I take respectful like a small bruise well earned.
Ten minutes later, my phone buzzes with a voice memo. I hit play and hear a man breathing too close to the mic, a room’s echo hugging his throat. He whispers, “He paid for polish and for silence,” then taps the phone near something that clinks like a bell yoke screw in a jar. “I have a burn,” he says. “I’ll talk if you blur me.”
I stop walking. Cars scroll by, their tires singing on damp asphalt. Across the water, the club’s video replays, its bell tone smooth as a lie told six times. I hold the phone to my chest and listen to my own heartbeat knock against the ledger copy in my bag.
“Ruth,” I call, voice steadying as I say it, “we’ve got our first witness since the video.”
She steps into the hall with her pen already uncapped. “Then let’s make sure what he says can’t be spun.”
I nod and press Reply, but I don’t send words yet. I let silence sit between us long enough to gather its courage. Then the typing dots bloom again on my screen without me prompting them, and the next line arrives like a fuse: He called it the countdown.