I climb the tower ladder with the dummy strip in my pocket and the bell rope pressing a resin smell into the boards. The air up here carries diesel and cold stone. My backpack bites into my shoulder in beats that match the clockworks’ low cough. I whisper counts—“one, two, three”—without meaning to, a nervous metronome that won’t retire.
Ruth waits on the platform with a headlamp and the evidence box. “Door was clear,” she says. “No fresh scuffs on the lock. I still wedged the bottom landing with a chalk.” Her voice is coffee-sturdy. I take it like a handrail.
“We’ve got an hour before anyone wanders in,” I say, though I’m really telling myself to breathe. The wind through the louvers skims my cheeks and tastes like metal shavings and wet rope. The lake down there isn’t sleeping; it heaves in long, lazy pulses, a seiche’s after-ache. That pulse can warp sound in the rafters; I’ll have to log it.
I set the gear: two small-diaphragm condensers, cardioid, one aimed at the bell mouth, one off-axis toward the rope pit, building an XY I can deconvolve later. I tape a reference mic near the louver where the rumor of town leaks in—cars, gulls, church coffee warming somewhere below. The tripod feet feel guilty on the old planks; I tuck foam under them to keep the floor from adding its own narrative.
“Want me on clap duty or balloon?” Ruth asks, tying back her hair with a rubber band she pretends is new and not from 1998.
“Balloon first,” I say. “Sine sweep second. Then claps for human irregularity.” I smile because it’s my favorite phrase in all of audio.
She grins back, the headlamp making a halo of sawdust around her. “Documenting human irregularity is the whole job.”
I click the recorder: 96k/24-bit, clean preamps, timecode synced to the laptop because future me will thank present me for once. “Room tone,” I announce to the file. “Bell chamber, pre-dawn, lake conditions: seiche-positive, wind from west, diesel in air. Regatta season banners stored downstairs making cloth slap on stairwell.” The cloth does slap, gently, like you slap a friend awake without admitting that’s what you’re doing.
“Impulse one,” I say. Ruth raises the balloon like a communion she’s allowed to burst. I nod. She pops it. The crack kicks the bell’s ribs and comes back at us as a shiver of harmonics, a glass choir sliding out of stone. My chest answers with a small animal sound I didn’t plan.
“Again,” I whisper. She pops a second, then a third at different positions: rope pit, bell mouth, stairwell hatch. Each pop finds seams in the air that weren’t there a second prior. I mark positions, heights, my own foot stance, because the lab likes obsessive fidelity and so do I.
“Sweep,” I say, and I start the sine tone, low to high, slow enough to comb through thickness. The tone feels like a finger running the tower’s spine. At 2.6 kHz the louvers buzz sympathetically. I log it. At 120 Hz the floor hums like a swallowed truck. I log that too.
“Claps,” Ruth says, and she claps in pairs the way I taught her—wide hands, soft pad first, then bone, so the transient has a shoulder and a knuckle. The spectrogram in my head paints the room as she works. I tag files as if the tags are a rope we can climb back up if we fall.
Micro-hook: When we pause, the tower releases one quiet tick from the clock face like a guilty secret.
“Now the hinge,” I say, and my mouth goes dry. I pull the dummy strip and Celia’s jig from the evidence box with gloved hands. The jig’s screws are still warm from the anger of last night—a feeling that makes parts of me work faster and other parts slower. I sit on the low bench built into the wall, stone pressing cold into my jeans, and mount the copper strip with the care of threading a needle in a moving car.
“Want me on rope noise?” Ruth says, fingers hovering near the hemp.
“On my count,” I answer. “Celia’s hand first, then the rope, then the drag.” I hold my breath for three because Lydia said she did, and I press the strip through the groove. The jig’s burr gives a tiny three-tooth kiss, the deeper bite, the short skid. The recorder catches what the room does to that small act: a bright ping framed by a wood cough and the lake’s long throat.
“Rope,” I say. Ruth pulls a clean ten centimeters, slow. The strands whisper like a secret you want to be caught. My mics drink it. The bell doesn’t ring, but it considers.
I run the hinge again. “One, two, three,” I breathe. The third tooth lands and I feel a tremor in my wrist—a ghost of whoever made this motion until it entered muscle memory.
“You’re making a face,” Ruth says.
“I’m meeting her hand,” I say, and I don’t apologize for the ghost talk. “Again.” I clock another pass. Same burr rhythm. Same roomprint halo around a small action, the evidence that this place writes itself into anything you do here.
We work the sequence like a dance we’re learning from a faded photograph. Hinge. Rope. Breath. Wood creak. Rope again. Hinge. Tiny jig ping. The lake in the louvers keeps time.
“Now the scream proxy,” I say, and I hate the phrase even when it’s necessary. “No voice. A tone burst we can EQ into the locket band.” I trigger a 900 Hz burst through a small speaker, then shape it through the room at the location the former bell-ringer nephew indicated—near the hatch where teens would huddle on dares. We record three angles, each with the room’s fingerprint wrapping the sound like a hard candy wrapper.
Ruth squints at me. “You’re going to convolve this with the locket strip, aren’t you.”
“I am,” I say. “To test whether the IR explains the original room halo.” I keep the jargon short because the important part isn’t internet credibility; it’s convincing a jury that sound carries fingerprints like any other medium. “And then I’m going to lay that against the real file’s seams.”
The tower groans, bored with our industry. Outside, a gull performs its usual stand-up routine—heckle, heckle, steal. The town below wakes into percolated church coffee and marina diesel. Those smells climb stairs faster than we do.
We take a beat to listen: no footsteps, no whisper of shoes on grit. “We’re okay,” Ruth says, the way you say it when you want it to be true enough to become true.
I cue the laptop and load the lab’s deconvolution plug-in. I’ve done this on kitchen tables and in car seats; doing it in the tower where the sound grew its bones feels like writing a letter in the house where someone died. I feed in the impulse, feed in our hinge pings, tell the math to marry them. The screen fills with a waveform that looks like a skyline. I zoom to the faint sawteeth nestled in the transients and bite down on my lower lip.
“What’s the word?” Ruth asks.
“Close,” I say. “Really close.” I drag our reconstructed hinge+roomprint into a new lane. I open a copy of the original locket file—the unshared one, the version with its hiss intact like honest dust—and line the two signals by their first little tooth. The room’s comb filter makes its familiar vertical ladder on the spectrogram, the same pattern we saw during our first tower visit. My shoulders drop a notch without asking.
“Now the splice,” I say. I zoom to the center of the original where the lab flagged a crossfade shaped like a politician’s apology—smooth at the top, dirty at the bottom. I match our reenacted section to the pre-splice half and let the two ride together. The phase cancels a piece of the room—proof that we’re correct about the space. Then I hit the seam, and the cancellation breaks even though the room doesn’t change. The timing does.
“There,” I say, pointing to the thin line like a surgeon finding a hidden bleeder. “Time stretch. Whoever cut this nudged tempo a hair to hide clock time. The bell peal timing on the tail—watch.” I scrub to the end of the file where a bell overtone faintly overlaps the scream’s edit tail. I’d heard it months ago; back then it was a ghost; now it’s a grip.
Ruth leans in until our cheeks almost touch. “You think the bell schedule will align?”
“We’re going to make it align,” I say, “or we’re going to prove someone didn’t want it to.” I pull out the sexton ledger photos we took—the page with “keys checked out by E.C.” in the margin—and the church bulletin archives Ruth copied in her neat square letters. Saturday regatta rehearsal bell at 7:15, blessing at 8:00, the youth bell ring at 9:30. On 2008’s week, the church posted a special noon peal for crew baptisms. Regatta culture loves the theater of legacy; they ring boys into manhood and pretend the girls hear the same song.
I line up the file’s bell ghost against the noon pattern. The overtone ratio says the bell was struck hard from a side pull, not a full throw. The ghost resolves. My throat closes like it does when lake air carries winter.
“Noon, 2008,” I say. “The scream’s energy decays under a noon strike. The room halo is ours. The timing was our timing until someone massaged a crossfade.”
“Show me later,” Ruth says, practical even at a revelation. “Show the lawyer better.”
“Watch this,” I say, unable to keep still. I pull a later church video from the folder a parishioner sent me—2017 summer carnival, same tower, a phone clip of bells ringing over a dunk tank and powdered-sugar air. The bell’s overtone ladder is identical; that’s what bells do. But the clock tick rate between strikes changed after repairs; the curve is fractionally different. I overlay the locket’s tail onto 2017. The locket disagrees. It agrees with 2008.
Ruth exhales like she’s been holding her lungs hostage for years. “So the original capture is 2008,” she says, voice low. “And the edit—”
“—comes later,” I finish. “Years later. Someone with access slid an insert to muddy when, not where.” I zoom into the splice and mark the stretch percent. “One point two percent. Subtle enough to hide in almost anything. Not enough to fool a roomprint.”
She taps her pen against her palm. “You can say this in English?”
“I can,” I say. “The tower sings in a pattern. Our reenactment matches the tower’s song. In the middle, the song stumbles like a lazy dancer—that’s the edit. At the end, the bell’s hum lands exactly where it would on regatta week in 2008. Whoever tried to blur the clock didn’t change the bell’s bones.”
Ruth smiles without her eyes, which means she’s already five moves ahead. “Defense will call it podcast magic.”
“Then we give them boring science,” I say. “Chain-of-custody, lab logs, room IRs, spectra overlays, bell schedules, sexton margin note, and our field recordings. We let the jurors be bored enough to trust it.”
The tower gives us a gift then: a draft sneaks through, swirling dust into a small galaxy that spirals in the light. The old rope drinks a sliver of movement and squeaks. I log the squeak because I log everything in case one day it has teeth.
We run a second pass of the hinge sequence to confirm. The burrs line up like the teeth in a tiny zipper. I layer this take over the original’s early transients and watch phase cancellation eat the noise like a gentle eraser. I can almost hear Celia’s held breath between clicks. Absorption eats my anxiety until all I can do is work.
Micro-hook: A gull peels off the lake outside and drops a shell against the far sidewalk. The pop echoes up the stairwell like a footstep you don’t want to name.
“One more,” I say. “Then we pack and go before the priest decides dawn is holy again.”
Ruth checks the stairwell with a small mirror like an old trick she pretends she learned on a heist movie. “Clear,” she says. “For now.”
I speak to the recorder: “Conclusion draft: Original scream and hinge roomprint consistent with 2008 regatta week noon bell. Insert identified by crossfade morphology and micro time stretch; likely added later by person with tower access.” Saying it aloud turns vapor to ice. My shoulders unspool another inch.
We start coil-and-stow. The smell of percolated coffee from the church hall sneaks up the stairs, sweet and burned. The Facebook swap group will be posting centerpieces by noon and policing tone by twelve-oh-five. Good families will cluck about “respect,” and I will upload spectrograms that look like modern art until I reshape “respect” into something that holds a girl’s name without dropping it.
“Triumphant?” Ruth asks, eyebrow up, because she knows I won’t let myself have the word yet.
“Useful,” I say. “Which is better.”
She tucks the jig back into the foam and signs the seal, hand steady. We both pause to look at it, a tiny sled that connected a daughter’s hand to a room that refuses to forget. Brass bells and locket metal—the durable things. Tarnish doesn’t erase blood; it only hides it until you learn how to polish with light instead of chemicals.
I sling the backpack and feel the laptop’s warmth against my spine, a second, artificial heat that says we captured something alive. I kill the mics one by one and listen to the room tone without mediation: wind, rope… and a faint shoe on grit below.
Ruth’s eyes cut to mine. “You heard that,” she says, already pressing the evidence box closer to her body.
“Boots,” I whisper. “Middle landing.”
Another grit-scrape. The seiche gives a heavy breath at the louvers and sends our hair forward like a nudge. I turn off the recorder but keep the camera rolling because future me sometimes needs past me to be paranoid.
“Down fast, or up and hide?” Ruth asks, and she’s calm, which is how I know she’s scared.
My triumphant shrinks to a point and hardens. “Neither,” I say. “We walk like we belong to this place, because today we do.” I pocket the dummy strip, tighten the pack, and nod toward the hatch where the stairwell frames a band of gray. “But hit record on your phone just in case we need a second angle on whoever decided to count after us.”
The boots pause, as if the tower itself warned the owner to reconsider. A bell somewhere in the town tries a single note, off the hour again, carried crooked across the water.
I try to make my voice ordinary. “Ready?”
Ruth shifts the evidence box to her good side. “Three,” she says.
I put my hand on the rail that so many hands wore smooth and step into the stairwell, the truth of the room zipped on the drive between my shoulder blades, the edit seams mapped in my head, and the unanswered question coiled at my feet: who’s waiting on the landing—and whose clock are they trying to reset?