The dock boards sweated under the morning haze, each plank beading tiny mirrors of lake light. Diesel hung in the air with wet rope and yesterday’s fish, and the distant percolator at the bait shop coughed its church-coffee breath into the wind. I tucked my scarf closer and shook chalk powder into my palm. The locket against my throat kissed cold metal to skin, whispering its own kind of metronome.
“Boat seventeen is still theirs in everything but name,” Ruth said, squinting at the flaking stencil: 17. She nudged a scuff with her shoe. “You sure you want to do this in daylight?”
“I’m done with shadows,” I said. I pocketed my phone and clicked out the tape measure. The steel tongue snapped straight with a satisfying bite. “We’re careful. We’re accurate. We’re fast.”
Ruth opened a manila folder shielded from spray by a plastic sleeve. The autopsy photos didn’t leave; they visited and stayed. She angled the images so only I could see. “Two patterned contusions on the right lateral ribs,” she murmured. “Centered at ninety-three centimeters from the heel, spacing sixteen centimeters edge-to-edge.” Her finger hovered, not touching. “And three ovals along the thigh, four-and-a-half centimeters apart, with a faint smear line between the second and third. You remember the old rub-rail on Seventeen?”
I remembered it in my palm: the brittle plastic sleeved over bolted stanchions, tired before its time, taped where it cracked. I chalked a line along the outer edge of the berth, then a parallel line where a body would contact if shoved by a surge. I pressed the tape’s metal tang into a knot of wood and drew the yellow ribbon to the piling. “From cleat face to piling scar—sixteen point two centimeters,” I called. “Fender spacing?”
Ruth measured between two black cylinders scuffed into gray. “Forty-five on center,” she said, voice low. “Old-school install. Whoever tied this line liked symmetry, and real life never stays symmetrical.”
“Bruises do,” I said. I made three small chalk ovals on the plank, four-and-a-half centimeters apart, then angled a smear between them the way skin would if water shoved a thigh against a bouncing fender. The chalk left a soft rasping note like paper on teeth. “If she hit here, the rib marks line up with cleat and rub-rail bolts.” I crouched and rested my knuckles on the boards. Water nudged the pilings with a hollow cluck.
“Wind fifteen out of the west,” Ruth said, scanning the flags draped off the clubhouse. “But the lake’s in a mood. Seiche last night, and this morning hasn’t reset. Currents are still pulling sideways.”
Micro-hook: A wake rolled in from no visible boat and lifted the dock just enough to make the chalk lines breathe.
I looked up toward the bell tower’s slate spire peeking over roofs. “Tower to dock,” I said. “Ten minutes if you sprint straight and don’t stop. Fifteen if you’re drunk, scared, or being counted at.” My voice dropped on the last word without my permission.
Ruth heard it anyway. “We don’t write that part until we can prove the count,” she said gently. “Today is math.”
We worked our way down the berth like old carpenters—measure, mark, confirm. I photographed each chalk shape with a ruler in the frame and a sticky note catching the time. Ruth read the timestamps while I called the measurements back to her like drill. The numbers behaved: sixteen apart, forty-five apart, four-and-a-half apart, as if the dock had been measured by a bruise.
“Celia’s thigh was five-five from the heel in the photo frame,” Ruth said, checking scale against a coin the old coroner used for reference. “These ovals would land where her leg would meet if she dropped from about this angle.” She positioned her own shin near the chalk, not touching, her body explaining what she refused to narrate.
“Height?” I asked.
“A meter above the deck if the surge lifted the boat to the rub-rail,” she said. “Lower if she slid, higher if she was pushed.”
The word hung and didn’t fall. I stood and clicked the tape back into its case, the last snap loud enough to scatter a gull. The marina’s Facebook swap group would turn these pictures into morality theater if I wasn’t careful. They’d decide whose girl Celia was and whose she wasn’t. They’d write me into a villain and applaud themselves for protecting “good families.”
“Let’s fix the time,” I said. “If the bell schedule gives us when she left the tower, the lake level gives us what the dock was doing when she hit.”
We carried our clipboard and camera into the harbor office. The harbor master wasn’t at his desk, but the wall chart was: a faded NOAA print with station readings for lake level, with a little pen taped to a string like a church pen that doesn’t want to wander. A fresh note in the corner read: Seiche 00:47—high in—low out 02:10.
“This is the station outside the breakwater,” Ruth said, already pinching and zooming on her phone to pull up the online readout. “But inside the harbor is delayed by a few minutes.” She pointed to a scribbled annotation from last year: Inside lag 4–6 min. “Remember the night we mapped clap echoes? The wave moved like gossip—late but mean.”
I traced my finger along the curve: low at 00:35, rising to a local crest around 00:50, then trough again by 02:10. I scrolled to the date stamped on my tower reenactment spreadsheet: the 2008 regatta week we’d confirmed. The station record for that week had the same sawtooth pattern, a surge arriving around the time the bells had rung their off-schedule peal.
“We have the tower peal at 00:41 from the parish log we copied,” I said. “We matched that to the impulse response in the locket replica—within, what, five seconds?”
“Seven,” Ruth said. “But the bell log could be hand-rounded. Call it thirty seconds.”
“Thirty seconds puts her out the door and onto the stairs by 00:42,” I said. I drew a straight line from spire to dock on the wall map with my finger. “Ten minutes from tower to Seventeen if she ran straight, nine if she cut the alley and the parking lot wasn’t blocked by prep trucks.”
“Or twelve if someone slowed her,” Ruth said. She didn’t look at me when she said it; she looked at the lag note like it could answer back. “Inside-lag puts the crest here around 00:55. That’s when the dock lifts the most, when a body would ride high into a cleat, then drop into a fender trough.”
I took the pen on its string and didn’t write on the chart—temptation resisted. I wrote in my notebook instead. “00:55 impact window,” I said aloud, letting my own voice memorize the sound. “Cleat spacing sixteen. Fenders forty-five. Thigh bruise separation four-and-a-half with smear. Rub-rail bolts at rib level for someone of her height.” I swallowed, and the coffee taste I hadn’t had rose anyway.
Micro-hook: A teenage clerk popped in with a box of muffins and stopped when he saw our charts, eyes skidding away the way people look at accidents long enough to pretend they didn’t.
“All good?” he asked, voice breaking courtesy over curiosity.
“All public,” Ruth said, kind. She folded the folder to hide the worst photos. “We’re measuring board maintenance.”
He relaxed, which meant he believed we were fixing splinters and not history, and left the box like an offering. The faint sugar smell layered over diesel and rope, a sweet lie over the honest stink.
Back on the dock, we walked the span from the head of the pier to Seventeen like we were scouting a parade route. I counted steps under my breath, recorded wind speed off the weather app, then closed my eyes and listened. With the seiche still tugging, sound didn’t go straight; it skimmed and bent. From the tower’s direction came the faintest double-knock, the way bell ropes knock wood when they swing wrong. The lake stores echoes in the wrong drawers and hands them back when it pleases.
“Ready for tape?” Ruth asked.
I unpacked the shotgun mic and the small recorder with the low-cut engaged to kill the worst wind. “I’m going to do this without names,” I said. “Methods only. Measurements. Any place that could point to a person, I say ‘an individual’ and leave it at that.”
“Good,” she said. “And you say ‘alleged’ like it’s a brick.”
I perched on a piling cap and angled the mic toward the chalk marks. I took a breath, tasted rope and brass and the bare hint of clove that memory had rubbed into the day. I clicked record.
“Room tone,” I whispered, holding still for ten seconds while water and gull kept their own pulse. Then I began.
“This is a dock,” I said quietly, “and this is a ruler. Between this cleat and this piling is sixteen-point-two centimeters. Between these fenders is forty-five. On these boards, four-and-a-half centimeters repeats like a song verse, the kind a bruise sings when it doesn’t get to heal. We compared these numbers to official photographs taken the night a young woman didn’t make it home. The pattern matches contact at this berth—Boat Seventeen—during a lake surge logged that night.”
Ruth stood behind me, my human pop filter. I kept going.
“We cross-referenced harbor seiche data and the parish bell log. The tower’s off-schedule peal that week—tied to a tradition some still call baptism and others call intimidation—places her departure at 00:41. The seiche crest inside the harbor lagged by four to six minutes, peaking near 00:55. That’s the window a body would lift into hard metal then slide into softer damage. This tells us location and time are not rumors; they are geometry and water.”
I let ten seconds of waves breathe after that, then closed with the part I’d practiced until it stopped shaking my throat.
“This explanation is not an accusation,” I said. “It’s a measurement. We will not name any living person today. We will not speculate beyond the lines chalked on wood and the timestamps in public logs. If you have information that contradicts these measurements, you can contact us and we will measure again, on mic, with witnesses.”
I clicked stop and looked at Ruth. She didn’t smile. She nodded like a judge.
“Say it again,” she said. “Once with new phrasing for the table of contents. People who hate you won’t listen all the way through.”
I recorded a shorter version with headings baked in—Measurement One: Cleat Spacing, Measurement Two: Fenders, Measurement Three: Seiche Timing—each phrase deliberately dull and difficult to take out of context without sounding like math. Then I packed the gear, photographed the chalk until my phone complained, and wiped the marks clean with lake water. Chalk washes. Bruises don’t.
“Excited?” Ruth asked as we strapped cases, trying to sound like she was asking about weather.
“A little,” I admitted, and the locket picked up my pulse like a small bell. “Not about being right. About being clear.”
“Same thing on good days,” she said. She glanced toward the clubhouse where a brass bell hung under the eaves, a regatta relic. “On bad days, clarity gets you punished.”
We walked back toward the lot. The wind shifted, and the sillage of someone’s cologne—citrus woven with clove—ran a thread through the diesel. I unlocked the car and we sat with the doors closed, the world muffled to a manageable hum. I slotted the SD card into the laptop and watched the files populate, each tiny waveform a heartbeat.
“This part,” I said, fingers hovering over the keys, “I have to get right or they’ll call it ‘podcast magic’ and toss it all.” I opened my script template and typed slowly. Disclosure: methods recorded on site; all measurements repeatable. I added the footnote: Autopsy images described, not broadcast. I placed the photos in a private evidence folder and duplicated the audio to a cold drive.
Ruth read over my shoulder and made a small sound that meant approval and protectiveness had shaken hands. “We file a brief with the complaint today,” she said. “Not public, just preserved. If they try to pull your permits or shut you out of public space, we show the judge the ruler.”
I hit save. The laptop whirred, tiny fan rising and falling like a tired singer. The lake slapped the bulkhead with the wet palm of someone trying to be let in. I closed my eyes and saw numbers, not faces—sixteen, forty-five, four-and-a-half, 00:41, 00:55—and the thin bridge between them that a town kept trying to burn and rebuild depending on who crossed.
My phone buzzed against the console. A notification banner floated up like a fish hungry for bread. @HarborSwapMod mentioned you: “We hope certain shows avoid inflaming the regatta.” Another buzz followed it, faster. New upload from @SecondLieWatch: the thumbnail was a freeze-frame of my mouth mid-syllable from some live Q&A months ago, stretched into an ugly vowel.
I held the phone between two fingers so I wouldn’t crush it. Ruth saw my face and didn’t ask; she pulled her own phone and opened the same feed, a silent duet of dread. The thumbnail pulsed a red circle. Title: “EXCLUSIVE: Podcaster admits to ‘using grief’—listen.”
“You recorded clean,” she said, voice level. “But they don’t need clean. They need a cut.”
I stared at the words that pretended to be mine and tasted metal in the back of my mouth, the kind that hides blood with wealth’s shine. I saved my careful file again and backed it up to the cold drive. Then I asked the question I didn’t want to hear my own answer to: after all this measuring, who gets to set the length of the story the town will hear?