I pick the side chapel because the nave carries gossip like a kite, and I need air that doesn’t turn sentences into parade banners. Beeswax and old varnish drift off the pews. Somewhere deeper in the building a coffeepot sighs—percolated church coffee, eternal, stale and forgiving. The lake throws a shoulder against the breakwater and the sound arrives off-angle through the stone, a seiche slap that makes the candle flames tick.
“I can stop this at any time,” I say, placing the recorder on the prayer kneeler. “We stay on background until you choose otherwise. You call the shape, not me.”
The woman who messaged me sits on the edge of the pew like a choir robe still hangs from her shoulders. Late twenties, hair tucked under a knit cap, hands worrying a leather bracelet with a tiny brass charm. She studies the Saint Brigid statue as if the wooden eyes might wink her permission.
“Okay,” she says, not looking at me yet. “First names only for now.”
“I’m Mara,” I say, even though she knows. I nod toward the arch; Ruth waits there with a folded legal pad, gray coat buttoned to her throat, mouth a dry line that means patience. “Ruth’s here to handle process. She used to be a detective. She’s also the person who makes me count my breaths.”
“Jess,” the woman says after a beat, a different Jess than my transcript angel. She touches the bracelet charm with her thumb and then looks at me full on. “I sang here. Altos. Junior year of high school through my first year of community college.”
“Thank you for meeting me here,” I say. I gesture to the tiny chapel window, glass bubbles throwing ragged lake-light across her cheek. “I figured less echo, more privacy.”
“Everything echoes in this place,” she says, and the words lift a small shiver out of her shoulders. “Even what you don’t say.”
I click the recorder on. The red light answers. “We’re rolling. Room tone first,” I say, and we sit for ten long seconds while the chapel registers: candle spit, wood tick, faraway footstep, rope whisper from above where the tower breathes.
“You wrote you heard something under a bell,” I say when the quiet settles. “One night. Regatta week.”
Jess nods. She swallows. “You know how they do the bell ring for the crews? Baptize the newbies?” She inhales and tilts her head toward the nave as if the memory still waits there. “That tradition. The town calls it charming.”
“I’ve recorded the overtones,” I say, to give her ballast. “Harmonics stack in that tower like ribs.”
“I was shelving hymnals after rehearsal,” she says, hands pinched white on the bracelet. “June. The air wasn’t hot, but it smelled like summer had just gotten out of a shower. I heard laughter out by the steps—boys laughing in that way where they think the laugh protects them. I’m not saying they were boys. I’m saying the laugh was.”
Ruth steps closer into the arch, pen still capped. Jess glances at her, then back to me. “They rang the bell. Not right, not the pattern Father liked, more like a dare. And under the bell I heard—” She stops, mouth opening then closing, a small fish that refuses the hook.
I wait. I don’t rescue the sentence. I let it decide.
“I heard a word that wasn’t a word,” she says finally. “I told myself it was a drunk girl doing a bit. That’s what we do, right? If you can label it, it’s not a problem. I stacked hymnals and told myself she was playing.”
My chest does the small ache that comes with secondhand courage. “You think you heard a scream under a peal.”
“I know I did,” she says, and something unclenches in her jaw. “Because the bell cut it into slices. You know? The way big sound chops little sound into coins. I could hear the space between. I folded it into the folder in my head where the town puts things we don’t collect.”
We share the silence a moment. Beeswax sweetens the air like a held note.
“I need you to say anything you can about air,” I say gently. “Smell, taste. The body keeps better logs than memory sometimes.”
Her eyes go to the arch to make sure the nave is empty. “Cloves,” she says, almost whispering. “And not like Christmas. Like those cigarettes that make every teenager think they’re European. I tasted them in the back of my throat, spicy, too sweet, like I’d licked a brown sugar spoon. And diesel. Not gasoline—diesel from the big trucks by the marina when they move the boat lifts. The mix of the two—spice and machinery—got into my hair.”
Ruth uncaps her pen without seeming to move. I hear her breath hitch, but she doesn’t speak.
“Cloves and diesel,” I repeat for the tape. “Any other markers?”
“Footsteps on the metal stair,” Jess says. She points up, to where the tower’s interior spiral starts its climb. “The sound goes through you, doesn’t it? I can still feel it in the meat of my knees.”
“Would you recognize the clove smell now?” I ask.
She nods once. “I worked at the bait shop summers. There was a guy who would come in with a pack rolled in his sleeve because the old pictures said handsome came in that shape. He bought ice and cheap beer and clove cigarettes. I remember him because he never looked at me. He looked at his reflection in the beer door. I told myself boys do that.”
My neck tightens. I hear Mason’s voice at the gas station, all friendly carbon, and the ghost taste of cloves in my mouth returns like a dare. “Do you know a name?” I ask.
“He was with the Marina boys,” she says. “Big shoulders loping like a dog, boat-deck legs. Someone called him Mase. Another kid said ‘Yates, knock it off’ when he flicked ash where the fuel cans sit. And he laughed that laugh.”
Ruth’s pen freezes at the last word. I say, steady: “You’re naming Mason Yates.”
“I’m naming a smell,” she says quickly, shoulders climbing. “And a habit. And a laugh. And the way he called the bell a toy. I’m naming none of the rest until I hear myself back.”
“You get to stop the tape,” I say, and I mean it. “You get to play it back first. You get to cut what you want cut.”
The lake pushes hard then—an inside-out wave, a seiche bump—and the bell rope beyond the arch whispers a single dry syllable. Jess startles; I keep my hands open on my knees. I watch her settle her breath like a singer fixes posture.
“Okay,” she says. “Play your thing. The locket.”
I lift the headphones from the kneeler and ask permission with my eyebrows. She nods. I cue the file to the segment we’ve mapped like a coastline: the bell overtones, the strange undercry the roomprint holds like a hair trapped in ice. I keep the volume low. I hit play and set the cups gently over her ears. The red light on the recorder stares up at the bottom of the Saint’s hem.
Jess closes her eyes. Her throat moves. I watch the small muscles in her face do math. Her fingers stop picking the bracelet and go still.
“There,” she says, hand darting—eyes still closed—toward my laptop screen where the spectrogram climbs like stained glass. Her fingertip hovers above the 1.1 kHz band. “Your little teeth. Those are the cuts the bell made.”
I feel the yes rip through me, a clean line from ears to gut. “Hold that spot,” I say, and I overlay the harmonic fingerprint we pulled on tower reenactment day. The bell’s overtone ladder sits on the screen like ribs in X-ray. The undercry’s energy peaks nestle exactly between the third and fourth overtones where the impulse response told us to look. I don’t talk about theory. I let her see the picture.
Ruth steps in fully now; her boots squeak on old tile. “Jess,” she says softly, “what you just did is what we need a jury to do: you connected body memory to a ruler. I can write a statement, but it reads cold. Your hand showing ‘there’—” She taps her legal pad. “That breathes.”
Jess pulls the headphones off, careful, reverent even, as if the locket were bone. She stares at the Saint, then at the bell rope shadow. “I’m late to save,” she says, half to the statue. “That’s what I carry. I heard her and filed it like I was writing minutes.” Her laugh is a little noise with too many edges. “I worked the swap group back then too. I deleted things that made ‘good families’ look bad. We were taught that’s how you keep peace—delete. I can’t un-delete that night in my head.”
“You’re not late,” I say. “You’re right on the count. One, two, three—now. You’re here right now.”
She breathes out, the air shaking at first and then smoothing. “That clove taste,” she says more steadily, eyes on me. “I’ve tried to name it for years. My sister said I invented it because I was mad I didn’t get chosen for a legacy crew scholarship. The way the town trains girls to police other girls could fill your show for ten seasons.”
“I won’t make your pain an episode arc,” I say. The words are muscle memory now; the leak taught me how sharp they must land. “I will make your detail a fact. Cloves and diesel. Under the bell. Mason laughed. The bell cut the sound into teeth.”
She nods once. “Okay,” she says. “Write it like that.”
Ruth slides the legal pad onto the pew and uncaps her pen again. “Voluntary witness statement,” she says, as if she’s ordering a sandwich we all want. “No names you don’t choose, description of sensory markers, alignment to physical acoustics. I’ll draft. You can sign or not sign.”
“I’ll sign,” Jess says, then swallows. “But you keep me off air until your math can carry my name.”
“Deal,” I say. I tuck a stray hair behind my ear and feel the locket chain bite my neck, a tiny brass reminder. “Do you remember any words—like someone counted?”
“Three,” she says, immediate, and then blinks hard. “But maybe that’s because I listened to your show. Maybe I placed it there to match.”
“I’ll mark it as ambiguous,” I say. “I won’t build plot from a maybe.”
We sit with that, three women in a chapel where too many boys learned you ring a bell to baptize your power. The Saint looks without looking; the candles kneel down their flames and stand them back up.
Ruth reads her draft aloud, each sentence precise enough to sit on a courtroom table. Jess edits her own life with a fierce sort of politeness; she replaces “boys” with “group,” deletes any adjective that smells like judgment. She signs with a quick hand and blows on the ink because she doesn’t trust time to dry what matters.
“I might puke,” she says, then smiles a little. “But I’m lighter and I hate it. Why does telling the truth make me feel like I’ve betrayed someone who left me to do the hard thing alone?”
“Because the story taught you loyalty means silence,” I say. “The story was wrong. We’re writing the warranty.”
She slips the bracelet back over her knuckles and stands. “If he finds out—Mason—I don’t want him at my work. He drops off bait for his fishing buddies some mornings. Clove stink before sunup. My boss thinks he tips well.”
“We’ll tell your boss you’re part of an investigation that requires a safer schedule,” Ruth says. “No details. Formal tone. The kind that scares people into being kind.”
Jess laughs for real then, a sound like a page finally turned. “I like her,” she says to me. “She sounds like the old nun who taught me ledger math.”
“She teaches me breath math,” I say. “Same tricks.”
We walk her to the side door. The air outside smacks us with diesel in the lightest thread, the marina cranes testing their hydraulics for the first warm-ish day. Lake smell rides up—cold iron, algae memory, wet rope. The tower throws a long shadow over the parking lot like a sundial for guilt.
Jess squeezes my arm once before she leaves. “Post what you need to,” she says. “But don’t post me. Not yet. I’ll know when.”
“You’ll be the one to tell me when,” I say. “Not the town. Not the club. You.”
She nods and goes, boots clicking time across the concrete.
Ruth and I stand under the arch for one more minute. We listen to the tower breathe. I hear the roomprint in my head, the little teeth Jess named, the cloves that follow Mason around like a chorus.
“We just tied him to the tower with a smell,” Ruth says, voice low. “A jury’s nose isn’t evidence, but a jury’s memory is a force.”
“It’s the missing color in the waveform,” I say. I pack the recorder, wrap the headphones cable slow so I don’t tangle our proof. “Diesel from the lifts, clove from his sleeve, laughter in the stairwell. Her hand on the exact harmonic notch. It’s another rung on the ladder.”
Ruth looks at the Saint, then at me. “You know what’s next,” she says. “Before the town tells the story for you.”
I do. The thought rises like tide inside my ribs. Lydia. I’ve danced around the ask, kept the scream off air, protected the thing that first taught me to listen. Jess’s memory sharpens the edge of that choice. Stories save and stories pin; I have to make the saving louder than the pinning.
We step back into the chapel. I touch the Saint’s foot, not for grace but for grounding. My phone buzzes with a new message from a number I locked under Unknown—Church. My stomach tightens; I don’t open it yet. I hold the locket under my shirt and feel the cool brass against skin that smells like candle smoke.
“Ready?” Ruth asks, opening the door to the nave where sound becomes bigger than itself.
“Ready to ask,” I say, and the question tolls in my chest like a bell I can’t unring: will Lydia let me tell the world that under St. Brigid’s peal, a girl’s voice carried—and that cloves on a man’s breath counted her down?