I climb to the attic with my phone flashlight off so I don’t blind Amaya on the narrow steps. The boards groan in an old-house key that makes the lake’s breath underneath feel closer, throatier. My hand skims a splintered rail; resin and dust coat my fingers. I smell insulation warmed by trapped heat, a sweet stale note of cedar balls, a ghost of cloves that makes my shoulders hitch before logic catches up—old air holds everything.
“Over here,” Amaya whispers. “By the dormer. Purple hydrangea wreath house, like I said.”
I pivot toward her outline and the box between us—shoe brand long dead, lid rubber-banded. I set the soft case with my scanner on a crate and ease the band free. Photos slide against one another with that dry, papery hiss that always hits me in the ribs. A disposable camera strip peeks out, uncut, six exposures like windows I haven’t opened yet.
“Thank you for trusting me,” I say. “No mics. I’ll scan tonight and bring the originals back in the morning.”
“I don’t want them in the trash,” she says, hugging her elbows. “My aunt’s landlord likes clean lines and empty history.”
“I’ll keep chain-of-custody,” I say, because ritual protects more than evidence sometimes. “You can sit with us while we scan, or you can walk away and I’ll text you a receipt.”
“I’ll come,” she says. “But can we be quick? He does his rounds at nine.”
Hope loosens something in my chest. Tips roar all day, but objects—objects make sound stand still. I glance at the strip again and close the box like a prayer.
We take the steps two at a time. In the chill of the entryway, diesel drifts in from a passing truck and wets the air. I taste percolated coffee in the back of my throat from the church-basement cup Ruth handed me earlier, still sour on my tongue. In the car, I drop the shoebox on the backseat with both hands—heavier than it looks, like memory.
“Seatbelt it,” Amaya says, half a joke, half not.
“I do that,” I say, and click the belt over the box. The buckle’s metal is cold like the locket when I first found it—brass that keeps its shape after everything.
Micro-hook. I drive thinking about Everett’s email telling me not to chase rumors into attics. I keep my face quiet. I keep my questions for after I bank this heat.
In the studio, Ruth has the flatbed scanner warmed and a clean microfiber cloth folded like a surgeon’s instrument. She has that look she gets with delicate work: jaw set, eyes soft, hands already slower than thought.
“You’re good,” she says to Amaya, offering a chair and a glass of water that smells faintly like our pipes. “You want to see the monitor while we digitize?”
Amaya nods and perches. I put on nitrile gloves and lay out the strip. The emulsion glitters at a tilt. I remember my mother showing me, when I was young, how to handle coins by the edges only—how fingerprints tell stories of their own we might not want to write.
“These are from regatta week?” I ask. “Do you know the year?”
“Two-thousand-eight,” Amaya says. “Summer I graduated eighth grade. My cousin borrowed a disposable and forgot to develop it. It lived in the attic since.”
I hum—a sound I make when I’m building a mental grid. Regatta culture eats summers whole: freshmen baptized by bell rings at St. Brigid’s, legacy crews paraded under pennants, Facebook swap groups posting dress codes like commandments and deleting the girls who don’t comply. This town prints its memory on glossy paper and calls it tradition.
Ruth wipes the scanner glass in small concentric circles. “We’ll go high DPI,” she says, “and we’ll scan the strip whole first before we cut it.”
“Please,” I say. “I want contact sheets and full-res.”
I position the strip, emulsion down, edges aligned against the ruler. The lamp hum rises—same pitch as the bell overtone I wake up hearing now. Onscreen, six rectangles bloom from negative to positive. Lake, dock, confetti of faces, a blurred elbow, the church lawn with paper plates, and—my breath lodges—a shot framed up at the tower from the steps. The corner of the clock glass is bright, and a smudge inside it looks darker than it should.
“Don’t get ahead of yourself,” Ruth says without looking at me.
“I’m already twelve steps down the stairs,” I say.
“We walk,” she says. “No running.”
I magnify each frame in sequence to check focus and dust. The first shows boys in regatta jackets, logo patches catching light. The second is the marina dock; wet rope coils like sleepy snakes, fenders bobbing. Diesel glosses the water’s surface, rainbow thin. In the third, someone snapped the church bake table—percolated coffee urn, cookie plates, the painter’s tape sign: GOOD FAMILIES SUPPORT THE REGATTA. I store the phrase under Ironies and keep moving.
The fourth frame is our tower shot. White stone, clock face like an eye. The glass has a reflection at the low right quadrant, a bright tear shape where sun found the angle. Inside the tear, there’s a smear I want to name but don’t, not yet. I zoom in. Pixels become squares, then become shapes again with software help: a jacket cuff at the edge of the window, the tiny arc of a watch peeking under fabric. The watch has a dial with a double index at twelve and a bezel I’d seen once in an old newsletter photo—regatta edition, donors thanked by name and brand.
“Ruth,” I say. “The club newsletter.”
She is already pulling a hanging file from the cabinet. She keeps newsletters the way she keeps everything—tabbed by event, date penciled in the corner, stains cataloged in her head. She lays a 2008 regatta issue beside the scanner, smooths the spine, and scans the ads with her finger. There: a full-page spread with Everett laughing over a tray of oysters, cuff immaculate, a watch ad on the opposing page: Meridian Mariner ‘Regatta’ — limited run, double index at twelve, midnight dial with crest option.
“He loves to mirror himself,” Ruth says, tapping the ad, then the photo, then the reflection on our screen. “Big donors got the crest on the dial that year. See the faint oval at twelve?”
I zoom tighter. The oval is there, a smudge of heraldry. The cuff, crisp. The angle—thirty degrees off vertical, consistent with someone standing inside the tower window leaning toward the glass and glancing at the lawn below. Placement matters more than face. Faces lie; positions don’t.
Amaya leans in, knuckles white on the chair. “Is that…?”
“Maybe,” I say, slow. “We verify before we declare. The reflection looks like Everett’s cuff and watch, and the angle puts him inside the tower window that week. We’ll date the strip by the processing marks and confirm the clock repair schedule.”
“He’s in there,” she says, a tremble under the words that might be anger, might be release. “He’s in there, right?”
I feel the room’s air shift. This is where stories save and exploit in the same breath. I center myself with small work. “Let’s finish the pass.”
Micro-hook. I mark the reflection frame with a yellow flag—corroborate—and zoom to the fifth.
The fifth frame shocks me with tenderness: a girl on the tower steps laughing with her head thrown back, hair caught mid-arc. Sun needles through the strands. At her throat, a glint flares—a tiny heart on a chain, edges softened by motion. I choke on air and pull the locket I wear from under my shirt like a reflex. The hinge nicks my finger in the familiar spot.
“Celia,” I say, not asking.
Ruth inhales through her nose. “Necklace matches,” she says. “Size, chain weight, way it sits.”
I zoom. The glint is more flare than metal, but the silhouette is right—the little heart with a seam line that would be invisible to most. She’s wearing a soft thrifted cardigan I recognize from Lydia’s box of fabrics; the cuff shows a pulled thread. I catalog details: chipped nail polish, a stamp X on her wrist from the bake table, a smear of flour on her knuckle, the dimple that Lydia keeps a photo of in her wallet. No face-on shot to plaster on a wall—blessing and curse—but enough to say girl, tower steps, locket at throat, week aligned.
“Chain-of-custody,” I say, voice steadier than my hand. “Amaya, I’m going to log each file and give you a receipt with resolutions, dates, and scan settings. You keep the originals in your sight or mine until morning.”
“I’m not leaving,” she says. “Not until I watch you make a copy for Lydia.”
“You get naming rights on the folder,” I say. “Not for the episode. For the archive.”
“Call it ‘Not Trash,’” she says, a quick grin that dies and then grows back, stubborn.
I move to the sixth frame: blur of feet, confetti of gravel, a shadow like a rope across the step. It runs across the girl’s shoe from the previous frame if I align them in sequence. My stomach tightens. Bells make shadows in summer that cut across faces like rules.
We rescan the reflection frame at brutal resolution. Ruth adjusts the color curve so the sleeve’s weave shows. I run a glare reduction pass and then stop—no enhancements that invent. I annotate instead: Angle from step, sun azimuth at 5:12 p.m., seiche chart shows minor surge pushing sound east between 5 and 6—acoustics consistent with bell carry. The lake always wants a cameo.
“Back to the watch,” Ruth says, flipping the newsletter. She points at a caption: ‘Crane family toasts safety with Meridian Mariner release.’ The photo shows Everrett with the watch face visible—double index at twelve, crest oval, a unique scratch at the outer bezel between 12 and 1. I copy the scratch and overlay it with our reflection. The flaw lines up like a vein.
“That’s his,” I say, heat rising behind my ears. “Bezel scratch matches. Cuff monogram is too soft to read, but the watch is a fingerprint.”
“We still need to be ready for pushback,” Ruth says. “They’ll say reflections distort. They’ll call it a pareidolia party. We’ll meet them with geometry and the newsletter. And we’ll remind them we started with physics.”
I nod, throat tight. I drag the cursor back to the fifth frame and zoom into the locket again. I want to reach into the pixel grid and lift it into my palm. I want to ask it what it held that day, whether it had learned to scream yet or whether it still only knew how to shine.
Amaya wipes her cheeks with the cuff of her hoodie. “I was the one who bought her the disposable,” she says, voice small. “We took turns with it. I didn’t know… I didn’t know it would matter.”
“You made a record,” I say. “That’s everything.”
The printer spits our labels: date; source; scan settings; chain-of-custody signatures, mine, Ruth’s, Amaya’s. I export a copy set for Lydia and write her name in ink that feathers a little where the paper drinks. The studio smells like warm plastic from the scanner lamp and Ruth’s hand lotion—lavender, clean. Outside, the lake thumps the quay, and the window tosses the sound into corners I never reach with my broom.
“Next steps,” Ruth says briskly, flipping to a fresh page. “We confirm tower access that hour as best as logs allow. We photograph the tower window from the steps tomorrow to replicate the reflection angle. We find a Meridian Mariner owner who can testify to production quirks. And we do not publish the reflection frame until we’ve done all three.”
“I’ll call the jeweler,” I say. “He’s cataloged watches for estate auctions for years. He’ll know the run.”
“And I’ll check the club bulletin online,” she says. “The PDF might have metadata we can use.”
My phone vibrates and I swipe without thinking. A new email pops from Everett with no greeting, just a forwarded flyer—Community Roundtable on Safety—and a note: “Still open to partnering before misinformation spreads.” Below that, a P.S.: “Lovely attic air tonight. Watch your step on the third stair.”
The room’s temperature drops around my spine. I go still, then hold the phone up. Ruth’s eyes go hard.
“We finish the work,” she says. “We document. We tell Lydia first.”
Amaya pulls the shoebox toward her chest like a shield. “Did I do the wrong thing?” she asks.
“You did the right thing,” I say, holding her gaze until mine stops shaking. “And now we do ours.”
We export encrypted copies to the cold drive and tuck a backup on a thumb we’ll carry, not mail. I write Not Trash on a second box for scanned copies. I hand Amaya the original shoebox and our receipt. She takes them like a newborn.
I look once more at the reflection: cuff, watch, bezel scratch, tower glass; then at the locket flare on Celia’s throat in the next frame. Stories save and stories pin, I tell myself, and my work is to keep the pin from becoming a blade.
I lock the studio door and pocket the thumb drive. The lake’s breath is louder now; a pressure change that can make sound carry farther than it should. I ask the question that refuses to stay put while we step into the hallway’s dim: now that the tower window shows Everett’s shadow and Celia’s locket shines in the same strip, how do I keep this proof from warping in the town’s hands before I can anchor it with light?