The Annex doors breathe before people do. A seiche must be pushing at the harbor, because the pressure here shifts—hinges sigh, and the glass in the vestibule hums a note I can feel in my molars. I cup my locket beneath my collar and follow Ruth across scuffed tile toward the clerk’s counter, where a brass bell with a nicked rim sits like a dare.
“Don’t touch that,” Ruth murmurs. “No bells today.”
“Copy,” I say, and keep my hands on the folder she handed me in the car, the one with the judge’s stamped order and two copies of our affidavit. The coffee on the waiting table smells over-percolated and penitential—church-basement comfort with a bite.
The clerk—mid-fifties, hair wound tight, nameplate reading E. Dawes—takes us in with a glance that counts our pockets. Her cardigan has a stitched anchor near the cuff. Regatta people love anchors. Regatta people run the town.
Ruth shows her badge wallet, retired shield tucked behind a dog-eared union card. “We’re here to access a storage locker under court order,” she says, low, patient. “We’ll require a witness signature.”
Dawes stares at the order, then at Ruth, then at me. “Media?” she asks, chin tilting at my camera bag.
“Documentarian,” I say. “Chain-of-custody camera only. No broadcast today.”
“People say that.” Dawes slides the order back with two fingers, letting her nails click the laminate. “Who’s the judge?”
“Hathaway,” Ruth says.
The clerk’s eyebrows lift a millimeter. Hathaway is the judge with a spine the club hasn’t quite bent. Dawes presses the intercom. “Mr. Croft to the Annex counter.” She doesn’t look at us while she talks. “You’ll need a building witness.”
My pulse ticks off seconds like a metronome in a studio. Outside, a gull scrapes its call along the roofline, and the wind answers with grit. I try not to think about the sedan that idled two blocks from my building through most of the night.
A maintenance man with keys at his hip and gravel on his boots stops beside the bell. He doesn’t ring it. “Croft,” he says. “What’s the locker?”
“Two seventeen,” Ruth says.
“Haven’t had that one open in years,” he says. He puts on a pair of blue nitrile gloves. My chest loosens a hair. Witness plus gloves, a small mercy.
Dawes pulls a clipboard from the slot wall and slides it to me. “You sign in as observer,” she says. “Full name, purpose. Tick ‘photography’ if you’re going to take pictures. Declare equipment.”
“Keane,” I write, hand steady because fear makes me neat. I check ‘photography,’ list my DSLR body and the fixed lens, plus a 1:1 ruler in centimeters. I can smell paper, toner, and the faint iron of old dust. I can hear the whisper of the copy room. I can taste my own breath, tinny with morning adrenaline.
Ruth signs as investigator, then hands Dawes a second copy of the order with a note she’s added in block letters: REQUEST ANNEX WITNESS; REQUEST LOCKER OPENED BY MAINTENANCE TO PRESERVE LATCH.
“We good?” Ruth asks.
Dawes flips a page, stamps a line with a thud that vibrates the counter. “You have thirty minutes,” she says. “No destructive testing. Anything you remove gets logged here and signed for. You want the hallway camera saved, you note it, and I’ll flag the server.”
“Flag it,” Ruth says. “Today’s feeds, 0600 to 0900.”
“Done,” Dawes says, and stands. “Follow me.”
Micro-hook. The hallway swallows sound at one step and throws it back at the next; the building breathes with the lake. We pass doors with plastic labels—Records, Community Programs, Evidence Overflow—and then a caged stairwell. Croft unlocks the basement door, the light a humming green.
Locker 217 lives in a run of dented steel, each square door stamped with numbers from a century that didn’t expect public records to outlive the families who funded the shelves. The latch on 217 droops. Someone tried to repair it with a different screw head. The bolt Ruth brought stays in her pocket.
“Camera on,” I say. I pull my DSLR, test the shutter. “Log starts now.”
I read the date and time into a voice memo for redundancy, then set the little ruler and focus card on the concrete floor. Croft angles a portable work light, and the smell of old metal floats up—zinc and locker paint, a faint resin tang beneath. Church coffee rides the air from upstairs and turns the space into a parish basement in my nose.
“Annex witness present, maintenance opening latch,” Ruth narrates for our log. “No destructive entry. Latch compromised prior. Photographs to follow.”
Croft slides the latch with two gloved fingers. It sticks, sighs, and gives. The door peels open with a tired metal scrape. He steps back.
I get my first shot—a wide with the locker as found, interior shadowed. Then I shoot corners, floor, and lip. On the bottom shelf sits a shoebox with water soak lines and a marina decal; on the shelf above, a coiled something in brown paper and twine, end caps showing through, dark and tacky.
“Hold,” I say, and kneel. The rope ends smell like hemp and tallow and old varnish; the tar at their tips carries a faint bell tower cold, a stone smell you only know if you’ve climbed where pigeons line the sills.
“Hemp,” Ruth says, voice small to fit the room. “Treated. Church rope end caps are dipped sometimes to harden. Save your theories for the paper.”
“Copy,” I say, though my skin knows what it knows: countdown air, palms polishing rope, a ring that trains itself into muscle.
I shoot the paper wrap, each seam, each stain. I photograph the twine knot and the tar level. I fill a frame with the rope’s fray and slip an ABFO scale at the edge. Then I lift the coil two inches with a gloved finger so Ruth can slide an evidence paper beneath it without scraping fibers, and we lower it like a loaf you don’t want to collapse.
“Label one,” Ruth says. “Tower-style rope ends, two pieces, tar tip intact.”
I print on the bag with the Annex Sharpie: Item 1—Rope End Pieces—217—M.K./R.C.—Time. The bag crinkles like a whisper. I add a brief description and number the first photo on the log.
The shoebox lid sticks from humidity. I get fingerprints photos before touching it. The marina decal reads Crane House—Regatta 2008 in pretentious script. I shoot that until the letters are seared into the lens. Then I open.
Inside the box: a watch manual—Meridian Mariner, Limited—its cover soft from handling, its corners marked; a ribbon strip in a familiar blue that my fingers hate; and beneath, a phone with blackened edges and glass that melted into waves. The smell of cooked plastic plants itself in my throat; I swallow it down with coffee phantom.
“Manual first,” Ruth says. “No smudging the cover ink.”
I shoot the manual in situ and then on clean paper. Inside the front, someone circled Crown Offset at 2 o’clock and scribbled Engraving Options in pen. The handwriting is neat, banker-thin.
“Watch with crown at two,” I say. “That’s the model in the glass.”
“Quiet,” Ruth says, not unkind. “Descriptions only.”
I read into the log, each letter a step onto firmer ground. “Item 2—Meridian Mariner Owner’s Guide, annotated, regatta year.”
The ribbon wants to coil itself. It’s Crane Club blue, satin, with a tiny grease spot like thumbprint at one end. I photograph both sides, the fray, the spot, the length against the ruler. “Item 3—Blue ribbon strip, satin, with unknown stain.”
Then the phone. I brace my elbows. I shoot top, bottom, both sides, inside the SIM tray cavity if it had one, the warped glass like lake chop frozen. The back case sheared, battery swollen and retracted. Along one edge, the plastic frame split enough that a memory slot peeks out.
“See that?” I ask.
Ruth bends; Croft leans, but keeps his hands clear. “MicroSD,” Ruth says. “Maybe. Old enough to have one.”
“Might be cooked,” I say. “Might be half-lucky.”
She looks at Dawes, who watches from the hall with her arms folded and a patience that feels earned. “Do we have an antistatic sleeve?” Ruth asks.
Dawes nods toward a drawer. “Top left,” she says. “And document that you removed the chip, not the clerk.”
I put on fresh gloves. I take a macro of the slot before touching anything. Then I slide a thin plastic spudger into the gap and tease the card out like I’m tugging a splinter from a child’s hand. It resists, then slides free into my palm with a dry click I feel in my teeth. It’s scorched at the edge but not charcoal; the label’s ink is half-peeled, enough to read 8GB and a brand I know from drugstore racks.
“Item 4,” I breathe, and the room feels bigger. “MicroSD card, partial melt on one edge.”
“Bag separately,” Ruth says, voice steady in the way bridges are steady when you don’t look down. “Antistatic. Double envelope.”
I slip the card into the sleeve, the sleeve into a second, the second into a bag. I write the number, our initials, the time. The pen squeaks against plastic.
“What about the phone body?” Croft asks.
“Bag whole,” Ruth says. “Item 5. We’ll need a chain that shows it was altered only for chip removal under observation.”
Dawes steps closer to watch me seal the phone. “You’re tidy,” she says to me, a compliment in her language. “Tidy gets you heard.”
“Tidy might save a scream,” I say before I can stop it.
Ruth clears her throat. “Photograph the empty locker,” she says. “Then the latch.”
I shoot the interior bare, the dust outline where the box lived, the spider web in the corner with a single dead moth. I shoot the latch’s old screw with its wrong head, the paint scrape. I photograph Croft re-closing, his gloves—their blue creased—and the click of the latch back into its droop.
We sign the removal log with Dawes as witness. She writes SAVE HALLWAY CAMS at the bottom in blocker ink and draws a box around it.
“You’ll want a manifest copy,” she says.
“Two,” Ruth says. “And a receipt acknowledgment attached.”
Dawes prints, the machine coughing toner smell into the stairwell. I stack our bags in the bin we brought—rope, manual, ribbon, chip, phone—each a little bell I’m trying not to ring.
“One more item for the record,” I say. I take a close shot of the manual’s back page where a stamp shows Crane House Boutique—Gifted. No price. Gifts hide cost with nicer cardstock.
We carry the bin back past doors that mind their business. The fluorescent hum pitches up for a second and drops, a sound the tower would never make, and that difference steadies me. Outside, a blue-gray morning stares through the wired glass. Diesel and wet rope ride a small gust when Croft cracks the side door for a breath. I can taste the marina from a block away, engine and lake and old rope—scent as receipt.
“We don’t announce this,” Ruth says in the foyer, voice near my shoulder. “We file it. We get the chip imaged before anyone knows a thing. If the club learns we opened a locker, they’ll send a prayer circle and a lawyer with the same handshake.”
“I know a repair tech who won’t talk for free or cheap virtue,” I say. “He hates bullies and likes puzzles. Back room over the bait shop. Cash and a witness.”
“Good,” Ruth says. “But we don’t walk into his shop with the chip in your pocket and a tail on your bumper.”
Dawes hands us the manifest copies. “I’ll post the camera flag,” she says, and then lowers her voice a notch. “Be careful. Some people think the Annex is where public things go to sleep. I like waking them.”
“Thank you,” I say, and mean it enough that my chest hurts.
Micro-hook. In the car, I set the bin by my feet and clip the chip bag into a hard case inside my backpack so it won’t bend. The locket warms against my skin; brass holds temperature like memory holds fingerprints. I plug a write-blocker into my little field laptop, a thing I keep for days when I need to be both journalist and janitor.
“We test in read-only,” Ruth says.
“Read-only,” I echo, and slot the chip into the adapter, then the adapter into the blocker, then the blocker into the machine. The screen throws up a drive letter and, for a breath that tastes like lightning, nothing else.
A second later, a tiny partition mounts. /PRIVATE/DCIM/LOST.dir blinks into the window, like a hand under water.
“You’re seeing that,” I whisper.
“I’m seeing it,” Ruth says, hands flat on her thighs so she won’t reach for anything and violate our own rules. “Don’t open files here. Just list.”
I type a command and let the names roll: VID_071908_2359.tmp, AUD_NOTE_3.bak, IMG_071808_1401.jpg. The modified dates live in the neighborhood Mason gave me, and my head goes light enough that I anchor myself on the seatbelt.
“You okay?” Ruth asks.
“I might throw up and hug you at the same time,” I say, because my body doesn’t care that I’m trying to be a clean, flat line on an evidence log. “We have to get to the tech. We have to not die on Mill Street.”
She smiles without teeth. “Let’s do both.”
I eject, power down, reseal the chip’s bag with a fresh strip. I write a line on the log: VIEWED DIRECTORY LISTING ONLY—NO OPEN. Ink catches a ridge in the paper. Outside, the Annex bell sits quiet, its nicked rim a circle that holds.
We step into the morning. The wind tastes like lake and diesel, wet rope and hope, and the town’s Facebook mom group is probably already arguing about whether my episode ruined the “family feel” of thrift night. I don’t care. The rope in our bag is heavier than their swap posts. The manual is louder than their anchor icons.
“Do you hear that?” I ask as we cross to the car. A footfall lands down the hallway we just left, wrong cadence for Dawes, too slow for Croft. The Annex’s breath catches around us, sound traveling farther than it should.
“Keep walking,” Ruth says. “Start the car. Not fast.”
I fit the key and feel every tooth, old metal on old metal. The locket finds the hollow at my throat and lies there like a promise that can cut.
I ask the question that shakes the air between my teeth and the chip in my bag: with rope fibers tied to a tower and a watch manual that mirrors a cuff in glass, will I get this data into daylight before the club learns what I pulled from the dark—or will the footsteps behind the Annex door become the hand that tries to take it back?