I take the stairs to the tech loft two at a time, pretending my knees aren’t made of glass and caffeine. The bait shop below smells like minnows and old ice; up here the air shifts to hot solder, dusted plastic, and percolated coffee that’s lived too long on a warmer. The lake presses a low note through the cracked window—the kind of pressure that says a seiche is building somewhere downshore. I tuck the chip case deeper into my backpack and touch the locket under my collarbone for luck I don’t deserve.
“Door,” Ruth says behind me, not breathless, never breathless. I hold it for her, then for the repair tech who steps out from behind a tower of parts bins wiping his hands on a lint-free cloth.
“You brought the patient,” he says. He doesn’t bother with my name; he knows the bag I’m carrying matters more than the person who carried it. His name is Theo, but everyone calls him Wires.
I set the bin on his anti-static mat, lay out the phone, then the chip in its sleeve, then our write-blocker, then my printed log. “We need read-only imaging, sector-by-sector. Witness present. No write operations,” I say, and hear my voice keep flat from training and fear.
Wires nods. “You brought your own blocker,” he says. “You trust me, but not the universe. Good.”
“Universe is where the club lives,” I say.
Ruth steps forward with a folded sheet. “We need you to sign as an observing tech,” she says. “Chain-of-custody affidavit. No nondisclosure; this isn’t a private contract. If anyone calls you after this, you call me first.”
He doesn’t reach for a pen yet. He tilts his head at the phone and the chip like a mechanic listening to an engine before the hood opens. “What’s our risk profile?”
“Legal pressure,” I say. “Not criminal on you. Not yet.”
He smiles at the ‘not yet’ and slides the affidavit closer. “I hate bullies,” he says. “I like puzzles.” He signs with a quick, blocky hand and the impatience of a person who loves a bench more than a conference room.
We glove up. He seats the microSD in an adapter, then into the blocker, then into his forensic machine. Fans kick up; his lamp changes temperature with a click. The hum turns the room into a held breath. He sets a second write-blocker for the phone once he removes its battery and isolates the board. The scorched plastic releases a sweet, burnt smell that coats my tongue. I swallow coffee instead of anger.
“Imaging,” he says, and the screen starts to crawl. Hex crawls at the pace of grief; you can’t rush it. I count each line with my pulse. Outside, the fish-cleaning station hose coughs and the lake answers.
“Talk to me,” Ruth says quietly, eyes on the window glass. “Are we missing any link from locker to here?”
“No,” I say. “Photos with scale. Witness signature from the Annex. Locker latch documented. Dawes flagged the cameras.” I rub my thumbnail along the edge of the locket until the brass warms. “We’re clean.”
Wires taps the keyboard. “Partial partition,” he says. “Your first pass was right. The directory table’s hurt, but not dead.” He looks at me. “You ready for disappointment before joy?”
“I live there,” I say.
Micro-hook. The imaging finishes on the microSD and he kicks a hash verification. I watch the numbers align like stars: source MD5, image MD5, match. He exhales through his nose, approval without applause.
“Mounting read-only,” he says, and the folder tree unspools. LOST.dir sits like a bruise at the bottom, then DCIM/100VIDEO blinks on, then an orphaned metadata file that won’t know it’s hope until we tell it. He selects VID_071908_2359.tmp and copies it to a separate container, one we’ll image again and hash separately. He opens it in a hex viewer first, then in the video tool that makes his machine the loudest person in the room.
“No speakers,” Ruth says.
“Headphones,” Wires replies, and pulls a tangled but clean pair from a drawer. He clips a two-way splitter, passes me one side, Ruth the other. He doesn’t hit play. He stares at the scrub bar like a priest considering bread.
“Before we hear it,” I say, “I need the file properties.”
He nods, opens Properties. The pane lists a thumbnail—black edges, a smear of gray—and a creation date: 2008-07-19 23:59:07 EDT. Location, none; this phone didn’t tag GPS. Device, a model number that matches the carcass on the mat. Modified date, 2008-07-20 00:01:02—likely when the phone wrote its index. I feel the date in my throat. Regatta night. The seiche stories afterward always start around midnight.
“Play,” Ruth says.
Wires clicks. The clip opens on black—then the first bell strikes, a thick bronze vowel that eats the room. The second bell overlaps the first, a beat late, blessed and wrong. Wind pushes the mic, and for a second I’m inside the tower again, stalls and ropes and dust and pigeon grit underfoot. Laughter slashes—boys, two at least, delighted by their own daring. Then a girl’s breath hits the mic and the word “don’t!” scrapes out of her mouth like a match head lighting.
My blood goes cold-hot at once. I grip the bench edge. The foam on my coffee has collapsed; I can smell its burnt top note. I remember the choir witness, diesel and cloves braided in the nave.
Then a voice I know down to its smile says, unhurried, pleased: “Three.”
The room forgets how to be a room. I go numb first, like my body is protecting my organs from sound. Ruth’s hand lands on my shoulder, light but firm enough to pin me to the bench. Wires doesn’t move; he watches the waveform like he expects it to reach back and bite.
The clip finishes with a blur of stone footfalls, a muffled yelp, then a heavy second of silence that might hold a lifetime.
No one speaks. The lake breath shoves the window and the glass gives a tiny, tired tick. I am a clean white page with one word on it: Three.
Ruth clears her throat. “Run it again,” she says to Wires. “With spectrogram on.”
He rewinds, overlays frequency display. The bell harmonics rise like scaffolding; I can see the same second overtone I mapped from the tower tests, the one that makes a faint wing in the upper band. The voice sits crisp in a band that doesn’t match the bell’s structure. It’s human. It’s Everett Crane, tasting one syllable like it’s a toast.
“Freeze on the ‘Three,’” I say, and Wires taps the key. The vowel sits as a clean bar, then the final consonant clips when someone jostles the mic.
“We need authenticity scaffolding,” Ruth says, voice back on rails. “We need to document workflow now.”
My hands tremble, then settle. Anger catches up to numbness, and my knee starts bouncing against the workbench. I’ve spent months breathing other people’s caution. I want this syllable to be a bell clapper to the mouth.
Wires opens his metadata tool and scrolls. “Container: 3GP,” he reads. “Codec matches the device profile for that year. No injection markers. Header timing consistent with record start and stop. Camera model handshake matches the board you brought in. File system date stamps align. No editing signature.”
“Hash the extracted clip,” Ruth says. “Write it to two WORM drives. One goes to Annex. One to my safe. Image the phone body even if it’s dead; courts love redundancy.”
“On it,” Wires says. He starts the hash and I photograph every dialog box like they’re fingerprints. I shoot the screens, the dates, the file paths, the head of the splitter, my gloved finger pointing to the creation stamp. I narrate for the record. “Video recovered from microSD, read-only. Creation date July nineteenth, 2008, twenty-three fifty-nine oh-seven Eastern. Ten seconds duration. Contains bell strikes, multiple unidentified male voices, one unidentified female vocalizing ‘don’t,’ and Everett Crane’s voice saying ‘Three.’”
Saying his name turns my stomach and steadies my spine. My anger sharpens into something that can cut without trembling.
Micro-hook. Wires ejects the original chip from the blocker and reseals it in the antistatic sleeve. He labels the forensic image disk with a printed sticker; I film the label application like it’s a christening. He burns the first WORM to a drive that is satisfyingly ugly and heavy, then starts the second.
Ruth flips open her leather folio, pens uncapped and aligned like scalpels. “Affidavit—evidence extraction,” she says, and writes in tidy lines. She describes the chain from Locker 217 to the bait shop loft, the presence of write-blockers, the checksums, the watchful eyes. She leaves blank spaces for Wires to sign and for me to initial each step of the process I witnessed. Her handwriting has no loops. It doesn’t ask permission; it announces.
“Witness to the affidavit is me,” Wires says. “But you’ll need a notary.”
Ruth nods. “Dawes at the Annex can notarize. She’s not scared of ink.”
I watch Wires slide the second disk into a hard case. I taste penny metal in my mouth—adrenaline cutting through the coffee residue. Wind lifts a torn flyer on the bulletin board: Regatta Safety Volunteers Needed—the ink bubbled by humidity. Regatta culture loves a volunteer with a good surname. They ring the bell for recruits and call it baptism.
Wires leans back. “You want to see the clip on the spectrogram one more time?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “I want the checksums, the MD5s and SHA256s printed, and I want to leave before anyone who shouldn’t know we’re here learns this bench exists.”
He prints, and the laser coughs toner into the warm air. I fan the paper while it cools, like a relic you don’t want to smudge. He hands me a tiny flash drive sealed in an evidence bag with an initial line. “This is a copy of the hashes and the workflow report,” he says. “No media on it. Paper plus numbers, no audio. If your bag gets taken, this survives a different way.”
“You really do hate bullies,” I say.
“I grew up here,” he says. “They counted to three at boys like me too. Different game.”
Ruth slides the affidavit to me. “Initial by each step you saw,” she says. I do, hand steady now, purpose replacing jitters. She signs, then passes it to Wires, who signs and dates, adding the time off the forensic machine’s clock.
We pack the drives into separate cases. Wires keeps one for a moment and looks at me. “You know what you have,” he says. “Now you need to not let what you have get used to hurt the wrong people.”
“Victims first,” I say. “Always.” I feel Lydia’s pointed, generous yes fill the space between my ribs.
Ruth puts the affidavit in a sealed envelope and writes To Annex—Notary Required—Today across the front. She adds the manifest copy behind it. “We file this, witness notarized, then the clip goes nowhere without a judge’s eyes and Lydia’s consent on timing,” she says.
My phone lights. A new email header floats on the lock screen: From: Tolland & Crane LLP—Subject: Demand to Preserve Records; Invitation to Conversation re Collaboration. The word collaboration is the velvet trap lined with teeth.
“Do not open that,” Ruth says. “Screenshots of the header only.”
I snap the screen and bag my phone like it’s evidence against itself. The lake smacks the pier outside with a wet, regular sound that makes the bells in my head align.
“One last check,” I say to Wires. “Device model match.”
He points at the board on the mat and the properties printout. “Model numbers match,” he says. “Serials aren’t recoverable; fire ate the sticker. Board code matches the family. If they argue it’s not that phone, they’ll need a miracle and three engineers.”
“They can rent both,” I say. “They can’t rent the truth trapped in a file created nineteen seconds before midnight.”
Wires flicks off the magnifier. “Take the back stairs,” he says. “Less view from the street. I’ll walk you down.”
We move like a small parade—me with the drive case against my stomach, Ruth with the envelope firm in her elbow, Wires with the empty bin. The stair smell shifts from solder to algae. A gust from the lake pushes scales of cold onto my cheeks, and I smell diesel from a fishing boat idling at the dock, cloves in a stranger’s coat wafted up from the street. My throat closes, then opens; scent is a bell rope too.
At the bottom landing, Ruth pulls her phone and dials the Annex. “Dawes? It’s Calder. Ready your stamp,” she says. “We’re coming with a witness affidavit and two WORMs.”
She ends the call and looks at me. “You okay to carry the drive and not hurl?”
“I’m done being sick,” I say. “I’m ready to be specific.”
Micro-hook. We step into the alley light. Across the street, the café chalkboard still says FAMILY SPECIAL—REGATTA PANCAKES in cheerful looped letters. In the window reflection, movement—someone in a light jacket pauses just long enough to feel like a decision.
My phone buzzes again. A calendar invite from Tolland & Crane LLP blocks out an hour labeled Conversation re Collaboration—Protecting the Community. Location: Crane House Boardroom. The bell tower spire cuts the sky between buildings, a dark metronome.
I ask the question I don’t put in any affidavit, not yet: now that Everett’s “Three” is trapped in a ten-second chamber of truth with bells for witnesses, will he try to drown it in a sea of polite invitations and legal paper—or will the next sound I record be the town’s donors counting how many ways they can say no to one syllable that refuses to be civilized?