The scream lifts off the water like a gull tearing itself out of a net, and the pier becomes a single live wire. People jolt backward, coffee sloshes, a stroller wheel skids across wet planks. I taste diesel and penny at the same time. Wind shoves the brass pennants so hard they chatter. Then the second scream hits—too clean at the edges, too bright for a human throat—and my ribs know before my brain finishes the sentence: someone is staging this.
“Back, back—everyone back!” a patrol officer shouts, palms out. He’s young, jaw tight, breath turning to fog. His radio crackles and the word cordon spits through. Yellow tape blooms from his belt like a flag.
“I’m media,” I say, and I lift my recorder where he can see the red blink. “I’m documenting. I’ll stay to the side.”
“Stay behind the line,” he says, but his eyes flick to the lanyard on my neck—press card, tired laminate, edges whitening—then to Ruth beside me. He knows her. Everyone knows Ruth. He lowers his voice a notch. “Don’t get wet.”
Ruth angles her body between me and the swell of bodies pressing for a view. “Keep your ears and your math,” she says. “I’ll keep shoulders off you.”
I hit record and hold the deck near my chest so the wind baffles don’t drown it. The lake breath is wrong tonight: heavy, then suddenly gone. A small seiche shoves water through the pilings and changes the sound of space; the pier begins to grunt in a lower key. Sound moves different when the lake decides to inhale. It fools the brain into thinking voices jump.
The third “scream” arrives a beat late. I see three heads turn like sunflowers tracking the same false sun. I stop listening for the scream and start listening for what makes it.
“Talk to me, gear,” I whisper to my recorder. I flick to a spectrum view and watch a comb of frequencies leap, too symmetrical for a throat, harmonics stair-stepping in a tidy ladder. I open my phone, thumb the Bluetooth scan, and a list of beacons floods in. Cold air bites my nose; rope tar and wet wood thread the wind. The coffee someone dropped next to my boot smells like percolated church brew—thin, bitter, indestructible.
“Anything?” Ruth asks, chin tucked against the gust.
“A lot,” I say. “Mostly phones, some watches—” I freeze. A name pops on the scan and holds for a heartbeat: CRANE-HSE-AUX. The MAC address underneath ends in :17. My pulse kicks so wide I almost drop the phone. The beacon vanishes, reappears weaker, vanishes again.
“Everett’s house auxiliary?” Ruth says, under her breath.
“Could be a default name. Or a deliberate one,” I say. “RSSI’s hopping. The source is not moving far. Under the deck, maybe.”
The fourth scream fires and I watch the spectrum rather than the horizon. There’s a pre-echo—barely half a tenth of a second—then the full sample, and a gentle roll-off that makes the waveform look shaved at the top. My fingers stop shaking. Human chaos makes me shake; synthetic noise steadies me. I mark the time—20:14:36—and put a second recorder on the edge of the pilings, dead cat fur stroking my knuckles like a cat that hates me less than usual.
“Officer,” I call, keeping my voice low, not performative. “Permission to document under-deck placement if we locate a device?”
He weighs me in a look, then Ruth, then the crowd chanting fragments of fear and excitement. “You stay visible to me,” he says. “She—” he points to Ruth, “—does the hands. You don’t touch.”
“Copy,” I say.
“Copy,” Ruth echoes.
We move along the tape’s inside edge, eyes down. I smell cloves on someone’s scarf, the same hitch-sweet note the choir girl told me she tasted when the bells swallowed a cry. My stomach does a slow wheel and refocuses. I count pilings. I remember Lydia asking me to give the girls the first cut. I’ll give them this: not letting a plastic trick wash their witness down the drain.
Another scream hits. The Bluetooth beacon strengthens to -62 dBm, then -55. I angle the phone, a divining rod of packets.
“There,” I say. A tar-streaked piling near a rusted cleat, where gull droppings whitewash the wood. Between the bolts, a black seam looks wrong—not a shadow, not algae. I crouch, slip my hand into the cold gap without touching the surface. Air carries that factory-plastic tang, like new earbuds in a warm car.
“Light,” Ruth says, already clicking on her small pen-beam. She angles it into the gap and nods. “Speaker grille. Camo wrap.” She glances at the officer. “I can reach.”
“Hold,” he says into his shoulder mic. “Unit twelve to four—hold crowd. We may have a device; not explosive.” Then to us: “Go.”
Ruth drops to her knees, unbothered by splinters. Regatta culture baptizes with bell rings; Ruth baptizes herself in sawdust and procedure. She fishes a gloved hand into the seam and comes up with a hand-sized brick slick with lake. A strip of Gorilla tape hangs in a black snarl. She holds the speaker up and water threads out of its charging port like a weep.
The scream does not come. Silence is heavier than panic. Somewhere behind us, a child laughs in the way that makes adults flinch.
“I need photos,” I say, already moving. I shoot wide, mid, close: the gap, the bolts, the rust halo, the speaker in Ruth’s hand with the lake behind it like a witness that won’t swear. I tilt the phone to catch the model imprint, breath fogging the lens, then wipe it with my sleeve. The speaker has a friendly outdoor name—the kind people take to cookouts—and a serial etched soft into the back housing. I capture it with a penny for scale. I hear myself narrate for the tape in a voice that’s three degrees colder than my skin. “Serial S-8R1E… last digits 217.”
“Cute,” Ruth says. “Like the locker.”
“Not a coincidence,” I say.
The officer steps closer, open evidence bag ready. “This goes to the station,” he says. “Chain-of-custody.”
“I’ll log my video and scans,” I say. “You’ll get copies.”
“You better,” he says, but there’s no bite to it. He watched me crouch before anyone screamed for a selfie.
I step back to the railing and pull up the scan history. The beacon name comes back, this time with a manufacturer field: a midrange brand sold at the marina outfitters. I tap the MAC address into my notes beside the timestamps and the sample lengths. I pull my little SDR dongle from my bag—habit, not certainty—and let it sniff the band. There it is: a brief control packet at each start, a telltale advertisement packet with a friendly name. Not human. Not grief. A trick.
“Who benefits?” I say, half to Ruth, half to the lake.
“Anyone who wants to conflate your ten seconds with this garbage,” Ruth says. She tips the speaker slightly so excess water tracks away from the serial. “Anyone who wants people to walk home saying, ‘See, it’s all speakers and girls hamming it up.’”
The officer seals the bag. “We’ll need statements.”
“I’ll give you a copy of my log, my photos, and my scan,” I say. “Do you want the crowd’s phone videos? I can post a call.”
“Hold off,” he says. “We don’t want copycats.” He realizes what he said and grimaces. “More copycats.”
A woman near the tape points her phone and says, loudly, “And there’s the podcaster—caught planting the evidence!” Her face is a local swap-group moderator’s face; I know it from thread wars about “tasteful” porch furniture. She lifts her chin. “This is what I warned you all about.”
“Ma’am,” the officer says, weary, “I watched them retrieve it.”
“From where she told them to look!” she says. “It’s a stunt.” Her bracelets clink—good-family gold, one bell charm among them, memory on a chain pretending it never cut skin.
I angle my body and keep my mouth shut. The lake wind does the arguing for me, shoving her words into the knot of police tape where they snag and flutter like a torn flyers.
“We don’t feed it,” Ruth says low. “We log. We move.”
“One more thing,” I say, opening the battery flap with my eyes instead of my hands. “Did you see the name the beacon broadcast?”
Ruth raises an eyebrow. I show her the screenshot. CRANE-HSE-AUX.
“They could claim it’s a dumb label,” I say. “But a dumb label still tells on who set it up.”
“Get that to Kira,” she says. “And to Dawes.” She nods toward the officer. “You mind if I read the serial off to my colleague at the Annex so we can preserve the purchase record before someone ‘loses’ it?”
He thinks and then nods once. “You do it in my hearing.”
Ruth calls the Annex, voice switching to cop-calm. “Calder. Need a preservation request entered now. Purchase record, speaker model Osprey Go, serial S-8R1E-217, retailer Crane House Marina Outfitters. Flag any account named ‘Auxiliary,’ ‘Crane House,’ or any Marina Club sub-accounts. Yes, tonight. Yes, rush. I’ll send the bag number via text.” She hangs up and pockets her phone. “Done.”
The crowd thins to murmurs. The officer relaxes one shoulder at a time. A gull lands on the breakwater and scolds the world. The smell of wet rope shifts to cold iron as the wind edges east. The bells at St. Brigid’s stay mercifully quiet, but I imagine them ringing just to spite the night.
“Let me see the placement again,” I say. I lean over the gap and close my eyes. The lake folds small noises into itself and returns a different shape. I’ll match that shape later to the recorder’s echo tail. I shoot three more angles of the bolt heads. I imagine a hand I can’t see sliding tape in a hurry, laughing at the thought of people running. I taste clove again and wonder if the donor coffee hit the priest’s tongue before or after he took the call that told him how to talk about this.
“You’re making a map,” Ruth says.
“I’m making a case that this sound lived here for ten minutes and not in a human throat,” I say. “A human throat would have thrown air in more directions. This hugged wood.”
The officer clears his throat. “I’m adding a note,” he says. “Several witnesses report a man in a Crane House windbreaker at the far end of the pier just before the first, uh—event. He walked away quickly.”
“Any description?” I ask.
“Tall, cap, older,” he says. “That describes half the donors.”
“Better than zero,” Ruth says.
I upload the photos to redundant drives and a cloud vault while we stand there on the slats, the wind drying my fingers to sand. I type the timeline into my notes with minutes and seconds. The recorder warms my palm; the locket in my pocket holds its tiny cold like a promise.
My phone buzzes. A text from Kira: Saw your voicemail. Do not comment publicly beyond ‘device recovered; cooperating with police.’ I’ll draft a statement. Another buzz: a DM from a Marina Club “auxiliary” account, smiley punctuation sharp enough to cut: Shame about pranks! People use speakers all the time. Be careful what you call real.
“They’re already spinning,” I say.
“Of course,” Ruth says. “They want the town to confuse your ten seconds with this playlist.”
“I won’t let them,” I say, and I realize my voice isn’t shaking. Alarm has burned off to something cleaner. Numbers and bolts, packets and echoes—I can win a night like this.
“We’re bagging it,” the officer says, pressing the seal. “We’ll need you at the station for a quick statement.”
“We’ll follow,” Ruth says. To me: “You ride with me. We route past the Marina Outfitters and see if lights are on.”
We walk toward the parking lot and I notice the man by the lamppost for the first time—a parish volunteer who stacks chairs at St. Brigid’s after every event, polite to a bruise. He’s on his phone, eyes on me, lips moving. The wind carries one phrase: “Yes, Father… yes, the podcaster.” He turns away and the bell charm on his key ring chips the metal of the lamppost with a patient, practiced kiss.
My phone pings again. An email from the outfitters’ automated account lands like a fish in a bucket: Order Confirmation—Aux/Events—Speaker Replacements—Pick-up: Deacon Lyle (St. Brigid’s). Someone just ordered more. The timestamp is three minutes ago.
“Ruth,” I say, holding up the screen, my breath fogging the glass. “They placed a new order in the last three minutes. Pickup name is a deacon.”
She exhales through her nose, the sound a small bell of disbelief. “He’s not clergy-clergy,” she says. “He’s the rung below. He moves keys. He carries gossip. He gets plausible deniability.”
“He’s about to get a record,” I say. “And we get a statement signed.”
The lake shoves one last seiche at the breakwater, and the pier answers with a hollow boom. The town likes to baptize with bells and good families; the water baptizes with blunt sound that doesn’t ask permission. I tuck my recorder deeper into my coat and ask the question that will drag me to the rectory sooner than I planned: if the club donates speakers “for events” and the deacon signs for them with a smile, how many nights has a polite man carried staged screams under his arm while telling us he’s protecting our peace?