Ruth parks beside the rectory where the wind can’t bully the doors, and I pocket my recorder without hitting red. The air tastes like wet rope and percolated church coffee before we even reach the steps. Somewhere beyond the brick, the lake pushes a small seiche toward the breakwall; I feel it in the floor of my chest, a pressure change I’ve learned to clock like weather. Bells sleep above us like animals that know their work too well.
“You sure you want to do this face-to-face?” Ruth asks, closing the car with a soft shoulder. Her voice keeps to the pitch that doesn’t echo.
“He’s answering calls from the people staging speakers,” I say. “I want my words to reach before their ‘collaboration’ does.”
I carry the manila folder against my ribs—ledger margins we copied, donor emails we printed, the outfitters’ receipt with Deacon Lyle’s name. Paper has weight; stories argue better when they’re heavy.
Inside the parish hall, heat clicks and radiators hiss like tired geese. Father Mikhail meets us by the side chapel where votives burn clean and slow. He keeps his hands tucked into his sleeves the way men do when they’ve practiced withholding.
“Ms. Keane,” he says, then, to Ruth, “Detective Calder.” He can’t stop calling her that, and I don’t correct him.
“Father,” I say. I keep my tone even. Bitter rides shotgun; I lock it in and don’t let it speak.
We sit on a pew that rocks the tiniest bit, the kind of wobble that makes sound travel weird in the nave. The lake’s surge finds the walls and comes back as a faint thrum, reshaping distance. I think of the locket’s roomprint, how the tower imprinted itself on a scream, and I remind myself why I’m here: to make the building help.
“You asked for five minutes,” he says. “No recordings.”
“I’m here for a conversation,” I say. “I brought copies for your conscience, not your file cabinet.”
Ruth sets her notebook on the pew, spine parallel to his line of sight. “We’re also here to keep you out of the machine Everett spins for anyone who crosses him,” she says. “That machine eats clergy, too.”
I open the folder. Paper edges scrape bark out of my fingertips. “This,” I say, and slide the first copy: the sexton’s ledger margin we found, the one Father tried to pull back. The little note reads keys checked out by E.C., week of regatta, in the sexton’s cramped hand, a slanted E that looks like someone tripped mid-letter.
His eyes flinch. “You shouldn’t have that.”
“Neither should anyone with a donation plaque,” I say. “And yet.”
I keep the cadence slow. I lay the Marina Outfitters receipt next—a serial line for Osprey Go speakers, pickup signature Deacon Lyle, account Aux/Events. Then the crane-spire-logo newsletter Ruth found, the one bragging about Meridian Mariner watches as regatta gifts, the same model from Locker 217’s manual.
“I don’t run the club,” he says, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I run a parish budget that has meant keeping heat on for people who can’t afford it.”
“And for that heat,” Ruth says, “you let a ledger walk and keys go unaccounted. For that heat, girls froze.”
He stiffens. Ruth’s words hit harder than mine because they come wrapped in procedure, not podcast. I track his breath until the rigid line drains out of his shoulders.
“I’m not your enemy,” I say, and I let compassion have one inch. “But I can’t narrate forgiveness over a cover-up. The copycat speaker—it was signed out to your deacon. Children ran. People laughed. That’s on whoever told him to place it and on whoever nodded from the rectory when Everett called.”
He closes his eyes and doesn’t make a show of praying. I hear the radiator knock twice, like a bell with a hand over its mouth.
“This town baptizes kids with bell rings at St. Brigid’s,” I say, softer. “Legacy crews get their names in the newsletter. Facebook swap groups give out gold stars to ‘good families’ and shame everyone else for their porch chairs. I don’t have a porch chair worth shaming, Father. I have a dead girl whose locket doesn’t let me sleep.”
He swallows. The candles put honey color back into the bones of his face. “You put me in a hole with your listeners,” he says. “They call at midnight. They say I helped hide a murderer.”
“I don’t let them say that on my feed,” I say. “I delete and block. I don’t let them say it because I didn’t have your words. Give me your words.”
Ruth opens her notebook again, pen tapping once, a metronome that means testimony, not gossip. “Five minutes,” she says. “Tell us who leaned on you.”
He looks at the copies, at the ledger E.C., at the receipt with the deacon’s name, and I can feel the hinge inside him start to warm. Brass tarnishes; heat brings out what the cloth can’t.
“Everett called often,” he says finally, voice sanded down. “But he didn’t threaten. He thanked. He suggested. He sent articles about misinformation and how ‘panic harms the vulnerable.’ He offered grants for the pantry. He was… neighborly.”
“Who threatened?” Ruth asks.
He doesn’t answer right away. He stares past us toward the transept where a key ring dangles on a hook, one bell charm among the steel, tapping the plaster with a tiny patience.
“The town council liaison to cultural events,” he says, at last. “Councilor Penfield. He said that if we didn’t help ‘lower the temperature,’ the city would reevaluate maintenance reimbursements and permits for the festival use of the lot. He used the word discretionary like a hammer.”
Bitter lurches inside my chest, but I hold it. “He tied permits to your cooperation.”
“He tied them to ‘civic harmony,’” the priest says. His hands leave his sleeves. “He said the Marina Club helps us. He said they are our friends. He said, ‘Don’t let a podcaster make you look ungrateful, Father.’”
Ruth writes the name with a block letter neatness that will scan well into evidence. “You understand what you’ve done by saying that,” she says. “You’ve opened the door to show institutional coercion. That matters.”
“Do your affidavits leave room for shame?” he asks, ghost of a smile burning itself down before it becomes a joke.
“They leave room for facts,” Ruth says. “Shame can walk itself in later.”
I slide the last page across—Amaya’s tower-glass reflection, Everett’s cuff and watch, the locket glint under the bell in a separate frame. “This isn’t rumor,” I say. “These are light and metal answering each other.”
He studies the photo like it might ask his blessing. I watch recognition flare and then fall into resignation. “I tried to protect what I could,” he says, almost to himself. “I protected the wrong thing.”
We sit with the sentence. The wind changes and the building breathes differently; the nave swallows the radiator hiss and returns it soft. The lake’s distant shove tugs at the stained glass and lays a green ripple across the wood.
“I won’t ask you to say penance into my microphone,” I say. “I’m asking you to help me get truth through the door a lawyer will try to close.”
He stands, motion small, and disappears into the sacristy. I don’t speak. I count ten, twenty, thirty hammering heartbeats while Ruth taps the pen lid against her ring finger, slow and sure.
He comes back with a battered tin strongbox, the kind with a dollar-store lock that fails if you look at it sternly. He sets it on the pew, fishes a small key from his pocket, and opens the box on an exhale that sounds more like grief than relief.
Inside lies a ring with three keys and two tags. One key is brass with a notch pattern like a row of teeth caught mid-laugh. Stamped into the bow is SB-2. The other keys are modern, safe and boring. The brass one looks like it knows things.
“This is the spare for the tower access door,” he says. “The sexton carried SB-1. SB-2 was supposed to be mine.”
“Was?” Ruth asks.
He looks away. “Supposed.”
I think of the ledger and the missing margin the day he tried to pull the book from our hands. I think of a week when E.C. checked out secrets like a man borrowing silence from a library he endowed.
“We verify,” Ruth says. She takes out a small loupe and I love her for it. “Stamping matches the ledger notation,” she murmurs. “The bow wear is consistent with a key that lived on a ring, not in a drawer. Metal’s warm. You’ve held this lately.”
He flinches again and nods. “I told myself I was locking, not opening,” he says. “I told myself—” He stops, closes his jaw, recalibrates. “You will log this. You will return it after duplication to a secure chain. I will sign the affidavit stating consent. You will not mock me on your program.”
“I don’t mock,” I say. “Not clergy, not cashiers, not anybody without their hands on the book of harm.”
He takes the brass key free of the ring and places it in Ruth’s palm. He does it like a blessing he isn’t sure he’s allowed to give. The key clicks against her latex glove with a clear, ridiculous, holy sound. I feel the air in the chapel change shape, like the moment a story stops resisting and starts to carry.
“Councilor Penfield will deny everything,” he says. “He’ll say I misheard. He’ll send you emails about civic pride.”
“I already have one,” I say. I don’t add that the swap-group moderators cheer his posts and scold my comments for tone. I don’t add that their bell charms look like absolutions from a gift shop.
Ruth tucks the key into an evidence sleeve and writes the bag number in triplicate. “Do you consent to us replicating it for investigative access when appropriate?” she asks.
“I do,” he says, the liturgical cadence slanting his voice. “I also keep one condition.”
“Name it,” I say.
“You protect the families when the donors turn their eyes on them,” he says. “You point the light at me.” He lifts his chin, more resolve than performance now. “At us.”
“I can do that,” I say, and I mean it. “I can say who threatened and who helped and who took too long to choose. I can say the tower belongs to the truth that was trapped in it.”
He glances at the stained glass where the patron’s name sits in a ribbon at the bottom, a Crane ancestor’s generosity embalmed forever in blue.
“There will be fallout,” he says.
“There already is,” Ruth says. “Better we make it honest.”
I stand, and the pew gives that little rock again, and the seiche shifts in my bones in a way that tells me the wind is moving further east. “I’m going to bring an acoustics map back here,” I say. “I’m going to show your council what the tower does to a voice. I’m going to let them hear the difference between a speaker in a piling and a room that holds a girl.”
He nods once, a priest blessing a plan he can’t supervise.
“I’ll write my affidavit tonight,” he says. “I’ll name Penfield. I’ll detail the calls from Everett. I’ll confess to misjudgment without requesting absolution in print.”
“That’s more than most,” Ruth says.
He looks at me like he’s trying to decide if I’m going to be kind. I don’t promise kindness. I promise accuracy. It’s the only mercy I trust.
The candles snap tiny noises as they drown their last bubbles. The smell of coffee from the hall insinuates itself through the door, thin and ordinary, trying to make this moment small. I press the manila folder closed and tuck it under my arm.
“Father,” I say. “One more question.”
He waits.
“When you held that key,” I ask, “did you ever go up there alone and listen?”
His mouth opens and then he gives me a small, honest answer. “Once,” he says. “I heard the lake climb the walls. I heard the bell breathe. I did not hear God.”
“Then let’s let the town hear the rest,” I say.
We walk out into the cold and the church door clicks shut with a sound that will live on my tape whether I hit record or not. Ruth holds the bagged key like a heart rescued out of a fire and turns to me with her eyes bright behind the practical.
“Councilor Penfield,” she says, and the name looks like a bolt we’re going to pull. “And the engraver.”
“Tomorrow,” I say, throat tight and clean. “The watch first.”
A gust drives the smell of diesel from the harbor across the lot and rings the little bell charm on the volunteer’s key ring by the steps. He watches us leave and doesn’t call out. The town has learned how to count by bells. I climb into the passenger seat and ask the question that hitches the night to morning: now that I hold the tower’s teeth in an evidence bag, how many doors will open—and which one will slam when Penfield hears his name on our paper?