The cat finds it first.
She crouches over the floor vent like a lighthouse with paws, tail flicking, ears set to predator. Her claws catch the slats and make a small tinny clatter, then the cover wobbles, and something light and black tumbles out. It hits the hardwood with a tick that pulls every muscle in my back into a fist.
I don’t scream. I don’t breathe. I watch a button-sized disc quiver on the floor beside the vent where warm air breathes my studio’s stale heat. A hair-thin pigtail dangles—two wires taped together. The cat bats once, delicately, then steps back, offended by the taste of adhesive on her paw.
I slide on nitrile gloves like a magician scared of his own trick and go to my knees. The little disc is warm. My thumb feels the texture of drilled dots that pretend to be nothing. A faint electronic hiss rides the air near my wrist—there, then gone when a seiche presses against the building and the vent exhales heavier. St. Brigid’s carries sound on days like this; the lake makes everything speak twice.
“No, no, no,” I say, low, to the cat, to the room, to whoever loves tidy words like safety and collaboration.
I lift the mic into an evidence bag and zip the seam. I snap two photos: device on floor, device in bag. My recorder’s timecode blinks steady numbers. I narrate, voice tight but level, the way Ruth has taught me: “Twenty-one hundred hours. Heating vent, southeast corner, apartment. Unknown device—disc mic with pigtail. Found by house cat. Bagged.”
My phone shakes in my hand twice while dialing because the locket at my throat remembers bells and my fingers remember glass. “Ruth,” I say when she picks up, “they graduated.”
“Good,” she says without pause. “We’ll make them repeat the class. Don’t touch anything else. I’m five minutes out. Doors locked. Windows locked. Breaker off for the heater.”
I kill the thermostat; the vent goes from breath to silence. Without the warm rush, the studio smells like dust, lemon oil from the Harbor Barn’s old display case I repurposed as a shelf, and the percolated church coffee that lives in everyone’s coat fibers in this town. I hear my neighbor’s TV talk about regatta scholarships, the anchor’s voice reedy through walls. Regatta culture makes the background hum—cups, bells, baptisms, boys in blazers practicing their good names.
I stand in the middle of the room and do nothing. Control is doing nothing until I can do the right thing.
Ruth knocks three beats that are ours and ours alone. When I open the door, she holds up the small hard case that means business: RF scanner, flashlight, mirror on a telescoping rod, spare gloves, a little Faraday pouch that looks like a purse for a careful witch.
“Cat found it?” she asks, stepping in, eyes sweeping once, twice, an old instinct flicking like a tail.
“She did,” I say. “Vent. Button mic. Warm.”
“Good cat,” Ruth says, and the cat—traitor—winds through Ruth’s ankles like she’s on payroll. “Show me.”
I point. Ruth crouches, opens the case, and slides the scanner’s wand around the vent mouth. It chortles like a bored cricket, then thins to nothing. She moves to the window frame, runs the wand along the sill, pauses at the corner where paint bubbles over old caulk. “Screw mark’s fresher than the paint,” she says. “Somebody liked your ventilation.”
“I heard a hiss earlier,” I say, and I hate the way the word earlier drags a cheap memory into something expensive.
“Let’s see what we’ve got,” she says. “We’ll triage. We’re not doing a hero’s sweep and missing three. We go slow.”
I hold the Faraday pouch open while she transfers the evidence bag into it. The pouch mouth swallows the hum and the room shifts a hair toward normal. Ruth clicks on the telescoping mirror and checks behind the radiator, under the lip of the kitchen counter, around the cat’s feeding nook. We find a smear of adhesive foam at the baseboard but no second device. The wand stays quiet except when it sniffs my phone and purrs, offended by everything connected.
“They could have put the receiver outside,” I say. “Or in a car. Or piggybacked a neighbor’s Wi-Fi.”
“They could have,” she says. “But this—” she taps the pouch, “—this looks like it stores, then dumps. We’ll know in a minute. Let’s set up.”
I clear a small square of my desk and lay down clean butcher paper, a habit from the metals lab Lydia taught me without calling it that. Ruth sets the pouch down, then her gloved hands go gentle with zipper teeth. She removes the bagged mic, a micro-SD card the size of a clipped fingernail sliding halfway out of a slot I would have missed, and a coin cell. She doesn’t let the card breathe air before she slides it into a tiny read-only USB adapter.
“Narrate,” she prompts.
I hit record. “Opening Faraday pouch. Removing evidence bag. Microphone unit contains micro-SD card labeled—unlabeled. Placing card into write-blocker. Laptop in airplane mode. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth disabled. Power on.”
The computer wakes with a sound that feels obscene. Files bloom: REC_147.mp3 sits on top like a dare.
“Play?” Ruth asks.
“On the recorder,” I say. “Line-in. I want a clean copy while we listen.”
I cable the laptop to my portable recorder, check that levels swing but not clip, hit record, then double-click the file. The room pinches narrower.
Wind noise. My own radiator breathes tinny under the track.
Then a man’s voice, casual enough to be a weather report: “—she leaves Thursdays at eight forty. Dog walk at nine fifteen if she’s at her mom’s. Studio run when she’s editing late. She does that low light, curtains half. You can see the screen glow from Pine.”
I taste metal in my mouth, a coppery wash that might be from the locket against my throat or the fear that sits under my tongue like a penny.
Another male voice answers, lower, older, patient. “Keep it boring. Don’t rush. Festival week we pull her back into the hall. Put her on the mic with a partner. Lone wolves get feral.”
Ruth lifts a finger—pause. I stop playback. The room stays loud in the silence. Bells creep from the lake, misdelivered by the wind: St. Brigid’s practice peal knocks once and disappears into the traffic on Harbor. The seiche has shifted again; sound pulls sideways in Ashgrove on a night like this.
“Lieutenant,” Ruth says softly. “Not Everett. The tone. Logistics.”
I nod. I know that voice from the ribbon-cutting and from a fundraiser where donors took credit for oxygen and the rest of us were allowed to breathe it. I don’t say the name because saying names in rooms makes them heavier.
“We’re going to take the whole card,” Ruth says. “But we’re going to call your attorney before we sneeze. We may need to let a judge hear this fresh.”
“There’s more,” I say, thumb tight on the recorder so the tremor has something to press against. “I heard them talk about the council vote. And I think they mentioned the night walk. Our night walk.”
She nods. “We sweep first. Then we listen. Then we move.”
We finish the sweep like we’re cleaning a wound. Ruth finds the faint outline of tape on the underside of my desk and a hair that isn’t mine—gray, stiff—as if someone old knelt here and thought I wouldn’t look. I take photos of nothing so a jury can see that nothing used to be something. The Facebook swap group pings my phone—the moderator has posted a sweetly barbed note about “overreaction about lake noises” and includes a link to regatta scholarships. The comments section is a brass polish that hides blood.
“Keys,” Ruth says, standing. “Clothes. Laptops. Drives. Cat.”
“Lydia’s?” I ask. My voice walks a narrow line between wanting to be safe and not wanting to make my mother part of the map.
“Temporarily,” she says. “We’ll rotate safe houses afterward. Tonight we go to a place that has eyes. And neighbors who will open doors if someone knocks wrong.”
I pack with the tenderness of a thief breaking into her own life. The cat goes into her carrier with a complaint that locates me squarely in the world I want to keep. I slide the watch receipt envelope and the club newsletter into a hard plastic folder. The locket rests inside my shirt, warm from my skin. Bells live there now. Recordings pin the dead, yes, but they also pin the living to promises.
We call the attorney on speaker while I zip the suitcase. “Document, duplicate, decamp,” she says. “Don’t engage. I’ll file for emergency protective order in the morning and a warrant for adjacent devices. Send me the file hashes.”
“Working,” I say, and I’m grateful for a verb I can do while everything else is a noun hungry for me.
Ruth carries the Faraday pouch like a communion ciborium. We step into the hall and the building breathes a mix of radiator steam and someone else’s dinner—garlic, tomato, the wet wool of grownup coats. The stairwell door gives us its usual grunt. Outside, the lake air cuts clean and tastes like diesel. The wind pushes sound ragged down the block; a gull laughs wrong over the marina and the sound lands in my chest, jagged as broken watch glass.
“Eyes up,” Ruth says, and I realize my gaze has been on the cat’s carrier, on the things I can protect.
We walk the short block to the car, check underneath, check door edges for tape, check the tires for unfamiliar shine. My world has turned into small circles I draw around the shape of danger. I put the cat in the back. The carrier’s door clicks with the authority I want to borrow.
“You can be scared,” Ruth says gently as she starts the engine. “You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“I’m scared,” I say. There is relief in the exactness.
We pull out, and my building recedes into the block’s row of copy-paste lives. At the corner, a Marina Club bumper sticker moves through the intersection and the driver doesn’t look our way. Everyone’s polite when the stakes are what other people lose.
The ride to Lydia’s takes ten minutes even with the way Ruth drives, careful but decisive, the kind of driver you want when a town with donors at every door decides the story belongs to them. The cat settles into a sulky loaf. I press the Faraday pouch to my thigh and imagine the little disc inside trying to call home and finding only the dark.
Lydia opens her door before we knock, hair in a bandana, robe wrapped tight. The house smells like the percolator that never leaves the counter, like ointment and laundry and the lavender sachets she refuses to stop sewing. Her eyes scan the carrier, my face, the envelope, Ruth’s jaw.
“You’re staying,” she says, not asking. “Good. Beds are made.”
“Just for tonight,” I say. “We had a visitor. In the vent.”
Lydia’s mouth goes thin. She doesn’t say I told you because she raised me on the rule that love and gloating don’t share a plate. “I’ll put the kettle on,” she says instead. “You’ll tell me what words you need me not to say.”
We enter through the back where the mudroom turns everyone equal: donors and dog-walkers, daughters and disappointments. Ruth places the pouch on the kitchen table like it’s a sleeping bird. I pass the cat to Lydia, who acts like carriers are sacred. The kettle hums. The house pulls quiet around us—the kind of quiet that knows how to listen without making a show of it.
We plug the recorder into the wall and copy files to two encrypted drives. I read the hashes into the mic, then hand one drive to Ruth and tuck the other into Lydia’s flour bin under a zip-top bag of measuring spoons. Ritual keeps fear from flooding the floor.
“Play me the voice,” Lydia says when the kettle clicks. Her hands tremble just enough that the mugs tick the counter. The locket’s chain presses a small red rope into my throat.
“One sentence,” I say. “Then we stop.”
I roll a few seconds of the clip. —she leaves Thursdays at eight forty— The sound papers the kitchen with cold certainty and lands in Lydia’s jaw. She nods once. “Men who schedule women,” she says. “I remember their shoes.”
Ruth takes the mug, takes a breath. “We’re here tonight,” she says. “I’ll sit in a chair by the front window with a blanket and the kind of flashlight that is not friendly.”
“You’ll not be cold,” Lydia says, brisk, because fear is ugly only when it keeps its boots on in the house.
I carry my suitcase down the hall toward the bedroom I had in high school, the one with the fake tin ceiling tiles I glued up with too much ambition. The night air presses on the windows. Over the radiator’s soft hiss, I hear it again—a thin electronic shush that isn’t water or heat.
I stop outside the linen closet. The vent cover there wears four screws, two old and painted, two new and bright. My scalp prickles. The lake takes a breath and holds it.
“Ruth?” I call, holding still, voice a thread I don’t want to cut. “Do you hear that?”
She is beside me before the kettle steam has thinned. We listen together to the shush that may be wind, may be a trick of pressure, may be a disc the size of a button wanting to make my mother’s house part of the map. I put my hand over the locket, and the metal is warm, solid, patient.
I ask the question that makes my throat feel like a bell rope ready to burn: did the surveillance move with me—or was it already in the place that taught me to listen?