I catch the sexton in the side vestibule while the nave smells like last night’s percolated coffee and hymnbooks that have soaked up fifty winters. He keeps the security chain on the door and studies me through the gap. “Five minutes,” he says. “Any longer and I’ll have parish ladies calling the diocese.”
“Thank you,” I say, and pass him two sealed envelopes. The first reads TOWER MAINT.; the second reads ROOF FUND, a fiction Ruth swore was real.
Ruth waits behind me in a borrowed hard hat, chin tucked into her scarf. “We stay off the bell frame,” she tells me, not the sexton. “We don’t touch the clapper. We log every action and we leave it cleaner than we found it.”
He eyes the envelopes, pockets them, and unlatches the chain. “Up and down,” he says. “No experiments during the Angelus.”
“Which is when?” I ask.
“Whenever the donors are listening,” he says, and turns his back, leading us past a donor wall punched with brass ovals. Everett Crane’s name holds center like a sun.
The side door to the tower breathes cold when he opens it. “I’ll wait on the lower landing,” he says. “Ten minutes, and then I lock.” He hands me a faded visitor tag on a lanyard that smells like lemon cleaner and incense. My fingers close over the edge of the plastic as if permission were a shape I could carry out.
The tower stairs grab at my calves immediately. Narrow, steep, stone that has memorized shoes. Pigeons flutter somewhere above, a soft panic like hands riffling paper. I keep the fireproof box slung across my chest and the small tripod under my arm. Ruth goes ahead, counting in a low voice. “Seventeen… nineteen… watch that chip… twenty-one…”
Halfway up, a slit window coughs lake air into my face, wet and metallic. The seiche must be pushing; the sound from the water feels elastic, like footsteps bouncing off a drum. Diesel from an early tow mixes with old rope and dust. I think of regatta baptisms—bell rings to announce good families—and how the Facebook groups bless and punish with equal zeal.
At the first landing, pigeons scatter. Their bodies thud the rafters and a feather sticks to my cheek. I wipe it away with the back of my glove. Ruth plants the tripod, hands steady. “Recorder,” she says. I pass our field unit and watch her check levels with that same calm metronome in her breath. The fluorescents are mercifully absent here; light arrives in careful stripes from the slit windows, the color of old pewter.
“Second Lives, working tape,” I whisper for my mic. “St. Brigid’s bell tower, interior landing one. Clap tests, hums, RT60 estimate.”
Ruth points at the runged beams above us. “Clap from there,” she says. “Face the wall, elbows a hand’s width out. Not too close, or you’ll excite only the stone.” She says excite like an apology.
I take position. “Ready?”
“Ready.”
I clap once. The sound explodes and returns on itself, swelling where I expect it to die. Reverberation blooms in a slow flower, then folds in scalloped waves. Three seconds by my ribs, another half tucked in the tail. I clap again, softer, to catch the room off guard. The return kisses my ears and slides down the stair spine like a borrowed voice.
“Again,” Ruth says, and I do, five claps at measured intervals, then a series of staccato snaps. She nods at the recorder display, then at me. “Hum?”
I hum a low A and let it ride the space. The bell above us answers without moving, overtone ghosts stepping into place like people who know where to stand in group photos. My chest vibrates, and vertigo licks my ankles, a nudge toward the spiral drop behind my heels.
“Step back,” Ruth says quietly, and I obey. She marks the timestamp and murmurs, “RT60 roughly three and a quarter at 1k, longer down low. Flutter echoes in the stair throat.”
I swallow hard. “Listen to how the tail scallops,” I say. “Same ripples as on the locket.”
“Maybe. We’ll prove it with pictures,” she says. “Landing two.”
We climb. The stairs narrow like the tower is losing patience. Dust drifts in little galaxies around our headlamps. Someone has rubbed a heart in the grime on the wall; a line through it turns romance into warning. Higher, the pigeons roost under the clock face, cooing in a register that tricks my ear into hearing words. I taste copper like I’ve licked the locket; old metal coats the back of my tongue.
On landing two, the bell hangs right there—massive, shoulder-heavy, dark with a history of hands that didn’t get plaques. The rope droops through a pulley, burnished at the grip point to something that looks like polished bone. I don’t touch it. I feel the air radiating from it anyway, a cold that isn’t temperature so much as authority.
“Two minutes,” the sexton calls up, voice flat enough to make itself neutral. It still carries judgment.
“We’ll be fast,” Ruth calls back. She eyes me. “No heroics.”
We repeat the pattern. Claps bloom and fall, wider here, the tail like a sheet settling. I do a series of coordinated claps—short-long, long-short—matching the rhythm the copper strip tended to wake. Ruth watches the recorder, then the rope, then me. “Hear that?” she asks.
“Third partial gets louder on the long-short,” I say. “Like the locket.”
She nods once. “Wind gradient at the slits could be focusing it. Or the beam position. Or the way the bell belly sits in the room. Or your want.”
“Or my want,” I repeat, and clap again, angling my palms to catch the returning bloom. The reverb feels physical now, a pressure change that drops behind my eyes. Vertigo reaches up again, a gentle but insistent hand to the back of my neck. I plant my boots wider.
“Hum,” Ruth says. I hum. The bell’s ghost harmonics stack around my voice. For a second I forget to breathe and my body does it for me, a small gasp that doesn’t belong on tape. I tag the moment anyway. My hands shake. I set them on my thighs until they remember where they are.
“One more, then down,” Ruth says. “He’ll lock us out with our gear in here if his conscience needs theater.”
I clap once into the stair throat. The return ripples a hair, the same scallop I saw on the spectrogram at home. I grin without permission. Ruth does not grin; she watches the recorder count.
“Time,” the sexton calls again, this time with more church in it.
We descend. The stairs pinch my knees and the drop tugs at the corners of my eyes. At the first landing, a pigeon explodes from a beam and skates the edge of my face. I swear under my breath. Ruth catches my elbow without looking like she’s caught me. “Focus,” she says.
On the ground floor, the sexton waits with the impatience of a man who eats duty for breakfast. He jingles a ring of keys shaped like a question mark. He smells like damp wool and the cologne of men who keep hydrangeas alive. “Done?”
“Thank you,” I say. “We’ll donate again if a second session becomes necessary.”
He shrugs with his eyebrows and pushes the side door toward us. “People get precious when you measure holy things,” he says. “You measured holy things.”
Outside, the morning has sharpened. The lake sits gray and watchful, and a towboat coughs diesel into air that tastes like coins and coffee. A pair of boys jog the footing of the pier, earbuds in, faces tilted toward the part of adulthood that lets you ignore bells.
On the church steps, Ruth pulls the recorder and my laptop from the bag. “Fast compare,” she says. She parks us beside a brass plaque listing donors; the Crane name shines brighter, either from polishing or from ego. I feel it watching us.
I open SpectraLite. The program trundles awake in that graceless way I love it for. I load the landing two clap and the hum, then the locket file, and freeze three frames: our clap decay, our hum’s harmonics, and the locket’s hiss with the scream perched under the third.
“There,” I say, and my finger lands in the air a breath over the screen so I don’t smudge anything that can’t be smudged. “Third partial center matches within a few hertz, decay scallop pattern repeats at similar intervals.”
Ruth leans in, reading the picture like a suspect. “What doesn’t match,” she says, “is the exact tail length. Your locket’s decay loses a half second after the scallop.”
“Because the copper strip truncates,” I say. “Or because the capture point wasn’t this landing. Or because my want.” I hear my voice trying to be dutiful and resisting pride.
“Or because wind changed. Or because there were bodies in the room.” She taps the screen near the scream’s ridge. Her glove creaks softly. “But the fingerprint is in the family.”
“Family,” I repeat, and glance at Everett Crane’s name shining next to my elbow. I hate that word living there.
The sexton hovers just inside the vestibule, watching us through the ripple of old glass. He lifts his chin toward the nave, a reminder that laundry lists of the dead await breakfast readers. Ruth closes the laptop. “We have enough to keep moving,” she says. “Not enough to publish. Not enough to accuse.”
“Enough to ask permission,” I say. The word permission feels heavier than the locket in my pocket.
“From whom?” she asks, testing me again.
“From the person whose initials ride the front of the thing,” I say. “From Lydia Brighton. Flowers. No tape until she says.”
Ruth’s mouth tightens like a stitch being pulled. “She’ll know my voice,” she says.
“Then we bring yours,” I say. “And mine stays quiet until hers tells it what to do.”
The seiche slaps the marina pilings with that tired applause. Facebook’s morning chatter starts pinging my phone even through Do Not Disturb: a swap group thread about “church busybodies,” a DM requesting “behind-the-scenes.” I put the phone back in my bag. I grip the notebook so hard the wire binding prints my palm.
“One more thing,” Ruth says, and leads me along the side wall to a small, weathered door near the base of the tower. A plaque hangs beside it: RESTORATION MADE POSSIBLE BY THE GENEROSITY OF— The names march in brass. The Cranes own the middle. Someone has rubbed a thumb over Everett’s oval enough to make it brighter than the others. Wind drags a smell of wet rope across our faces. “Power buys the echo chamber,” Ruth says. “Then pretends to be the echo.”
I open my laptop again despite my better patience and overlay one last spectrogram: our hum beside the locket’s hiss. The peaks don’t twin. They salute. Partial alignment. Not a wedding, a handshake.
“It’s the room,” I say. “Maybe not this landing, maybe higher, maybe lower, but this room taught that scream its shape.”
Ruth doesn’t argue. She points at the church’s side garden, where a small bronze bell rests on a plinth, cracked, rope long gone. “They retired that one in ’97,” she says. “Boys took it off its yoke one summer. Left fingerprints at the scene. Rich fingerprints don’t stick unless and until the town gets tired.”
“Is the town tired?” I ask.
“Depends which family asks the question,” she says.
The sexton locks the side door with a finality that pinches. “We done here?” he calls gently, politeness with teeth.
“For today,” Ruth says, raising her hands like a harmless person. She nudges me down the steps with her shoulder. “We have a stop to make and a boundary to keep.”
We head toward Pine Street, past the donor wall, past the hydrant that always leaks in spring, past the bulletin board where bake sales and bell schedules braid. I hear the tower breathing behind us, patient and full. The locket in my pocket feels heavier now that the room that might have taught it to scream has heard us back.
“You’re going to want to edit this clean and post a taste,” Ruth says. “You’re going to want to make the town praise you before it punishes you.”
“I’m going to buy flowers,” I say, and there’s no room inside the sentence for anything else.
Ruth nods once, a verdict delivered without gavel. “Then we ask Lydia Brighton how to say her daughter’s name.”
A gust lifts lake smell into our mouths—diesel, wet rope, old coffee—and the tower swallows our footsteps, turning them into somebody else’s memory. The spectrogram in my head keeps its ladder. The third partial gleams like a thin blade. The scream waits under it, not louder, not kinder, only nearer.
I don’t know what Lydia will give us.
I know the room just gave us permission to ask.