The church breathes frost. I can taste percolated coffee in the vestibule air, that parish bitterness that never quite leaves the wood. Ruth closes the side door behind us and tucks the key back into the labeled bag, her gloves whispering against plastic. I slip the recorder’s strap around my wrist and rest a thumb on the stopwatch app, heart sat back behind my ribs like a clock waiting for the hour.
“We start on the strike,” Ruth says, chin up toward the bell. “One ring. Your mark.”
“Copy,” I say, mouth dry with cold and purpose. I tuck the locket inside my scarf. The brass warmth taps my collarbone, weighty and familiar, a metronome I didn’t ask for.
Outside, the lake throws a low growl at the breakwall. Flags along the marina jerk and settle, their halyards clack-clack-clacking like anxious teeth. The wind carries diesel and wet rope and the faint iron-stain smell of rain on stone even though the sky is hard and clear.
I hold my breath. The tower’s mechanism ticks, a tiny insect under slate. Then the bell drops its syllable into the night, one big vowel that makes the glass hum in the vestibule.
I hit start.
“Mark,” I say into the mic. “Bell one. Zero colon zero-zero.”
Ruth lifts two fingers, a referee’s small blessing. “Go.”
We push into the stairwell, and the wood swallows us. The air tastes like dust that grew up in hymnals. My boots take the first step, and I speak each contact into the recorder, a call-and-response with wood grain.
“Twelve seconds landing,” I say, breath ghosting the beam light. “Footfall pattern: ta—ta—ta— pause.”
“Left knee on the fifth,” Ruth murmurs behind me. “You favor it when you hurry.”
“Noted,” I say. “But I’m not Celia’s height. We’ll annotate.”
The stairs creak in pitches. I log them like notes: middle C for the split tread, F-sharp near the window where pigeons have scratched their graffiti. Wind reaches through the slats and smears my own voice around my ears a fraction late, the same flanging I hear in the locket. I say it out loud: “Wind smear, negative forty milliseconds, estimate.”
Ruth’s pencil scratches in the pocket notebook she never lets an app replace. “Landing two at thirty-eight,” she says. “Door latch at—call it one-oh-five?”
The door at the clock level sticks the way the sexton warned. I shoulder it. The latch coughs metal. “One-oh-five,” I confirm, and the stopwatch clicks past the minute with a green blink.
Micro-hook: If the timing doesn’t line up here, the whole story goes soft. I push faster.
We spiral up. My palm skids the rail; splinters nip. From the slit window I catch the marina’s string of pennants tilting, white triangles nodding like heads who have decided something without me. I smell the lake stronger now—cold and copper-bright. The bell level opens like a throat and the whole town’s night leaks in.
“Door to exterior at one thirty-seven,” I say, pushing into the open. Wind knocks the brim of my cap and turns my words into little boats. Lights along the pier stutter in the black water. The breakwater wears a lace of blown spray.
“Copy,” Ruth says, voice steady. “We hold here for the second mark?”
“We only had one ring in the clip,” I say, “but the roomprint overtone says where we are. We log anyway.”
We stand beside the bell rope, which hangs like an accusation roped off from use, its hemp fibers glossy with oil and history. I breathe through my scarf and take one clean sample: ten seconds of nothing-but-night to paint into the spectrogram later as a kind of transparency layer.
“Down,” Ruth says.
“Down,” I echo, and we jog the first dozen steps with care. My thighs burn a little from the cold. I listen more than I look, hunting the exact creak that sang under “don’t” in the ten-second phone clip. There—a sympathetic little whine that never quite resolves, just hovers like a held breath. “Noted,” I say. “Seventy-four seconds between first footstep and that whine if we assume—”
“Don’t assume,” Ruth says, but her mouth tucks where her smile keeps its coat.
“—if we mark it and test both ways,” I finish, and she nods.
On the ground floor, the vestibule’s heater clicks awake and fills the hall with that weak parish warmth and the ghost smell of old coffee. I call the time: “Two fourteen to door threshold,” and we move into the night. The clock face above us stares like a blind witness.
The sidewalk from tower to street tastes like salt spray and grit. Streetlamps push cones into the dark, their ballast hums dovetailing with my recorder’s noise floor. A gull cries like a bad hinge; I mark it so nobody mistakes the pitch for a girl. Ruth walks a half-stride outboard, taking the wind first, her shoulder an old seawall.
“Left on Brigid Way,” she says. “We’ll cut through the parking. You wanted the fastest likely path.”
“Fastest that keeps the bells in ear,” I say. “Keep me honest.”
A car turns the corner slow, its tires whispering on wet salt. The driver glances once then away, deciding we’re not trouble or too much of it. I log the Doppler shift of the passing, because sound is a crowd and every body has to be counted to hear the one person you’re looking for.
We reach the marina lot at three minutes twenty-one. Ropes slap masts. Diesel breath lingers from an evening warmup. I put the recorder near a coil and give it five seconds so my future self remembers the base layer of this town: rope on wood, metal on wind, money on silence.
“Map says pier entrance at three fifty-seven,” Ruth calls, eyes on her old analog face, the one that doesn’t lie because it can’t. “Gate’s open.”
“Footfall change,” I say, stepping from asphalt to the first board. The wood gives a long complaint that lands exactly over the frequency valley I saw under the phone’s clip. I check the stopwatch: “Four zero-two.”
“Celia’s gasp was before that,” Ruth says. “Ten second clip starts with laughter, then ‘don’t.’ The bell’s decay was still in that air.”
“Which means we’re right,” I say, the words too quick. I pull them back into caution. “We’re in range.”
The pier boards are slick and spare. I match the pace I hear in my head: a not-quite-run, the gait of someone who doesn’t want to fall but wants to be away. Ruth keeps count, her voice soft: “One…two…three…four,” and I tap my boot heel at each board seam to stamp the rhythm into the night.
“Four twenty,” I say, and then the board at the fifth seam gives the swallow I know from the spectrogram, a little velveted gulp that sits at 220 Hz like it learned how to sing against a bell. “There,” I say, throat tight. “That’s the same tone. That’s the same exact tone.”
“Mark it,” Ruth says. “Again.”
I take three passes: heel, toe, weight shift. The board answers with the same tired note in the same posture. I hold the recorder low so the mic hears what knees hear. “My right boot is biased,” I say. “But the interval between seam four and five is point eighty-six seconds at this pace. The laugh-to-don’t overlap in the clip suggests…this.”
Ruth flips her pencil. “We’re not writing poetry,” she says. “We’re writing a map.”
“Maps can be poems,” I say. “We just can’t read them like prayers.” The wind pushes my words into my scarf; they come back warmer, damp with breath.
Micro-hook: If the next five seams don’t rhyme with the clip, we start over, and confidence becomes just a story I told myself in a church night.
We walk the length to the mooring where Boat 17 used to tie up, the place the bruise pattern matched. The line cleat is new, polished by hands that wanted it noticed. I bend, recorder a hand’s breadth from the board, and press gently with my palm. The wood answers with a low mmm I can feel in bone. I check the stopwatch.
“From bell strike to this seam: five fifty-two,” I say. “The phone clip’s last laugh sits at five fiftyish when you stretch for sampling drift.” I look at Ruth, the night shining in her pupils like lake. “We’re not chasing our tail.”
“No,” she says. “We’re chasing their path.”
We stand there, the harbor a mouth that forgot how to close. Across the water, a late train dings the crossing bells and the lake steals the ding and turns it thin and wandering. The seiche lifts—two inches maybe—and drops, and the whole pier shivers like an animal shaking off a hand.
“I need the stair rates again on a clean pass,” I say. “Then the door latch. Then this seam three times. Then my breath at the place she said ‘don’t.’”
“You sure?” Ruth asks.
“Yes,” I say, not because I’m brave but because I have a list.
We reverse course. The cold finds my knuckles. I keep the pace and call the marks. The stairs take the same times within a margin I can defend. The latch clears at one-oh-five again. The vestibule tastes like coffee ghosts again. In the bell room, the rope hangs like a truce waiting to break. I touch it—two fingers, a pledge to leave it as I found it—and then we move back down without saying much, our boots learning the creak grammar like a language we can finally speak.
On the pier again, I time my breath and let the word form in my mouth without voicing. I think it, then put the air out into the recorder at the seam where the board swallows. Wind takes part of it; the mic hears the rest. My stopwatch and the clip’s interval hold hands like kids crossing.
Ruth nods. “Robust,” she says, and her voice doesn’t often do praise.
“Robust,” I echo, and the word warms a spot I didn’t expect. “We can put this in a courtroom without dying.”
“Careful,” she warns, but she smiles, brief as a pilot light catching.
We sweep our gear the way we sweep a room: nothing left behind for a friendly janitor to roll his eyes at tomorrow. I photograph the seams with the day’s paper tucked into the frame the way old cops love, date plain, nothing for a motion to argue with. I take ten seconds of pure lake to lay under tomorrow’s cut so the transitions don’t sound fake. I clip the locket back under my scarf and let it cool against my skin until it’s only metal again.
“Let’s get you home,” Ruth says.
“Home is Lydia’s,” I say, and the word softens in my throat even as the night stays hard around us. “Two hours sleep, then transcripts.”
We step off the pier and the lake pushes again, that seiche hand under the town, lifting and putting it down somewhere slightly different. A siren threads the wind from far inland, a high, insistent line that doesn’t belong to the marina or the rail yard. It keeps coming.
My phone buzzes. Unknown number. Then again. Ruth looks at me, eyebrows a question that already knows an answer.
I don’t pick up yet. I listen to the ring—its cadence, its insistence—and I look back at the route we just mapped: bell to door to street to pier to seam. The timeline holds steady in my hand like a measured rope. My thumb hovers over the green answer button.
I ask the question I don’t want the night to answer without me: now that our path is proven board by board, which knock will come first—the one on a courtroom door, or the one that pulls me away from evidence toward someone falling where I learned how to listen?