The metals room breathes like a pocket full of coins. Flux sweetens the air with its acrid sugar, and the lockers along the wall exhale a damp belt-leather smell every time the door shuts. I keep my recorder capped in my bag per Lydia’s rules and my own good sense; this visit is hands and eyes, not a performance. I let my fingers rest on the strap anyway, the way I might hold a friend’s sleeve in a crowd.
“You’re the podcaster,” Mr. Del Toro says, wiping his palms on a dark apron that has learned every year’s fingerprints. “And you’re the one from Pine Street.”
“Mara,” I say. “Ruth.”
Ruth nods like an affidavit. “Off the record until you say otherwise. We’re here to look, not to make you look bad.”
“Good,” he says, and flicks a switch. The big dust collector hums awake in the corner, a low chest purr. “If somebody’s going to tell this, better it’s people who know what a burr is. Watch your step. The floor eats shoelaces.”
I walk past a row of student projects—battered key fobs, a copper rose that refuses to wilt, the noble failures of teenagers who learned heat before patience. The far window frames a slab of lake, pewter today. The seiche has the shoreline wagging the docks, and every time the rope rubs a cleat, a little moan runs under the room noise like a bass note with manners. Regatta banners sag above the chalkboard, blues bleached by years of announcements. In one corner, a coffee maker mutters an old salvation; the pot smells like percolator penance, the kind churches serve when you don’t deserve better.
“You knew Celia,” I say, keeping my voice small enough to fit between the hammers.
“I taught her,” he says. “She taught herself. I locked the door, and she still found more hours.”
Ruth taps her notebook. “We’re looking for a manufacturing signature. A jig, a habit, a flaw she repeated. Anything that could make a pattern in brass that another person would notice.”
He leads us to a cabinet with masking-taped labels that have survived more summers than the paint. He opens the second drawer and lifts out a zip-top bag, the kind that keeps small parts honest. Inside is a photo on copier paper, half-tones bruised to gray. He lays it on the bench like an altar cloth.
“Here,” he says. “She built this with me junior year. We kept it because kids copied it. Some of them needed training wheels to keep their hands straight. Celia didn’t, but she liked guides for speed.”
The photo shows a little wooden platform with two metal rails in a gentle zigzag, like a heartbeat that refuses to smooth out. Short pegs slot into holes along the rails to vary the angle. At one end, a clamp holds thin stock. Arrows in pen show the direction to push the stylus; a note in neat block letters reads CHECK DEPTH. WIPE BETWEEN PASSES. I hear Lydia’s voice in my ear—her girl’s tidiness—and the room loses one degree of air.
“The rails,” I say, and my hand is already finding the locket on the felt square in my bag. I pass it to him, and he touches it with a finger he doesn’t let tremble. “See how the engraving steps? Not a smooth curve. A staircase. You can see the corner where the rail made her correct too late.”
Ruth leans, peering over her glasses. “Left-handed adjust,” she says. “That kink would live in every piece from that jig unless you flip the rails.”
“You knew her hands,” I say to Mr. Del Toro.
“I know hands,” he says, which honors her without drowning us. He reaches to a high shelf and lowers a plastic tub, then rifles through cloths until he produces a real version of the jig from the photo. The metal rails are scuffed; one peg is replaced with a shortened nail. The clamp teeth carry a polish where years of thin copper have learned to sit still.
Micro-hook: I align the locket under the rail and the pattern kisses itself, the tiny missteps lining up like old friends saying our names without names.
“May I photograph?” I ask. “Measurements with the guard down. No students.”
“You may,” he says. “No faces. No school logos. My rules.”
“Mine too,” I say, and I lift the phone only after I wipe the lens on my sleeve, as if clarity is ethics, not glass. The calipers click in my hand, soft metronome. I take a ruler reading of the rail spacing and jot it next to the hash from last night’s DM in my notebook, separate cases touching like magnets that refuse to stick.
Ruth breaks the moment gently. “We’ll need contemporaneous documentation. Enrollment records, rosters, syllabi. If we can show who shared this room with Celia, we can knock on doors. We can ask for good memories before we ask for hard ones.”
He hesitates, and I watch his mouth arrange the school’s caution into his own discomfort. “You can look,” he says after a beat. “I keep copies. The office keeps originals. Mine are for me when I forget the good parts. But you can look.”
He leaves us with the jig and the patient tools and disappears down the short hall. The dust collector breath lowers. The room’s smaller sounds take advantage of the quiet—paper flexes, a bored screw settles in a bin, a drop of something finally lets go inside the sink and taps the basin like a kind clock.
“You hear that?” I say to Ruth.
“The tap?” she says.
“The clock,” I say, and neither of us explains it, because we’re both rehearsing how to be careful when the names arrive.
He returns with a binder older than his apron. The cover reads METALS & JEWELRY—ENROLLMENT in black marker that used to shout. Each section divider has months in shaky capitals, and the paper edges are peppered with a confetti of hole chads from decades of page turns. He lays it on the bench and places two fingers on the spine like he’s keeping a pulse.
“These are my copies,” he says. “Not official. But they tracked with the office sheets, last I checked. I make them because memory rusts.”
Ruth pulls a stool and sits, pens at the ready. I stand, wanting a better angle on fate. He flips to Spring 2008. Names in pencil parade down the page—firsts and last initials, phone numbers, parent signatures that curl or skitter depending on the hour they signed. He flips to Summer Session and finds —.
The page is not there.
The divider is there, with its little plastic tab winking, but the sheet behind it has vanished. The ghosts of two clean rings show where a three-hole punch met paper. The tear marks aren’t clumsy; somebody eased the sheet out along the rings, patient enough not to rip the divider, careful enough to leave only suggestion.
“I didn’t pull that,” he says, quiet enough for the locket to hear him. “I wouldn’t.”
“When did you last see it?” Ruth asks, and she doesn’t let the tenderness leak into the question even though it wants to.
He closes his eyes briefly. “I pulled this binder last year to help a kid prove she’d finished the safety unit for a scholarship. The summer page was where it belonged. I remember because Celia’s name always stops me. She took the summer slot to use the studio AC when the house got too hot. She said hot metal behaved better than hot people.”
The line lands with that particular teacher’s grief—a lesson he couldn’t grade. My throat tastes like copper. “Who else would have reason to look?” I ask. “Counselors, office staff, alumni who visit, coaches who steal paper for their camps?”
He flips to the inside cover where he’s written a legend to his own system: office sync—Aug, Jan; binder lock—after midterms, after show. A tiny circle has been filled in next to Aug ‘08 and then traced again in a different pen, a different year, like a reminder built on a memory.
“The office has the originals,” he says. “But the office also has turnover.”
Ruth’s pencil stops. “And donors,” she says.
“And donors,” he concedes, not naming the family whose plaques smile from the trophy case two doors down. He presses his thumb into the empty space where the summer sheet should rest, the way a person presses a bruise to measure what hurts less.
Micro-hook: I take a picture of the absence, because sometimes the hole is the only honest part.
“We can work around this,” I say, partly to him, partly to the girls in the past tense. “Yearbook photos, art show lists, tool checkouts. Who signed out the jeweler’s saws? Who used the pickle pot after hours? Kids tag everything online when they’re proud. The swap groups love to resell old school pieces with names etched wrong.”
He nods and rises, moving with the stiff care of a man who doesn’t want his anger to spill. He opens another cabinet and hands me a folder labeled SHOW—2008. Inside, program pages list C. BRIGHTON—ETCHED LOCKET, BRASS/ENAMEL with a tiny asterisk that means display only. A stapled photo page shows three tables, students in front of them, faces washed by a camera flash that didn’t have permission. Celia’s table sits just out of frame—the corner of a felt board peeks in with a heart silhouette shaped by light, not an object.
“Is that—” I start.
“Empty mount,” he says. “She took it home the night before the show. Said her mother didn’t like crowds staring at hearts.”
I breathe Lydia’s porch inside my chest until my pulse settles. “Do you remember names from the summer crew?”
“I remember pairs,” he says. “Kids cluster. There was a girl who wore boat shoes with brass eyelets and called me Mr. D because the extra syllables were for people with ties. There was a boy who returned files too clean. There was Everett’s cousin who came once with an ‘I’m just waiting’ face and, to his credit, didn’t touch anything.”
“Cousin?” Ruth asks.
“Mason Crane,” he says, like a wire tightening. “He wasn’t enrolled. He said he was meeting a friend who wanted to make a charm for regatta night. I told him this was school, not the marina.”
The name drops onto the bench like a washer that missed the tray. I write it, underlining once, then bracket it. “We can track that,” I say. “But we still need that roster.”
He picks up the binder again and turns it to the back. The pockets hold permission slips and a candy wrapper that has surrendered its colors to time. Behind them, a thin sheet of paper hides. He draws it out and lays it flat. The header reads ROOM SIGN-OUT—SUMMER OPEN STUDIO, with dates in a faint grid and signatures in inconsistent bravado. Names crop up in blocks—T. Vasquez, N. Hsu, C. Brighton, and then gaps where someone didn’t sign or signed with a joke. Two lines have been erased so thoroughly the paper’s skin shines.
“I make sign-out sheets,” he says, apologetic without reason. “The office ignores them. They matter to me. Everybody else uses their keys and their smiles.”
Ruth leans in. “Erase marks. Who has white vinyl erasers in here?”
“Every bench,” he says. “But those erasures were done with care. Cleaned with lighter fluid or citrus remover. I can smell it when I get close.”
He’s right; there’s a candied solvent tang over those two slots, different from the usual metal stink. I taste lemon, then the old copper I carry now wherever the locket lies.
“Who cleaned solvent in here recently?” I ask.
“Custodian on Fridays,” he says. “But that smell isn’t mop and bucket. That’s bench top, and that’s deliberate.”
I photograph the erased lines at an angle to catch the sheen and then shade over them lightly with the side of my pencil, not touching the paper, just hovering as if memory could be coaxed to confess by proximity. Nothing blooms. The names stay gone.
“We’ll FOIA the official roster,” Ruth says, practical like a bandage. “We’ll ask the district, then ask again when they pretend there’s no district. In the meantime, we’ll build our own: show program, sign-out sheet, classmates’ photos, locker assignments.”
I let the room details anchor me—the pegboard holes in soldier rows, the way the bell of a tiny torch catches the light from the high windows, the faint whir of the dust collector winding down like a held breath relaxing. Outside, the lake gives the docks a slow shove, then calls the sound back to itself. The town trains children to ring bells for winners, to baptize new crews at St. Brigid’s with public clangor and private rules. Kids learn who is worth hearing. The rest get edited.
“I’ll print what’s left,” Mr. Del Toro says. “You can take copies. The jig stays.”
“It should,” I say. “It’s a witness.”
He meets my eye with something like relief. “She built it to fix a small shake in her wrist when she was tired,” he says. “I told her everybody shakes. She told me some people have to prove they don’t.”
I pack the locket again, face-down on felt, and let the zipper teeth close like a quiet verdict. I thank him with my hands, firm, because words here get filed under speeches and I want to file under work. Ruth signs her name on the visitor clipboard without the flourish she saves for affidavits.
At the door, I look back at the empty divider tab. My body leans toward it like a plant to a window.
“Who has access to your room after hours?” I ask.
“Me,” he says. “Custodial. Admin with master keys. Coaches with misplaced gratitude. Kids who learned the door’s sweet spot from kids older than them. And people with donations who get to be late.”
The line draws a path I don’t like.
Micro-hook: I picture a hand easing a sheet off rings—patient, neat, sure—which is worse than tearing.
Ruth holds the door for me, and the hall carries the ghost of bleach and floor wax, that sour-sweet school perfume that says you’ll graduate from this whether you want to or not. The trophy case glitters to our right. A regatta photo stops me: boys hoisting oars, girls holding towels like flags. In the glass, the church roofline is a dark triangle. At the edge of the frame, a girl’s shoulder intrudes, familiar by absence. I put my finger on the glass without touching it, then make myself move.
“We’re not done here,” I tell Ruth.
“We never are,” she says.
We step into the cold, and the wind brings percolated coffee from a church basement I can’t see and diesel from a bus that’s already left. The bell at St. Brigid’s doesn’t ring, and that feels like strategy. I tighten my scarf and think about a missing sheet with clean holes.
I don’t know yet who pulled the page.
I do know they used the kind of care people save for heirlooms.