I brace my elbows on cool steel and lean into the circle of light. The lab’s magnifier hovers above the bracelet like a curious moon, its rim fogged from my breath. I smell ethanol and salt and the faint rubber of lab gloves, the scent I once thought belonged only to other people’s emergencies. Outside the window, Graypoint’s harbor draws its tight curve, funneling weather toward the single white gnash of Widow’s Teeth. The wind picks up and taps the panes with rain that tastes metallic in the air.
“We’re alone,” Jonah says, peering around a rack of core tubes labeled by tide dates. “She left the badge on the desk, door logs cleared. We’ve got an hour before faculty coffee.”
“Then we make it a deposition,” I answer, and shift the bracelet with a pair of tweezers. Its stamped plastic looks cheap until the magnifier reveals its afterlife: a film of grit, a glittering fleck like old boat paint, something that could be a diatom skeleton or a bit of broken promise. My skepticism hovers with the lens; storms touch everything out there. Grit can hitch rides for years.
Jonah powers up a tablet and opens a folder labeled with a date and the harbor’s abbreviated coordinates. He keeps his voice soft, like the gulls could file affidavits. “Baseline from the shoal before the winter dredge. Baseline from the eastern ramp. And… bracelet residue.”
“I need the numbers,” I say. “Not the poetry.”
“Particle diameters: bimodal distribution,” he reads. “Coarse sand spikes at 0.5 to 1 mm, with a long tail of silts under 63 micrometers. That double hump shows up in storm crossflow at the Teeth. The eastern ramp doesn’t have it.”
I glance from the tablet to the magnifier. The grains sit like a tiny constellation, some rounded, some angular. “Rounded says travel,” I murmur. “Angular says fresh break.”
“You’re getting insufferable,” he says, but he smiles. “Here—the diatom panel. We’ve got a dominance of Paralia sulcata and Skeletonema fragments, which is typical of nearshore winter turbulence. The kicker is trace paint—zinc-rich, matching the wrecked mooring buoy they replaced after the squall. That’s on the storm report.”
My skepticism wobbles. Widow’s Teeth isn’t a metaphor in this light; it’s a factory for certain shapes of damage. “When did the buoy tear?” I ask.
He taps a line item. “Three days after the storm, but the scrape started the night of—the buoy was yawing, scouring. The lab cross-checked flakes from the buoy base with what’s embedded in the bracelet scum. Zinc ratio and binder polymer match.”
The magnifier enlarges one blue-gray fleck until it’s a country on a map. I breathe, keep the tweezers steady, and let the numbers enter my bones. I’m impressed in spite of myself. I’m also furious at the elegance of the proof: the very storm Vivienne used as a shroud now pries up the edge of the fabric.
I make myself go methodical. I photograph the bracelet from four angles, include a scale ruler, and hold my breath each time so the focal plane stays crisp. The tablet’s light paints my fingers with cold. The town smells different from up here—less kelp, more metal wetness, printer toner drifting from a corner machine spitting out tide graphs. Old-line families hire fishermen to guard empty estates through winter; here a lab bench guards the truth better than any living man.
“What does the report call the time window?” I ask.
Jonah scrolls. He reads with the slow patience he uses on depositions. “Storm transport model says peak turbulence between 23:10 and 01:40. The diatom states—” he snorts at himself “—the assemblage suggests winter, but we need the isotope bit for the exact storm. Wait. Here we go: trace mineralogy matches the Teeth core taken two days after the squall. The silt fraction’s rare earth profile fits the erosion spike from the cliff under Sea Ledger—see the lanthanum/cerium ratio bump?”
He turns the tablet so I can see. The graph rises like a bent finger. Erosion, yes. I picture the cliff face under the house, layers of old bottles and shell grit and bones of decorative gardens washing toward one hungry point. The brass bell hangs in my head, tolling donation or death with the same breath. I tap the graph.
“So the bracelet lived at the Teeth that night,” I say. It isn’t a question, but I need the chain of reasoning to weight itself in my chest until it can’t be shifted.
“It wasn’t just a passenger in somebody’s beach bag last month,” Jonah says. “It sat where the current beats specific dust into everything unlucky enough to wait.”
“Specific dust,” I repeat, tasting toner. The language feels right—precise without letting anyone off the hook. “We put that in a paragraph even a judge who hates science can love.”
He scrolls to the signature block and frowns. “She notes the chain-of-custody from you to me to her glovebox, then back. We need to update.”
“We update now,” I say. I pull out the clipboard I’ve started to think of as a second spine. “Specimen ID BR-TEETH-L17—temporary—” I cross out temporary and write “—confirmed—pending final.” I add: “Bracelet residue scraped under magnification, no destructive testing beyond sample lift. Photos attached.”
Jonah uncaps the pen with his teeth and tsk-tsks when the cap gets too close to the steel bench. “You’ve gone full archivist.”
“I liked her because she hated photocopiers,” I say, smiling despite the weight of the room. “Hate implies standards.”
We both go quiet. The magnifier hums. Rain textures the windows, and the shoal’s white boil flashes between streaks—gnashing against the gray. A gull rides the wind scything over the water and then gives up, angling toward the yacht club where antique sextants will sit beside venture “mentorships” on a silent-auction table again this spring. Mercy as branding; justice as seating chart.
“Question,” Jonah says softly. “Does this help Tamsin, or does it just make the storm prettier?”
“It fixes time,” I say. “The bracelet’s not a souvenir. It was present, then. Whatever happened to Lark wasn’t a lake tale, it was Graypoint’s harbor with all its habits.” I keep my gaze on the plastic curve under the lens. “And if Vivienne argues the bracelet was planted, the rare earth profile fights back.”
Jonah nods, not with triumph, but with the grim satisfaction of a fisherman setting a line correctly against a current. He opens the lab’s little printer and shakes out a sheaf of pages. The paper has that fresh, warm smell like bread, and the black of the graphs looks almost oily under the lamp.
“Here’s the formal bit,” he says. “She linked the particle distribution to the storm report by date. That gets us the time stamp the court can’t call poetic.”
I let the words press into me until my shoulders loosen. I initial the corner of each page with a tight, unsentimental M.E., then ask for the tablet again. I want to read everything, not just the prettiest parts.
The final page carries a small footnote that makes my skin tighten: Paint flake binder includes a polyurethane additive consistent with municipal buoy replacement batch; supplier code GP-FO-17. I know those letters. GP for Graypoint. FO for Foundation Operations. Seventeen for the fiscal year Lark “died.”
“Say that code,” I ask, though I can recite it from memory.
Jonah reads it out loud and then looks at me. “You recognize it.”
“Foundation storage requisitions,” I say. “That’s how they track vendor kits. Buoys, storm glass, all the ceremonial junk, and—” I stop, the word too bitter “—and bereavement packets.”
He exhales through his teeth. “They ordered the buoy paint.”
“Or our operations office did, because donors like their names on things,” I say. “Either way, the paper trail eats its own tail. The same storeroom that held bereavement cash and NDAs could have processed this paint order.”
We stand in the lab’s bright hush and let the implication thrum. The town’s clean invoices have always been the dirtiest part.
“Chain-of-custody,” Jonah says after a beat, pulling me back into the comfort of boxes to check. “Let’s record the report receipt, the photographs, your initial, my timestamp, and this note about the supplier code.”
I write, slow enough for my hand to make it permanent: Report received by J.R., witnessed by M.E.; residue origin consistent with Widow’s Teeth during storm date; rare earth profile matches cliff erosion under Sea Ledger. Then, below that, I add: Addendum: supplier code GP-FO-17 appears in binder analysis; see Foundation Operations requisitions. My pen clicks a tiny punctuation at the end and I feel fortified in a way caffeine can’t replicate.
Jonah slides the bracelet back into its labeled evidence pouch, the plastic whispering as it closes. He checks the zip twice, then photographs the seal. “Do we leave a copy of the report here?”
“We leave nothing,” I say. “We take copies, hide one in the sextant, and carry one to the courthouse when the clerk’s light turns green.”
“You and your bells,” he teases. “When this is over, you’re going to hear them in dishwashers.”
I don’t tell him I already do. I glance down at the bracelet and think of Tamsin’s burner-texted caution: no police, no press, no Vivienne. Protecting family can be hiding the truth or revealing it. Today I can pretend they’re the same because this truth lives in numbers that belong to no one.
The lab door shudders when a gust hits the outer stairwell. I look at the clock. We’re inside our hour but not by much. Jonah gathers the printouts into a manila folder and tucks the chain-of-custody under the clip. I slip the pouch into my coat’s inner pocket like a talisman I refuse to worship.
“One more,” I say, holding the tablet so the footnote fills the screen. “If GP-FO-17 is the batch, then the storage ledger will have the receiving line. Date, vendor, invoice. If the same requisitions shelf holds bereavement kits, we follow the shelf.”
“Door marked ‘Foundation Storage,’” he says, catching up not because he’s slow but because he wants me to own the thought. “You know where the door is.”
“I know the door,” I say. “I’ve signed past it a hundred times and never looked harder than the varnish.”
He presses two fingers to the bracelet pouch through my coat and meets my eyes. “We don’t take a crowbar. We take a camera, and we take the facts that don’t mind light.”
“I’ll take both,” I say, and the joke lands with the weight of intention. We tidy the bench like we were never here—gloves binned, magnifier eased back to neutral, lamp clicked off so the room’s gray returns.
As we shoulder the exit, the harbor throws a handful of sleet against the door. Widow’s Teeth pulses white, then disappears beneath a swell. I pull the folder under my coat and feel the chain-of-custody press my ribs. The town smells like wind and wet rope and, for a second, caramelized sugar from a bakery warming its ovens—a ghost of Lark’s notebooks hovering where science can’t quantify it.
“You fortified?” Jonah asks as we start down the stairs. His hand skims the rail as if taking the lab’s pulse.
“I am,” I say, and I mean it. “But I’m also counting cameras.”
“I’m already on them,” he says. “Yacht club’s got a new dome at the corner. The fishermen guard the empties. Everyone’s watching; nobody sees.”
We reach the last step. The wind snaps at my collar and blows the words away so only my mouth remembers the shape: Foundation Storage. I tighten my grip on the folder until the cardboard edges bite.
“We go now,” I say.
“We go quiet,” he answers.
And I leave the lab with science in my pocket and a footnote in my teeth, already tasting the varnish on a door I have to open without breaking it—yet.