The small whale-oil lamp on Pella’s slate desk was smoking slightly. Its yellow flame flickered in the draft that rose from the open floor trench. On the desk lay three separate sheets of paper, each ruled into narrow columns. Imran Bell’s warning from their first meeting in the washroom echoed in Pella’s mind: The moment you fall in love with an explanation, Pella, you stop being an investigator and you become a priest. Keep your measurements clean, keep your hypotheses separate, and never let hope write your ledger.
Her wrist ached from holding the steel sounding rod to her skull for forty minutes. Her ear was red and tender where the metal ball had pressed against the bone. She dipped her steel pen into the black dark oak-ink, her fingers steady despite the mounting excitement in her chest. She had established a strict double-blind transcription protocol. She would record the exact timing of the sound impulses on Sheet A, Eren would record the physical water fluctuations in the drainage trench on Sheet B. Sister Merrow would log the chiming of the city bells on Sheet C.
For an hour, the three of them worked in total silence. Tink. Tink. Tink. Pella made three upright slash marks with her pen. She clicked the stopwatch: one second, two seconds, three seconds, four seconds. Tap-tap-tap. Three small dots. The set repeated eighteen times with clean, steady care, never varying by more than a tenth of a second.
