They sent their methods and observations to a second independent sound laboratory. Jonah disliked the wait. He was an expert in his own right, and another expert's caution could feel like an insult. Lena reminded him that the case did not need a brilliant revelation. It needed a result that anyone capable could check. She placed two graphs side by side and showed him how a splice could be identified without guessing at the editor's intentions. He listened closely. The sound of a daughter teaching a father something new was unfamiliar enough to hurt and lovely enough to make him stay.
Meanwhile, Mei interviewed families whose voices appeared in the Riverbend collection. Some wanted the archive returned without conditions. Others feared that placing it entirely in a community trust would mean no funding for preservation. A grandson of one broadcaster supported a commercial release, arguing that royalties could pay for education and medical care. Marisol did not dismiss him. She asked for a transparent accounting and a seat at the table. The argument became more serious, less satisfying, and therefore more real than the simple story the press wanted. There was no united family voice waiting for Jonah to discover it. He would have to support a process in which people might vote against his preference.
Graham Voss used the disagreement to his advantage. In an interview he called the families "passionate but divided" and said Marwick could provide professional stability. He offered an escrow account for future revenue, without disclosing how its administrator would be selected. He also claimed that Jonah had withheld important evidence about an old release signature. That part was true in the narrow sense that Jonah had not known about the inserted page when he spoke publicly months before. Jonah resisted issuing an angry response. He gave Mei the complete record instead, including his uncertainty, and agreed that the hearing should consider it. His restraint disappointed the journalist who called asking for a confrontation. Jonah could live with that disappointment.
A retired teacher named Mrs. Dorsey agreed to let Lena and Marisol inspect a trunk of community documents. Her house smelled of cedar and lemon peel. She remembered the union reading room and the nights the women from the radio station invited neighbors upstairs to debate whether the equipment should belong to the union or to an independent cooperative. Mrs. Dorsey was ninety-one, and Lena recorded the interview only after explaining where the file would be stored and who could listen to it. The old woman smiled at the question. "At my age," she said, "everybody wants my memories until I ask where they're putting them."
The trunk contained minutes from neighborhood meetings, receipts for microphone parts and a list of families who donated coins to buy a transmitter. The meeting minutes named a rotating committee, not a private owner. One page referred to a written charter approved later that year, but the charter itself was absent. Mrs. Dorsey said a man from a museum had once borrowed copies and never returned them. She could not remember his name. Lena asked whether he had left a card. The teacher pointed toward a biscuit tin full of old business cards. Most had faded. One bore Harold Fen's restoration laboratory logo. Jonah stared at the date penciled on its back: eight years after Fen supposedly received the red reel for a single technical examination.
The date mattered because Marwick's provenance statement claimed the laboratory had acquired the entire collection much earlier, through Jonah's release. A later visit to a private home suggested that the lab knew ownership remained disputed. It was not definitive proof of wrongdoing, but it weakened the story of an uncomplicated purchase. Mei requested discovery of Fen's historical correspondence through the relevant legal process. Marisol photographed the card with Mrs. Dorsey's permission and promised to return it before leaving. The old woman kept the original in her tin. She had spent too long watching important men carry neighborhood papers away in polished folders.
That evening the second laboratory sent a preliminary technical report. The Marwick audio had been assembled from at least two generations of sources, with a cut at the moment Vera began speaking about ownership. The report did not identify the editor or establish who possessed the originals.
The second laboratory asked for a written description of the signal chain used to digitize the cassette, including the machine's speed and any software filters. Lena located her earlier notes and discovered she had omitted a basic detail: the cassette player's motor had been serviced shortly before transfer. She corrected the report before the comparison was circulated. It was embarrassing to catch her own omission while examining another company's omissions, but she wrote it plainly. Jonah did not tell her that nobody would notice. He helped her find the technician's service receipt. If they expected Marwick to account for every change, they needed to apply the same standard to themselves.
It did, however, show that the advertised "unaltered master" was not unaltered. Lena leaned over the screen, relieved not because the discovery proved her father correct, but because the laboratory named its limitations as carefully as its findings. She had learned to distrust certainties too beautiful to examine.
Then came a message from an unfamiliar sender: a short sound file with no description. Lena listened through headphones. It opened with a room full of people moving chairs, then Vera's voice saying, "Before anybody sings, we must ask who gets to speak for us." A man answered, "The owners." Vera replied, "Then we have the wrong meeting." The file ended with a chair scraping and the click of a reel recorder. Beneath it was a note: IF YOU PLAY THE REST, SOMEONE YOU LOVE WILL HAVE TO EXPLAIN WHAT HE SIGNED.
CHAPTER 10