The Wind Chime Lady Was Running a Con, and the Chimes Gave Her Away

There is a specific madness that comes from wind chimes you did not choose. One set, fine, charming even. But my neighbor Eleanor had, at last count, somewhere near two hundred, strung across a back porch that faced directly into every open window on our side of the street. On a still day it was tolerable. On a windy day it sounded like a cutlery drawer falling down a staircase for six straight hours.

Eleanor was in her late fifties, warm to your face, vague about herself. She said the chimes kept away negative energy. I said the chimes were negative energy, delivered directly into my skull between the hours of noon and never. She laughed like I had made a delightful joke and hung three more.

The street organized against the chimes the way streets do, which is slowly and with great cowardice. We researched ordinances. Wind chimes, it turns out, occupy a legal gray zone -- they are not quite noise pollution, not quite a nuisance, just a slow torture the law has no strong opinion about. We tried appealing to Eleanor's better nature. Eleanor's better nature loved wind chimes. We were, frankly, losing, and I had begun to accept a future of tinkling madness.

Then the chimes did something none of us expected. They started keeping different hours.

I noticed it because I had, by then, become an unwilling expert in Eleanor's soundscape. The chimes had always been a daytime affliction. But that spring they began ringing at odd, specific times -- a burst at 11 p.m., another near 2 a.m., in weather that was otherwise dead calm. Chimes do not ring without wind. Something was moving them. And once I started watching, from behind the blinds we all seem to own, I saw that the something was people. People I did not recognize, arriving at Eleanor's back porch at strange hours, brushing through the curtain of chimes on their way in and out.

It took a few weeks and a nosy retired detective three doors down to piece it together. Eleanor was running something out of that house. Not drugs, as we first, thrillingly assumed. It was a kind of investment scheme -- a friendly, spiritual-sounding one, aimed mostly at older women from her church and her energy-healing circle. She would host them, read their charts or their palms or whatever the pitch required, and steer them into putting money into a fund that existed, we would learn, only in Eleanor's imagination. The wind chimes, the detective figured out, were not decoration. They were an alarm system. Two hundred chimes meant no one could approach that porch, in daylight or dark, without announcing themselves. Eleanor had wrapped her entire operation in a wall of sound and called it spiritual.