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.

When it came apart it came apart through the money, the way these things always do. One of the older women had a son, and the son asked reasonable questions, and the reasonable questions had no answers, and then there were lawyers, and then there was the kind of quiet official visit our street had unfortunately grown familiar with. Eleanor did not go quietly, exactly, but she went. The house emptied out over a hard, strange month.

And the chimes came down. That is the image that stays with me: a work crew, hired by whoever handles these things, taking down two hundred wind chimes one by one and dropping them into contractor bags, and the sound of it -- a final, chaotic, hours-long jangle as they were unstrung -- being the loudest the porch had ever been, louder than any windstorm, a whole con's worth of alarm bells ringing at once as the thing they protected fell apart.

The new neighbors hung exactly one wind chime, a small brass one, tasteful, near their kitchen door. And I will tell you, to my genuine surprise, that I like it. It rings now and then and I do not flinch. It just sounds like a chime. It does not sound like a warning. It took me a while to understand the difference, but Eleanor taught me: noise is only unbearable when it is hiding something, and the most maddening sound on earth is the sound of somebody keeping you away from the truth.