How does a city misplace a 300-year-old, one-ton English bell?

That's what Michael J. Lee, a 76-year-old historian in Peterborough, England, wanted to know. He began sending me e-mails last week asking about the three big bronze bells that his cathedral city, 75 miles north of London, sent across the pond to Pittsburgh in 1987.

Henry Penn cast the bells in 1709. Mr. Penn was no close relation to William Penn, Mr. Lee said, but had a distant Pennsylvania connection nonetheless: He served his apprenticeship at the same English foundry where Ben Franklin's uncle was a blacksmith.

The bells were sold to Americans because overseers of Peterborough Cathedral needed to finance a scheme for new bells there, a decision that Mr. Lee still bemoans. Paul J. Kelly, general manager of what was then Pittsburgh's Vista International Hotel, was in Peterborough on a trade mission and brought back a newspaper article that intrigued one of his neighbors in Ross, James Beck.

"The headline was something like, 'Hey, Yanks, it's not the Liberty Bell but at least it isn't cracked','' Mr. Beck, now a financial adviser in Butler County, remembered yesterday.

He and Mr. Kelly threw in together and paid four figures for the three bells, and then donated the largest one to the city.

This "City Bell'' didn't ring any bells with me, but a computer search found two passing mentions in The Pittsburgh Press in the early 1990s: Mayor Sophie Masloff was scheduled to usher in the new years of 1991 and 1992 by ringing the Pittsburgh City Bell on Liberty Avenue near the Vista, now the Westin Convention Center Hotel.

Joseph Sabino Mistick, Mayor Masloff's executive secretary, hazily remembered some mini-controversy where some folks in England wanted the bell back.

"We cherished the bell,'' he said. "We fought for the bell. They'll have to pull my cold dead fingers from it.''

Evidently, the Masloff administration never told their successors that the city had this bell, however. Tom Murphy, mayor for 12 years beginning in 1994, told me Tuesday he never heard of it.

Oops.

"They really wanted no help from us during the transition,'' Mr. Mistick said, "and I guess as a result they never got to hear about the bell.''

So it has been sitting, silent and forgotten, for more than 15 years, but where?

Mr. Lee e-mailed a clue, a 1987 photo of the bell in the Vista. The hotel has changed hands three times in the years since, but on Tuesday I reached Tracy Woods at the Westin, its current incarnation, and she said there was a big bell in the parking garage under the hotel.

"I've worked here 14 years and I've never seen it out of the garage,'' she said. She put me in touch with Bret Shoemaker, the Liberty Center operations manager, and he agreed to lead me to the bell. By then I was feeling like one of the Hardy Boys.

On Tuesday afternoon, we took an elevator down to the garage and walked up to a large bell, sitting unceremoniously atop a short wooden platform, in plain sight, near a wall. It's dusty, and someone had drawn a Liberty Bell-style crack with a Sharpie, but "1709" is inscribed on the side.

I e-mailed Mr. Lee to tell him I'd cracked the mystery of the errant bell. Though the hour was late in England, he called me to ask if I'd go back to see the inscription. This was one of 10 bells that Mr. Penn cast for "change ringing,'' bells of different pitches meant to be rung together. Each bears a unique Latin phrase.

The next day I went back with Mr. Shoemaker and Edward E. Williams, general manager of the Liberty Center for Forest City Management, joined us. In his 11 years there, he'd always thought this was a replica, not a 300-year-old heirloom.

The translation of the Latin inscription on the City Bell is said to be, "Magnify the Lord with me,'' though I confess I had some difficulty transcribing the full 360-degree Latin inscription, even with a flashlight.

As for the other two bells, Mr. Beck said they're at the Pete Dye Golf Club in Bridgeport, W.Va. His old friend and co-owner of the bells, Mr. Kelly, died several years ago in his native Ireland, and a bell is displayed at the golf club in Mr. Kelly's honor. The other is in storage there until Mr. Beck can find it a suitable home.

Back in England, Mr. Lee, a romantic sort, would like to see the remaining Peterborough Cathedral bell and its slightly smaller American cousin rung in unison in this, the 300th-anniversary year.

Mayor Ravenstahl was home with his young family yesterday in the wake of his Tuesday primary victory and I couldn't reach him. But what mayor would pass on a shot at a transatlantic big-bell concert that comes up once in three centuries?