Book Eight, Chapter 37: Drowned

This was one of those rare storylines we played in the age of cell phones. None of them were smartphones, of course, but that didn’t matter when the nine missing boats failed to arrive in time for weigh-in. People in the crowds who had shown up to see the awards ceremony started calling their friends and family out on the boats.

No one answered.

Anna was calling her dad from her character’s cell phone, and like everyone else, it rang unanswered and went to voicemail.

Antoine went to bond with the locals while I filmed, feeling like a real creep, too, because these people were sad and vulnerable. It was surprisingly silent. People didn’t want to speak the worst possibilities into existence.

It was moments like these that could feel so real in Carousel. No one was over the top. I had seen people mourning mass shootings and plane crashes on TV before. The feeling in the air was exactly like that as people waited for news of survivors, for answers of any kind, really.

I noticed that Cassie was walking around with a large basket of flowers and handing them out to people. They were little white weeds, from what I could tell, but she would hand them to distressed people, and they would thank her.

Eventually, we crossed paths, and she handed me one of the little white flowers.

She was clearly using her Wards of Affection trope to try to strengthen people against spiritual attacks and supernatural foes, but as she handed me a flower after we crossed paths, I held it in my hands, and even with my psychic background active, I didn’t really feel any sort of power coming from it.

I was never one to lean into my psychic abilities. Still, the fiasco with the psychic clown apocalypse had made me ultra-aware of the supernatural sensations that had once felt so subtle I could ignore them.

I felt nothing. Maybe I was being blocked.

Was this even a supernatural storyline? It was too soon to know. While we had some time Off-Screen, we didn’t get a chance to meet and share information.

Eventually, Dexter, the guy running the tournament, started barking orders over the loudspeaker as emergency vehicles began pulling into the campgrounds where the story was set.

“All right, folks,” he said. “It seems that some of our contestants have gotten lost. Remember that this lake has lots of fingers, twists, and turns, and no one’s been on it in many years. Nothing to panic about here, folks. We’re going to go out and look for them. All right, we’re going to bring them home.”

If only the man could put an ounce of confidence in his voice, that might have reassured people. Instead, it made them more nervous.

No one who had made phone calls managed to get through, and people were lining up to volunteer for the search-and-rescue boats.

I found Antoine while we were On-Screen and we started filming some footage together.

“It seems that some of the contestants did not return by weigh-in,” Antoine said to the camera, “So we’re going to go out and look for them right now. We don’t think it’s an emergency, but we are concerned. It’s been about an hour since they were supposed to be back, and nine boats are still missing. The current theory is that there are parts of the lake with unseen obstacles that may have caused the boats to become submerged or trapped. That’s no big deal. We know how to handle situations like this, and my team and I would be glad to lend a hand.”

What did he mean by my team? It was just me.

Before we could load on the boats, the whole area went On-Screen as a man wearing a bright orange life vest started running toward the crowd from along the rocky beach, waving his arms and screaming, “Wait!”

He was a little overweight. The way he wheezed and stumbled as he ran, you would think he had just ran a marathon. The real trouble was that he was drunk as a skunk, absolutely plastered.

Antoine and I made our way toward him as he reached the crowd and started catching his breath. He looked like he was about to hurl.

Antoine must have recognized him.

“Sir, are you one of the missing fishermen?” he asked as people began crowding around.

The man took a few moments to get words out, but he was nodding his head energetically.

“My brother,” he said. “My brother and I were on our boat. He fell in the water.”

The man dropped to his knees right there on the asphalt. Tears were rolling down his face.

“I couldn’t find him anywhere. I tried, I tried, I just, he just went under,” he added through tears.

Just then, Dexter arrived, trying his best to exude authority and failing. “Robbie, what are you saying about your brother?”

The man, Robbie, was breathing in deep and catching his breath.

“We was out fishing around Myrtle Cove, you know up there where they got them tree limbs in the water. Well, we used to fish out there all the time before the lake went kaput. And there was this girl in the water. She was drowning, waving for us. Well, we trolled the boat on over, and Donald reached down to help her up, but then he fell overboard.”

The man might have been drunk, but his story was sobering, the way it silenced other people.

“I went right after him, trying to grab for him, for the girl, but somebody pulled me down into the water. I swear I tried to find Donald, but I was wearing this life jacket when he went under. I couldn’t swim down to him, and something was pulling at my leg. I just kicked, and I kicked until I got to shore, and I ran right here.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“Now hold on, folks,” Dexter said. “Just a second while we get to the bottom of it.”

He then turned to Robbie and said, “What girl are you talking about in the water? Has a girl gone missing?”

Anna was there, and she was flipping through the registration pages.

She shook her head. “None of the teams that went missing had any women on them,” she said.

“No, no,” Robbie said. “This was a younger girl. I couldn’t see her face well cause she kept thrashing underwater. She had blonde hair and golden eyes. We was trying to save her.”

The whole crowd burst with people relaying to each other what he had been saying and commenting on it.

“Did she have a necklace?” Anna asked, cutting through the bickering and worry.

Robbie looked up at her, finally able to stop wheezing, and said, “Yes, I think she did. I know she did. Pearl necklace.”

Anna, giving it her best as an actress, looked like she had seen a ghost, or at least in this case heard someone talking about having seen one.

Someone from the crowd said, “You reckon that’s where everybody else is? They’re out there, and to help this girl, maybe.”

As if that made sense. It was better than nothing, though.

Someone else said, “Robbie, you’re drunk. What the hell are you talking about?”

They weren’t wrong. The alcohol issue was probably introduced to allow some people to dismiss his story if they wanted to.

“We need to go forward with the rescue teams,” Dexter said. “Robbie, can you show us where this happened?”

Robbie nodded his head.

The crowd started to move toward the docks as the story went Off-Screen.

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