Book Eight, Chapter 38: Tangled

We took the boat the long way around the lake, sticking to the shoreline instead of cutting across anywhere, making sure we got a good look at every nook and cranny where a boat might be found.

Funny enough, for as much ground as we covered, we never saw any of the other rescuers. It was like their script was telling them to avoid us to make us feel isolated on a wild lake. Carousel could take the footage and make it look reasonable, but anyone who actually saw the lake would know how silly that was. It wouldn’t take more than a few hours to see every square inch of the Carousel Basin Lake.

“Got a boat up ahead,” Antoine said once we were On-Screen.

This one was harder to see. It was dark-colored and ran up under some fallen scrub oak that had fallen into the water.

“I don’t see anyone aboard,” Anna said.

“Well, that one’s closer to the bank,” Antoine said as he powered down the engine. “Let’s stick to the trolling motor. We don’t need to get our propeller gunked up… You know, I think this is close enough to the edge that they could have climbed up onto land if they wanted to.”

And they would have had to climb, because it was a steep incline from the lake to the forest above. If they were properly motivated, they could have made it, although it wasn’t clear whether the boat drifted to that location or was maneuvered there.

As we moved closer, it was easy to see that this boat’s propeller was also tangled in plant matter.

“Got some aggressive freshwater seaweed or something around here,” I said. They might not have been able to see the propeller yet. I could because I was zooming in on it with my powerful camera.

Camden shook his head. “The population of underwater foliage has been rebounding ever since we started restocking the lake. We had a warm spring in the last couple of weeks. The bladderworts have been popping up all over.”

For as smart as Camden sounded, I could almost see him reading off the red wallpaper where he had memorized information using his Photographic Memory trope.

Anna flipped through some papers in her hands that she had brought. “Wait a second,” she said. “This isn’t one of the boats registered for the tournament.”

That made some amount of sense. It was a pontoon party vessel. There were no fishing poles or any fishing gear on it that I could see, other than a long-handled fishing net. It was a double-decker. The pontoons underneath were bigger than most conoes.

“That’s one of ours,” Camden said. “I’m sure of it. That’s one of our research vessels. It was just at the docks before we left.”

I continuously filmed between those who were talking.

“Are you saying that this boat was abandoned in the last hour?” Antoine said. He was at the front of the boat steering the trolling motor, so getting a good shot of him was easy.

“I swear it was there. I sent my secondary team out on it,” Camden said. “Get me up close. I need to get up there.”

Antoine did as requested.

“Maybe we should leave it alone,” Cassie said, speaking up for the first time. “You shouldn’t disturb the vessel of the dead.”

“Oh, hush,” Camden said. “We don’t know anybody is dead.”

He jumped from the front of our boat onto the pontoon deck and quickly made his way to the pilot seat.

“I smell a blown engine,” Antoine said. “Twin engines. Wow.”

I smelled it too. It really was so easy to blow an engine by movie logic.

I zoomed in on the vegetation that had wrapped itself around the boat’s propellers underwater. It was so thick I could see the yellow flowers all throughout.

“They were taking samples,” Camden said. “They must have been interrupted because they didn’t even close their kit.” Then he paused for a moment as he clearly tried to remember the names of his assistants. “This is Jezebel’s, and that’s Dieter’s. All the others, too.”

He made those up. They must have gotten so little screen time that he hadn’t thought to remember them, which was ironic for a guy who could literally remember anything if he chose to, through Carousel’s magic.

Maybe Jezebel and Dieter were real. What did I know?

I shut off my camera when we went Off-Screen. I had to change the battery. Then I had an idea. Carousel must have liked it too, because we went On-Screen almost as soon as we had gone Off.

I plugged in the new battery and said, “You know, the place we were fishing this morning must have been right in view of the yellow boat we found earlier. I think I’ll go over some of our footage to see if we caught anything.”

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I powered on my camera, flipped out the viewing screen, and started fast-forwarding through all the footage I shot.

While we were going through the interviews, something I noticed was that of all the people at the docks, only a fraction of them were wearing life jackets, and one of those people happened to be Robbie, the drunkard who had survived whatever monster had attacked.

I looked over on the boat toward the stowing area where all of our life jackets were stored. It was such a silly thing to overlook. In Carousel, you couldn’t really drown unless you wanted to or something else wanted you to. Grit helped you hold your breath, Hustle allowed you to maneuver easily, and you hardly needed Mettle to paddle because you were basically using plot armor as a flotation device. That was just movie magic.

I made a mental note to put on a life jacket, seeing as my low plot armor was about to become really relevant.

Finally, when I had passed all the interviews I had taped, I saw footage of us out fishing. Skipping ahead, I found footage from the cove where we had filmed most of our successful work, pulling in catfish after catfish. Because of the nature of how we had to work together to pull in those big fish, a lot of it wasn’t on film, and I had to point the camera away at times, leaving it on its tripod. But sure enough, we got lots of footage of the cove where the yellow boat had been discovered.

I wondered which happened first. Did we happen to catch footage of that area because that’s where the yellow boat was, or did Carousel put the yellow boat over there because that’s where my camera kept pointing? I would never know.

“It looks like it’s already abandoned,” Antoine said as he stared down at the yellow boat. “It’s not moving. Whatever happened must have happened just after sunrise.”

“Yeah, looks like we got to our spot too late. We had meandered a bit,” I said.