Chương 280: 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." A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"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. - For the first time since the story started, the five of us joined up together to share information.

"He was describing my character's sister," Anna said as we huddled together.

"She had blonde hair and golden eyes. I had a picture of her in my diary. Look." She reached into her bag, pulled out a black-and-white composition notebook, and flipped through it, revealing a rectangular photograph of a teenage girl.

"She's the enemy," Cassie said.

"I used Reflective Jump Scare earlier, and that's who I saw." It was all coming together.

"So we're talking about a ghost," I said.

"Some sort of drowned ghost dragging people to a watery grave. We were bound to get one eventually… But wait a second, one of the NPCs said that your sister drowned in the pool down the road five years ago, not in the lake." Ghosts tend to be specific about the places they haunt.

"The lake would have been completely fenced off five years ago," Camden said.

"It was a huge project. They did everything they could to keep people and animals out of it. KRSL really screwed this place over. That's why they were generous enough to pay for the rehab. They even pay my character's salary."

"Yeah. She was found in the pool. They said it was an accidental drowning," Anna said.

"But look here. The pages in my diary right before it happened are ripped out. That's got mean something."

"Nice catch," I said.

"The girl next door has a dark secret. Also, having sisters named Joanne and Anna is confusing." Anna ignored my last comment.

"I don't know what happened. She feels so guilty about her sister's death, but it doesn't say why," Anna said. The needle on the plot cycle was moving pretty quickly. It looked like this was going to be a pretty short story.

"All right, we'll go out to search for the missing people," Antoine said.

"We can probably all come up with excuses to go together, can't we?"

"Easy enough," Camden said.

"Cassie, are you sensing anything about this ghost?" I asked, "Because I'm not picking up any psychicness." Cassie shrugged.

"I checked around my cabin," she said, "for some sort of book on lake monsters or something, you know, because I have that It Is Written trope. But I didn't find anything. Nothing about ghosts either. My character is more of a nature-lover, free-spirited type. Thinks they should have left the lake alone. She thinks we're fooling ourselves and that nature will get revenge." Other than Reflective Jump Scare giving her a look at Anna's sister, she wasn't having any luck from the supernatural angle.

We talked a little bit more, sharing what information we had gotten from the townspeople, but we were about to be back On-Screen, so we all took our places to get ready. On-Screen. Antoine and I loaded onto his boat and waited for the others while stowing the fishing gear.

"Do you guys mind if I go with you? Our boats are already full," Camden asked, appearing beside us on the dock.

"Hop on in," Antoine said.

"We could use someone familiar with the lake." Cassie got on similarly. Anna's entry onto the boat was a little bit more dramatic.

"Please, my dad was on our family boat. I need to look for him," she said, holding back tears and trying to appear strong.

"I won't take much room."

"All right," Antoine said.

"Go ahead and untie us and then hop on." That was simple. We, along with every other boat in the marina, started flying out onto the lake. Unfortunately, since it had just been reopened, there weren't actually that many other boats, and emergency services were having difficulty finding any. So they were commandeering the locals' watercrafts, but we managed to sneak out before they showed up asking for ours.

The only part of the lake we knew was cleared was the part that Antoine and I had fished in, so the first place we went was a cove near where we had fished that we had never actually gone down.

"I don't know where all these boats could be," Antoine said.

"If it were one boat, maybe, but nine? I can't imagine nine boats getting caught anywhere, trying to rescue drowning victims or otherwise." Since the boat was going full throttle, he had to scream every word.

"Maybe some type of submerged sandbar," Camden responded.

"A place that looks deeper than it is could be a perfect trap for someone looking to find some bass." Of course, we knew that we weren't going to find the missing people stranded on some sandbar in the lake looking for a tow, but we had to keep our spirits up so that when we found out what was happening, we could act surprised. And that's exactly what happened. First, we found a little metal boat with its engine still running, idling. Whoever had been driving it was missing, and it was now caught in some brush.

We would have investigated it more fully if a bright yellow boat nearby hadn't caught our eye before we could. It was easier to get to. It too was completely abandoned. The lake was filled with twists and turns, but it wasn't so large that nine boats could hide in it. In fact, it was a little weird that no one had seen this boat during the actual tournament, but I was sure the audience wouldn't realize that until days later.

"This is making no sense," Camden said as we approached the yellow boat. Unlike the little metal one, its motor was not on, but as we got closer, we began to smell a burnt, oily smell.

"This looks like its motor got caught up in some weeds," Antoine said.

"Are those flowers?"

"Best cut off the engine," I said.

"Get the trolling motor out." We quickly did so, moving the rest of the way with the little onboard foot-powered motor instead of the big one in the back. Sure enough, when we got close, we saw that the propeller for the yellow boat was absolutely trashed with green, slimy weeds with little yellow flowers, the kind that could be seen growing in the water along many of the shores of the lake.

"We need to keep looking," Anna said.

"My dad's boat is gray with red stripes."

"We'll keep looking," Antoine said.

"We'll do what it takes to find it." Antoine's character was going to get a huge ratings bump after this. As we moved out of the area to deeper waters where we could use the big motor, all we could do was wonder what the ghost of Joanne Reed had to do with all these disappearances. Vengeful spirits all had one thing in common: grievances. The way Anna's diary explained it, Joanne had drowned in a pool. No foul play was suspected. Why was she now on a rampage?