Bay found it impossible to get to sleep and stay asleep that night. She had always been a light sleeper, her entire life, and cursed with insomnia in periods that came in waves of weeks at a time, but this was a different kind of sleeplessness than she was used to. Her air mattress provided her no comfort as she rolled around in the dark of an unfamiliar room, unable to stop thinking about what she had seen.

A woman was dead. Her head had been in a bucket. Like some kind of scene from the French Revolution, with heads coming off under the guillotine. She somehow doubted that poor woman's death had been so easy and clean, though. It was a horrible thought that people who were executed probably had an easier time of it, but Bay couldn't help but think it.

Almost without meaning to, she looked up a news story about the death, found the woman's name. It was a shock, perhaps, that the police had not only identified her but had released that information to the public. Justine Mulvais.

It didn't take long to find the woman's socials. She had linked her Facebook and Instagram, both of which were public. It didn't take a lot to confirm that she had found the correct J. Mulvais: the most recent photos were all taken at Arcadis. The comments were such a jarring thing to look at-- a completely innocuous last few posts, but under each one was someone (a friend? a curious stranger?) writing "RIP" or crying emojis or some other message that did nothing to capture the gravity or enormity of what had happened. Social media wasn't designed for eulogizing.

Bay clicked on one of the people who were tagged in the photo, a smiling woman carrying a child, probably about four years old, on her shoulders. Marie Whittacre. Her most recent Instagram post was a black square, and Bay checked to read the caption.

> "i told justine to txt me when she got home safe but i figured she had just forgot. i fell asleep and didnt try to txt her til this morning and then i get a call from police saying they found a body wearing my bracelet at the park nd can you identify the body and i told them right away who it was.

>

> cant believe it

>

> best friend since we were three years old we went to every single thing together and now shes just gone. if i didnt have ray i have to look out for idk what id do

>

> who the hell would kill a woman like that and do what they did to her it makes me die just thinking about it and if i ever find out who did it god cant stop me from what i need to do

>

> they made me look at her to make sure they had the right person and i swear i wish i hadnt seen it nobody but the devil is meant to see things like that. glad they called me and not her ma shes a nice woman doesnt deserve what happened to her daughter doesnt deserve to have to see that

>

> dont call me dont text me i dont want to talk to u unless youre justine and justine is dead so dont talk to me i swear to god"

It was a painful thing to read, and Bay put down her phone feeling shaken. It was voyeuristic for her to creep on this woman's socials, but she couldn't undo doing it. Clearly this woman, Marie, knew that people were going to look, or she wouldn't have put up a statement like that, but that didn't make Bay feel any better for having looked.

She had felt sick after seeing the dead woman's head, but that was probably nothing compared to what Marie had experienced when she had been made to ID the body. Her finger hovered over the private message button, considering sending her a message, but Marie had been clear that she didn't want to talk, and what would Bay have said, anyway? Nothing.

She stared up at the black ceiling of her room, laying flat on her back, listening to the unfamiliar house creak in the wind. The social media photographs were confirmation that the woman (Justine, she reminded herself-- a person, not just a body) had been killed at Arcadis, or at least taken from there. The question was when, really. Had she been dragged off into the woods? Kidnapped as she walked back to her car in the parking lot? Tied up in a locker room and hidden until the park was empty for the night? The idea was too creepy.

She kept imagining it, some kind of faceless monster, creeping up behind this woman, dragging her down the shadowy path back behind the pavilion, holding a knife to her back to force her to walk along... Bay wondered how exactly she had been killed. Probably the head wasn't the first thing to go. Maybe it was. The scenarios danced through her mind, each grimmer than the last, until she pictured the wolf dragging the body along through the woods, up to the fence and... She stopped. It wouldn't be so easy to hoist the body up and over, or to force a living person to climb. Maybe the body parts had been hacked up beforehand, and tossed over one by one. Or. The fence.

Oh, God, the fence.

She picked up her phone, texted Jonah.

> the fence hole

A reply came faster than Bay had been expecting, but perhaps she should have been expecting that Jonah was not asleep.

< what about it

> actually.

> do you want to know what I'm going to say?

< everyone who asks me that question knows the answer is no but i tell them to tell me anyway

> the woman was murdered like from cicada, right

> i looked at her fb and that was the last place she was

< yeah. probably. at least too many coincidences for it to not be

> i was thinking

< that's generally a bad idea

> i know. anyway

> i kept imagining like how the murderer got the body out

> and i know I didn't make the fence hole open again

> and we know that the fence hole re opened over the night b/c it was closed yesterday

> and that same night there suddenly was a body in thelake

> anyway. thats my thoughts

< makes sense ig

> i don't like the idea tho

< why

< aside from general murder bad

> its not like the hole is that visible right

> like if you were just someone coming to the fence for the first time

> you wouldn't see it

> you wouldn't know its there

> you wouldn't think to use it

> if you wanted a hole in the fence youd probably cut a new one

< yeah

< true

> so theres like. two bad possibilities.

> murderer knew abt the fence hole somehow probably

> so either they've been hanging out at arcadis and watching us

> or

< really don't like what you're implying

> me either

< you can't just say shit like that bay

< the amnt my neck is already on the line for the staff is like

< so fucking much

> i know i know

> i mean

> i don't think that any of the staff are killers

> not like i know anybody that well.

> i guess

< look i'm not that good at reading people but i don't think

< i mean maybe

< literally fuck all of this

> maybe it was mr calvin

< lol

< it would make a dumb kind of sense

< but probably not

< hes weird and bad but i don't think he's murder culpable

> look idk if it would feel worse to have one of the staff do a murder or have someone creeping

> either way feels extremely bad

< yeah

< i mean somebody else could have cut the fence back open for no good reason

< you left the party early on friday right

< someone could have done it for some reason then

> yeah

> it could be unrelated ig

> i hope its unrelated anyway

< i'd say youre gonna give me nightmares but ive already got those

> yeah sorry for texting you my half baked murder theories at 3am

< its fine lol. not like i haven't also been thinking about it nonstop

< god i'm so not looking forward to tomorrow

< think abt how on edge i am rightnow

< then multiply that by not sleeping

< and sunday crowds

< and probably half the staff isnt gonna show up

< im preemptively losing it

> got any cold medicine you could take

If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

< lol

< maybe

< i should like try to sleep for real tho

< gn

> night

Bay put her phone down again. Sleeping was useless, but there wasn't anything else to do.

----------------------------------------

Jonah had been right about Sunday, in some ways. Bay arrived on time, hyped up on as much coffee as she could physically put in her body. Out of an abundance of caution, she had biked to work along the roads, rather than taking the shortcut through the woods. It had turned a short commute into a long one, and a much more dangerous one, as cars whizzed by on the badly paved roads with no shoulder to speak of.

She wasn't the only one who had the same idea. She found Genesis, the girl who ran the information desk, outside the main Arcadis gates, looking bemusedly around.

"What's the matter?" Bay asked, pedaling up beside her.

"Oh, hey. Bay, right?"

"Yeah."

"Just wondering where the best place to put my bike is. Usually I don't have to worry about it."

"Oh. Hm." Bay considered this problem. "Do you have the gate code?"

"Yeah."

"We can probably toss them in the wave pool pump house. It's usually not full of things."

"Well, what if the wave pool needs to pump?"

"Hah. You think the police are going to be done searching the lake?"

Genesis looked around, slightly conspiratorially. "Probably not until they find the murder weapon."

"And that seems real likely to happen," Bay said. "I'm sure they'll give up before they do."

"Why?"

"I mean, I feel like dumping the murder weapon in the same place you put the body is a recipe for getting caught. But what do I know about murder?"

Genesis shrugged. They walked their bikes over to the gate, and then through, and then pedaled through the still empty park.

"Rest of the staff not here yet?"

"Hopefully they're just all running late and not skipping," Genesis said.

"I wouldn't bet money on it."

"Me neither."

The bikes were locked inside the wave pool pumphouse, and Bay stood outside, feeling the muggy air of the summer morning surround her. The park was weird when it was quiet and not quite fully light out. Walking past the still waters of the normal pool, when no one was around, she had the curious urge to jump in, or perhaps float across the top, footsteps so light as to not even leave a ripple on the surface of the water.

"Coming here to help out now that the wave pool's dead?" someone asked, coming up behind Bay and startling her. She turned around quickly. It was Zach, who she knew but didn't know. Granted, it wasn't as if Bay really knew knew anyone outside of Kyle and Amanda and Jonah.

"Oh, hi Zach," Bay said. "I don't know. Someone should probably stay at the wave pool just to stop guests from wandering into it and drowning themselves." Bay made a nervous kind of laugh at her own joke, but Zach just frowned a little.

"Should probably drain it."

"It does that on its own pretty well. It was pretty low this morning when I came past it."

"It drains faster when the wave pumps are going. Pushes water right out through that crack."

"I know," Bay said. "Where is everybody? It feels like people should be here by now."

Zach waved a hand around at the park. "I think that more people than usual will be skipping their shifts."

"Jonah thought that might happen."

"It doesn't surprise me."

"Why are you here?" Bay asked.

"I'm not afraid of getting murdered," Zach said flatly. "I suppose I should ask you that question."

"I, oh, I don't know. It didn't really occur to me not to come." Bay half laughed again. "Jonah's rubbing off on me, I suppose."

"She here?"

"Probably she will be. She came in late yesterday though."

"She's the one who found the body, right?" Zach asked. "It would have been better if she didn't come in at all yesterday."

"Part of the body, anyway," Bay muttered. "I mean. I guess it's better that she found it rather than having it sitting around in the lake?"

Zach just frowned. "If half the staff aren't going to be here, Jonah should probably do triage on what rides are going to be open and who's going to staff them."

It was at that moment that Jonah showed up, with Kyle and Amanda in tow. Jonah looked terrible. Her sunburn was still clearly raw, and the kind of raw that made one shiny with it. Her hair lay flat on her head, as she hadn't styled it. Her staff shirt was wrinkled, and her eyes had the deepest bags under them that Bay could have possibly imagined.

"You look rough."

"You look only marginally better, so you don't have that much room to talk," Jonah snapped. Bay shrugged. Jonah's poor mood was understandable.

"Hey, don't antagonize the few staff you have left, Rebecca," Zach said.

"Fuck off. Where is everybody else?"

"I've seen a few people around," Bay said. "But I think you were right that we're going to have tough numbers today."

"Urgh. I guess I need to change up the staff assignments... Zach, can you make an announcement and get everybody to meet here so I know who actually is here?"

"Sure." Zach headed away from the flat pool, headed to who knows where, and a minute later, his voice rang out from the crackly speakers around the park. "Aquatics staff, we're meeting right now at the pool. Hustle."

"Taskmaster," Kyle said.

"Not in the mood," Jonah said.

They all waited around silently for a minute, each lost in their own private contemplation, until the rest of the staff who had shown up for work trickled in from around the park. It was about half the normal roster. Jonah sighed, took down names of who was there and who wasn't, and quickly decided which rides actually needed staff, and which ones were ill attended enough to be closed. Everywhere was still criminally understaffed. The pool they were standing at usually had a rotation of three guards, but today it was just going to be two, on the chair all day. They didn't have anyone to switch with. Every slide got one guard. That was it. It was a blessing that the wave pool was closed to begin with. Jonah sent everyone shuffling off.

"And what am I doing?" Bay asked, after she realized that she hadn't been given an assignment.

"You're going to go patch up the hole in the fence."

"Wait, shouldn't we tell the police about it?" Bay looked around, whispering.

Jonah grabbed her arm and pulled her into the locker room, where they didn't see anyone else. "Why?"

"Shouldn't they, I don't know, search it for clues?"

"Does it really matter how the body got over the fence?"

"I don't know," Bay said. "But there might be fingerprints."

"If they can get fingerprints off the fence, they'll only find mine and yours and Amanda's. And loo, Bay, I..."

"What?"

"I don't want the police in here investigating the staff. I don't think that anyone did it, and telling them about the hole would only bring that down on us. Some fucking creep who's been watching us wouldn't--"

The door to the locker room opened, and Jonah hastily stepped back from Bay, shutting her mouth. "What are you two doing in here?" Kyle asked, looking at them rather suspiciously.

"Making sure there's no corpses in the drains," Jonah muttered, pushing past him and leaving.

"She's just pissy about Amanda," Kyle said to Bay, who watched Jonah go, rather forlornly.

"What did Amanda do?"

"Well, it took both of us showing up at her house this morning to convince her to come to work. And then she eventually rode in my car, which I don't think made her any happier."

"Your relationship with Amanda is none of my business," Bay said.

"Glad you see it that way," Kyle said. "Anyway, what were you doing in here?"

"Having a conversation. Is that illegal now?"

"It's just weird."

"Not like you haven't had plenty of 'conversations' in here."

"I really have no idea what you're implying," Kyle said, failing even to fake innocence. "I didn't know Jonah was into you."

Bay rolled her eyes. "Have fun guarding this pool all day long."

"Me and Zach will have the greatest time in the world. Through our long association, we've learned to communicate with each other across the pool deck with a sophisticated kind of sign language."

"I'll go tell Amanda that you're going to spend the whole day watching how Zach moves his body."

That got a laugh out of Kyle, finally. "Look, tell her I'm sorry that she's all alone on waterslide duty."

"Better than the wave pool."

"Yeah."

Bay left the locker room, letting Kyle do whatever he needed to do in there before the park opened. Bay made her way to the maintenance shed, looking around for the twine that had been used to tie the fence back together before. She found it pretty easily, though she couldn't find the wire snips that she would need to accompany it. She settled on a pair of pliers, figuring if she needed to, she could bend the wire back and forth enough times to break it. Besides, this spool of wire was almost out.

The park was open by now, and the first few early crowds were pushing through the park, dispersing and making nuisances of themselves. Odd, Bay thought, how the staff seemed to be the only real people in this transient place, even though the guests were the reason for them to exist. And yet, to the guests, the staff probably had as much meaning to their lives as wallpaper. Completely different worlds, existing overlaid on each other, meeting at the edges.

With so few people around yelling, the piped in music was the loudest sound, and it grew quiet as Bay entered the woods and made a beeline for the fence. It was only after she had gotten there that she realized that, perhaps if a murderer was around, they might be waiting to ambush someone who had gone into the woods alone. Still, she was there at the hole now.

The discarded fence chunk was nowhere to be seen. Bay had hoped to pick it up and patch it back together in the same way it had originally been repaired, by weaving the edges with twine, but since it didn't exist, that wasn't going to happen. She looked around for it for a minute, kicking up the most visible piles of leaves, and peering past the nearby trees, but gave up rather quickly. It was a little worrying that it was gone (after all, why would someone steal it?), but she had a task to do, so she sat down to do it.

In school, Bay had taken one semester of a textile arts class, so knew the basics of weaving. That artistic technique was not what she employed now. Instead, she simply ran her twine back and forth through the nearby fence links, making rows of wire, then repeated it on the diagonals until she ran out of twine and was forced to wrap the edges together with her fingers. It was a clumsy job, but it sealed up the hole. No coyotes would get through, anyway. If human murderers did, that was a different problem, and clearly one that a fence couldn't solve.

She stood, on legs that ached from being crossed, and began the slow walk back to the park. As she walked, something shiny caught her eye, half buried in the leaf litter. Thinking it might be the missing fence piece, and cursing herself for not looking for it harder earlier, Bay stopped and kicked at it gently with her toe. It was not the missing fence piece. It was a pair of wire snips. She had the sinking feeling that they had been the ones she had been unable to find earlier, while looking through the maintenance shed.

Cautiously, as though they were a live bomb, Bay cleared all the debris away from them with her foot, careful not to touch the wire snips herself.

She pulled out her phone and called Jonah, wiggling slightly as she listened to the dial tone. When Jonah answered, her voice echoed, as though she were in some kind of cave.

"Did you fix the fence?" Jonah asked.

"Yeah. I need you to come admire my handiwork."

"Really?"

"Are you busy?"

"I've been riding the Belly of the Whale and calling up everyone who's not at work to yell at them. Other than that, no."

"Ok. I need you to come see it."

"You're not on speakerphone, by the way."

"I'm just being cautious."

"I'll be there in like three minutes." Jonah hung up, and Bay waited in the woods, feeling like every creak of the wind in the branches was something more unpleasant. Even though it was a cloudless day, and hot, it somehow felt eerie.

Jonah arrived, somewhat out of breath, and she took a different path through the woods than Bay had, so Bay had to yell to catch her attention.

"Over here," Bay called. "Careful," she added, when Jonah was several steps away from stepping on the wire snips. She pointed at them, making sure that Jonah saw.

"That's not a murder weapon."

"It's fence cutting shears," Bay said. "Also, for the record, the piece of the fence that got cut out is gone gone."

Jonah bent down, looked closely at the snips. "I think these are..."

"From the maintenance shed," Bay said. "I couldn't find them earlier."

"So, whoever cut the fence came from Arcadis."

"Yeah."

"Doesn't necessarily mean they did the murder."

"It's weird, though."

"Why?"

"It's on this side of the fence," Bay said. "The Arcadis side."

"So?"

"Well, they cut the fence using clips from Arcadis."

"You assume they're from the park, anyway."

"Yeah. I mean, I guess we should try to find out for sure."

Jonah had a concentrated look on her face, then it brightened. "I think we can, but continue what you were saying?"

"So somebody cuts the fence. They go through. They have to come BACK, in order to get these wire snips way over here."

"Hm."

"Weird."

"That makes me feel like it's way less likely for the fence to have been cut by the murderer."

"Why?"

"Why would they come back this direction?" Jonah asked.

"To try to put the evidence back?"

"Then why would they leave it here?"

"Maybe they dropped it?"

"Argh, we're just going in circles," Jonah said. "Did you see any footprints or anything?"

The leaf litter on the ground wasn't the type of material that retained footprints. "No."

"And you're saying the fence piece is missing?"

"Yeah."

Jonah ran her hand through her hair, sticking it up into short little spikes. "Okay. Okay."

"Okay what?"

"Here's my thought. If the fence piece is like, deliberately hidden, maybe it was the murderer who went through."

"Why would they get rid of it though?"

"Fingerprints?"

"Then they wouldn't want to leave these laying around." Bay gestured at the snips again, laying on the ground between them like some kind of dead thing.

"Maybe they like, scratched themself on the sharp edge and got DNA in it."

"Wouldn't they be more likely to get themself on the like main fence part?"

"Did you see any like fabric scraps or anything when you were over there?"

"No."

"This sucks."

"Should we tell the police?"

"Why are you so trusting of them all of a sudden?" Jonah asked. "Weren't you telling me to get a lawyer yesterday?"

"I thought you were too zoned out to see that," Bay said. "I thought they were asking you questions that implicated me a little too much."

"Yeah, and that's why I don't want to tell the police now. I don't want them poking at everyone. Fuck. Mr. Calvin would kill me if I told them that they needed to start interviewing staff."

Bay paced back and forth, sticking her hands into her pockets. "So what do we do?"

"I don't know." Jonah made a kind of unintelligible groaning sound. "Fuck this so much."

"Yeah. I guess we have to decide if it's worse for the police to, you know, be at Arcadis, or if it's worse that maybe one of the staff DID do it?"

"Obviously that's worse," Jonah snapped. "Sorry. You know what I mean."

"Yeah. What was it you were going to say before, about confirming that these came from Arcadis?"

"You think they came out of the maintenance shed, right?"

"Yeah."

"When I was patching the fence up the first time, Amanda sent me this stupid snapchat video of her trying to figure out the best type of twine to use. It might show what was in the shed."

"You still have it?"

"I never looked at it. It should still be in my inbox or whatever."

"Ok. I hope it does."

Jonah pulled out her phone and poked around at it. "Here, you record this with your phone. I don't know how to save a snap video."

"Let's get out of the way so I don't get that in frame," Bay said, nodding once again to the snips. "Just in case."

"Yeah."

It was an awkward configuration, as Jonah held her phone so that Bay could record the screen of it with her own. It was possibly the dumbest thing that she had ever done.

The tinny voice of Amanda rang out. "Jonahhhhhhhh," she said. "Which wire is better? Green or black?" The image spun around somewhat dizzyingly as Amanda flipped the camera back towards herself. "Tell me, or I know I'll bring you the wrong one." She was standing with her back to the wall of the shed, on which were hanging giant gardening shears, the ones that maintenance used to prune back particularly unruly bushes. The sight of it jogged something in Bay's memory, but she waited until the video of Amanda nattering on finished.

"I think those wire snips were on the table in the back," Jonah said, as soon as Bay closed her recording of the phone screen. "The blue handle was kinda visible."

Bay considered how exactly she wanted to voice her suspicions. "How often does maintenance actually do landscaping?" she asked.

"Never, if they can help it," Jonah said. "Why?"

"How likely is it that they'd be pruning bushes today?"

"Not likely at all."

"Those big shears..." Bay said. "The ones on the wall behind Amanda..."

Jonah's face paled, even beneath her hellish sunburn. "Oh, Jesus."