"I can't deal with this right now," Jonah said, abruptly sitting up. "I'm gonna go home, and I'm gonna sleep, and I'm gonna pretend that I don't see what's on your computer screen right now, and I'm gonna..."

Bay shook her head, minimizing the program. "This can wait until tomorrow."

"It can wait until forever, as far as I'm concerned," Jonah said, but she knew she was lying to herself. The ghostly form floating on the surface of the pool was going to haunt her nightmares, like something straight out of a Junji Ito comic, if Junji Ito worked in smeary looking black and white film, rather than crisp ink lines.

"Yeah," Bay said, a trembling note in her voice. "We can put it away for now."

"How do I keep getting you involved in shit?" Jonah asked, and leaned back on the air mattress. It was so flat that when she put weight on her elbow, she could feel the hard wooden floor through it. "It's not fair."

"Don't worry about it," Bay said. "Seriously."

"I should go home." Bay didn't say anything, and Jonah got the feeling that Bay probably wanted her to stay. Maybe it would be better if they each weren't alone, to cope with this by themselves, but Jonah wanted to forget about it rather than cope. Even though she had just laid down, she struggled back up into a seated position. "Enjoy your day off," Jonah mumbled, then stood.

"Jonah," Bay began, but then trailed off.

"What?"

"Stay sane out there," Bay said finally, though with a reluctance that indicated that was not what she had originally wanted to say.

Jonah put a pained smile on her face. "I'll try."

"You know you can call me if you need me, right?"

"Okay."

"I'm serious. Don't worry about dragging me through it. I'm already through it, okay?"

"Alright," Jonah said. "I will. I promise."

Bay smiled. "I'll walk you out."

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

As Jonah had suspected, the image did not leave her brain. It seemed to exist perpetually behind her eyeballs, warping and shifting to fit itself in to whatever scene she was looking at. She stared at the road as she drove to work the next morning and pictured a ghost like body standing in the road. She imagined it floating down the gentle waters of the lazy river, bobbing across the wave pool, laid out on the forest floor, decomposing into a fine white foam on the lake surface.

She couldn't stand the memory of it feeling so unreliable, so, during the middle of her shift, she texted Bay and simply asked for the picture. Bay sent it to her without argument or comment, and Jonah took the time to really examine it. Bay really had worked magic on the photo, and while the image was in no way "clear", it was impossible now not to notice the pale spot on the surface of the pool, and it had enough clarity to distinguish arms from torso and legs from each other. The head was almost invisible, because the hair blended in to the pool water. If it wasn't for that, Jonah might have been able to explain the image away as someone simply doing the starfish, back float, on the pool surface. But a person does not starfish face down for long enough to get captured clearly in a night time pinhole photo. She didn't need years of working as a lifeguard to tell her that.

The other mysterious thing about the photo was the smudge on the lounge chair. It was even less distinct, indicating movement, but it was human sized. The fact that the two smudges were coexisting was a weird sticking point.

Jonah was in her normal hiding place, which was to say that she was riding the Belly of the Whale around over and over, not getting off and just letting the boat carry her through the dark tunnel, past the biblical displays which had lost all meaning and recognition. The ride operator, a bored kid named Tom, didn't really care, especially since the ride almost never had anyone on it to begin with. Jonah would get off eventually. She just needed space to think, and this was better than Rebecca had done, hiding away in her office. At least anybody could come and find her here if they needed her.

First, she needed to establish the identity of the dead body in the pool. She strongly suspected that it was Justine Mulvais, the same dead woman in the lake, but she didn't have any reason to say that, other than a desperate hope that Arcadis did not have two dead people on the same night. Jonah did a cursory google search, checking to see if there were any news stories about missing people. Predictably, all the results were filled with were stories about Justine. On one hand, not having a separate person who might be dead was good, but on the other hand...

It all came back to Arcadis, once again.

All the news stories about Justine were on the subject of her boyfriend, who did seem like a real scumbag, and looked like a jerk in his mugshot, but that might have just been what happened to people who had mugshots and news articles written about how they maybe probably killed their girlfriend. She didn't think that she could make any judgements about that. She knew that if she didn't know anything else about this case, all the weird things that had been happening at Arcadis, the photo, and her personal connection to pulling the head out of the lake, she probably would have read the news articles and decided that yes, this Brian fuck was indeed guilty. Could anyone blame her for that? She ran the thought over in her head like marbles.

The boat she was in sailed past a diorama of the biblical Jonah being swallowed by a great whale, his legs sticking comically out of the whale's mouth. Not how whales worked, but Jonah found herself jealous of her biblical counterpart. If only she could get swallowed up, spend a couple days digesting somewhere dark and warm, and eventually get spit back up onto foreign shores with new clarity and purpose. It sounded good.

The boat knocked against the walls of the ride. Jonah refocused.

What were the facts? At first, she felt like there were none, but then she began to construct a timeline of events. She started it during the last time anyone was known to have seen Justine Mulvais alive, Friday afternoon, at Arcadis.

Friday afternoon. Justine was alive, and at the park with her friend. Her friend left, leaving Justine behind. Jonah didn't understand why Justine had stayed behind—that was unclear from the news articles. All that had been explained was that the friend had left because her young child was getting cranky. Perhaps it was just one of those things—random life moments where someone makes an inexplicable choice, like going to a different grocery store than usual, and on the way they get hit by a truck. Fate or bad luck, or some mysterious guiding hand pushing them in the wrong direction. Mulvais stays at the park, and she doesn't leave it alive.

What else happened on Friday? Jonah struggled to recall the mundane afternoon. It hadn't felt like anything at the time. The rides were all full of mud. Mr. Calvin told her to turn the pumps on for all the rides, so that they could be clear for the Saturday crowds. She had gone home and passed out.

It was a Friday. Oh. She had texted Bay that night. Bay had been at the park, setting up her cameras. She claimed to have left the party pretty quickly.

Those stupid fucking parties. Jonah should have called the cops on them when she had had the chance.

The timeline was muddled here. Had the fence been cut before Bay left? She texted Bay to ask.

>on friday night, did u see the fence cut when u left the party?

< not afaik

< it was really dark tho

< and I wasn't paying attention or thinking about it

>k thanks

That didn't clear things up, precisely, but Jonah felt like Bay would have seen if the fence had been cut. After all, she probably would have been happy to have a little path through which to carry her delicate cameras.

Jonah's boat emerged into the bright sunlight, she drifted past Tom, who had his head leaned on his arm and was staring into space, and then vanished back into the darkness.

Who else had been at the party?

Amanda, Kyle, Zach, probably a ton of other Arcadis staff. All the regulars. At some point, there had been someone sleeping on a lounge chair. At probably the same time, a body had been on the surface of the pool. Bay hadn't seen the body, certainly, so the body must have appeared after she left. And somehow, somewhen, after the time that Bay left, that body had ended up chopped up and in the lake.

Probably.

She was still operating under the assumption that the pool body was Justine Mulvais.

Maybe that chopping was done with the shears that were missing from the maintenance shed. Maybe the body was dragged out through the hole in the fence. Maybe the boyfriend had actually done it, somehow, and his plot involved having Justine's body in the pool for some amount of time. Maybe that was him in the lounge chair. But no, Jonah looked closely at the smudge in the seat, it was too small to be the hulking figure that the news reports showed.

How had Justine died, and how had her body gotten from the pool to the lake? She certainly hadn't gotten up and walked.

There was not enough information. All that this photo did was confuse the existing (and accepted) story. Sure, if this was Justine, it showed that the murder weapon was not the shears, because she was dead before she got chopped up.

Jonah was thinking in circles, as the Belly of the Whale took her round and round.

She needed more information, and there weren't any good places to get it. She would have to start with the only thing she had access to: the Arcadis staff. And she was going to do that without talking to the police, or Mr. Calvin, or anybody else, because they were right. She wasn't Sherlock Holmes; she was just a lifeguard. But a dead body in a pool seemed, rather unfortunately, exactly the purview of a lifeguard. Like it or not, for her own sanity, and because it felt like to her it was her job, she was going to get to the bottom of this.

She got out of the little boat as it came around to the entrance of the ride, and she headed back into Arcadis. The park wasn't very full—Tuesdays tended to be fairly empty, and the sky threatened rain, though it hadn't started yet. The air was positively soupy, and it was unpleasant to leave the cool, cave-like environment of Belly of the Whale. There was a reason that it had become her refuge, even though she had never liked the place.

Jonah made a circuit of the park, checking all the rides and their operators, just to make sure that all of her staff were accounted for, and there were no disasters that she needed to solve. It all seemed fine at the moment (what a rare and wonderful thing), so she went and tracked down the person that she wanted to talk to. Amanda seemed like an easy first target.

Amanda was not where she was supposed to be (guarding the Thunderdome waterslide with Marcus). Jonah called up to Marcus to see what had happened to her.

"I kicked her out," Marcus said with a shrug.

"What?"

"She wouldn't shut up!" He seemed truly aggrieved. "There's only so much I can take in terms of hearing about how annoying her high school is, and how cool Kyle is. Kyle is not that cool."

Jonah stifled a laugh at that. "Where'd you send her?"

"I told her to go find literally anything else to do. I don't really care. I can handle Thunderdome myself."

"I'll find you a replacement partner. Someone less chatty."

"You do that."

Jonah completed another circuit of Arcadis, this time looking a lot more closely for the wayward Amanda. Not finding her at any of the rides, Jonah resigned herself to stalking her location on snapchat, once again. Amanda's little dancing emoji hovered over Arcadis, wiggling its arms around the normal pool. Jonah frowned, knowing exactly what that meant. She stomped over to the normal pool, saw Zach sitting in the lifeguard chair on the deck and went over to him.

"Are Kyle and Amanda making out in there?" she asked him, jerking her head towards the changing room.

"Kyle has Tuesdays off," Zach said mildly. "If I remember correctly, he begged you to switch his day off to Fridays, and you said no."

Jonah's face flushed, embarrassed at her error and misplaced anger. "Oh. Okay."

Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

"I'm pretty sure she's mopping, like I told her to. There was a poop incident."

"Isn't there always?"

"It's the nature of changing rooms," Zach said. "Anyway, I had enough guards, and no idea why she presented herself to me, so I sent her in there to deal with it."

"Markus kicked her off of Thunderdome because she couldn't shut up. You can send one of your guards over to him so he has coverage."

Zach turned and yelled at one of his fellow guards, the one sitting on the other end of the deck. "Hey, Jim, when Amanda comes out, you're headed to Thunderdome."

"Can I take my fifteen first?"

Zach glanced at Jonah. "I don't give a fuck."

"Sure," Zach yelled. To Jonah, he said, "Perhaps you should start giving a fuck, as you say."

"I'm experimenting with this new level of misery," Jonah said. "Maybe I'll be shit enough that Mr. Calvin will fire me, so I don't have to commit to quitting at the end of the summer."

"Jonah, you need to get yourself together. I've been having a worse time than you, and you're getting paid more. So stop it with the pity party."

"Oh yeah? Did you pull a decapitated head out of the lake?" she asked, a little too loudly. A couple guests looked at her, shocked.

Zach refused to respond, just staring out across the pool with a completely inscrutable expression. His face was half hidden by his baseball cap. Jonah stomped away, towards the changing room. Zach and whatever his issue was could go fuck themselves, for all she cared. Still, she couldn't help but glance behind herself as she headed into the changing room, looking at him on the chair, wondering what exactly was going on with him.

She found Amanda in the changing room. It wasn't that hard, because as soon as she opened the door, she could hear Amanda's voice.

"And so I said, I think my chemistry teacher from last year is like, the absolute worst, because she always yelled at me when I came in like, half a second late. And also she failed me, so it's like, do I have to risk taking it over? Or can I just, like, not take chemistry? And I asked Markus his opinion and he just told me I should have passed chemistry in the first place, and I was so mad—"

Jonah found Amanda with her phone pressed between her shoulder and her ear, ineffectively mopping the changing room floor. She looked up when she saw Jonah. "Oh, hey, your sister's here to yell at me," she said into the phone with a wink. "Gotta go. Yeah, bye, I'll see what I can do, I just have work, like, all the time. No you can't meet him. Seriously, hang up. Byeeeeeee."

Jonah watched this half conversation with a bored expression and Amanda finally hung up the call and put her phone in her pocket.

"I'm working," she said, before Jonah could even say anything. "You can't yell at me for doing what Zach told me to do."

Jonah raised an eyebrow, and Amanda had the decency to shut up. "I didn't come to yell at you," Jonah said.

"That's a first, and also a relief."

"But you really shouldn't be on the phone during work. My sister knows that."

"Well, you know, I was bored in here by myself."

"Whatever."

"So what did you come to talk to me about?" Amanda asked, leaning dangerously on the mop.

"Don't stand like that. If you fall, you'll knock your teeth out." Amanda readjusted her posture so that the mop handle was not directly below her chin. "I wanted to ask you about last Friday."

"What about it?" Amanda asked, suddenly very suspicious.

"I want to know who was at the party, and what happened there," Jonah said.

"Why?" Amanda asked, narrowing her eyes.

Now this was a lie that Jonah had realized she would need to make. It hadn't been easy to think of a good one, one that would get Amanda to give her enough information without feeling like she was snitching. "Nobody's in trouble," Jonah said. "But I found something valuable that I'm pretty sure was lost by one of the party attendees, and I want to return it as discreetly as possible."

"What did you find?" Amanda's eyes were still narrowed.

"You know how when someone looses something, they're asked to prove it by describing what it is, rather than having the person who found it announce, 'hey, I found a wallet with forty dollars and twelve gift cards in it', and then everyone tries to claim it? Same deal here."

"Hm," Amanda said. She scratched her chin. "Seems like it would be easier for me to just tell everyone to talk to you."

"I would like to handle this without rumors going everywhere," Jonah said. "So, if you could tell me who was where and doing what at the party, I could take care of this quietly."

"This feels like entrapment," Amanda said. "Isn't that against the law?"

"Look, I swear to God I'm not gonna take a list of names to Mr. Calvin or whatever. I have a vested interest in having staff left to me for the rest of the summer."

Amanda laughed at that. "True."

"So, I'd love it if you could tell me who was at the party, and doing what, where, and when."

"I don't know. It was kinda boring," Amanda said, twirling her hair around. "Everybody just seemed, like, kinda tired, and no one had brought anything fun to do."

"Sounds depressing."

"Yeah, I don't know. It was like everybody there though. Me, Kyle, Zach, Qwamae, Tyler, Bay, Jacob, Genesis, Chris, Vi, I don't know, like, everybody who usually comes. I bet you know the list better than I do."

"And did anything interesting happen?"

"Kyle and I made out. Bunch of people played truth or dare, but none of the dares were like, even interesting. They were all dumb guy shit like climb this or drink the pool water or take a shot. Bay left early because she said the whole thing was too depressing. I had like one drink and fell asleep. It was kinda dumb."

"The parties generally are," Jonah said. "I don't know why I bothered to go to them for so long."

Amanda shrugged. "It's better than not going."

"Could you be more specific about what happened after Bay left?"

"Kyle and I walked around, then he and Zach challenged each other to some dumb game that I wasn't paying attention to. I fell asleep. When I woke up it was like, stupid morning. Kyle said I could stay over at his house, so I did."

"Who was around when you woke up?"

"Well, nobody at first, and I thought that everybody had just LEFT ME, but I texted Kyle and he and Zach were still around hanging out. Everybody else went home while I was asleep though." She sounded genuinely aggrieved.

"And where were Zach and Kyle hanging out?"

"Why would I care? They were completely drunk. I think they might have gone swimming in their clothes or something dumb like that."

"What?"

"They were soaking wet," Amanda said. "I'd have honestly preferred if they went skinny dipping, even if that's gay. Kyle got mud on me when he hugged me."

"Seriously, Amanda?" Jonah shook her head. But she had to move on with her questioning. "Do you know where they went swimming?"

"I bet they turned on the wave pool," Amanda said. "Seems like the kind of stupid thing they'd do."

"Yeah, it does." Jonah sighed. "Did you see anything weird when you woke up?"

"Like what?"

"I don't know," Jonah said. "Like weird noises, or people."

"No." Amanda's eyes were narrowed again. "You're not very good at lying to me."

"What did I say that was a lie?"

"You were all like, 'oh Amanda, I have to return this precious object to someone', but you're still fishing around about that lady who got murdered."

Jonah couldn't precisely deny it. "Well, did you see anything weird?"

"Like I just said, no." And she blew a bubble with her gum, as though to underscore her point. "Don't go telling me that you think I was like half a second away from getting murdered. They caught the dude. It was classic boyfriend revenge."

Jonah shook her head helplessly. "I feel really bad about the whole thing."

"Isn't everybody telling you it's not your problem to worry about?"

"Yeah."

"Then it's not your problem to worry about."

"You'd think that you'd be more interested, since you're like a true crime guru."

"I'll be interested when there's a podcast miniseries about the case," Amanda said. "Or even when the trial's in the news. I'm not interested in you trying to scare me with dumb conspiracy theories."

"Is it really a conspiracy theory if I'm the only one who's worried about it?" Jonah asked.

"Hm, good question."

"Well, can you humor me for like, one more second?" Jonah asked.

"Fine."

"Come outside for a sec."

Amanda leaned her mop on the wall and followed Jonah out, both of them squinting in the muted outdoor light, that was still much more than the dark changing room. "Which chair were you sleeping on?" Jonah asked.

"Seriously? That matters?"

"Just tell me."

"That one." Amanda pointed across the pool, to a chair currently occupied by a mother grasping a squirming toddler. The mother somehow saw Amanda's pointing and frowned across at them. Jonah did the mental math, comparing the photograph in her head to the scene laid out before her. It was a match, as she had thought it might be.

"You done interrogating me now?" Amanda asked.

"Yeah, sure. Uh, Zach wants you on the chair."

"Fine," Amanda huffed. "If you insist."

"It's what you get paid to do."

"Yeah, like you're getting paid to investigate crimes that already got solved," Amanda said, loud enough for Zach to hear. He looked up and stared at them with a piercing look. Jonah shook her head and walked away.

She would have to talk to Zach, but she had no desire to do so now, so she walked away, back to her real duties, trying not to picture that ghostly body on the surface of the pool as she did.

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

It was again at the end of the day that Mr. Calvin found her. He had a stormy look on his face, and a rough sound in his voice that didn't bode well. Jonah was helping to put away the boats from lazy river when he came around, and he pulled her away from the work with a rough word.

"Jonah," he said.

"Um, hi Mr. Calvin," she said, wiping her hands on her shorts.

"Can I speak with you for a minute?"

"Sure?"

"In private." He gestured for her to follow him, and they walked a significant distance away from the rest of the staff, though some of them watched them leave with pity and curiosity clear in their eyes.

"I've been hearing some disturbing things, Jonah," Mr. Calvin said.

Jonah looked down at the ground. "I'm not sure I know what you mean."

"Wasn't it just a few days ago that I told you to stop spreading panic around my staff?"

"Yeah, I guess," Jonah said. She didn't entirely know where this was going or where it had come from, but she didn't like his tone, or the way he looked at her with his slimy eyeballs. "I haven't been bothering the police."

"Yes, I'm aware," Mr. Calvin said, with a dry voice. "But I've been told that you have been quote unquote investigating things."

"Not really," Jonah said.

"Oh?"

"I really haven't. I just talked to people."

"Talking to people makes them nervous, in case you hadn't noticed."

"Sorry," Jonah said. "I—"

"I don't really care what your motivations are. The outcome, that you're making the rest of my staff paranoid, remains. The police already caught someone. Let the dead rest, okay?"

Jonah didn't say anything.

"Do you understand, Ms. Wylan?"

"Yeah." She kicked at the ground, feeling like a petulant thirteen year old.

"This is your last warning. There's plenty of people here who want your job." It clicked then that it was Zach who had snitched on her to Mr. Calvin. The anger boiled up inside of her, but she tamped it down. She was tempted to spit out that she quit, right then and there, but she felt tied to Arcadis, and she wasn't going to give up any of this without at least a fight. Make them fire her. That was the way it would have to go. "Do you understand?"

"I already said I did," Jonah said. "I'll keep my thoughts to myself."

"You do that. It'll be better for the whole staff."

Jonah shook her head and started walking away. Mr. Calvin's eyes bored holes in her back, but he didn't follow her or call out to stop her. She returned to angrily putting away the boats in the lazy river, stacking inner tubes with such vigor that the whole stack threatened to topple over.

Fuck Arcadis. Fuck Mr. Calvin. And fuck me, Jonah thought.

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

Zach was in the parking lot walking down towards the road, and Jonah ran after him. A light misty rain was falling, and the sun was low enough in the sky as to be a non-entity. It was the parking lot lights instead that illuminated the rather desolate scene. Only a few staff cars were left in the lot, and the temperature had dropped precipitously, raising goosebumps on Jonah's arms exposed by her orange staff shirt.

"Zach!" Jonah yelled, running past her own car in an attempt to reach him. "Zach!"

He didn't stop, and Jonah grew more perturbed as he stepped out into the road, continuing to ignore her. She continued to head towards him, and eventually got close enough to grab his arm. He yanked it away from her and continued walking.

"What the fuck is your problem, Zach?" she asked. It would have been a yell if she wasn't so pathetically out of breath. It was mostly a wheeze.

"Could ask you the same question," Zach said, walking away still. Jonah continued her dogged pursuit, though now that she had caught up with him, she could catch her breath.

"You didn't have to rat on me to Calvin," she said, hissing.

"Thought you wanted to get fired."

"Fuck off! I'll get fired on my own terms, and not because you're messing with my life, trying to steal my job."

"I'm not stealing shit, Jonah."

"Then what the fuck are you going to Calvin for?" She was loud enough now that her voice almost echoed in the weird silence of the tree lined streets.

"You're prying into shit that's none of your business."

"Like fuck it's my business! I told you all to stay out of the park, and you were there Friday, and I want to figure out how somebody fucking died!"

Zach stopped and turned, staring her down with red eyes. Had he been crying? It seemed odd to her-- Zach had always been, if not stoic, at least the same breed of masculine that wouldn't allow him to show too much weakness.

"Nothing happened," Zach said. "Absolutely nothing. And I don't trust you not to turn on everybody, the way you've been acting."

"And how have I been acting?" Jonah was incensed.

"You think you're better, now that you've got a position. You can wander around, and hide out in the whale, and tell people what to do, and you can spend your time investigating, or whatever, because you're above everything else."

"So it is about my job."

He twitched, face damp from the misty rain. "It's about that, and this shit place, and everything else."

"I'll talk to Kyle and figure out what happened on Friday, if you're not going to tell me."

"Can you give it a rest, Jonah?" He just sounded tired, now. "Amanda passed out. Kyle and I got drunk as fuck. That's it. Long story short. Leave me alone."

"Then why are you acting so weird?"

"Because apparently, according to you, I was hanging out in the woods at Arcadis, smashed out of my goddamn mind, while thirty feet away some woman was getting murdered. We left Amanda just sleeping there. And you're digging up things because you're searching for somebody to blame, because, I don't know, you want to think that the world is a terrible place in a weird way. It's just a terrible place. Some lady gets murdered by her boyfriend. It happens at Arcadis and there's nothing any of us could have done to stop it. Fuck."

"Jesus, Zach, that's not your fault."

"Sure it fucking isn't." And he sounded incomprehensibly bitter.

"I wish this hadn't happened."

"Yeah. Can I go now, or are you going to try to interrogate me like you did Amanda?"

"I mean--" Jonah began, and Zach cut her off.

"That was a rhetorical question. I'm leaving. Don't follow me."