The rain fell all night, but ended by morning, leaving a cloudy sky, damp grounds, and a relatively empty Arcadis Park. It was probably for the best that few guests had shown up, not least because Jonah was exhausted, but the rain had again churned up the lake, leaving all the attractions filled with water gone positively soupy with mud. Jonah walked the park in a quasi daze throughout her entire long shift, broken only by moments of sudden and great confusion when she was called upon to do anything.
The staff, having no guests around to bother them, had apparently too much time on their hands to think about things that they needed Jonah to do, seeing her as an easier target than Rebecca had been. She was certainly more accessible, choosing to talk to her staff by leaning on and over the fences to the attractions and having a casual conversation, rather than either locking herself in her office or yelling at them. Everyone wanted her to do two things: process their paychecks and change their schedule. Everyone wanted off of Saturday shift.
"I'm not taking anybody off of Saturday," Jonah said to the fifteenth person who asked. "We honestly need more Saturday staff."
"What for?" Qwamae asked. "There's nobody here. This place is dead."
"Have you looked at the weather forecast for this week at all?"
"I prefer to let it surprise me," Qwamae said with a grin.
"It's supposed to be terrible this week, but next Saturday will be the hottest day of the year, as far as I can tell."
"They say that every weekend," Quamae said.
"It's bound to be true on one of them," Jonah said. "And when it is, it's always packed here."
"All the more reason for you to let me have Saturdays off," he pleaded, making doe eyes at her.
"I couldn't rearrange the schedule even if I wanted to. I still don't have computer access."
"What a convenient little lie."
"Hey, I'm going to be here on Saturday, suffering, just like you are. Maybe if you don't let your Friday nights mess you up so much," Jonah said with a pointed stare.
Qwamae laughed and walked away, blowing his whistle at a kid who was holding another kid's head below the water in the normal pool.
Jonah did need computer access. She had walked around enough to work up the nerve to confront Mr. Calvin about it, and so she stood in front of his office, hesitating. His truck was splattered with mud. She couldn't tell if he had gone off road with it, or just had a particularly unlucky encounter with a puddle. She knocked on the door and stared at it as she waited. Its windows gleamed in the somewhat eerie afternoon light.
When the door finally swung open, crashing inwards, Jonah practically jumped out of her skin.
"Jonah, I'm surprised to see you here," Mr. Calvin said. "What's the issue? Haven't come to quit on me, have you?" He laughed, a slimy kind of chuckle.
"Er, no," Jonah said. "I'm just coming about, you know, I don't have access to Rebecca's computer, so I can't do the schedule, and I don't really know how to do paychecks, and everybody's been asking for theirs. Rebecca usually handed them out on Saturdays because basically everyone's here, so..." She trailed off. Her hands, which had been gesticulating somewhat randomly, flopped to her sides and she buried them in her pockets.
"Ah. Yes. Paychecks. Now that is a tricky little thing, isn't it. How about you come in? And shut the door behind you. You're letting the air out."
Mr. Calvin's office was indeed frigid, kept cooler than a person could even be comfortable, and goosebumps broke out along Jonah's arms immediately. Mr. Calvin, though, seemed perfectly content, even though icicles should have been forming underneath the vents of his window AC unit.
Jonah had been inside the office before, but she hadn't been in any of the rooms aside from the very first one, the one with a slightly filthy red carpet and a military surplus looking desk, on which Mr. Calvin perched.
"So. First of all, I have something for you."
"Uh, thanks?"
"I got maintenance to find you all the keys." He pulled out a heavy keychain from his pocket, dangling with at least thirty keys, each with their own red tags, and tossed it at Jonah. She caught it, feeling the ice cold tongues of metal stabbing into her palm. She tucked the whole mass uncomfortably into her pocket, where they stabbed her side instead.
"That should be helpful."
"I imagine it will be. Now, I guess I should ask how your first few days have been going?"
"Um. Fine, I guess." Jonah squeezed her hands into fists in her pockets, hoping that Mr. Calvin wouldn't ask her anything about the night before. She didn't know if he knew about the parties, or even the fire alarm. He probably knew about the fire alarm.
"That's good, good. I heard that you talked to the staff yesterday?"
"Yeah. Just let all the aquatics people know that Rebecca quit and everything."
"Did they take the news okay?"
"I guess. I mean. We'll see how the summer goes."
"I'm sure we will."
"Thank you for telling them to stay off the property at night," he said.
"Oh?" Jonah's voice squeaked on that line. "I didn't know you got that detailed of a report of it."
Mr. Calvin tapped his ears. "Word gets around. Don't go telling people you'll do things for them, though. That can only get you in trouble."
"Okay," Jonah said.
"Speaking of trouble, and of last night, I don't know if you heard the fire trucks go by. Do you live anywhere near the road to Arcadis?"
Jonah shook her head.
"We apparently had some clowns who thought that setting off fireworks would be a thrilling idea."
"Aren't fireworks illegal in this state?" Jonah asked, guessing that playing dumb was perhaps the easiest way to get out of this without being forced to answer questions.
Mr. Calvin just laughed at that. "Legal or not, I saw them going up, right over the Ferris wheel."
"You called the fire department?" Jonah asked.
"I drove here, to yell at whoever it was myself," Mr. Calvin said, a mean looking grin on his face. "But by the time I arrived, the fire department had already been summoned through the automatic alarm."
"Wow," Jonah said, trying to keep the fear out of her face and voice. "What a coincidence. Did you see who set it off?"
"Unfortunately, the perpetrators seemed to have escaped before either I or the fire department could make a catch."
"Does the fire department usually, uh, catch people?"
"I wouldn't have minded if they hosed whoever was doing it down," Mr. Calvin said.
"Hah." Jonah's laughing was about as insincere as it could get.
"Anyway, I would like you to please quietly ask around and figure out who was at Arcadis last night."
"You think it was someone here?"
"Of course it was someone here," Mr. Calvin said. "Don't play stupid with me. I'm hoping for good things from you."
"Uh."
"I would like for you to figure this out for me. I don't want to have bad apples working here."
"I don't think that anyone will just tell me that they came in here and shot off a bunch of fireworks. I'm their boss now."
"Then you'll have to find someone reliable to listen out for you," Mr. Calvin said. "I'm trusting you, Jonah."
"Um. Okay."
"Can I get your opinion on something?" His tone switched from serious to cheerful without any change in his facial expression. It was somewhat disconcerting.
"I guess."
"The fence."
"What about it?"
"Would it be worth trying to reinforce it, to stop people from coming over?"
"It would make a lot of the staff pretty angry. It's a lot faster to get here through the woods than it is along the road."
"I know, but that's also how certain people got away from me last night."
"What would you do to reinforce it?" Jonah was curious now.
"I read this article about how any fence can be electrified."
"I, uh, wouldn't do that," Jonah said. "It really seems like a lawsuit waiting to happen. Or a forest fire."
"And people setting off illegal fireworks here at night isn't?"
Jonah was stumped by that question. "Um. I don't know. I mean..."
Mr. Calvin sighed. "Maybe you're right. Barbed wire then?"
"I don't think the fence poles are tall enough for you to put it on the top?"
"I would just have someone wrap it through the holes along the top."
"I think that people would just cut through the fence again," Jonah said.
"Again?" Mr. Calvin asked, a sudden sharp curiosity in his voice.
"Oh, er, yeah, someone cut the fence open. I patched it up."
"Who?"
"Um. I don't know," Jonah said. She did know, but Bay had helped her last night, so she wasn't going to snitch her out just yet. "Tom just told Amanda about the hole, and she told me, and I fixed it. No idea who made it."
"How unfortunate," Mr. Calvin said with the dryest possible voice. "Well, if there are any other holes in the fence, please report them to me."
"Yeah okay," Jonah said. She desperately wanted to switch the topic. "Um. About the paychecks?"
"Accounts does those. I have last week's ready for you. You just have to bring me this week's timecards, and it'll get taken care of. And if you can remind people to clock in and out correctly, I'd deeply appreciate it."
"Sure."
Mr. Calvin did an acrobatic lean behind himself across the top of the desk and pulled out a thick stack of envelopes, each with the name of one of the members of the aquatics staff written on top of it. Jonah took the stack and held it gingerly, as though all of the checks in her hands were a kind of ticking time bomb. She noticed that some of them were thicker than others, and she couldn't help but pull one of the thick ones out of the stack and turn it over in her hand.
Mr. Calvin preempted her question. "There are several people who prefer to be paid in cash," he said. "Be very careful not to lose their envelopes."
"Is that... legal?"
"Why wouldn't it be?" Mr. Calvin asked, staring at her.
"I don't know." Jonah shrugged and tried to drop the subject. "I'll bring you the timecards."
"You do that," Mr. Calvin said.
Jonah escaped as quickly as she could.
----------------------------------------
Distributing the paychecks gave Jonah another reason to do a lap of the park and check in on all of her employees. This took, of course, longer than expected, because it seemed like every three seconds she was having to tell someone to focus on not letting children drown in the swampy ponds that had once been pools, fixing random problems with all the waterslides, and generally being harrangued about the schedule. She was fed up when she finally made it to the wave pool, which was her last stop.
She handed out the envelopes to the three guards on duty, then caught Bay's attention and got her down off the tall lifeguard chair.
"Bay, here's your paycheck," Jonah said.
"Thanks, I'll just stick that down the front of my wet bathing suit," Bay said. Her legs were caked with streaks of dried mud; clearly she had needed to do a rescue earlier in the day.
"I'll show you where you can stash it until the end of the day," Jonah said. "Follow me."
Bay rolled her eyes. "Seems very secure."
"It's a check, nobody's gonna be able to cash it without you signing it."
"Sure." But she followed Jonah back into the pump room behind the wave pool anyway. Jonah headed down the stairs. "I always just tossed mine in the tool drawer here."
Against the wall there was a bright orange tool chest, which contained specialized equipment for fixing the wave pool devices. Jonah pulled open the top drawer of it and laughed. "Goes to show when the last time anyone was in here was." There was a torn up envelope that she pulled out, one that had her own name printed on the front of it.
"Alright," Bay said, slipping the check in the drawer. She started to walk back up the stairs.
"Wait, Bay, I need to talk to you about something," Jonah said.
Bay paused on the steps, turning, hands on her hips. The dim light in the basement obscured her face. "What?"
"Thanks for helping me out last night," Jonah said. "It was a good thing you were there."
"You owe me big time, you know that, right?"
"Yeah. Listen, Mr. Calvin was apparently sitting in the parking lot, ready to charge in to grab people who were setting off fireworks."
"Yikes." Bay's voice was flat.
"Yeah. You didn't see him, right?"
"Everyone ran as soon as the alarm went off. Myself included."
"That's good. Listen, Bay, I know I already asked you to do me a favor, but..."
"What?"
"Can you tell whoever was setting off the fireworks that they can't do that, or they're seriously going to get caught? Mr. Calvin doesn't fuck around. If he catches anyone, they'll definitely be fired, and maybe get the police called on them, too."
Stolen novel; please report.
Bay was silent for a second. "I want something in exchange."
"What?"
"Switch me off wave pool."
Jonah bit her lip. "Where do you want to be put?"
"Someplace less chaotic."
"I'll think about it. I don't want everyone to know that I'm switching around schedules."
"Then I'll think about telling the fireworks lighter to cut it out," Bay said, turning to go.
"Wait, is there anything else I could get you instead?"
Bay stopped again, this time with a foot on a higher step, and her back to Jonah. "The key to the roof of the front changing area."
"Why the fuck do you want that?"
"I put one of my cameras up there. I think it's a decent spot, so I want to be able to switch the film out and get multiple shots."
"Fine. I'll make you a copy tonight. But you can't go up there during guest hours."
"I'm not stupid."
----------------------------------------
The rest of the week passed in a kind of dizzying blur. Jonah came quickly to understand exactly why Rebecca had been so quick to hide in her office when she wasn't out and about yelling at everyone: it was sheer chaos in the park, even on quiet days, when wrangling the aquatics staff was her responsibility. She wished that she had someone she could deputize, but the person who she trusted most to handle that kind of responsibility, Zack, was too pissed about the fact that he didn't get her job to speak to her. She wasn't going to open that can of worms.
And the fact was, most of the lifeguards under her care were teenagers at best. Working at Arcadis was a summer job that people graduated from as they got real jobs and moved on with their lives. Jonah was trapped by being a kind of academic failure during the rest of the year, one who couldn't manage to score any internship or research position or anything that would have kept her from coming back to her hometown every summer. A crowd of teenagers, put in charge of supervising a rowdy and often drunk mix of guests of all ages, it was a recipe for chaos.
At least they had several days off that week. The rain didn't let up on Tuesday and Wednesday, forcing the park to close, and scattered showers on Thursday kept the park light on guests. The rain was a blessing for Jonah in that respect, but it clogged up the machinery and made the rides malfunction, and the lack of ticket sales put Mr. Calvin in a terrible mood.
Jonah took every excuse she could to go "inspect" the mechanical parts of various rides, but really what that meant was finding a quiet little building to hole up in and stare into space for fifteen minutes. It was the little things.
On Friday, the cool weather that had been bringing buckets of rain with it broke, and the park was full up again. The staff, which had been enjoying an "easy" week, was suddenly in full gear and no one was happy about it. Four people had to be rescued from the wave pool, according to Bay. Jonah spent as much of her time in hiding as she could, not wanting to risk having to dive into a mud swamped ride to pull someone out.
Mr. Calvin found her while she was in hiding, which was embarrassing.
Jonah was "inspecting" the darkness inside a ride called "The Belly of the Whale", which was a classic tunnel-of-love style boat ride, but one that was inexplicably and intensely biblically themed, with extensive and large dioramas. Jonah did not particularly like the ride, especially when she considered that her dad had been working at the park when he had met her mother, and the fact that she was named after the main character of this particular biblical story. It had some unpleasant implications that she didn't particularly desire to dwell on.
Guests tended to avoid the ride as well, which made it perfect for Jonah to get some peace and quiet.
In any event, Jonah had ridden one of the slow moving boats through the tunnel, and had clambered out onto the ledge of one of the dioramas. A flashlight dangled limply from her hands, and she leaned against the glass partition that stopped guests from getting inside the diorama and messing with the figure of the biblical Jonah on his knees, praying inside the whale.
She watched empty boat after empty boat go by, and when a boat with a passenger on it approached, Jonah started to step into one of the empty ones, but Mr. Calvin's voice stopped her.
"Jonah, I was told I could find you out here," he said, a voice more jovial than Jonah had expected. Still, anything breaking the silence of the ride alarmed her, and she miscalculated her step and stumbled, falling to her knees in the little fish shaped boat and causing it to splash muddy water everywhere.
"Are you alright?" Mr. Calvin asked.
"Fine," Jonah muttered as she sat herself in the boat and pointed her flashlight behind her. Mr. Calvin was as greasy as he ever was, perhaps more so in this gurgling flashlight illumination.
"What were you doing in here?" Mr. Calvin asked.
"A guest said her kid dropped something on one of the dioramas," Jonah lied through her teeth as the boat bumped along down the hallway. "I was checking for her."
"Oh, did you find it?"
"No, I think the mud makes it too hard to see. It might turn up in the filter later."
"Ah, yes, the mud, that was what I came to talk to you about."
The boats emerged from the tunnel and into the glaring light of day, and Jonah stepped out of hers, followed moments later by Mr. Calvin. The ride operator, a teenager named Vi, tried to look as professional as she could, with both of her bosses standing right there in front of her.
Mr. Calvin took Jonah's arm, which made her skin crawl, and they walked away from the ride a little.
"I've had some complaints about the mud," Mr. Calvin said.
"I'm aware."
"I would like your opinion on it."
"What kind of opinion?"
"How to get rid of it."
"I think it just takes time. This is the raniest summer we've ever had, I think the lake is just all churned up."
"Hm."
"Do you think there's another way to get rid of it?"
"There might be a chemical solution. If we put a ton of chlorine in the water..."
"I think that would cause more problems than it would solve, Mr. Calvin."
"How long will it take for this all to clear out?"
"If it doesn't rain again, and you run the pumps on all the attractions all night, it might be like, halfway clearer by tomorrow." Jonah was bullshitting, but she didn't want to give Mr. Calvin an answer he didn't want to hear.
"Oh, that's good," he said. "Can you arrange that?"
"Um. I guess?"
"Perfect." He walked away, leaving Jonah rather flummoxed by the whole interaction. Mr. Calvin had owned Arcadis for years. He should have been just as aware of how the mud worked as she was. Granted, this had been a very rainy summer, but that shouldn't have made this much of a difference.
It took up the rest of Jonah's afternoon to get all the pumps running.
----------------------------------------
That night, Jonah returned home, completely exhausted, and neatly dodged her entire family. She had no desire to talk to any of them, so she found her little couch where she slept and simply curled up and fell asleep, blanket covering even her face. She had meant to wake up around ten, in order to get something to eat, but she woke up in pitch darkness at midnight instead, with the feeling that she had forgotten something very important.
She fumbled for her phone in the darkness and checked the time. Oh. That was what it was. It was Friday again. Party night.
Jonah blearily texted Bay, the only person she could text about this sort of thing. She received a response almost immediately.
>are u @ cicada
< what
>the party
>i'm not gonna get u in trouble i just want to know whats going on >no fireworkks? >what >calvin didn't show up right >whos with you >if i wanted to get u all in trouble id just callthe police >lol >how long will u stay for >did u cut open the fence again >just checking >see u tmrw Although that exchange didn't completely soothe her mind, knowing that still anything could happen at these parties, it at least took long enough that Jonah's eyes began to water in the phone-glow, and her brain was fuzzy once again with sleep. She bid Bay goodnight, and the phone dropped to her chest, tumbling to the floor as she fell asleep. ---------------------------------------- Jonah was late to work the next morning, on account of not plugging in her phone, and thus her alarm not going off. Her dad woke her up when he stumbled downstairs, turning on all the lights in the room. "What are you still doing here?" Jonah tried to roll over, miscalculated the direction, and fell onto the floor with a thud, her phone stabbing into her ribcage. "What time is it?" she blearily asked. "Ten." She bit her lip to stop herself from swearing. So it was out the door with no shower and no breakfast,and just the same clothes she had worn all day yesterday. She was able to charge her phone with a battery bar that she pulled out of the junk drawer in the kitchen and shoved into her pocket, so the day could have at least been a little bit worse. She biked/walked to work rather than trying to battle the cars that were sure to be filling the parking lot. The day was already a scorcher. Perhaps it really was the hottest Saturday of the year. She had thought that yesterday had been hot, but that was nothing compared to this. As she came to the fence, she saw that the stupid hole had been opened up once again. Jonah didn't have time to fix it, but she did have time to send an angry message to Bay. >I thought you said you didn't open up my fence again She attached a picture of the fence. Bay texted back when Jonah was just walking into the park grounds proper, immediately surrounded on all sides by a press of guests, overwhelmed with heat and light and shouting. Reluctantly, Jonah made her way across Arcadis to the wave pool. She had hoped that she could sneak into the office where the timecards were and fill hers out without anyone noticing that she had been gone, but clearly that wasn't happening. She arrived at the wave pool and found Bay there alone, shooing guests away. She had put up the 'attraction closed' cones, but the wave pool was always so popular that it didn't discourage quite everyone, even though the ride was clearly not running. "What's the issue?" Jonah asked. "Same as last time. Water level again," Bay said, gesturing at the swampy looking wave pool that was dangerously low on water. "Well why didn't you fix it? I showed you how." Bay gave her a look. "I'm not stupid. That was the first thing I tried." "And?" "And the filter wasn't the problem. There just isn't any water coming through the pipes." "What?" Jonah said, then groaned as she realized what was going on. "Nevermind, I know what the problem is." Bay raised an eyebrow and waited for Jonah to elaborate. "I ran the pumps on every ride all night long, to try to get the mud out. Probably the main line filter is clogged up." "Shouldn't everybody be having this same problem, then?" "Only the wave pool has a giant fucking crack in the bottom of it. And probably everybody turned off their flow when they came in. I saw that most of the attractions were less muddy looking than they were before." They were certainly far from entirely clear, but it was better than what had been like swimming through water black as tar. "Ah. Do you know how to fix it?" "I'd prefer to have maintenance do it," Jonah said. "They claim they're busy." "With what?" "Ferris wheel, I think?" Jonah looked across the park at the Ferris wheel, reaching up into the sky. It wasn't moving. "Fine. I'll go fix it." "I don't know if I should thank you," Bay said. "It's peaceful around here when this thing is broken." "Well, you'll want to summon everybody back from wherever you sent them." Jonah had to imagine that the other wave pool guards had gone to find a spot of peace and quiet, rather than actually going to lend assistance to some other attraction. "Sure." "I'll text you when I've fixed it, so you can make sure that the water is running." "I'll keep an eye out." Jonah left the wavepool and headed back the way that she had just come from, towards the woods. It was a bit of a walk to the lake, and she hopped the fence gamely. She was glad to be in among the trees, as it was a relief from the sun, if not from the heat. The cicadas screamed, but the screams from the park grew more and more distant. The lake came into view, ripples lapping at a silty shore. There was a path cut in the undergrowth, and Jonah stepped onto it and followed it, squinting as the sun bounced off the water directly into her eyes. The path led to a short pier and a weird little building built into the surface of the lake: the pumphouse that fed all the attractions at Arcadis. It opened with a keycode (a very insecure 5555). She entered the pumphouse and immediately saw the problem, or part of it, anyway. The two big pumps had shut down at some point during the night, probably from their emergency shutoff, to stop their motors from burning out. It was a classic thing that happened when the major filter got too clogged. She went over to the big safety switch on the wall and flipped it to the off position: she had no desire to have the pumps reactivate while her hand was in their guts. She kicked the filthy bucket that was used to clean the filters across the floor towards the manhole cover. Jonah knelt down on the concrete floor and reluctantly strained to open the large manhole cover that hid access to the filters. It slid aside with a nasty scrape. Jonah steeled herself, staring down into the dark pit for a second, then reluctantly reached inside, scooping out handfuls of grime. It was the usual stuff: dead leaves, branches, old grocery bags, and mud after mud after mud. Then her fingers tangled into something that she thought was weirdly stringy grass. She tugged on it, felt it give a little but not enough, and yanked harder. It took more effort than she was expecting, and she fell backwards onto her butt as it came up from the hole, clutched in her hand. It took a long moment to process what she was holding, in the light that filtered in through the pumphouse's grimy windows. She was holding a handful of human hair, and attached to the human hair was a severed human head, covered in mud, but distinct nonetheless. Jonah gave a stifled cry, coughing and choking and trying to let go of it. But the hair was so thoroughly tangled in with her hand that she couldn't until she used her other hand to pull it away. The head dropped to the floor, and made a dangerous sort of half roll towards the hole in the floor back into the water, and Jonah was forced to catch it again, this time with both hands. The whole moment felt like a series of disjointed sensations. Her hands were already so dirty from pulling things up out of the filter that she couldn't feel the texture of the skin, and she didn't smell anything other than the foul odor of the rotting leaves in the lake water, but she could hear the sort of wet squelching sounds that came as her fingers slid on the head, and she could see it. That alone would have been too much. The head had clearly belonged to a woman. That was clear even underneath the mud. She was pale skinned, and her hair (what was left of it, after some had been ripped out by the filter pumps) was long and straight. Jonah stared at it for a second, then gingerly stood, holding it in both hands. She exited the filter house and walked a few steps down the pier. She didn't know where she was going. She couldn't just march back into Arcadis holding a severed head. She didn't want to put it down again. There was an irrational fear in her stomach that it would somehow start walking away if she wasn't holding onto it. but she didn't want to be holding it, either. She needed to... She needed to... She returned to the pumphouse, kicked over the bucket which held the slime that she had pulled out of the filter before. It spilled, leaving a massive pile of sludge on the concrete floor. She kicked the bucket out the door then. Gingerly, Jonah put the head down on the pier, looking at it with half her attention as she rinsed the bucket out in the lake water. Once it was clean(er), she carefully picked the head back up and put it in the bucket. There. Nothing bad could happen to it there. Now that she didn't have to look at it so directly, the horror of it hit Jonah more fully, and she stared down into the swirling lake water, feeling her stomach roll and bile threaten to come up and choke her. She imagined the head more luridly than it actually looked, and that wasn't helping her at all. She didn't manage to quell the nausea, and she puked over the side of the pier. She wanted to rinse her mouth out with the lake water, but the thought of the fact that the head had just come out of the lake water stopped her. The thought of the fact that that there were probably other body parts in the lake made that thought worse, and she couldn't help but think that all the vague shadows down at the bottom were now hands and legs and torso. She gagged again, but crawled over to the other side of the pier and managed to not throw up, mainly because there was absolutely nothing left in her stomach. She had to do something. She rinsed her hands in the lake, then pulled her phone out of her pocket. Her hands shook so badly that she almost dropped that in the lake, which would have been a major problem. At the dialing screen, she hesitated. 911 seemed too much. This wasn't an emergency, precisely. Nothing more could be done for the head. She should probably call Mr. Calvin. She wanted to call her sister. Jonah dialed the non-emergency police line. "Thank you for dialing the Blacklake township non-emergency line. If you are currently experiencing an emergency, hang up and dial 911. Please hold as your call is transferred to an operator. There are"-- a robotic voice-- "two"-- and back to normal--"parties ahead of you. Please be aware that all calls on this line are recorded." The jaunty hold music that rang in Jonah's ear was at complete odds with the severed head in a bucket not five feet away from her. A cloud passed over the sun as she waited. She jumped a little when the generic music ended and a woman's voice greeted her. "Thank you for waiting, can you please tell me your name, location, and reason for your call." "Hi, uh, my name is Jonah Wylan, and I'm the, er, aquatics staff leader at Arcadis Park, and, um, well I found something in the lake?" "Could you clarify, please?" "I was cleaning out the water pumps, the ones that feed all the rides and stuff at the park, and when I was cleaning the filter, I found, guh--" Jonah found it hard to say out loud exactly what she had found. The bile rose in her throat as she tried to, and though she mouthed the words, no sound came out. "Are you alright, Ms. Wylan?" the operator asked. "Are you experiencing an emergency?" "It's not an emergency, exactly, sorry, I know I'm not being very helpful." "Please take a deep breath, Ms. Wylan." Jonah did, and she could hear her own stuttering breath over the phone line. "What did you find in the lake, Ms. Wylan?" "I thought it was grass but when I pulled it out, it was--" She took a deep breath. "I found"-- a tiny hiccough of hysterical laughter interrupted her sentence-- "somebody's head." "Let me just confirm what you told me, Ms. Wylan," the operator said. "You are at the Arcadis Park lakefront, and you found a head in the water filter?" "Yeah," Jonah said. The relief of having it said out loud was palpable, and her heartbeat thrumming in her ears suddenly calmed back down to a reasonable level. She could feel the relief. "Is there anyone with you?" "No, I'm by myself." "Were there any other body parts?" "No? I don't know? Do you need me to look?" "No, please stay where you are and do not touch anything." "I already touched it, is that okay?" "That's fine, Ms. Wylan. I'm going to send the police to your location. Please do not move." "I don't want them to bother people at the park," Jonah said. "Can you tell them to not... be loud?" She didn't want to cause chaos among the guests on the busiest Saturday of the season. Mr. Calvin would kill her for that. It was funny, that that was the kind of thing that she was thinking about. "I will pass that request along," the operator said. "Please stay on the line." That didn't sound like the request was about to be honored. Jonah switched her phone to speakerphone, so that she could write a text message to Bay.