Then he clicked on his website to see if his father had listened to his podcast. It didn’t load immediately—which was sometimes the case at work; the Internet was spotty no matter how much the higher-ups complained to the board, explaining that a slow Internet connection should probably not be an issue in a newsroom. Not knowing if it would be ten seconds or two minutes, Anders stood up to take Jess’s suggestion of finding coffee. In the break room, as he was filling a foam cup to the brim with the hot liquid, Greta walked in.
“There you are.”
“Yeah, sorry I was running late this morning. I overslept.” He hadn’t ever been late before, so he thought honesty was the best policy and hoped for leniency on his first offense.
Greta waved Anders’s sentence away as if it didn’t matter. “Listen, I need you to go out to Salisbury High School, like, fifteen minutes ago. It’s on lockdown. A man knocked off a 7-Eleven with a hunting rifle and he’s on the loose. Hector’s covering a college visit today for that ninth-grade lacrosse phenom and he’s all the way up in D.C.”
“Why didn’t you send Jess?” Anders asked, slugging down the hot coffee, not feeling it scald his throat.
“She’s got to be at the courthouse at one for the record-pumpkin trial. It was the biggest story for us last year—she can’t miss it.”
Anders vaguely remembered Jess saying something about it. At last October’s pumpkin festival, a local farmer had beat the record for largest gourd ever grown in the state—weighing in at more than 1,600 pounds. But another farmer claimed the vine had actually started on his land—that it was his pumpkin, even though it crawled over the fence and grew in the original farmer’s garden. It ended in a knife fight, the vine-originating farmer stabbing the record-winning farmer, who spent months in the hospital on ventilation but fortunately survived.
“I’m on it,” Anders said, getting a burst of adrenaline and confidence from this very Clark Kent–like experience, and he all but ran from the break room, yelling, “Text me the address!” over his shoulder to Greta. He grabbed his laptop, closing it with his hand and shoving it in his bag in one quick motion, and was out the door.
The moon was high in the sky, the sun long gone, by the time Anders finally got back to his apartment that evening. The police didn’t track down the suspect until 5:00 p.m.—he had been holing up in an empty shed more than six miles from the school—and the kids hadn’t been allowed to leave until that happened. Anders had been on the ground, interviewing worried parents who—over time—morphed into angry parents who felt their kids were being held hostage inside the building while they were standing outside of it, when clearly any threat of the hunting-rifle robber was nowhere to be found. But protocol was protocol. When he got back to the newsroom, Greta informed him that not only would this be the lead story but that he would be penning three other related stories (about local gun laws, school safety, and community reaction), and that for the first time ever, every single byline on the front page would be his (his!), including the photos. He spent hours poring over each paragraph, sentence, caption, and word choice at least a hundred times, making sure the stories were perfect before turning them in.
When he let himself in, he barely glanced toward the kitchen to scan for cockroaches—he was too tired to do anything about it if he saw one—before slinking over to his mattress and collapsing onto it.
He kicked his shoes off and lay there for a minute, enjoying the rest. The silence. And then, as if his thought had jinxed it, the bass started thumping from upstairs. Anders groaned. He sat up and contemplated walking up to his neighbor’s apartment to ask him to turn down the music, but it was too many steps. Instead he crawled over to where he’d dropped his laptop and pulled it out, along with his headphones, and then made his way back to the mattress, where he plugged the buds into his ears and the keyboard and sighed as an old This American Life episode filled his brain. He adjusted his stack of pillows behind him so they made a big cushion against the wall and then leaned into them, so he was sitting up, but comfortable.
Then he mindlessly checked his email, Twitter, the news, his eyes drooping heavily, thanks to his exhausting day and the music lulling him under. He slid the computer onto the mattress and nearly closed it before remembering his website, the podcast that he had uploaded the night before. He clicked on the URL, thinking he would glance at the stats before allowing himself to drift off for the night, but when he saw the numbers, he took a sharp breath and sat straight up.
There were 894.
He had 894 downloads. In one day. What in the world? He knew it had been good work; an intriguing premise, and he had told it well. But still, 894?
Heart thrumming in his chest, his gaze moved from the listens to the comments. He had six. Six! Wide awake now, he scrolled down. Leonard, of course, was the first.
LeonardC404: Riveting. Hope you don’t mind, but I shared it with a few colleagues in the department. We’ve all got to know—what happens next?—Dad
Jsweets: An invisible husband? Haha! Dying for more—why are the people just going along with it?
StanforKeanu: This happened to my mom after my dad passed. She swore she could see him and talk to him. I didn’t know it had a name, but yeah, I think it’s more common than people know.
Dems4Life: Fifteen bucks it’s a bunch of Repugnicans high on the meth they cook up in their crab shanties. You’d see people too if you were stoned all the time.
Patriot1976: Libtard.
LDE4892898: I make $230,000 working from home. Want to learn how? Go to bit.x.z.url.com
Anders stared at the screen, a mix of pride and joy flooding his body (and only a touch of disappointment at the comment that was missing this time). His instincts had been right. People were responding to this story. What’s more—they wanted to know what happened next! And Anders was going to give the people what they wanted. He could go over to the island on weekends—every weekend if he needed to. Until he could answer Jsweets’s question, anyway, which was his question as well: Why are the people just going along with it?
His exhaustion quickly forgotten, Anders stayed up late into the night, revamping his website, archiving all his old podcast episodes, and leaving the two Frick Island episodes front and center beneath the title of his new serial, in a big-serif font on the home page: WHAT THE FRICK?
* * *
—
On Saturday morning, when BobDan spotted the familiar visage waiting on the dock at the Winder Cove Marina a hundred yards out, his heart stopped in his chest for a beat. Pearl had called Lady Judy, who told Shirlene at the market, who in turn told BobDan that the boy wasn’t in fact a Mormon, as BobDan had incorrectly assumed, but a journalist. And BobDan—and the island as a whole—had even less use for one of those. The last thing they needed was some young Carl Bernstein wannabe snooping around, looking under rocks that were better left unturned.