“Rest assured we are doing everything we can to identify the aggressors,” said Officer Brian Stevens, who is leading the investigation. Officer Stevens and his team arrived on the scene at once, but they found no evidence of the aggressor(s) in the ventilation system or surrounding area. Surveillance captured nothing unusual.
Officials have, however, determined that the fake blood was made from water, corn syrup, flour, cocoa powder, and red food coloring.
“Obviously we don’t have much to go on,” Detective Grubb told the Gazette. “But if I had to guess, I’d say it’s an ecoterrorist. You’ve got to chop down a heck of a lot of trees to build that housing in the Valley, don’t you?”
According to Officer Stevens, however, it’s too soon to speculate about the perpetrators. “But we do have reason to believe the people behind this act are experienced criminals,” he said. “There were no fingerprints, no DNA on any of the items. All we know is that whoever got into the ventilation system had to be pretty small.”
Some officials theorize that the invaders were animal-rights activists, protesting the wild game aspect of the dinner.
A veteran of small-town development, Benjamin Ritter has a different theory.
“It seems obvious to me that this was a protest against the Valley development. I mean, twenty-six voodoo dolls? When exactly twenty-six developers were present? Come on,” Ritter told the Gazette. “I see this kind of resistance all the time. It can be painful for inhabitants to watch their town change. Usually, we see this in folks who are attached to the local history—often the older generation. They’re worried that we’re the Big Bad Wolf, coming to blow down their favorite diner and replace it with a chain, bulldoze the mom-and-pop supermarkets and build up megastores, take away their church parking, put up a stadium that nobody ever uses. And they have a right to be skeptical—urban revitalization plans have failed countless residents in the past. But we won’t fail you. I think when people realize how beneficial our work will be for them, their children, their grandchildren, they won’t be so scared.”
He went on to say that if he could send one message to the aggressors, it would be: “We’re on your side.”
Officer Stevens and his team do not believe that the developers face any significant threats, but they are cautioning residents to remain alert and to report any unusual occurrences to the local police department. The event may be connected to a series of power outages that occurred during a charette this past spring.
If you can contribute any information about this event, please call or text 1-800-CRIMEFIGHTER, which will give you the option to place an anonymous tip.
The Vacca Vale Gazette will provide updates as they are made available. The revitalization plan will proceed on scheduled pace.
Where Life Lives On
Joan Kowalski is forty years old. Whenever she’s forced to provide a Defining Characteristic during a corporate ice breaker, she reveals that she has freckles on her eyelids but nowhere else. Group leaders always demand that she prove it. After she closes her eyes, at least two good-natured strangers make comments like, Oh my, or, I’ll be damned, or, Very nice. Joan never feels closer to anyone afterward, never feels like a defined character, and doesn’t understand why people are so eager to break the ice.
Joan works at Restinpeace.com, Where Life Lives On, screening obituary comments for foul language, copyrighted material, and mean-spirited remarks about the deceased. “You would be surprised,” she often tells people, “by how cruel people can be to the dead.”
After a lethally stylish coiffeur described Joan’s hair as “the color of February,” she began to trim her bangs herself, at home, shorter than any stylist ever permitted. This performance of autonomy never ceases to exhilarate her. Like most denizens of Vacca Vale, Joan has never lived elsewhere, and she now occupies a small apartment in La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex, on the corner of Bella Coola and Saint Francis. At the laundromat, once, she overheard two women discussing the origin story of their building: saddened by the economic decline of his hometown, a wonky Christian philanthropist—now a resident of Quebec—decided to donate money to fund an affordable housing complex in Vacca Vale. He had one stipulation: it must look and sound chic. So he chose a French word he liked and fastened it to a deteriorating building with vintage charm, prioritizing aesthetic over functionality. La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex was born. The building is located in the southern edge of downtown, with abandoned Zorn factories to its west and Chastity Valley to its east. In the early twentieth century, the building housed factory laborers. The donor selected a darling rabbit wallpaper for the lobby, along with brass rabbit lamps he wished to place in every apartment. Developers eventually vetoed the lamps in favor of updating the building’s water heater. After suffering a few more rejections, the donor stopped trying to influence the design. Now, most tenants of the building call their home by its English translation: the Rabbit Hutch.
Joan can eat an unnatural amount of watermelon in one sitting—a skill she sometimes employs to amuse friends and coworkers to the detriment of her digestion. She likes to ride the South Shore train to visit her aunt Tammy in Gary, Indiana. As the train pulls her across her state, she likes to watch the factories breathe orange fire into the sky, likes to imagine that she is a stowaway orphan headed toward a Big City Adventure. On the South Shore, she likes to read Charles Dickens because he pays attention to pollution but also makes her laugh, which makes her feel that it is possible to laugh in her own polluted city. Joan has never confidently traversed a crosswalk in her life, and she profoundly distrusts people who claim they don’t like bread.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, July sixteenth, Joan Kowalski sits at her desk, scanning an article that appeared on her newsfeed. A coworker that Joan wanted to impress and befriend brought a watermelon to lunch an hour earlier; performative gorging ensued. In the end, it was all for nothing. Joan said something irreverent about a member of a royal family, acutely upsetting the coworker. If Joan had known that the coworker was the sort to get defensive about monarchies, she wouldn’t have been so eager to impress her. But the damage is done.
According to the internet, threats associated with overeating watermelon include nausea, diarrhea, bloating, indigestion, and a “weak or absent pulse.” Joan decides to distract herself from this information with the local news. She adjusts her drugstore glasses and leans closer to the screen. She can hear Sylvie crunching company Moon Chips in the adjacent cubicle. CELEBRATION INTERRUPTED BY DISTURBING ACT, reads the front page.
Joan doesn’t care much about the Valley development—she could take it or leave it—but this event does unnerve her. Especially the voodoo dolls. Although she would never admit it, Joan is positively drugged with superstition. The supernatural—witchcraft, God, bad luck, astrology, time travel—has a death grip on her. She remembers the spectral girl at the laundromat last night, inquiring about the afterlife. Some odd name. The girl was pale, white-haired, elven, thin. Pretty in a strange way. Phantomized. Come to think of it, the girl was exactly as Joan imagines the Ghost of Christmas Past whenever she rereads A Christmas Carol. She thinks of the women who starved themselves—the fiancées of Jesus. Sweating blood.
Suddenly, Joan wants witnesses. Could anyone else see that girl?
“Joan?”
Joan quits the browser in a spasm of disgrace and spins. Her superior, Anne Shropshire, stands at the entrance of her cubicle. When Rest in Peace downsized two years prior, offices became stalls. To increase each employee’s sense of audial privacy as spatial privacy diminished, a white-noise soundtrack was installed in the ventilation. The office now sounds like a transatlantic flight. As a result, Restinpeace.com employees do enjoy intensified audial privacy, but they also frequently scare each other on accident. The office is rather tense.
Joan’s heart thuds. Relief that her pulse is neither weak nor absent briefly eclipses her shame.
“Sorry to bother you,” says Shropshire, “but I wanted to bring a little oversight to your attention.”
Joan folds her hands on her lap and waits. In the spotlight of direct attention, she becomes conscious of behavior programmed to operate unconsciously, like breathing and eye contact. She stares too long or not long enough, blinks too often or too little, inhales at irregular intervals, yawns in moments of suspense. Three avian pins are fastened to Anne Shropshire’s blouse.
“As I’m sure you know,” says Shropshire, “the Elsie Blitz obituary has drawn quite a lot of traffic. Your job as a screener is always very important and very valued here at Rest in Peace, but on high-profile obituaries like Elsie Blitz’s, your job is even more important. Supremely important.”
Joan needs to blink but worries that this would be a creepy time to do so. Her eyes water.
“Maybe you didn’t see the comment posted at four thirty-nine this morning by user Abominable Glow Man?”