The New Summerland

Chapter 3

Conner could remember the first story he read about it happening on a news website. It was one of those amateurish looking sites with no navigation and very few images, but often contain the most interesting “news” of the day. The kind where the “editors” (in the loosest sense of the term), select sensational headlines and political fodder from around the web and post links to the random articles and videos.

But even for one of these types of headline-aggregating sites, this story stuck out—it wasn’t every day that you read about four people drowning on the same night, in the same town, all in different places.

According to the news story, which had recently ran in the New Summerland Daily online paper, four men that lived in and around the small central Florida town had met the same fate on the night of July 19: “Four Florida Men Drown; in the Same Town; on the Same Night”. The circumstances were suspiciously similar. They were all fully clothed when their bodies were found. All four were alone. And none of the cases seemed to involve foul play.

Two of the men drowned in swimming pools. One in a small, peanut-shaped pool in his own backyard. The other in the deep end of a half-Olympic sized pool at a motel off the interstate. According to the motel owner the man wasn’t a guest at the establishment, and the night clerk working the desk said she hadn’t seen him check in with anyone else. There were only seven other people staying at the hotel that night—and no one knew the man that ended up at the bottom of the pool.

If it wasn’t for a car that was left idling at the entrance to a footpath off the side of the road that led to a small fishing dock, the other man may not have been found for some time. But after he didn’t show up for work the next morning and was reported missing, a patrol officer ran the plates of the idling car to track it back to him. They decided to send the diver in. The man was found about three feet from the end of the dock, dead at the bottom of the lake.

The fourth case was the most baffling. A woman called the police in the middle of the night when she woke up to find her husband no longer in bed beside her. The cops ignored the call, figuring the guy had left voluntarily and that this was more of a marriage issue, than a crime. But the woman knew something was wrong. Her husband had left his wallet and phone. If he was leaving her, he wouldn’t get very far without any money or an ID.

The next morning a municipal worker found a body floating in the city reservoir. Because he had no identification on him, police weren’t sure who he was—until a night shifter remembered the phone call from the woman at 3:30 a.m. She wept uncontrollably when they had her come in to identify the body. She knew he wouldn’t have left her. And she knew he wouldn’t intentionally kill himself. But she also knew that she had no idea what had happened to her husband that sticky Florida night.

But Conner, unlike the police, investigators, or other curious news readers, knew exactly what happen to the four men who died in New Summerland on the evening of July 19. He knew that he had to get there, because this was just the beginning.

To be continued soon ...