“Oh.” Her mouth turned down in a frown. “Yeah, that was sad.”
“What happened?”
“A bad storm capsized his boat. He drowned. Least they think that’s what happened. Still haven’t found the body. Probably eaten by sharks.” She shrugged nonchalantly at her gruesome suggestion, in the way only newspaper reporters, doctors, and police officers can. “Anyway, it was like the first waterman death in fifteen, sixteen years?”
“And his name was Tom,” Anders said. He stared at the man’s picture accompanying the article—young guy, buzzed hair almost like a military cut, friendly eyes. Tom. Tom. Tom. What was it about that name?
“Yep,” Jess said. She tilted her head. “You know the saddest thing about that island isn’t that waterman dying, though.”
“What do you mean?”
“Saddest thing is that the island isn’t even going to be here in eighty years, and not one of them seems to believe that.”
“Why won’t it be here?”
“Climate change? Maybe you’ve heard of it.” She grins. “Sea level’s rising. Frick Island is disappearing.”
Now that is interesting, Anders thought.
“Anyway—gotta run.”
“Yeah, OK. See ya.” He waved her on, then stared at the story a few beats more, searching the recesses of his brain. Nothing materialized, aside from the email he had received: You came all the way to Frick Island and missed the biggest story out here. He folded the paper in half and, standing, tucked it under his arm, then walked back to his desk to flesh out the four inches on the new dean of education due at noon.
—
After work, Anders went through his routine in a half daze— unlock apartment door, turn on light, scan for cockroaches. He loosened his tie, then pulled it off and started on his shirt—a short-sleeved white button-up that was a gift from his grandmother at his college graduation. Kelsey laughed when he tried it on and said he looked like one of those Latter-Day Saints kids who rode from house to house on their bikes peddling Mormonism to the masses. Anders didn’t care. The August heat and humidity was brutal and it was cooler than long sleeves while still being work appropriate. He hung it on the back of the folding chair.
Clad in his white undershirt and Dockers, he microwaved a frozen dinner and ate at the collapsible table while staring at NewsHour. He glanced at the folded newspaper he had brought home, where it now sat next to the plastic tray of half-eaten lasagna (that honestly tasted more like the plastic tray than lasagna), his eyes scanning the missing-waterman story again, and he thought about what Jess had said about the island.
His cell buzzed on the table and he experienced a brief hope it was Celeste, and then the immediate, familiar embarrassment. It’s over. Get it through your thick skull, Anders. He spied Kelsey’s name on the screen and turned his phone over, not eager to speak to his sister, who he knew was just calling to find out why he hadn’t yet answered her email about Labor Day.
After ditching the rest of his meal in the trash and scrubbing his fork in the sink—he hadn’t always been so steadfast in his cleaning, but with the cockroaches, he couldn’t leave anything to chance—he stretched out on his floor mattress and pulled up a new web page on his phone, typing “Frick Island disappearing” in the search bar.
A string of hyperlinks popped up, and Anders sat up straighter as he scanned through them, each headline more alarming than the next.
The Island Sinking into the Bay
Washing Away: The Vanishing Island
Frick Island: A Place in Crisis
Crisis? Good Lord, Anders thought, his eyebrows having risen halfway to his hairline. Except when he visited the island, it hadn’t exactly had the vibe of a place in crisis. Disrepair? Sure. Old-school? Definitely. But crisis? Not quite. He clicked on and skimmed a few of the articles, which all detailed the same point Jess had mentioned earlier—global warming was steadily increasing sea levels, which NASA assessed could rise up to two full meters in the next hundred years. And Frick Island—which lay exactly at sea level in the Chesapeake Bay— would at the very least be in dire trouble, if not completely underwater.
And while he read through article after article, Anders couldn’t help but think the journalists had missed something very vital: What did the people of Frick Island think about all this?
It was egregious, in fact, the oversight. How could you write a story about an island in crisis without the perspective of the actual islanders? He knew newspaper budgets were tight—maybe no one thought it was worth it to make the inconvenient trip to that little strip of land smack in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay. And yet, here Anders was. Less than two hours away from that little strip of land. A strip of land that might just contain the perfect story for a long-form podcast.
A story he had missed the first time he was there.
He pulled up his email and clicked on the saved message from NoManIsAnIsland, this time a buzz forming in his belly. The buzz he got whenever he felt maybe he was onto something. Was it climate change? Was that what this anonymous tipster was referring to?
Maybe it was a cry for help. Anders sat up straighter. Maybe he could tell a story that others had missed. Something that could make a difference and save the island, once and for all! That was one of the reasons he’d gotten into journalism—before Spotlight, no less—because he knew one reporter following the right trail could make a big difference in the lives of others. One only had to look at Serial—the popular true-life podcast about a convicted murderer who may not have committed the crime—to see that podcasts had the same opportunity as newspapers, maybe even more so. OK, so maybe the murder suspect hadn’t gotten a new trial in the end, but millions of people had been educated about the pitfalls of the American
