Chapter 3: A Lively Sense of the Grotesque

The Arcadia Bay of 2013 was a town on the ropes. Fishing was the quaint coastal hamlet's primary industry, a venture made rather difficult by the fish disappearing from the town's waters. The lack of fish meant the canneries in the local unincorporated townships closed. Good people lost their jobs, others moved away while they still had the money to do so, and property values plummeted. That last one benefited no entity in Arcadia Bay, save one: Prescott Development. Sean Prescott's business concern swooped in and bought property around town cheap, and it was theorized that Prescott was planning to remake the town in his own image, turning it into a resort destination for the hyper-rich, with Pan Estates leading the vanguard.

This never came to pass. Any hopes Sean Prescott had of mutating Arcadia Bay into the oft locally feared "Prescott Bay" died when his son Nathan shot Max Caulfield in the girls' bathroom of Blackwell Academy on October 7th of that year. Any further purchases of property, the Prescott Development board of directors surmised, would result in protests, and any land Prescott hoped to sell to outside businesses would be met with the same. Arcadia Bay became a poor investment, and Prescott put all properties (including Pan Estates) back on the real estate market at heavily discounted prices.

So how did a town that was dying in 2013 become a town that was in the middle of an unprecedented boom in 2018? Well, there are two answers to that question.

The first is that someone did eventually buy the property Prescott put up for sale: a Washington State conglomerate out of Issaquah that went by the name of Leonard International. Protests by the local township were quashed before they began by the one word that truly mattered in Arcadia Bay: Jobs. Fishing was out and, under Leonard International, freight was in. The American Rust Junkyard was flattened and turned into a freight depot to take advantage of the local railroad. Docks and marinas were re-purposed into truck stops that accommodated all of the shipments entering and leaving Arcadia Bay. Those on the fence about leaving stayed. Those who didn't want to leave came back. And everyone made money.

The second, and less likely, was the result of a sizable tourism trade brought about almost entirely by the works of Kate Bradford. Bradford, a local girl, wrote her first children's book in 2016, and her second in 2017, and both broke every sales metric on record. An overblown New Yorker profile credited the twenty-three-year-old Bradford as "The Woman Who Saved Print Media." Both of Bradford's books were set in an idyllic fictional version of Arcadia Bay, and this brought families to the town. Indeed, tourism became so robust in Arcadia Bay that a motel and a hotel were erected.

Arcadia Bay has an Embassy Suites, now. Good for them.

But with a town's growth comes a town's growing pains. A pitfall of any shipping community is that with all the cargo coming and going, illegal narcotics can be found in a number of shipments that many would find surprising. In the days of its bust (shortly before the boom brought about by Leonard International), the town's sole drug kingpin was a man named Frank Bowers, who left town sometime during the week after the funeral of Rachel Amber, never to be seen in Arcadia Bay again. Those who wished to locally deal some of the drugs that came into Arcadia Bay found a power vacuum waiting to be filled.

But any underworld is a dramatic production, with big divas, small extras, and myriad players in between. All those factors don't deal well with each other, and they are in need of people who can act as go-betweens. They are in need of people who can find things and people that don't want to be found. They are in need of people of grit and discretion.

In short, they are in need of people like Chloe Price.

Chloe stayed in Arcadia Bay until the summer of 2014, where she left in a cloud of mystery to parts unknown (Seattle, some said, though none could for sure). In a no less equal cloud of mystery, she came back to Arcadia Bay in the spring of 2015, her hair only blue on its fringes, as she had opted to let it grow back to its natural strawberry blonde.

Chloe had already known the denizens of Arcadia Bay that its upper and working classes wished to forget existed, and when new lowlifes rolled in, she was in a position to be friendly, but not to make friends. Favors were asked, money changed hands, and that is how Chloe Price made her living in 2018. For the record, she put "Freelance Consultant" on her taxes. No one from the IRS came knocking on her door, so she supposed it must have been true.

The record should also show that Frank Bowers never did collect Chloe's three-thousand dollar debt.


Chloe rolled The Beast into the parking lot of the Woodlawn Apartments at a quarter to eleven. She put it in park, and felt the truck cough and sputter underneath her. The Beast, a savagely beaten truck from a time before the earth cooled, was her first and, to date, only method of conveyance that she had ever owned. Getting rid of it would mean getting rid of the fading (but still visible) graffiti left by Rachel during her time on this earth. Old feelings died hard.

She stopped only to heap some scorn on the sign advertising the Woodlawn Apartments, which was a shitty building on a shitty block that had no lawn and was nowhere near any woods. She entered the piss-smelling lobby and ascended a single flight of stairs to apartment 205, the living space of Dalton Folger.

Where Lenny Diehl saw Dalton as a big scary black dude, Chloe (who had known him for about a year) saw him as a teddy bear who doted on his cat and who, Chloe had no doubt, would have given Lenny's watch back to him free of charge once he knew what was up.

Chloe didn't think Lenny needed to know this.

"His father's watch?" Dalton asked as he was collecting stray cat toys off of his living room's burgundy carpet. "Who does that shit?"

"Your boy Lenny, apparently."

"Lenny's not my boy," Dalton said. "I don't even think he's his mother's boy. Twitchy little motherfucker."

Chloe nodded. "Like he's trying to ignore a rash that isn't there?"

"Yeah," Dalton said, smiling. "He'll jump if you fart loud enough."

Chloe imagined this and smiled herself.

"So," she said. "Let's talk bidness. May I have the watch, please?"

Dalton looked at Chloe and squinted, not saying anything. If the gears turning in Dalton's head were any squeakier, Chloe reckoned she'd have to apply the oil herself.

"If you do me a favor," Dalton said.

"You know I don't work cheap," Chloe said.

"It's a small one."

"There are no small ones."

"I'm having a problem with my weed dealer," Dalton said.

"Yeah?" Chloe asked. "What kind of problem?"

"I don't know where the fuck he is. He's not answering his phone, and he's not texting me back. I need you to check up on him."

"That's it? Just see where he is?"

"I'm sensitive," Dalton said. "I care about people."

"And he deals cheaply, I guess?"

Dalton smiled again. "You know me too well."

Chloe scratched a little bit of the forehead under her beanie. "I dunno," Chloe said. "I don't work after midnight. You know the rules. Namely that that's the only one."

"You mean you need more enticement than the watch?"

"You know me," Chloe said. "I like my clients separate. You weave that shit together too much, you can't keep anything straight. Yeah, Dalton, I need some enticement."

"Tell you what," Dalton said. "He owes me a nickel bag from when I helped hook up his stereo. It's yours if you do this for me."

"Deal," Chloe said. "What's his name?"

"Justin Williams."

Chloe's eyebrows raised. "Damn."

"You know him?" Dalton asked. "What'm I saying. Chloe, you know everybody."

"Yeah, but I know Justin from when we were kids."

"Hmm," Dalton said. "From back in the day?"

"Before The Bay was The Bay, yeah. Even had a thing for me, if you can believe that."

This seemed to amuse Dalton a great deal. "Reeeeeeally? He know he was barking up the wrong tree?"

"Eventually," Chloe said.

"He cool about it?"

"Yeah," Chloe said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. "I suppose he was."


And to think the evening had started out so G-rated. Or at least as G-rated as Chloe's life ever got. Find a doofus' watch. Check.

So of course, drugs and drug dealers had to be involved eventually. To work under the radar in Arcadia Bay, as Chloe did, the moving, stopping, buying, selling, and trading of drugs was a fact of life. The only tenet of her working existence that put her on the side of the angels (in her eyes, at least) was that Chloe never dealt any of the shit herself.

Her most profitable (and time consuming) venture in this line of work to date was playing negotiator between two outfits of coke dealers that played as though they were too hard for a sit-down. For seven hours, stretching long into the pre-dawn hours of the following morning, Chloe drove back and forth across town, ferrying offers and counter-offers to make sure the dealers had their own separate corners on their own separate parts of town and no one got shot. It was because of this job that Chloe instituted the "no work past midnight" rule and kept to it.

Which wasn't to say it was all bad. She made six grand that night alone. She took a vacation in Long Beach, California with that money.

By herself.

Justin Williams lived in a ranch-style house two miles away that Chloe was surprised he could even afford, and she theorized that dealing was a job adjacent to a legitimate one for Leonard International, no doubt.

She hadn't seen Justin in years, even though their orbits were the same. She remembered the forbiddingly tall, endearingly gawky, bespectacled skater boy from their teenage years: thick glasses beneath straw-colored hair that fought to come out from underneath a ball-cap with the same level of heroism displayed by that guy who stood in front of that tank in China. Full of bravado in front of his boys, tentative around her.

She put The Beast in park by the curb in front of his house, and the truck began its bratty coughing fit. Before she left the vehicle, she reached into the pocket of her jacket and pulled out the watch that belonged to the late father of Lenny Diehl, given unto her by Dalton Folger. It was a cheap, gold-plated Seiko with glow in the dark numbers. She doubted it sold for fifty bucks back when it was new (in the eighties, probably), and she was about to pull two-hundred for it. Life's not fair, thought Chloe, and God help a great many if it ever is.

Under the amber glow of streetlight, in the unseasonably warm heat of the November evening, Chloe made her way to Justin's porch. There were no lights on in the house, save for the glow of a television through the window of what she assumed was the living room.

Chloe wondered how Justin would take this, a Ghost of Romantic Prospects Past showing up on his doorstep before midnight. Chloe had read letters that featured such instances as this. They usually began "Dear, Penthouse Forum."

Chloe knocked on the door, and the contact of her fist made the unlocked door open.

A chill went through Chloe. Every movie she had ever seen that had begun with a supposedly locked door opening spelled trouble, and every last byway in her brain screamed at her to walk away, to turn tail and run. All except one, and that was the one she usually followed.

She imagined that she would not last long in a horror movie.

Canned laughter and poor dialogue echoed through the interior of Justin Williams' surprisingly tidy house. The pictures on the hallway wall were muddy and half-remembered pin-pricks of white teeth and bright eyes in the unlit interior gloom. The carpet was… beige? White? Off-white? Some other bright hue that Chloe would need the color chart from Sherwin-Williams to figure out?

She followed the pale, ghostly television light into the living room. The light, and a strange smell that Chloe found familiar, but couldn't quite place.

Justin Williams had gained weight in the years since Chloe saw him last. Not enough to call him fat, but enough to compliment his height. His hairline retreated from his forehead like the Persian army when they knew the Battle of Marathon was lost. The pitiful attempts at a mustache all those years ago were, thankfully, abandoned.

The only thing that hadn't changed about Justin was his glasses. They were still the same black, blocky monstrosities that had plagued him in his teenage years.

Save for the bullet hole in the left lens, of course.

Justin was on the floor, his left eye marred by an assassin's gun, blood seeping from the socket and ruining the carpet. The bit of floor underneath Justin was a splash of blood, some bone, and various assorted cranial ephemera, wreathing his head like flame wreathed the head of the Virgin Mary in renaissance paintings that she'd seen. The light from the Three's Company episode on the blood-spattered flat-screen blackened the darkness of Justin's remains.

The funerals of both her father and Rachel had been closed casket affairs, so Justin Williams, age twenty-three, drew the unenviable short-straw in being the first dead body Chloe Price had ever seen.

She could not look away.

She did not notice the flashing, candy-like red and blue from the lights of the incoming police cruiser outside. What broke Chloe from her horrible trance was the sound of the open front door slamming against the hallway wall. She turned to see two middle-aged representatives of Arcadia Bay's finest enter the living room, guns leveled on her.

"ABPD! Put your fucking hands behind your head and get down on the ground!"

When you're beat, she thought, you do as you're told.

Chloe's hands went up.