Page 71 of What Happened to Lucy Vale
Akash told us that the Strut Girls had seen him and had hailed him over. They wanted to talk to him, he told us, about notes the Vales were receiving in their mailbox.
@ktcakes888:what kind of notes?
@kash_money:threats
@kash_money:someone wants them to move
@lululemonaide:move houses? Or move towns?
@kash_money:towns, I guess. Lucy didn’t really give me details
@lululemonaide:ten bucks says the Steeler-Cox delegation
@lululemonaide:Mad because Rachel went public about naming the new pavilion after a known pervert
@nononycky:* alleged * pervert, please. Innocent until proven guilty lol
@badprincess:I bet it’s Reese
@badprincess:salty because Lucy got Noah Landry
@meeksmaster:it could be anyone
@meeksmaster:I know like twelve people who think the Vales should have stayed up north
@badprincess:you know twelve people?
Conversation meandered, sputtered, and stalled over the summer. We lost track of time and each other. We lost service driving into the woods to find fishing holes, most of them down to puddles.
Peyton Neely lost her grandmother to a stroke. Sofia Young’s father lost his job at the university after a student came forward with claims of sexual harassment.
We all lost our minds when Sofia Young took a break from Discord.
Nick Topornycky lost his virginity.
Some of us grew beards. Evie Grant grew C cups. We were growing up, and growing apart, and getting our driver’s licenses.
It was a summer of change. A summer of growth.
It was the summer we fought back and started a podcast.
Four
We
Shark Wars was a direct response toBlood in the Water, Apple’s 1,241st most popular podcast, which by July had milked the Faraday mystery and rumors about our swim team across eight separate episodes with no signs of stopping.
We couldn’t stand it.
Technically the podcast was Skyler Matthews’s idea. For Skyler, the final straw came when the producers tracked down a previously unnamed witness who claimed to have heard an argument in the Faraday House the night Lydia died by suicide. A few hours before Lydia Faraday broke her neck on a belt, Housataunick native Jeffrey Hughes had been perched twenty feet in the air to repair the transformer on an electrical pole and became concerned by an escalating argument in the Faraday House. Sixteen years later, he was prepared to repeat the same impression he’d conveyed to the police that night: that there was trouble at 88 Lily Lane, that things were turning violent.
Of course, it was possible that Lydia Faraday had argued with someone before she decided to kill herself. But the fact that no one had ever admitted to being with her on the night of her death made the whole event suspicious and gave online conspiracy theorists plenty of juice tofuel their claims of a cover-up—or, at minimum, a sloppy and indifferent response from the sheriff’s department.
There was, of course, another possibility: that Jeffrey Hughes himself was an agent of these same conspiracy theories, an anti-Shark agitator, and possibly a straight-up liar.
As soon as Skyler floated the idea for a podcast, we all volunteered to help.
We recruited members from the podcast and AV club and poached some of the best talent from the school’s online newspaper, including junior Chloe Dawson, who’d done an infamous exposé on cafeteria beef expiration dates her sophomore year and was widely considered a rising star of the journalistic world, at least as far as lunch meat was concerned.
