Jordan saw her phone sitting on the kitchen table. She grabbed it and brought it to her desk where she kept her charger. As she plugged it in, the screen came on, showing recent messages and notifications. At the top of the screen was a text from Travis, reminding her to look at the pictures of the dead fish he had sent.
Leave me alone.
Jordan set the phone down and topped up her coffee. She hadn’t looked at the pictures Travis sent her. Not even a glance. She didn’t want to give him the satisfaction. But it felt wrong for her not to at least take a look. She was a reporter, after all. Someday she might need to know something about dead fish in a lake. Travis wouldn’t have to know.
Jordan sat down at the kitchen table, unlocked her phone, and opened her messages, looking at the thread from Travis. In a message from last night were four pictures from Copper Lake, all of them showing dead fish. Two were wide-angle shots that showed a couple hundred feet of the rocky shoreline covered with hundreds of dead fish. There were also two close-ups, one that showed three fish and the other showing just one.
The wide-angle shots looked like something from a contagion or apocalypse movie. In these shots, the dead fish almost looked fake. The close-ups, on the other hand, seemed all too real. Jordan was no animal expert and didn’t even like to eat seafood, but the fish in the photos were disturbing. They seemed somehow misshapen, with bumps and ridges along their bodies. Their eyes bulged abnormally, as if they were looking for something important before they died. And the scales looked scraped or scratched, almost eliminating the shine she’d expect to see.
These fish didn’t look as though they died of some kind of extreme fishing. These fish looked sick.
Now Jordan had a problem. She had looked at the pictures. In her mind, these images raised the question as to how the fish died. With the logical next step being to research the causes of fish dying in large numbers. Which was exactly why Jordan had told Travis she didn’t want to get involved.
She closed the pictures and set her phone down. She needed to do something. Anything. If she didn’t, she’d find herself googling “mass fish deaths.” She hated cleaning but got up to make an attempt. It took all of five minutes to wash her dishes. Not very helpful. Doing her laundry would take some time. She didn’t think she had ever done laundry before seven a.m., but it was better than the alternative. Jordan didn’t have much to wash, but she gathered up the few items, put them in a small laundry basket, and went to the laundry room in the basement of her building. She took her phone so she could get some social media updates while the clothes were in the washing machine.
Jordan’s Twitter and Instagram feeds were remarkably quiet. In the absence of good social media entertainment, her mind kept coming back to the pictures of the dead fish. She knew that so many fish shouldn’t die at once. Not without a good reason. But as perplexing as the dead fish question was, she resisted the urge to dig deeper.
The washing machine had completed the final rinse cycle, and Jordan transferred the clothes to the dryer. This would take more time than the washing machine, maybe an hour, so she returned to her apartment. Still, pictures gnawed at the edge of her thoughts, begging her to learn more. Jordan knew this feeling well and was conditioned to act on it. It was only through force of will that she fought off the urge to investigate the dead fish.
Jordan wasn’t one to watch much television, but she liked to keep up with local news. She turned the TV to the local NBC station. Mixed in with the array of mostly uninteresting stories was one that caught her attention. The FDA apparently planned to reduce barriers to developing new technologies to boost agricultural production. They were proposing the elimination of several requirements for using certain classes of hormones, antibiotics, and other chemicals in beef and poultry products destined for human consumption. The story took the position that this was good for the agricultural industry and that it would spur innovation. Definitely another example of the administration propping up big business at the expense of anything that was in the way. Jordan’s perspective was that eliminating too many requirements and safety checks created unnecessary risk. Food productivity was already at historically high levels. No one really knew what could happen if they tried to push productivity too far.
It had been almost an hour since Jordan had put her clothes in the dryer, so she went to retrieve them. When she had finished putting them away, she heated up another cup of coffee. She somehow thought she had passed a good chunk of the rainy morning. But the clock revealed it was only 8:15.
Jordan fell back on her bed, exhaling loudly. She was at a loss for what to do.
Her mind came back to the dead fish. As long as she had those pictures from Travis, she wouldn’t be able to ignore them. Better to just delete them.
Jordan got up and went to the kitchen and grabbed her phone. She opened the messages, ready to delete the one with the pictures from Travis. But she couldn’t. To do so would have gone against every reporting instinct she had. The time to delete the message would have been when she’d first gotten it. Before looking at the pictures. She couldn’t unsee them now. This left only one option.
Jordan grabbed her laptop from her shoulder bag, sat down at the kitchen table, and turned it on. Once logged in, she went to her messages and viewed the message stream from Travis. She opened each picture, the laptop screen enhancing the realism of the pictures. Looking at the close-ups, she was more convinced the fish looked sick. She didn’t know with what, but something was wrong with them.
Then Jordan did what she had been avoiding since Travis had mentioned the dead fish the previous night. She did what she was wired to do. She began to investigate.
First, she looked for published reports of dead fish from Copper Lake, either in the last week or anytime previously. There was nothing. Not a single report of any dead lake animal in Copper Lake, anytime in the last ten years. The lake had no public history of large numbers of fish dying. More importantly, recent mass deaths, often referred to as a “fish kill,” apparently did not make any news feed. Not even the local town news sites common across New England. That struck Jordan as a bit strange, especially since Copper Lake was a large lake with lots of summer traffic.
Jordan expanded the geography of her search, specifically including other big lakes. Nothing. Whatever caused the fish kill in Copper Lake appeared to have been an isolated event that had not otherwise occurred in the region. Or it was the first of what could be more future events.
Jordan moved on to try to learn about possible causes of a fish kill. She went from not finding anything on the Copper Lake fish kill to getting buried by stories about fish kills around the globe. Many of the stories were from reputable news sources. But there were also a few from some wacko sites quoting fish kills as signs that Armageddon was coming. That the end was near. Jordan gave those sites a wide berth.
Jordan stood up and paced around her apartment, trying to convince herself that she shouldn’t go to Copper Lake. Her instincts told her there was something wrong and that she wouldn’t be able to figure out much unless she was there. And that meant she wouldn’t be on vacation anymore. And Jordan really needed a break. Not that she had any money to go away, but she needed downtime.
As the reality set in that she would be going to Copper Lake, she managed to find a bright side. After all, how bad could it be to work on a story at a beautiful lake retreat in the summer? She could even get in some open-water swimming if she was lucky. Besides, it shouldn’t take more than a couple of days to come up with an explanation for what killed the fish. Once she knew the cause, there would be either an innocuous explanation or one that suggested something sinister or illegal.