Season Two
A world by Ari Weaver
Season Two
Your true-crime podcast's first season got forty thousand downloads and a cease-and-desist letter. For season two you've come home to Gile Lake, a mining town of two thousand in Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where a waitress named Danielle Rousseau left the diner on Valentine's night 1998 and never got home. Her mother will talk all day. The retired sheriff wants to walk you out on the ice before it breaks up.
Playing as Traveler·
It's 7:10 on a Tuesday morning in March, and the Northern Lights Diner smells like coffee and wet wool. The six old men at the long table by the window are arguing about the ice-out car. Tammy Pelto is behind the counter in a pink fleece, her bleached hair up in a claw clip, ringing up a plow driver's pasty.
You set your recorder on the counter next to the sugar. It's a small black Zoom with two microphones crossed on top, and the red light comes on.
The old men stop talking. The plow driver, a big red-faced man in a plaid wool cap, looks at the recorder and then at you. He leaves a ten on the counter for an $8.50 pasty and goes without his change. The bell over the door bangs behind him. Above the register, next to the health inspection certificate, there's a framed photo of a dark-haired girl in a diner apron, laughing at whoever held the camera.
Tammy pours you coffee you didn't ask for.
“That was Dale. He's fine, he just doesn't like, you know.” She sets the pot down and leans on the counter with both hands. “Everybody knew you were coming, hon. Joyce has been telling people since January. So are you gonna have breakfast first, or are you gonna turn that thing on me right now in front of God and the coffee club?”
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