Page 118 of Bless This Hot Mess

“I’m really not sure,” Emma-Lou admitted. “That’s the cover story. What I know is this–my parents were not swallowed by waves and lost to Poseidon. They were swallowed by guilt.”

“So, they didn’t really vanish in the Triangle,” Japheth said slowly. “They were detriangulated by Canada’s spy agency.”

“CSIS staged the whole thing,” Emma-Lou confirmed. “The cruise tickets, the news blurbs, the ‘lost at sea’ paperwork. The Bermuda Triangle is very convenient when you need plausible deniability. As far as I know, they went into witness protection. I don’t know where. I wasn’t allowed to.”

Ronald’s eyes widened, “Wait… you mean they’re still alive?”

“All I know is that,hopefully, they’re still alive. Probably with boring names like Bob and Sharon Arbuckle working in a strip mall luggage store somewhere in Moosejaw. Or maybe Thunder Bay. Witness protection sounds glamorous but they’re probably running a bait shop with phoney drivers’ licenses and just wishing they could come home.”

Rebekkah’s eyes welled, “They just left you.”

“They had to. They left me with this place,” Emma-Lou said. “And a promise that the laundering would stop.” She gave a short, humourless laugh. “But stopping is never that simple, is it? There were still… arrangements. New expectations. Just because my parents were gone, it’s not like the pressure let up. And I was terrified and grieving parents who were alive but dead to me. I said yes to people I never should have been talking to. Then the Ferraris came along with their envelopes and their devotion to saving the station, really trying to help me build an honest business. But it all got very messy, nearly impossible to separate the wheat from the chaff.”

She took another breath, the next confession feeling like swallowing glass. “Rino and his family,” she said, “they’re not mobsters. They are tax-averse capitalist Catholics with a flair for a dramatic way of speaking, but they employ good accountants who follow the tax act to the t. For years, they’ve been our biggest sponsor. They collect cash donations at the dealerships. We thank them on air. We invoice them for ad packages. They write it off as marketing. It’s all technically legal. But my parents had muddied the waters by stirring in the dirty money, it started years ago, and when they left, that muddle is almost impossible to parse out in the records.”

“So, when you say laundering,” Suwarna said, brisk and pale, “you mean your parents used WWJD as a wash cycle for genuinely criminal money, and the Ferraris later became an additional concentrated source of community-minded cash flow that ended up catching the stink?”

“That’s a very efficient summary, yes,” Emma-Lou said. “Rino genuinely believes he has been keeping us afloat out of kindness. I don’t think he knows about my parents’ CSIS deal.Or that his family’s reputation is being sullied by their earlier dirty dealings.”

“And the fire?” Ronald asked.

The question hung in the air like smoke.

“That part… that’s on me,” Emma-Lou admitted.

No one spoke. Outside, a truck rattled past, the sound filtering in through the broken glass like distant thunder.

“I wanted out,” she said. “Really out. No more envelopes, no more ‘lost’ invoices, no more lying awake at night wondering if CSIS was going to knock on my door again and ask why there were still untraceable deposits in our account. When Trinity came along and suddenly, we had actual listeners, actual advertisers, I thought… maybe this is it. Maybe we can pivot to being a real station supported by real businesses who sell legal things like wind chimes and body butter.”

“Mmm,” Carrington said. “The dream. Money-rolled by moisturizer.”

“But to cut ties clean with the Ferraris,” she went on, “I would have had to open every ledger, every shoebox, every envelope my parents ever tucked into the walls. It would have dragged WWJD into court, dragged Rino and his family along with us, dragged the whole town through a scandal. I kept thinking, ‘If I just… started over. Literally. If I burned the rot out, maybe something new could grow.”

Rebekkah’s mouth fell open. “You didn’t.”

“I did,” she said simply. “I had Suwarna sign off on that ridiculous popcorn machine for the lobby. The one that violated three sections of the fire code because of its wiring.”

“In my defence,” Suwarna cut in, colour rising, “the salesman was very persuasive and the pamphlet said, ‘wholesome cinematic experience’. And after reading the reviews from friends in my Friendster account, I did put in a requestwith the building inspector noting the electrical outlet should be inspected. And that’s when I sent out the employee memo that the popcorn machine was out of order until further notice and not to be used under any circumstance–no snack emergency carve outs. Though in hindsight, the fact that the manual had a skull and crossbones on the cover should have been an even bigger red flag.”

“I moved the popcorn machine closer to the records room,” Emma-Lou said. “I plugged in a space heater on the same power bar. I set the timer on the popper to start at the end of the workday. I thought, ‘If I can get the fire to start in the archives, where all the financial records are, and make sure the place is empty, I’ll watch and let it burn long enough to destroy that room, then call the fire department. We conveniently lose the records, we rebuild, no one gets hurt. Clean. Honest. A fresh start.’ I convinced myself it would somehow be a controlled burn, but without supervision.”

“Like a forest,” Ronald nodded. “You just wanted to burn the underbrush.”

“Except,” she said, voice cracking. “I am not a firefighter. I am a woman who barely passed grade twelve chemistry. I misjudged. The wiring was older than I realized. The timer was probably set to a clock in Taiwan. I argued with Rino in my office. He wanted to give us more donations collected at the dealerships; I told him we didn’t need the donations. He was angry because he’d promised his customers that their goodwill was going to a good cause. What was he supposed to do? It would be unethical for them to keep the money, or to donate it to a different charity when people intended for it to be given to WWJD. He’s such a rule follower. In a good way! I think he suspected something was up. He was worried if we slowed the flow of donationsto WWJD, it would not only hurt the station but also jeopardize Trinity’s peaking performance and you know how he feels about…”

“Japheth,” everyone said at once.

“I stormed out in a mood, told myself I’d come back later, check on things once everyone had left, switch it all off if I’d changed my mind,” Emma-Lou recounted, “but to be honest, it was pretty made up by that point.”

Her fingers dug into her own knees. “I went for a cool-down cappuccino. Just to get my head straight. By the time I was returning to the station,” she whispered, “the sky was orange. It wasn’t after 5 p.m., it was the middle of the afternoon. I was so scared.”

No one breathed for a moment, remembering where they were, what it was like.

“I called the station first, thinking I could warn you all, if you didn’t already… if you weren’t already… No one answered so I called 911,” she went on, “I didn’t know if anyone was still inside. I prayed you’d all made it out. I didn’t know if Trinity had gone back to rehearse. I didn’t know if Suwarna was caught in the elevator. I didn’t know if Carrington had smelled the smoke early enough to pull the fire alarm. I stood on the other side of the parking lot and watched flames come out of the roof and the only thing I could think was, ‘I have killed everyone and I have killed the station and my parents were right about me, I am not strong enough for this and I am not… good.’”

“How did we not see you? We ran out, we were looking for you,” Carrington asked, voice small.

“I hid behind the dumpster when I saw you were safe,” Emma-Lou said. “I was in shock. I was embarrassed. I didn’t know what to do. I watched the fire trucks. I watched you all arrive after you’d collected Trinity from Weinus, Weinus, & Ware’s office. I saw you standing out here, crying and huggingand I… I just couldn’t come over. I kept hearing my mother say, ‘If you can’t do something right, don’t do it at all,’ and I had done something wrong on the largest possible scale.”