The Invisible Husband of Frick Island by Colleen Oakley (inspirational books for women TXT) 📕

so immensely they have disassociated with reality. Though I haven’t dealt with that particular scenario, it brings to mind a news story I read a few years ago about a woman in Australia who lived with her husband’s dead body in their home for weeks, until neighbors started to smell the decomposition. He had died of natural causes, but she simply couldn’t let go. Perhaps you’ve come across that one in your research.

I hope this helps. Please let me know if you have any further questions.

Anders wrinkled his nose. At least Tom’s body wasn’t lying in wait, decaying in Piper’s carriage house. He didn’t think.

But he did think he finally had enough pieces to start pulling together an episode for his podcast. And he spent another week writing, recording, and editing it, until he had forty-nine minutes of a perfectly paced (if he did say so himself) story—beginning with the cryptic email he’d received from someone on Frick Island and slowly revealing his journey to understand climate change (peppering in a few of Mr. Gimby’s wacky clips), which turned into a possible investigation into a missing waterman, which turned into the shocking realization that the wife of that missing waterman was experiencing a delusion on a grand scale—and that the entire island was going along with it.

Ira Glass himself couldn’t have done it any better.

And last night at 3:20 a.m., he’d finally hit enter, uploading the episode to his website, posting it on Instagram and Twitter, and then falling into a deep, restful sleep. When he woke this morning with a start, sitting straight up, he knew without even glancing at the clock that he was wildly late for work. When he did look at the clock, he saw with a shock that he was nearly four hours late.

“Seriously, though, what’s up with you?” Jess said, her head popping up again like a game of whack-a-mole. “Is this about all that Frick Island stuff again?”

“Kind of,” Anders admitted, pulling his laptop out of his bag and powering it up.

Jess shook her head at him before disappearing once again. Last week, when Anders told her what he had seen, Jess was nonplussed. “I told you Frick Island was weird.”

Now he waited as his computer screen came alive and then went through the motions of checking his emails, responding to any that needed responding to, checking the news headlines, and then pinging Greta to let her know he was in.

Then he clicked on his website to see if his father had listened to his podcast. It didn’t load immediately—which was sometimes the case at work; the Internet was spotty no matter how much the higher-ups complained to the board, explaining that a slow Internet connection should probably not be an issue in a newsroom. Not knowing if it would be ten seconds or two minutes, Anders stood up to take Jess’s suggestion of finding coffee. In the break room, as he was filling a foam cup to the brim with the hot liquid, Greta walked in.

“There you are.”

“Yeah, sorry I was running late this morning. I overslept.” He hadn’t ever been late before, so he thought honesty was the best policy and hoped for leniency on his first offense.

Greta waved Anders’s sentence away as if it didn’t matter. “Listen, I need you to go out to Salisbury High School, like, fifteen minutes ago. It’s on lockdown. A man knocked off a 7-Eleven with a hunting rifle and he’s on the loose. Hector’s covering a college visit today for that ninth-grade lacrosse phenom and he’s all the way up in D.C.”

“Why didn’t you send Jess?” Anders asked, slugging down the hot coffee, not feeling it scald his throat.

“She’s got to be at the courthouse at one for the record-pumpkin trial. It was the biggest story for us last year—she can’t miss it.”

Anders vaguely remembered Jess saying something about it. At last October’s pumpkin festival, a local farmer had beat the record for largest gourd ever grown in the state—weighing in at more than 1,600 pounds. But another farmer claimed the vine had actually started on his land—that it was his pumpkin, even though it crawled over the fence and grew in the original farmer’s garden. It ended in a knife fight, the vine-originating farmer stabbing the record-winning farmer, who spent months in the hospital on ventilation but fortunately survived.

“I’m on it,” Anders said, getting a burst of adrenaline and confidence from this very Clark Kent–like experience, and he all but ran from the break room, yelling, “Text me the address!” over his shoulder to Greta. He grabbed his laptop, closing it with his hand and shoving it in his bag in one quick motion, and was out the door.

The moon was high in the sky, the sun long gone, by the time Anders finally got back to his apartment that evening. The police didn’t track down the suspect until 5:00 p.m.—he had been holing up in an empty shed more than six miles from the school—and the kids hadn’t been allowed to leave until that happened. Anders had been on the ground, interviewing worried parents who—over time—morphed into angry parents who felt their kids were being held hostage inside the building while they were standing outside of it, when clearly any threat of the hunting-rifle robber was nowhere to be found. But protocol was protocol. When he got back to the newsroom, Greta informed him that not only would this be the lead story but that he would be penning three other related stories (about local gun laws, school safety, and community reaction), and that for the first time ever, every single byline on the front page would be his (his!), including the photos. He spent hours poring over each paragraph, sentence, caption, and word choice at least a hundred times, making sure the stories were perfect before turning them in.

When he let himself in, he barely glanced toward the kitchen to scan for cockroaches—he was too tired to do anything about it