Romancing the ARG

Move over Joan Wilder.

Can you picture  two romance novelists sneaking in to rummage through the patient files in a psychiatric hospital? Sound like a plot for a novel?  It was real even if the hospital wasn’t. There was so much stuff in Zach’s files, Kelly and I decided to tackle it together. She divvied up the tasks. Kelly was supposed to handle anything in French. I was supposed handle everything else. We haven’t found anything in French yet.

The contents were creepy. I’m not much of a phone person (I use maybe 8 minutes a month on my cell) but when Kelly offered to be in charge of looking at all dead body pictures if I would call the dead people’s phone numbers, I decided I could overcome my phone phobia.

Now the phone number we found in Zach’s files is probably not for a dead person. I have no idea what might happen on the other end of that line when I call the number. If this were a TV detective show, I could watch someone else make the call. If it was a book, I could read about someone else thinking about making the call.

But this is immersive fiction, it’s on me. No one makes up my cover story for me. It’s real. I’m standing there with a phone in my hand, palms sweating.   I might get an irritated recpetionist, a cop, a psychiatrist. I might get a dead person. I was hoping I’d get someone who only speaks French.