Twenty Years Later(5)
Avery’s forte was true crime, finding an unsolved mystery and dissecting it for her audience in a way that hooked them and refused to let go. Her dark and edgy foray into some of the country’s most sordid crimes was where she made her name. But to contrast the sinister stories she covered, Avery also told stories of survival and hope. It was these stories of miracles and beating the odds that kept people tuning in. Not a week went by without Avery featuring some sort of real life, plucked from Middle America, feel-good story—like Kelly Rosenstein, the woman who sank her minivan into Devil’s Gate Reservoir in Pasadena after a drunk driver forced her off the road. The indomitable mother of four had not only managed to escape the sunken vehicle, but had miraculously done so with all of her children in tow. Avery interviewed the woman a week after the accident. With as many as six hundred people dying each year in the United States due to a submerged vehicle, how had this soccer mom managed to escape? It was simple. Years earlier Mack Carter had demonstrated the best way to escape a car after it sank to the bottom of a lake. Kelly Rosenstein had watched the episode and remembered what she saw.
So moved by the story, Avery decided to look up the old footage. It was how she ended up this afternoon strapped behind the wheel of a minivan that was parked inside a high school aquatics center, with a television crew ready to film the action. Today, the action would be a giant crane lifting the van over the pool and dropping it, and Avery, to the bottom. Cameras situated under the water would capture Avery’s attempt to escape from the submerged vehicle. She was, without doubt or shame, scared to death.
She knew America had loved Mack Carter for the stunts he performed, and Avery could think of no better way to wrap up her first full season as host of American Events than with a nod to her predecessor. Today’s taping was her right of passage. This would be her last episode before summer sabbatical. A summer that was sure to be the most trying of her life. She was following a lead out of New York that she thought had potential—the remains of a woman killed in the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks had just been identified using promising new DNA technology, and Avery wanted the chance to tell the story. If she made it through today’s stunt, she was off to New York to chase some leads.
At least, that was her story. She thought it was the perfect cover.
CHAPTER 2
Los Angeles, CA Friday, May 14, 2021
THE HONDA MINIVAN WAS PARKED ON A HYDRAULIC LIFT ON THE SIDE of the Los Angeles high school swimming pool. Avery chose the make and model because of their connection to the middle class. The minivan was among the most commonly driven vehicles in the United States. Sinking a sixty-thousand-dollar BMW in a high school swimming pool might be exciting to watch, but demonstrating to stay-at-home mothers how to escape their sunken vehicle was much better accomplished using an average, run-of-the-mill automobile.
Avery checked the seat belt buckle for the third time in less than a minute. Christine Swanson, her executive producer, leaned through the open driver’s side window.
“Good?” she asked.
Avery nodded.
“Show me the abort sign again,” Christine said.
Avery took the four fingers on her right hand and waved them back and forth in front of her throat.
“If you ever get panicked, or just can’t remember what to do, give the abort signal and the divers will have you out in ten seconds. Got it?”
Avery nodded.
“Words, Avery! I need to hear your voice.”
“Yes, Christine! I’ve got it, for Christ’s sake. Let’s go.”
“We’re about to sink you, and the car you’re sitting in, to the bottom of a swimming pool,” Christine said in a calm voice, trying to control the panicked moment. “I want to make sure your head is in the right place.”
“Of course my head is not in the right place, Chris. If it were, I wouldn’t be doing this. And if we don’t do it soon, I’ll lose my nerve. So let’s get this show on the road.”
Christine nodded. “Okay. You’ve got this.”
Christine backed away from the minivan, stuck her fingers between her lips, and whistled. It was an ear-splitting screech that echoed off the walls of the cavernous aquatics center.
“Let’s roll!”
A loud buzzing filled the indoor plaza as the crane’s hydraulics activated and jolted the platform, and the minivan parked on it, upward. Avery grabbed the steering wheel and white-knuckled it as if she were driving through a torrential downpour. She rolled up the window and the noise outside the vehicle—the producers yelling instructions, the engineers guiding the crane operator, the ring of the hydraulics, and the murmurs from three hundred spectators that filled the retractable bleachers and made up the studio audience—went silent. All she heard now was her own exaggerated breathing. Even the smell of chlorine disappeared.
Her ascent finally ended, and then the car jolted again as the back of the platform started to rise, pitching the nose of the minivan downward toward the water. A slew of engineers who consulted on the stunt had decided that thirty-eight degrees was the most accurate pitch angle to best represent a vehicle careening off the road and plunging into a body of water. To Avery it felt like she was hanging vertically off a cliff. The seat belt was tight across her chest as gravity pulled her forward. She straightened her legs on the floorboard to keep her position in the driver’s seat.