Ep 7: The Heist

You can always tell when Jocelyn feels strongly about something when she's seen something online that's pissed her off. It doesn't happen often, but when it does, she responds the same way every time. Like when a tourist tagged a photo of her coffee shop #middleofnowhere, or when some crazy woman started spamming everyone's Facebook page in town. "Project 573, search for it on Blue Sky, you'll see," she posted. God, people are weird. She'll take the offending post and repost it with the single word question: "Thoughts?" Jocelyn Harding is owner of the Dark Side of the Moon Coffee Shop. It's not the only place to get coffee in Mirror Falls, and it's certainly not the best, but the place has a kind of charm to it. Truth be told, calling it a coffee shop is a bit of a disservice. It's more a bookstore, yarn store, coffee shop. Jocelyn grew up on the mainland in a busy house where board games were bloodsport and second place was treated like a clerical error. Her mother ran the local library. Her father coached minor hockey and kept standings on the fridge for everything, including who unloaded the dishwasher fastest. She was good at school, collected scholarships the way other kids collected stickers. When she left for SFU, she intended to study law. She imagined herself dismantling bad arguments for a living. What she discovered instead was wheelchair basketball. She was fast and ruthless, the Tod Bertuzzi of the sport, the bruiser, the one the coach sends in to crash into a problem player. Basketball was fun, but it wasn't a career, and she was running out of fingers she hadn't broken yet. So she did office work at a giant retail and logistics company. It was soul-crushing. Beige walls, fluorescent lighting. Then one day in 2018, she remembers a letter her grandfather gave her as a kid. He told her to open it when I'm gone and life feels overwhelming. The letter invited her to leave the city and take over his old farm goods store in a place called Mirror Falls. It sounded like an escape, a reset, a chance to build a life that actually feels like one. Within a month, Jocelyn was on a bus. Don't buy plastic flowers when I die. Go somewhere, spend it well, live your life. She arrived in town with a handful of possessions, but no real instructions about how to run the store. It wasn't accessible. The lawn around it was overgrown. There were rocks and weeds to clear. The only thing left in the store was a crate of parsnip seeds, but her heart wasn't in farming. If this was going to be a reset, it was going to feel like one, with the things that she knows about and loves. And that is how Piera's Farm Goods became Dark Side of the Moon Coffee Shop, Bookstore, and Yarn Store. In time, it became notable for 3 things: the town's most generous return policy, the locked door with the door code she never found, and the southeast corner where, for some reason, the cell signal drops right out. She was proud of the store. She was proud of the town. She was proud she'd found her way. It was a rainy Tuesday. Jocelyn was mindlessly surfing on her laptop behind the counter when the notification popped up. Dark Side of the Moon had been tagged in a blog post. It was one of those god-awful travel influencers that come into town every so often. They'll videotape themselves eating poutine at the Dockside Pub, ooh and ahh at the dead jellyfish on the beach. Explore the caves. You can't blame them really. It is beautiful. That's the thing about Mirror Falls. Sometimes it feels like it was constructed with purpose. To be stared at. Studied. From a distance. The blog post was positive. Glowing even. "It's a nice town, Mirror Falls," the post started. "Sits on the north end of Vancouver Island. About 400 people live here." It has what you expect, a coffee shop called Dark Side of the Moon, a gas station called The Gas N' God, and a faulty electrical system. But the title is what had pissed Jocelyn off. Quirky and dying. She copied the link, switched to her Facebook tab, and pasted it. Thoughts? Maureen, of course, was first to see it. "Oh no," she commented. "This is not good." Vancouver Island is known for its fish and forest industries, but those actually only employ about 2 or 3% of the population. Tourism employs 6 times as many. And with the US tariffs forcing many island mills out of business these days, those tourist dollars are becoming even more important, especially for a small town like Mirror Falls. A busload of tourists could mean the difference between the town meeting its small payroll or not. The last thing they needed, the literal last thing, was some jackass from the mainland named Chad claiming the town wasn't worth visiting. There was another problem too, which only Maureen and Mayor Hans knew about. For the first time in anyone's memory, Maureen had failed to get a community support grant. She'd poured her heart into it, but the province was redirecting that money to help with the opioid crisis and recruiting doctors and bailing out the mills and what felt like a million other priorities. Mayor Hans called an extraordinary meeting for that night. Town Hall was standing room only. Felt like everyone was there. Maureen, Doug, Gui, and Kim, one of the AI tech bros that was in town for hiking. Someone even dragged Mohit from the Gas N' Gotti Inn. That kid was plugged in. "This could be really bad," Jocelyn reminded everyone. "We need a plan." Crystal suggested they lean into the faulty electrical system and market it as an immersive historical experience. Tourists pay extra to eat dinner by lantern and pretend refrigeration hasn't been invented yet. Pioneer Nights, she called it. Nope. Someone thought turning the forest west of town into a disconnected living lab would be fun. People would pay to have their phones confiscated. Mary George spoke up. Nope. Stephanie jokingly suggested a pop-up escape room in the Twilight Theater called Escape the Dying Town. "Not funny," said Maureen. And that is when Mohit, who was sitting on a table, spoke up. "Listen," he said, "I did some research, and you know what's really popular right now? Farmers markets. They're everywhere. Cedar, Salt Spring, Duncan. We should do one. Put up tables up and down Water Street. Stephanie's kids can do a performance. It'd be great." It was a good plan, but with one major flaw. Unless you counted the Mackenzie Chicken, who was more a personality than a producer, Mirror Falls was not an agricultural town anymore. The old farm goods store Jocelyn inherited had long since traded parsnips for paperbacks and pour-overs. "I know," Mohit said. That's where Ashford Bay comes in. Ashford Bay does have a farmers market, a thriving one. Every Saturday morning, heritage beets, sourdoughs with backstories, soap that looks like volcanic rock. And so the idea formed. We wait a month to give time to promote our market. Then we go to Ashford Bay, buy everything they have, bring it all back and sell it. The report that would be filed later that night was listed by time. At 7:30 Saturday morning, 3 vehicles left Mirror Falls like the least threatening heist crew in history. Doug drove the taxi. Danielle insisted on bringing the tow truck, which felt excessive but reassuring somehow. At 09:27, they parked 2 blocks from the Ashford Bay Market and fanned out with canvas bags and strict instructions to buy everything photogenic. By 10:14, they had cleared out 12 loaves of artisan croissants, 5 crates of heirloom carrots, 8 jars of rhubarb ginger jam, an alarming quantity of organic goat cheese, and two wooden crates labeled "hand foraged," which nobody opened. They paid full price and then some. "It's not theft," Jocelyn had said at the meeting. "It's procurement." At 12:27, they were back in Mirror Falls. Tables went up. Tablecloths were borrowed. Chalkboards appeared with careful handwriting. Mackenzie Meadow Carrots. Water Street Wildflower Honey. Doug had made a giant sign over the town entrance. "Welcome to the Mirror Falls Farmers Market," it read. And then in large letters underneath, "Take your time." Yes, people felt morally compromised, but desperate times, right? 13:04. The first car pulled in from the highway. Then another. 13:42. A small tour bus containing residents from a care home down island. Turns out the travel influencer Jackass had updated his post the night before, teasing a return visit to see the community's new farmers market. 14:21, said Jackass even showed up himself, taking photos, updating the original post in real time. 14:27, a woman that Maureen recognized showed up, one of the dozen or so AI tech bros, as the townsfolk liked to call them. People wandered between tables, They sampled, they bought, and for a few bright hours, Mirror Falls did not look dying. It looked busy, alive, and deeply Instagrammable. At 15:23, a white pickup rolled slowly down Water Street. The side read Ashford ¡Bay Farmers Market! 3 vendors stepped out and took in the scene. The tables. The chalkboards. The jars of jam with their own handwriting still visible on the labels. Nobody in Mirror Falls moved. "I'm sorry," said one of the new arrivals, "but is this my salsa?" A man with her looked over at the bath bombs. "These are mine." Mehran stepped forward, ready with an apology or a bribe or whatever it took to make all this go away. "Look," he said, "I know it looks bad, but we paid full price, plus tip!" There was a pause. Then the bath bomb guy laughed. "You could have just asked." "Asked what?" Jocelyn said. "To partner," he said. "we've been turning people away for months. There's no parking downtown. Half our vendors can't even get a table anymore. You've got a whole street." There was a long silence, broken only by Stephanie's kids who'd begun an interpretive dance about the plight of the global bee population. "So," Jocelyn said, "you're not here to shut us down?" "Not at all," he said. "This is the dumbest idea I have seen that actually worked." I'll tell you what, you guys have things you can sell, right? Like your own things, I mean. We can direct people out here if you want. And while Mirror Falls doesn't have any farms left, it does have things they can sell. Sweaters made by members of the local First Nation, books at Dark Side of the Moon, and the surprisingly popular powdered sugar beef at the Golden Wok. Sometimes truces are negotiated in the heat of battle. Other times, at 1547 in fact, over folding tables and overpriced coffee. A deal crafted by neighbors who realize that showing up together still counts as a win. That's the thing about small towns here. They rarely survive on big ideas. They survive when people remember that the next town over is still family. That evening, 22:03, Jocelyn went back online. She found the original blog post. It had been updated. The headline had been changed from "Quirky and Dying" to "Quirky and Trying." She copied the link, switched to her Facebook tab, pasted it, and typed Thoughts? At the exact same time, 15 kilometers away, Warrant Officer RJ Nells sat down at a laptop. She was exhausted. The walk had taken longer than usual, and whatever confidence she'd carried into this posting had thinned with every step. She'd been on recce for 2 years, but this wasn't the assignment she'd imagined when she asked for the transfer. It was wearing on her. The whole thing. The only reason she joined was she thought it'd be easy sailing to retirement. Maybe get a nice cottage back home on the lake. She flipped open the laptop, entered her resident handle, her clearance tier, and her access code. 1548: Residents of 573 Foxtrot observed discussing coordinated commerce with neighboring town. Deviation from baseline. Warrant Officer Nels clicked the button marked "File Observation Report," closed the laptop, and took a deep breath. Margaret Atwood once wrote that what people who are lost need most is a map with their own position marked so they know where they are in relation to everything else. A mirror, she wrote, is also a map, a geography of the mind. Nels knew what a breach would mean, how it would all play out. The card, the phone number, how protocol would be declared, how the minister would be woken up. But she couldn't shake it. The town, the easy trust. The way people spoke freely because they were alone. Or believed they were. And that night, deep in the forest, past the tripwires, past the cameras, past the alert sirens hiding far up in the trees, past even the domain of the tsunukwa, a new countdown began. And for the first time since the Cold War, this one was not under the government's control. Mirror Falls is produced with gratitude on the territory of the Coast Salish people. Story and sound design by Tod Maffin. Join other Mirror Falls fans and chat about this episode at chat.mirrorfalls.com. Check out Mirror Falls merchandise at shop.mirrorfalls.com. You can subscribe to Tod's free newsletter about Canada at farandwide.news.