Montrealer Guillaume Bilodeau, a 26-year-old creative copywriter and film studies graduate, becomes our first correspondent from north of the border with a submission that brings Mayor Napolitano back to Celeste’s house, where Rachel tries hard to seduce him but fails.
We also get a glimpse of Sydney, angrily pounding the wheel of his super-car with a bloody hand, and we see the mayor’s Burbank home, where someone has filled his bathtub with peat. Out of the boggy mess rises a crudely made tombstone sporting a vaguely threatening epitaph written in free verse.
Guillaume’s writing is as lyrical as his name, but at times it appears better suited for a novel, which he’s also working on. The tombstone poem certainly made this entry pop from the pack, but how do you cram all those words onto a sign in the bathtub and make it visually interesting? And besides, I couldn’t buy Napolitano living in Burbank.
Frequent participant Dianna Brown from Kokomo, Indiana, also weighed in this week and almost had a winner, if only for the nifty way she had Mayor Napolitano snag some evidence from the crime scene by inverting his latex glove around it and tying it off.
Give actors cool stuff like that to do, and they’ll want to play the part.
In Dianna’s economical two pages, she hints the big thug in the Rannoch Moor sweatshirt was killed by members of The Order, identifies the female murder victim as Celeste’s cousin Vina McKay (love that name!), and then takes us to Vina’s funeral, where someone surveilling the proceedings disappears when the mayor catches sight of him.
A nice effort, and it could have been good enough, if I hadn’t gotten another submission that begins to make a little more sense of our story’s big picture.
Check back late tonight to see this week’s winning pages.
