A Murky Murder Read online

  A Murky Murder

  The Dreamer Trilogy

  Book One

  By

  Constance Barker

  Copyright 2018 Constance Barker

  All rights reserved.

  Similarities to real people, places or events are purely coincidental.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17 | Mexican Solution

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  EPILOGUE

  Chapter 1

  Dreams of a Swamp

  The dense stands of trees trapped the sunlight, creating shadows, that made the green slope that ran down to the lake seem mysterious, even sinister. From the light it was impossible to tell what time of day it was. For that matter, Charli Gordon wasn’t even sure where she was. Or why.

  As she looked around, feeling the damp air and getting her bearings, she suddenly realized that the dreams were back. She wasn’t in the place she saw, not really. Someone else was there too, or not quite there, as she was. It was a comforting, reassuring presence, and she knew it, she remembered it. Still, having someone else inside her dream wasn’t something she’d ever gotten comfortable with. And she had been warned.

  She turned to watch the old woman amble down the hill looking as if she’d just stepped out of an old John Wayne movie. She wore the same buckskins and beads she always wore; her hair was tied in long pigtails and held in place with a red bandana. But this woman was a real presence, not just something her dream had cooked up.

  Assuming, of course, that there was a difference.

  Stopping in front of her, the old woman smiled. “You should talk to her,” she said, pointing down the slope, behind Charli. “Confronting dreams while you are in them is the only way to learn what’s going on. You must make the dream spirit explain.”

  Charli turned and stared toward the lake. At the edge where the ground grew soft and stank of decay, stood a lanky green figure. “She’s the dream spirit?”

  “She is the Lake Woman,” the old Indian woman said. “This dream is about her. You must learn from her.”

  Suddenly Charli found herself closer to the lake, standing in front of the Lake Woman. The green face flashed a smile. It wasn’t the most pleasant of smiles and it sent a chill through her. The woman’s skin looked like she’d risen from the muck. Maybe she had. She gave a toss of her head that made her long, muck-encrusted black hair flow around her face, catching the eerie light. “He is mine now,” she said. “You can’t have him back.”

  Charli summoned her nerve and spoke. “Who is your's now?” Her words echoed oddly, and she was unsure if the woman could even hear her.

  In a slow swirl, the green lady turned, faced the lake, her back to Charli. She reached out and handed Charli an object that tingled. “Tell her she didn’t need to make an offering. I took him to be my new husband. I will keep him.”

  She looked in her hand and saw a small, carved fish. She closed her hand around it. “A new husband? Are you in love?” Charli found herself wondering why it seemed like she had some idea what this green creature was talking about. There was a part of the conversation that seemed to be missing.

  The woman took a step toward the lake and raised her arms to the sky. “No, I have no love for him.”

  Charli opened her hand and saw the fish staring at her. “Then why did you take him?”

  “To fulfill our destiny. It is necessary.”

  Another thought occurred to her. “Why are you in my dream?”

  The woman turned back and Charli saw surprise. She cocked her head, looking at Charli as if she hadn’t seen her before. “You are the dreamer. Why do you ask me this? You brought the dream and its challenge to me.”

  “I did? How?”

  The woman pointed up the hill in the direction Charli had come from. “Has she taught you nothing? The questions come when it is their time. The dreams speak the answers.”

  Charli looked up the hill. She expected the Indian woman to be there, but she was gone. In her place a young deer was grazing. It was grey-brown but its underbelly and the underside of its tail were a shocking white. “Where...” Charli started. The deer raised its head and stood poised, frozen in place. It cocked an ear, and then with a flick of its tail, waving its white flag, it sprinted silently off among the trees.

  She turned back to the Lake Woman, but she too was gone. In fact, the surrounding trees had begun to fade. She stood and watched the light grow stronger until it hurt her eyes. She shut her eyes, but the light continued to grow stronger, even more uncomfortable.

  When Charli opened her eyes again she found she was in her bed. Strong morning light streamed in through the window. She’d forgotten to shut the blinds when she went to bed.

  “Just another weird dream,” she told herself. The thought wasn’t reassuring. She shook her head, troubled that the old woman had returned, bringing the troubling dreams (or was it the other way around?). She’d thought they were gone. This was the first time she’d had one since college. So, as they say in AA, ‘My name is Charli, and I’m a dreamer. I’ve been without the dreams for one hour.’

  Although the old woman made her uncomfortable at times, she was never a frightening presence. But then, she'd been appearing in Charli's dreams from the time she was tiny. It was just that her insistence that Charli explore the dream world for meaning got tedious. And it was frustrating that she didn't understand what the old woman expected of her.

  When she was little, she tried to talk to her mother about the dreams, but that didn’t go well. Her mother had no patience with dreams. “The real world, the here and now you see in the daylight, is the only world that matters.” That was the long and short of it from her oh-so successful mother, Susan Gordon. She ran her own interior design firm and while she praised imagination, she only appreciated it within well-defined boundaries.

  As her mind cleared, Charli chuckled to herself. Running into the Lake Woman was her own fault. She’d been researching the legend of the Lake Woman of Reelfoot Lake. That had been the subject of her lecture to her class in myths and legends at the University of Tennessee, at Martin. As an associate professor of anthropology, she’d picked the topic to make her students aware that myths and legends weren’t something restricted to European and Asian cultures, places where a variety of gods roamed freely. Myths abounded in every culture and they had loads of them right here in Tennessee.

  This particular legend originated with the Chickasaws. It wasn’t one of their important myths, not as ubiquitous as the stories of Sint-Holo, the great horned serpent, which was also claimed by the Choctaw, and not as important as the Ghost of the White Deer, but it was dramatic and romantic in its own way. There were many versions of the story of the Lake Woman, several of them contradictory, and all part of the allure and the culture of Reelfoot Lake, the wildlife preserve near Union City.

  As she made breakfast and g
ot her bearings the simple, concrete matters of daily life began to squeeze the dream from her consciousness. Soon, the only thing about the dream that troubled Charli was that she’d had it at all. In school she’d studied myths, hoping to get insights into her own dreams. That hadn’t worked out well. It seemed her studies simply fueled the dreams.

  Then, after college, when she’d taken the teaching job, the dreams had stopped. So why had they come back now?

  With luck, this would turn out to be a one off. The semester had ended, and she needed to spend the summer doing research and writing a paper, or maybe a book. Publish or perish was a real thing. And given that her specialty was myths and legends she had to hope the dreams wouldn’t be a distraction.

  This was a Saturday morning and whatever the future held, Charli decided to spend it relaxing... goofing off. The academic year had been intense. There were funding cutbacks that had stressed everyone out. She’d survived it and now she needed some ‘me’ time.

  She put on old, comfortable clothes and went into her ragged-looking yard, intending to while away the day catching up on her hapless attempt at creating a garden in her yard. She seldom had the time and interest to focus on it the way it needed. Now she could putter and turn her mind to important matters of state—such as what to have for lunch.

  That was when the doorbell rang.

  Chapter 2

  A Consultation

  Charli was pleased to see that her visitor was her good friend Elle Kramer. They’d been roommates at college and friends. In the post-graduation chaos they lost track of each other. Elle abruptly married her high-school sweetheart and Charli went job hunting. It hadn't been until she’d settled into her new teaching job and rented this house in Union City that Charli had reached out. That was when they discovered that somehow, against all odds, they’d both wound up living in Union City.

  Charli was there because housing was cheaper than in Martin, fifteen minutes away, where the university was. Elle’s husband, Lester Kramer, had taken a job as a financial wheeler dealer, to use the technical term, in St. Louis. He disliked the city however, and preferred having his home life in a more rural place. So every Sunday night he made the three-hour and change drive to the city; he came home on Thursday.

  Elle landed a job as an insurance adjuster. The company headquarters was in St. Louis, but she worked from home, covering the area around Martin. She loved it. “They pay me to poke my nose into things,” she said.

  Seeing Elle was always a delight, but that morning, opening the door and finding Elle on her doorstep, Charli was taken aback by Elle’s serious expression.

  “What’s wrong, Elle?” she asked as they went into the bright living room.

  “It’s about work,” she said. “My work. Can I talk about work on Saturday?”

  “I suppose you can, if you have to.”

  “It should be fair. You are working during the week, so I can’t talk about my work then.”

  “It’s officially academic summer, so I have every day now. And I don’t mind spending time on your work unless you're going to try to sell me a policy. You aren’t are you?”

  Elle laughed. “Not me. I don’t sell the crap, I just check out claims and make sure there’s no cheating going on.”

  Charli grinned. “If you don’t mind, we can talk your work while we eat. I’d started thinking about lunch and now my stomach is convinced it’s time to eat.”

  “If you put on some clothes that don’t look like Salvation Army rejects I’ll buy you lunch at Tom’s.”

  Tom’s was a local hangout place that had decent, but simple food. “Perfect.”

  Charli went into her bedroom for a quick change into nicer clothes and then the friends drove over and grabbed a booth at the restaurant. Saturdays weren’t a busy day for Tom, so the waitress wasn’t flustered and the food was good.

  Elle didn’t launch into her topic immediately; she appeared to be gathering her thoughts before she got to what was going on. Charli took advantage by refusing to speculate and focusing on the more important job of eating.

  “I need your help,” Elle admitted over dessert.

  “With an insurance claim? I don’t know...”

  “With finding someone.”

  Charli flinched. “Me? I’m not a private investigator.”

  Elle snorted. “There’s an aspect of the disappearance that falls into your... field of interest.”

  “Ah, a legend went missing? A myth was misplaced?”

  “A man disappeared under mysterious circumstances.”

  “And what’s that got to do with me?”

  “Did you ever hear the legend of the Lake Woman?” Charli sat up straight. “It’s a story about some Indian woman at Reelfoot lake who grabs fishermen or something.”

  “I’ve heard of it,” she said cautiously.

  “So there is a man, the insured party in the parlance, who disappeared out at that lake. His wife is certain it’s the work of the Lake Woman.”

  “How does that involve a claims adjuster?”

  “Well, the police report has him as missing. He went missing at night. They think he stumbled into the muck. They said that parts of it get a lot like quicksand. If he fell in it, then maybe he drowned. But they can’t find his body.” She sighed. “I can’t close the case without him being declared dead, assuming he is, which I do. And now I’m rattling on.”

  “So write that he is missing. Why is that unsettling you?”

  “Two reasons. Last night I was sitting around, having a nice glass of Merlot and reading through all the paperwork. Melly Block, the wife of the missing guy called. She was thinking about her husband and she wanted to know if the insurance would pay if this Lake Woman got him.”

  “From what you say, they wouldn’t pay. So?”

  Elle bit her lip, then picked up her iced tea and took a sip. “The thing is, I was suddenly thinking about two things. The first was the possibility that the lady and her husband cooked up a scam to defraud the company.”

  “One they didn’t think through, if they need a body to collect the money.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time. People do crazy things and think they can get away with it. I looked up the legend, thinking maybe I could figure out their angle. If they were using it as a scam, maybe there’s some clue in it. But all I learned was that there is this witch who lures men to their death.”

  “She isn’t a witch. She’s the Lake Woman,” Charli told her. “It’s an American Indian legend that is pretty well known around here. I’m told that despite being a lovely recreational area, Reelfoot Lake can also be a spooky place.”

  “And the people of Samburg, on the shore of the lake, seem easily spooked.”

  “Well, the legend is persistent. Probably boosts tourism.”

  “So what’s your take on the story?”

  “The most common version is that one day a Chickasaw brave went fishing and never came back. When the tribe gave up searching for him, his wife went out on her own. She was never seen again either. Shortly after that, several braves were camped out by the lake, fishing. At night, they heard a woman calling out. They split up in an attempt to find her, but one of them didn’t return. The others searched for him, but found no sign of him or the woman. When they reported what happened, the Shaman went into a trance to talk to this woman. When he came out of it, he said there was a bit of a curse.”

  “A bit of one?”

  “Apparently, it was a screw up. Some minor lake gods made a mistake. They saw that first brave who went missing and got the idea that he was offering himself as a sacrifice for good hunting. The Shaman didn’t explain how gods would get it wrong like that, but supposedly that’s what happened. When the woman came looking for him, they realized they’d screwed up. But they’d already eaten him.”

  “That certainly sucks.”

  “The gods felt bad for the woman. Her situation had one remarkable similarity to this one... the woman couldn’t take a new husband until t
he tribe accepted that her husband was dead.”

  “The pre-insurance version.”

  “Right. And, without a body, that would not happen. As a consolation prize, the gods gave her immortality and something of a hunting license. She was free to roam the edge of the lake and seduce any man that caught her eye.”

  “To replace her husband?”

  “Right, but them being only minor gods, the curse was defective or something, and her new husbands didn’t last forever. She has to replace them.”

  “Like my damn dishwasher.”

  “So every so often another man disappears, a victim to her soggy charms.”

  “Yuck. Unfortunately, ‘abducted by a ghost mistress’ isn’t a check box on any of the forms we have to fill out,” Elle said. “It’s a serious ‘none of the above’ which doesn’t make insurance regulators happy.”

  “So what will you do?”

  “I mentioned that two things were unsettling me.”

  “You did.” Charli had forgotten.

  “While I was talking to the guy’s wife, hearing about this legend crap, I suddenly saw your face.”

  “My face? You’re sure it was Merlot, not peyote?”

  “A nice Merlot. You started talking, but so was the wife, so I didn’t get what you said.”

  “I’m sure I was asking you to come over and buy me lunch.”

  “Be serious.”

  Charli stopped. “You are serious.”

  “Yes. I know it was late at night, but...”

  “Late at night when the dreams come,” the Indian woman whispered in her ear.

  “... I was certain you could help me.”

  “Help, how?”

  Elle looked out the window for a moment. Charli looked too but saw nothing but a sun-bleached yellow Mustang convertible. “I remember... back in college you had those dreams.”

  “Everyone has dreams.”

  Elle scowled. “Don’t pull that stuff. They don’t have dreams like the one you had about the math professor killing himself,” Elle said. “You saw it before it happened.”

  Charli remembered. She wished she could forget. “And you laughed at me.”