Muddy Creek: A Paranormal Mystery (Taryn's Camera Book 7) Read online

  Well, pin a rose on your nose, Taryn thought.

  “She wasn’t happy that night, though. Nothing I could do would make her happy,” Mr. Winston complained. Taryn bet that he could still quote the exact amount he’d spent that night, right down to the change. “When I was taking her home I asked her what was wrong. She said that there were people in her life she’d just like to see gone. I didn’t think anything of it, but later she asked me if I ever thought about things being better if ‘certain people’ disappeared. I had no idea what she was talking about, so I asked her who she wanted to see go. She said, ‘All the people I knew in elementary school.’ Just like that.”

  Taryn was glad she wasn’t being questioned about the number of people she’d wished dead over the years. Of course, Lucy had gone through with her death-wish.

  When it was Lucy’s attorney’s time to question the witness, Taryn had a momentary spark of hope. She didn’t know the man sitting before her, but she could spot a slime ball and media whore when she saw one. She bet that he, like half the reporters in the room, was probably already working on a book.

  When Taryn was trying to let off steam, she occasionally visited a forum for fans of reality television programs. Everyone had a username and, depending on the number of replies they made, a scale of “desperate attention-seeking whore” status points. Taryn, with around two hundred replies, was rated “a Bachelor All-Stars Contestant.” She was almost certain that Mr. Winston’s DAW status in life would be that of “Playboy Centerfold.”

  Glancing to her side, she saw Frieda scribbling song lyrics on the back of his notebook. She apparently had an affinity for Poison. Taryn imagined that even celebrity journalists got bored after awhile.

  “Mr. Winston,” Lucy’s attorney began as she hobbled up to the witness box, “did you ever hear Lucy Dawson say that she wished to kill anyone?”

  “Well, no,” he grinned. “Not straight out like that.”

  “Uh huh. And did she ever tell you exactly which person or persons from her elementary school she wanted to see dead?”

  His smile faltered for a second, but he continued to look around the room, playing to the audience. “Well, not specifically by name, but it seemed pretty clear to me.”

  “Ah, then, you’re a mind reader! Congratulations!”

  “Objection!”

  “Sustained.”

  “The teenage girl, Wendy, that died when we you were a child, can you recall the circumstances around her death?”

  Now he didn’t look so cocky. In fact, by the way he squirmed in the seat and pulled at his collar, he looked downright uncomfortable. Taryn wondered if his flannel was starting to get to him. She hoped so.

  “Well, um, yes. Her boyfriend at the time was first charged with manslaughter. She’d hung herself, and it appeared as though he’d helped her do it. She left behind a note. He was only given tampering with evidence later.”

  “Uh huh. Thank you very much. No further questions.”

  As the crowd shuffled out of the room half an hour later, Taryn let herself get caught up in the sea of arms and legs.

  “What the hell was that all about?” she demanded, once outside the courthouse. The lawn erupted in an uproar as phones were whipped out, microphones turned on, and people could finally express themselves outside the stuffy confines of the legal system.

  The reporter strolled up beside her and patted her on the shoulder. “My name is Frieda, by the way, and you’re not asking anything we haven’t all been asking ourselves. I came down from New York, you know, and I’ve never seen anything like this before in my life. It’s a great story. I mean, you’ve got murder, small town politics, the seedy underbelly of Mayberry…But the human side of me if a little disgusted at the farce this trial is. Fair justice my ass. I used to be a prosecutor, you know. Lucy Dawson is not getting a fair trial.”

  Taryn was shocked. The barracuda on television had been crucifying Lucy on her show every night. But this woman was a completely different person. She was honestly disgusted by the miscarriage of justice and didn’t sound so sure that Lucy was getting what she deserved.

  Taryn felt the delicate hand on her arm before anything else. When she turned, she was facing the same woman she’d sat next to at the PTA meeting. The quiet one she hadn’t minded.

  “Hi,” Taryn said as she leaned over and gave the other woman a brief hug. Luckily, she’d also been raised in a Southern, we-hug-everyone-whether-we-know-them-or-not household and embraced her back. “What are you doing here?”

  “I come here sometimes to listen. Not every day; I couldn’t handle that.”

  Taryn smiled. “I know what you mean. I couldn’t either.”

  “I’m Naomi, by the way. I don’t remember if I introduced myself the other night.” Naomi’s eyes were wide and red, as though she might have been recently crying. They were still glassy. In her loose dress that swept the ground and her hair slicked back from her head she looked thin, almost gaunt. Her face was pale. Taryn imagined that the trial was taking a lot out of people. She was dealing with ghosts of another kind, but she could commiserate.

  “This is Frieda,” Taryn gestured. “She works for the news.”

  “But don’t hold that against me,” she joked. When she shook Naomi’s hand, her small fingers disappeared inside Frieda’s big grip. Taryn hoped she wouldn’t squeeze too hard.

  “I’m going to have to head back to the motel,” Taryn apologized. “I have some painting to do today. Do you think they’ll bring Lucy out this way?”

  She didn’t know what she would say to her, but Taryn was struck by the urge of wanting to see her face again, to make eye contact.

  “Nah. They’ll slip her out the back,” Frieda told her.

  When Naomi excused herself and walked away, Taryn turned back to Frieda and raised her eyebrows. “Hands off of that one,” she warned her. “I don’t think she could take a barracuda throwing questions at her.”

  “I agree,” she replied jovially. “Looks like a stiff breeze would blow her over. And anyway, we’re not total monsters. I just play one on TV.” They both turned and watched as a handful of the reporters turned and ran towards the back of the building, where Lucy’s truck was pulling away.

  “Well, most of us anyway.”

  With a flood of emotions she neither understood nor was ready to process, Taryn began her walk back down the sidewalk. She stopped a few feet past the courthouse, though, and looked across the street. The jail set directly before her; its orange bricks dull in the hazy, afternoon sky. Beside it was a two-story white house. A yellow condemned sign was tacked to the front door. A maple tree grew through the porch.

  Lukas Monroe had spent far too much of his young life chained to a toilet in that house. Right there in the middle of town, out in the open, where any number of people could have saved him. Taryn shuddered and shook her head sadly. To think he’d been tied in there, unable to escape, and yet still had to hear familiar voices out on the street.

  How many times had his hopes lifted as someone knocked on the door or clumped their heavy boots on the floorboards inside? How many times had he thought someone was there to rescue him, only to have those hopes dashed?

  In the end, he’d had to save himself. Nobody had come for him.

  Taryn loved old houses. She saw potential in everything. She often felt more connected to the past than any present she’d been a part of.

  But some things just needed to go. Sometimes the simple physical reminder of them was too much to bear. For one of the first times ever, she was looking at a house she hoped would someday fall to the ground.

  * * *

  TARYN SAT FACING the other children in the classroom. Their desks had been arranged in a circle. She sat with her back to the door with her head bowed down. She could feel the presence of another girl close to her. It was comforting, though they did not look at one another. Neither moved.

  Hot, biting tears shamed her. She sniffed then immediately tried to cover it up wi
th a cough. Taryn was acutely aware of her pride, more so than she’d ever been in her life.

  Little baby, she sang tunelessly to herself, little baby gonna be okay. I’ll take care of you, it’s gonna be okay. Though she felt completely alone she pretended someone was there with her, their arms wrapped around her, smoothing her hair back and holding her close.

  Someone said something but their voice was muzzy and distorted. When she looked up a figure reared in the center of the ring, their outline hazy and wavy, like a hologram. They flickered in and out of her sight, a clumsy spirit pirouetting across the tiles.

  The sea of children’s faces all became a blur, with one another’s until she faced a sea of headless, featureless monsters. Taryn caught her breath and collapsed within herself, drawing her scrawny knees up to her chest and whimpering.

  The room was spinning, whirling around and around until Taryn thought she might throw up. Then a face broke through, a sweet, golden face of a young boy across from her. Through the sea of monsters he was the only one with a smile, the only one that looked at her. Their eyes met across the space for a brief second and then the monster was back, re-materializing between them.

  A blast of fire and bright light, and then darkness.

  Twenty

  “For one of the first times ever, I’m afraid to go to my jobsite.”

  Matt leaned over and patted her on the knee. “No wonder. I wouldn’t be thrilled to return, either.”

  “I spent all night sitting at the little table outside my room painting,” she complained. “At least until it got too dark to see. I’d normally be there, at the place.”

  “It would be difficult for me to return as well.”

  Taryn glanced over at him while she drove towards Venters County. The plan had been for him to fly into Huntington and rent a car. The car rental had fallen through, however, and without a public transportation system she’d had to fetch him. She didn’t mind. She was enjoying the outing and it meant she got to see him that much faster.

  His mix of Native American and Italian heritage gave Matt a smooth, olive complexion she envied. He spent far too much time indoors, which could sometimes make him appear pale, but he’d been working in his garden that fall and now his face was full of color. His long, thick eyelashes were things of beauty–even the girls who’d refused to date him in high school because he was “weird” had fawned over those. And his thick, glossy black hair fell across his head as an ebony cap. He was a beautiful man.

  “Are you sure that was Sarah there with you?” he asked.

  Taryn nodded. “I could smell her. And I definitely wasn’t scared. I kind of wanted to savor the moment, if you know what I mean.”

  She could feel him frowning beside her. “I don’t know, Taryn. I think I’d be careful about that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  They had turned off the main highway and were now making their way across the last five miles of winding road. She was taking him to town the back way, through Muddy Creek. He wanted to see the school before she took him to the room.

  “You don’t know what you’re dealing with here,” he reminded her. “And from what I’ve read about this stuff, since you’ve been experiencing it anyway, is that things aren’t always what they seem.”

  “You think something was pretending to be Sarah?”

  “You can’t rule it out.”

  And while Taryn did give it some serious consideration over the next few miles, she wasn’t convinced. The spirit had done nothing to hurt her; it had simply wanted her to watch the scene unfold before her. She didn’t think it was a malevolent ghost.

  “There’s still something I don’t understand,” Taryn admitted as they pulled over the side of the hill and dipped into the school’s parking lot.

  “What’s that?”

  Taryn put the car in park and turned around in her seat. “Andrew. I don’t get it. What about Andrew?”

  As he was always capable of doing, Matt temporarily put his own romantic feelings aside and, for a moment at least, turned into her friend. “Why hasn’t he contacted you? Why can’t you see him?”

  She nodded miserably, embarrassed by the tears that threatened to fall. Miserable at the idea of making Matt feel bad.

  Matt, for his part, appeared unfazed. Instead, he leaned over and brought her face close to his. Without kissing her, he gently tilted her head up until the curve at the top of her nose fit securely into the rise of his forehead. It was a perfect fit, and always had been.

  “I don’t know,” he said at last. “I wish it worked that way. I wish you could see him. I don’t know why any of this is happening.”

  “I have something important to tell you,” he whispered.

  “What?” she replied, keeping her voice at the same level.

  Barely moving, Matt leaned down to the backpack at his feet. He slowly removed a small bag and brought it up between them. “I didn’t know how to say this,” he began seriously, “so I thought I’d…”

  Taryn reached her hand into the bag and then squealed when her fingers touched something familiar. The mood already broken, she jumped back and laughed in delight.

  It was full of makeup.

  “I didn’t know what to get you, so I went to Sephora and told them stock you up.”

  It was the first time she’d been at Muddy Creek and felt any sense of peace.

  * * *

  “SO GIVE ME ANOTHER RUNDOWN on what happened the last time you were here.”

  They’d been walking around the building for an hour. In that time Taryn had been able to separate her emotions and memories from her actual job at hand and had acted tour guide, giving Matt a decent walk-through of the school’s history and interesting architectural features.

  “I gotta tell you,” she laughed. “It’s not a walk in the park in there. It’s creepy, even by our standards.”

  Matt grinned and slipped his hand into hers. It was cool on her warm, clammy skin. “As bad as that distillery in Tennessee?”

  “Oh Lord,” Taryn pretended to groan. “Okay, maybe not that bad, but bad in a different way.”

  The distillery had since been cleaned up, though it was still empty. When she and Matt had explored it however, on a weekend trip during college, vagrants had apparently been calling it “home” for awhile. The neat, yet towering, piles of excrement served as evidence.

  “Okay, well, so no poop. I can live with creepy-sans-poopy places,” Matt said.

  “This is creepy in a way that I’ve seen before. It’s just so…sad. Why let this happen to a school anyway? It could’ve been used for something.”

  “You think everything can be used for something,” Matt pointed out.

  “Well, not everything,” Taryn replied, thinking of Lukas Monroe’s white house on Main Street.

  “There’s an old school down in Benham, Kentucky,” Matt began, “in Harlan County, that’s been turned into a motel. It wasn’t that much bigger than this one. I saw it on the internet. Looked like your kind of place.”

  “Some schools have been turned into flea markets and stuff,” Taryn said. “Things can be done.”

  “Oh, I didn’t realize when I first made the travel arrangements that Huntington was where that plane crash killed the football team.” Matt paused, pulling Taryn to a stop beside him. “I’d seen the movie but for some reason didn’t put it together.”

  “And about ten miles from here was where that big flood happened that killed a lot of people,” Taryn added. “Right now they’re battling a major heroin epidemic. Dozens of people overdosing a day. And across the state line, over in Martin County, was where something happened to that coal slurry pond and it spilled however many thousands of tons on the community below.”

  “Geeze,” Matt shook his head, trying to process the information. “Lots of bad history here.”

  “Lots of good things, too,” Taryn conceded. “It’s a beautiful place. I hear the reporters talking about how worse it looks in the winter, with
all the leaves off the trees. They say that the foliage is covering the trash.”

  “People will always find a reason to complain about something.”

  They now stood before the entrance to the teacher’s lounge. Even then, in broad daylight with Matt beside her, Taryn was distrustful. She knew she had to go back inside at some point, but the dream from the night before still haunted her.

  “You can stay if you want,” Matt said. “I can go alone.”

  “No, I’ll go,” she sighed. “It’s better that I do this now, with you, while I can. Ready?”

  * * *

  TARYN KNEW MATT would go nuts over the books in the library, just as she had, but they didn’t have a lot of time. Her tummy growled from hunger; he was tired from his flight (it had taken two changes to get there), and she didn’t have much time before the sun set. They had to go straight to the action.

  “I didn’t hit the gym last time,” Taryn laughed. “Wanna start there?”

  So when they stepped inside, she turned him to the left and they made the short walk to that end of the building. She couldn’t help but notice how much faster it took them to walk it at a reasonable pace–much quicker than it had taken her to run it a couple of days before.

  The double doors leading into the cavernous room were propped open. Nothing to have to jiggle around to break into it.

  Inside, it appeared as ordinary as any other school gymnasium. Well, aside from the garbage blowing across the floor and the vermin excrement scattered about. “Look, Matt, there’s your poop!” He sent her a nasty look, but then winked.

  “You okay if I take a look around?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yep. I’m going to take some pictures anyway. Knock yourself out.”

  Taryn avoided the kitchen in the back. Instead, she walked around the perimeter and focused on getting a feel for what the space had once meant to the children who’d played in it.