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

  Taryn exchanged looks with Matt and then turned back to Misty. “Are those your photos there?”

  Misty nodded and slid the album over to Taryn. “Yeah. A little bit of scrapbooking, too. I bought me some of them crazy scissors and a few years ago I tried being creative with them. You wanna take them with you? You can just send them back with Sandy tomorrow or something. I don’t mind.”

  With the thick photo book under her hand Taryn’s heart began beating quickly. There was something in these pictures, she was sure of it. She just hoped she wasn’t opening as big a can of worms as she had in the past.

  * * *

  “I JUST CAN’T BELIEVE I didn’t see those flowers,” Taryn complained for the tenth time. “Or that I didn’t even go through those pictures after what happened.”

  “Well, you’re doing it now,” Matt told her. “And, besides, it doesn’t really bring us any closer to where we need to be.”

  They’d spread a blanket under a weeping willow tree behind the motel. A small stream flowed there and the water was unexpectedly pure. With the melodious splashes and gently falling leaves around them, they could have been on a movie set: Small Town America, Lot B. Matt had flopped on his stomach and was flipping through the pictures in the album again while Taryn once again scrolled their her pictures, trying to find something she hadn’t already seen.

  “Getting anything out of those?” she asked.

  “I don’t know what I am meant to be looking for,” he admitted.

  “Neither do I.”

  “Hey, does it seem weird to you that so many people didn’t like Lucy when she was younger? I mean, she was a kid, right?” Taryn was still chewing on the idea of having so many enemies. So far she hadn’t met a single person who’d actually been a fan of Lucy’s. Then or now.

  “For a famous author, her hometown sure doesn’t show her any love,” Matt agreed. “Wonder why she stayed around?”

  “No idea. I wouldn’t have.”

  “Nor I.”

  That reminded Taryn. She kept meaning to order some of Lucy’s books online. She wanted to give them a re-read, now that she’d met her and become involved. Taryn had to face it, however; she was searching for clues in whatever manner she could.

  “So is there anywhere around here I can take you on a date?” Matt asked, giving her ankle a tug.

  “Aw, you wanna date me now? After twenty-something years? That’s sweet.”

  Matt leered at her and slapped her bottom. “I treat my woman well.”

  Taryn laughed and lunged at him then, rolling him over until he was on his back and she straddled his waist. She’d always been able to pin him down easily. “You wanna take a lady to the Red Lobster in Huntington?”

  “Huh?”

  Taryn leaned down and snuggled into his chest. “Just a joke. I’ll explain later.”

  Sometimes it was nice to forget about the ghosts, even if just for a little while.

  Twenty-Two

  She’d told Matt that she needed to do this one by herself. Taryn had no idea how Lucy would feel, her bringing a man along with her, and she didn’t want to impose. She was already feeling uncomfortable with showing up unannounced. But then, Lucy had her phone turned off. There was no other way to get in touch with her.

  It was Saturday, so court was not in session. Taryn spent the morning painting in front of the school, somehow managing to both look at the building and not really see it at the same time. When she was finished, and had wrapped everything up, she got into her car and drove on up to the log cabin. Matt, meanwhile, was meant to be doing his own kind of work in the library. She hoped he’d have better luck than she’d had.

  The first thing Taryn noticed upon pulling into Lucy’s driveway was the burn pile. It was stacked high, taller than she was, and seemed to contain mostly weeds. Taryn smiled with irony. It was a wonder the county was letting her anywhere near matches.

  Lucy’s front porch was full of furniture. It literally held everything but the kitchen sink. Except, since it did have one of those old wash stands on it, even that old cliché didn’t apply in this case. It wasn’t just junk cluttering Lucy’s porch–the wardrobe, wash stand, twin headboard, cedar trunk, and chest of drawers were all antiques. And worth money. A shower curtain Taryn herself had coveted from Macy’s, but been unable to afford because it cost more than $100, was casually tossed over a stack of pots and pans, growing mold.

  Taryn could hear her mother, even after all these years, snapping, “That’s not an antique–that’s just old.”

  Taryn liked the “old” stuff as much as she did the antiques. In Lucy’s situation, though, she had both, and both were valuable.

  Lucy came to the door at the first knock. She looked different outside of the courtroom. Her long hair swished around her as she woke; the long, white nightgown she wore made her look like she’d stepped out of another time period. Her face, sans makeup, looked older and sadder. Her glasses fell down her nose and stayed there as she peered through the screen door and contemplated Taryn’s presence. Finally, she nodded and smiled grimly.

  “You saw something, then,” she murmured.

  Taryn bobbed her head and waited as Lucy wordlessly opened the door and allowed her to enter.

  The interior of Lucy’s house was a sight to behold. Although her own parents would’ve been shocked at its disorganization and the amount of stuff she’d been able to pack into it, Taryn couldn’t keep herself from looking around and marveling. Yes, there was a lot, and Lucy might have been a few untidy days away from being classified a hoarder, but there were so many interesting things to see. The small child’s chair, for instance, holding silk flowers in an antique vase and nailed to the wall. The corner full of metal and aluminum buckets of many sizes, intermixed with old-fashioned washboards. The rolling pins attached to the wall above the couch, there must have been more than two dozen. Their red handles were dusty and caked with grease, but Taryn could immediately imagine the stories of pies and biscuits they could tell.

  “I’ve got a lot of stuff, I know,” Lucy said as she motioned Taryn to take a seat.

  She settled into a chair covered in multi-colored afghans while Lucy took her seat across from her on a stately red, velvet settee. Next to her was a state-of-the-art stereo system, out of place amongst the rest. Country music was playing now.

  “I like it,” Taryn replied in all honesty. “It’s homey.”

  “I don’t see many people anymore, so my stuff keeps me company,” Lucy said. “I like being surrounded by things. I know we’re not supposed to say that, or mean it, but I don’t care anymore. It’s my money, and I don’t answer to anyone else.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  Lucy sat back against the settee and studied Taryn. Taryn watched as her hostess’ bare feet swung back and forth beneath her, her toes barely brushing the floor. She was a small woman. An old Restless Heart song, “The Bluest Eyes in Texas” began playing through the speakers and despite the brevity of the situation, Taryn smiled. She loved that song; it was one of her favorites. The haunting melody had always touched something inside of her. She started to remark on it, to kind of cut the ice and make light of the mood, but then Lucy straightened, looked around the room as though she’d seen a ghost, and closed her eyes in panic.

  “Lucy?” Taryn asked, worried.

  Lucy clutched her arms tightly to her chest and began rocking back and forth, muttering words to herself Taryn couldn’t hear.

  “Are you okay?” Taryn asked. She quickly rose to her feet and walked to the other woman. Lucy did not appear to recognize that Taryn was there.

  She couldn’t hear what she was saying, so Taryn fiddled with the button on the stereo until she’d turned the volume down. Lucy continued to rock, to mumble to herself, and then (even worse) to emit a high-pitched whinnying sound that shook Taryn.

  “Please, are you okay?”

  And then she stopped. As though it had not happened at all, Lucy opened her eyes and shook her h
ead. Her color had returned to normal. She was all right. “I’m sorry,” she apologized, clearly embarrassed. “It happens sometimes. Please, take a seat.”

  Taryn returned to her chair, afraid and bewildered.

  “So, what have you seen? I know it’s something, or else you wouldn’t be here.”

  “I don’t know what I’ve seen,” Taryn answered, still nervous about what had just happened, “but I can tell you what I’ve heard.”

  For the next several minutes it was Taryn’s turn to study Lucy as she told her about the singing, the objects flying around the room, the clattering of objects in the storage closet. When she’d finished with that, she thought for a second about omitting what she’d seen in her pictures but then gave in and told her about those as well.

  Lucy listened with eyes closed, only opening them when Taryn mentioned the flowers. For the slightest moment, Taryn thought she saw Lucy’s eyes widen with something akin to fear, but it might have been sadness. It was gone before she could register or understand it.

  “I don’t know what any of that means, you know,” Taryn said. She hoped her voice didn’t hold accusation.

  Lucy opened her eyes again. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know what some of it means myself.”

  “But you know who’s doing it, what it’s all about,” Taryn pressed.

  Lucy nodded. “I do.”

  “Then does it matter if I do anything or not?” Taryn asked, confused. “I mean, I guess I thought I was helping. But if you don’t want to talk about it…”

  Lucy rose and began pacing back and forth across the floor, her nightgown dragging the ground behind her. “I don’t know what to tell you. There are some things that deserve to be buried. Gone and buried. Don’t you ever feel like that?”

  “I don’t think these things are, though,” Taryn protested. “And now I am involved. I can’t say for sure that they won’t follow me. They followed me to my motel room.”

  “Oh, honey. That motel has its own ghosts to worry about,” Lucy laughed.

  “So I should just walk away?”

  Lucy stopped and sent Taryn a withering look. “You can do what you want.”

  Taryn felt her temper rising. “Look, I thought I was here for a reason. And I see and hear these things for a reason. You can’t just ask me to, well, you know, tell you stuff and then not tell me what it means.”

  “Humph,” Lucy sighed. Then, “Has there ever been a song in your life that you just hated? A song that everyone else loved? It comes on, and they all want to turn it up and sing along with it but all you can do is cover your ears and try not to scream.”

  Taryn nodded. There were songs she actively disliked. Only, she was sure they weren’t talking about music here.

  “At first, when people see your reaction, they want to know why you’re acting like that. Why you hate it. So, you try to explain it to them. Only they still don’t get it. In fact, they get angry at you. Now they want to change your mind. They won’t accept the fact that you have the right to dislike it, that you don’t have to go along with what they want. And soon,” Lucy finished as she continued her pacing, “you just stop telling them altogether. There’s no purpose.”

  “I want to know what song you hate,” Taryn pleaded.

  Lucy smiled at her, a gentle one this time. “You know, I believe you do. But this time, you’re just going to have to figure it out alone. I don’t have any more explanations left within me. I can’t talk about that song anymore. I just have to let it play.”

  Lucy followed Taryn out the front door and stood on her porch as she walked down to her car. At the burn pile. Taryn paused and pointed. “You cleaning?”

  Lucy nodded. “Man up the road does that for me once a week. Poison ivy. I am deathly allergic to it. Don’t even have to touch it to catch it. He burns it while I’m gone so that I don’t have to be here and breathe it in.”

  Taryn, also highly allergic to the awful weed, shuddered. “I don’t blame you. I hate that stuff.”

  “Oh, Taryn!” Lucy called as Taryn started to slide into the driver’s seat. “The dream about the hallway? I have that one, too. I don’t know what it means. And that’s the God’s truth.”

  Twenty-Three

  “Any luck?” From the grim look on Matt’s face, Taryn wasn’t hopeful.

  She’d been sitting outside at the small table for the past hour, waiting for him to return. He didn’t have a vehicle so he was limited to where he could travel by foot. And, frankly, there weren’t that many places to go to downtown–four restaurants, the library, and a gas station. Still, Taryn had felt his absence in an almost painful way, and she worried. It was funny how he could be several states away, and she could literally go for days without having more than a passing thought about wishing to be with him nonstop (yeah, it was a problem she was trying to sort out). Yet, get him in the same room with her, and she didn’t want to let him go.

  Now, as he ambled up to her and pulled out the other chair, she felt guilty for having sent him to work. They always spent their time together working on one project or another. They were never able to simply sit back, relax, and be.

  “You go first,” Matt sighed as he rubbed at his eyes.

  Taryn stretched her legs out under the table and rested them in his lap, where he immediately began working on her ankles.

  “Well, my day was eventful. I worked on the painting this morning and then I went to visit Lucy.”

  “Yeah? How’d that go?”

  “Well, I told her about what I’d seen, dreamed, and heard and she gave me…” Taryn paused for dramatic effect, “nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Nada.”

  “Damn,” Matt said, shaking his head. Taryn laughed. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d heard Matt curse. He thought cursing showed a lack of imagination. Taryn herself liked a good “shit” or “damn” when the moment called for one.

  “The fact that she’s avoiding talking to me about it means that it was something bad, Matt,” Taryn said. “I hate to push her, I do. She obviously doesn’t want to talk about it.”

  “But it’s affecting you now,” he pointed out. “You can’t just walk away. What if this follows you back to Nashville?”

  “I know,” Taryn agreed. “And I also feel like I have some sense of loyalty to the other people involved, too. Like Aunt Sarah. Sarah has nothing to do with Lucy; that’s all with me. And if she wants me involved, then I am going to have to do something about it.”

  “And the child-ghost,” Matt reminded her.

  “Right,” Taryn concurred. “So how did it go for you?”

  “Ohhhh.” Matt dropped her foot and groaned into his hands.

  “That bad, huh?”

  “Seriously, Taryn. Do you have any idea how many people have died here?”

  “Well, I was just reading about the heroin epidemic in the area. Apparently, Huntington was hit hard by it, and they see something like twenty overdoses in a single day. Every day.”

  Matt shook his head. “That’s not what I mean. I mean, the number of murders, suicides, and general random deaths. There has to be an above-average loss of life here.”

  “Here, listen to this…” He bent over and rummaged around in his backpack before extracting a navy blue notebook. “Ethan Wayne, death by self-inflicted gunshot wound. Wendy Spacke, death by hanging. Loyal Oswald, fatal overdose. Paul Jackson, jailed for first-degree murder. Travis Windsome, jailed for first-degree murder.”

  “Okay,” Taryn said slowly. “But not all of those were deaths. And, of course, you’re going to have that in any county. Unfortunately, these things happen.”

  “Ah!” Matt grinned, throwing her a wink. “But you don’t know the connections to these, do you?”

  “I recognize the name Wendy. That’s the girl who killed herself. She was a classmate or friend of Lucy’s, right?”

  “They all were.”

  “Huh?”

  “Taryn,”
Matt leaned forward and lowered his voice, “all of those people were classmates of Lucy’s at Muddy Creek. And those aren’t even all of the casualties.”

  Despite the somber information, Matt couldn’t help but look pleased with himself. Taryn, for her part, was shocked.

  “You’re kidding me!”

  “I’m not,” he asserted vehemently. “I started seeing a trend early on, so I ran with it. I used to be a reference librarian, you know. I got skills.”

  “Good Lord. There weren’t that many people in her class to begin with, were there?”

  Matt waved his hand around. “Hard to say for sure, but my guess would be no. Muddy Creek Elementary only had one class per grade. Each year they had seventeen students ‘graduate’ so you can figure that’s what their average was for each class, more or less.”

  “And how many kids were causalities of Lucy’s class? And these are the ones from Muddy Creek, right, and not spillovers into Middle School?”

  “Well, causalities from Middle School, and from outside of Lucy’s class are also high. Abnormally so I’d say. But with Lucy’s, there are only around four students in her class that ‘made it out’ or however you want to say it. That’s her, Jamey-the-principal, and two other girls I lost track of.”

  Taryn laughed a little, though it wasn’t funny. “Well, considering that she’s on trial for murder…”

  Matt closed his notebook and leaned back in his chair. “Taryn, I think something really, really bad happened there.”

  “Do you think Lucy…”

  “Had something to do with it,” he asked. “No, I don’t.”

  “A paranormal thing?”

  “Maybe,” he replied. “This is one of those cases where I think it wouldn’t be too farfetched to think the school or building or whatever is some kind of vortex. Maybe we’re dealing with something way out of our league here.”

  Taryn slumped back in her seat as well and groaned. “Great. So now what?”

  “I bought a pint of whiskey from a reporter in the parking lot. Want to drink?”