Conspiracies and Stuff: A Dreamland Junction Mystery

Conspiracies & Stuff

Dreamland Junction Mystery

Kendra Ashe

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2015 Kendra Ashe

All Rights Reserved 2015

Lavine Press 2015

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

The knocking couldn’t have come at a worse time. There I was, in the most compromising position imaginable, with the sexiest guy this side of heaven, who was about to give me an earth shattering orgasm, and then the knocking.

That’s when I was pulled back to earth, and Mister Perfect faded into that netherworld of dreams.

If it weren’t for the fact that I knew all it would take to bring him back was to drift into sleep, I might have literally screamed in frustration. My phantom lover had visited my dreams every night for the past week, which was fantastic. The problem was, all I could remember in the morning was his stunning blue eyes, and the total bliss of his touch.

Rolling over, I buried my head beneath a pillow. I figured that if I ignored the knocking long enough, whoever was on the other side of the door at such an ungodly hour, would eventually get the hint and go away. Then maybe I could go back to sleep and dream some more about having radical sex with whoever owned those gorgeous blue eyes.

It wasn’t going to happen. The pounding continued.

“Come on Kat! I’m dying out here!”

I knew that voice.

That was Spencer’s voice. Now I was sure it wasn’t real.

I was still dreaming, but it was just a different kind of dream. I was having one of those crazy dreams, the kind of dream that could really be considered a nightmare.

“Kat! If you don’t open up, you’re going to find me dead in the morning,” he warned in a muffled voice.

Oh what the hell!

If I were dreaming, it probably wouldn’t hurt anything to get up and answer the door. Maybe he’d be gone by the time I got there.

When I tried to roll out of bed, I discovered very quickly that I couldn’t move my legs. Panic set in, but just as I was ready to do some screaming and yelling of my own, I realized that I was tangled in my bedding.

Taking several calming breaths, I proceeded to unwrap the offending blankets from my legs and torso.

Meanwhile, the knocking and whining continued. “Please Kat! I need to go to the hospital.”

Part of me, the part of me that was awake, was worried that it really might be something serious this time. The part of me that was still half asleep was cursing up a storm.

Why had I ever thought that moving into a trailer was a good idea, even a double wide? With walls as thin as paper, there was no blocking out sound from outside. If I’d moved into a house, at least there might have been a basement I could hide in.

In spite of the fact that my slippers were bright green, I couldn’t find them in the dark, and I was still too groggy to think about turning on the light. Instead, I made my way to the front door in my bare feet. Thankfully, I’d be walking on carpet instead of cold tile.

Getting on my tiptoes, I peered through the peephole, just to be sure. You couldn’t be too careful these days, even in a town the size of Dreamland Junction.

It was Spencer all right, and he was resting his forehead against my door.

Unlatching the chain lock and deadbolt, I pulled the door open. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s my nose,” he moaned.

“My hell Spencer! Do you know what time it is?”

Actually, since I hadn’t looked at a clock yet,
I
didn’t even know what time it was.

Spencer stumbled through the door.

He was so busy holding his nose that he didn’t bother to watch where he was stepping, which resulted in him nearly tripping over my blue throw rug.

“What’s wrong with your nose?” I asked, leading him into the kitchen.

“They did it again. They shoved one of their tracking devices up my nose.”

In that moment, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to laugh or cry. What I did know for sure was that I felt a migraine coming on.

“Are you freaking serious, Spencer? You wake me up at …” I stopped long enough to glance at the bright neon beer clock hanging on my wall. “At three in the morning because you had a bad dream.”

I was sure that’s what it was. Spencer had been having a lot of bad dreams over the last week. Of course he insisted they weren’t dreams, but they had to be. I was pretty sure that if there were some kind of mother ship hovering over Spencer’s place, beaming him up in the middle of the night, I would probably notice. This was especially true since he was my next-door neighbor.

With Spencer you never could tell what was up. He smoked more weed than my grandfather did during the sixties free love era, which brought to mind the idea that I probably had several aunts and uncles running around that I didn’t even know existed.

“It wasn’t a bad dream,” he grumbled, moving his hand away from his nose so that I would get the full effect of his glare.

“They really did it. I woke up right in the middle.”

Now that he’d moved his hand away from his face, I could see that there really was blood dripping from one of his nostrils.

“You know … the heat could have given you a bloody nose,” I offered.

Spencer shook his head. “I know the difference Kat. With what you do … I can’t understand why you still won’t believe me.”

Placing one hand on my hip, I stared at Spencer for a long time.

Not only was Spencer my next-door neighbor, but he’d also been one of my best friends since kindergarten. He might have been an odd fish with his longish hair and piercings, but I’d never known him to make up stories.

“Okay,” I sighed. “Let me take a look.”

My bottom kitchen drawer was my junk drawer, which also happened to be where I kept my flashlight. It took a minute, but I managed to find it hiding beneath several old phonebooks.

“You’ll have to sit down and tilt your head back,” I instructed.

Spencer pulled one of the kitchen chairs to the middle of the floor and sat down.

As gross as it was, I forced myself to shine the flashlight up both of Spencer’s nostrils.

“I don’t see a thing, except a trace of blood. Like I said … you probably had a bloody nose because of the heat. It is July you know.”

Spencer drew his brows together and fixed me with a scathing look. “With you being psychic, you should already know what happened.”

“I’m a little psychic,” I corrected, holding my thumb and index finger about an inch apart to demonstrate just how little psychic I was. “I get hunches, and my hunch is … you had one too many beers down at the Green Man last night, and have probably been smoking way too much dope.”

“But you are a paranormal investigator,” he pointed out, ignoring my reference to his night of merry making.

“No,” I shook my head. “I’m a part time private investigator, who just happens to like exposing those dirty dogs running black projects in the government. That doesn’t make me a ghost hunter.”

“What about that ghost you saw last year. You telling me you really didn’t see it?”

Damn. I just knew he was going to bring that up. It was true. I did see a ghost in the Ladies Restroom at the Landing. I thought it was a ghost anyway. She’d been wearing clothes from my great grandmother’s time, and she disappeared when I tried to talk to her. In my book, that probably qualified as a ghost.

“Still … I don’t see anything up your nose.”

Since I was determined not to take another gander up Spencer’s nose, I returned the flashlight to the junk drawer and pulled a glass from the cupboard. I needed a drink, even if the water from the tap was lukewarm at best. Living in the desert had its disadvantages, and not getting cold water out of the kitchen tap was a big one.

“I can still feel something up there,” Spencer continued the argument, but I wasn’t listening.

Static erupted from the police scanner that sat on my kitchen counter between a roll of paper towels, and my Bigfoot cookie jar. If there was static, someone was keying their mic, which also meant someone was getting ready to say something.

Sure enough, the voice that came on the radio was one I knew well. Officer, Stick up his Butt, Brad Moss.

“This is Unit Twenty One. It looks like we have a 187 on Highway 375, about a mile north of the green hut.”

“Ten four. Back up is on the way,” the dispatcher replied in that monotone emotionless voice that was their trademark.

I didn’t live far from Highway 375, also known as the ET Highway. I’d been listening to the scanner long enough to know that a homicide had occurred and their reference to the green hut was really police code for the Alien Museum, which also wasn’t too far away.

Due to our close proximity to the infamous Area 51, Dreamland Junction, and in fact, the entire Dreamland area was filled with ET themed tourist traps.

It gave me a headache just thinking about it.

I also believed it was all this alien crap that contributed to Spencer’s bat shit crazy belief that he was an alien abductee.

Poor Spencer. But I supposed that if you lived around it long enough, it was bound to get to you sooner or later.

I’d lived in Dreamland Junction since I was baby, and I hadn’t once seen a little green man or a UFO. Not that I didn’t think the government was up to no good at Area 51, I just had my doubts that what they were doing out there had anything to do with otherworldly craft, or extra terrestrial beings.

But a homicide off the ET Highway was interesting.

“Let’s go check it out,” I tossed the words over my shoulder as I was heading for my bedroom to get dressed.

“Are you nuts?” he called after me. “Didn’t Moss tell you the next time you interfered in an investigation, he was going to lock you up?”

“He wouldn’t dare. That’s a violation of my rights. There’s still something called freedom of the press in this country,” I pointed out.

“I don’t know if a website called Black Files actually qualifies you as being a member of the press,” he grumbled.

I couldn’t blame Spencer for being none to anxious to check out the crime scene. Going to jail wasn’t exactly the best way to spend a Sunday morning. I would say it might even be worse than getting abducted by aliens.

* * *

The crime scene was visible a mile away, thanks to all the flashing lights from police vehicles.

Every so often there were accidents on the ET Highway, and there had even been a few people to actually disappear while driving on the highway, but I couldn’t remember any homicides. Not recently anyway.

“What do you think happened?” I asked Spencer, who was sitting quietly in the passenger seat, a look of dread painted on his face.

He lifted his shoulders in a half shrug. “I don’t know, but whatever it is … it looks serious.”

“Well any homicide is serious.”

Before he could answer, I pulled off to the side of the highway.

“Here,” I said, tossing him my tiny pink video recorder. “You do the video recording. I’ll take pictures and run the digital voice recorder.”

Spencer frowned. “You know they’re going to run us out of here.”

I shrugged. “Probably, but we’ll never know what happened if we don’t check it out for ourselves. You know how they like to cover things up around here.”

That was something that the both of us could agree on.

I still remembered the day Mayor Payne went running through the strip mall, wearing nothing but his underwear and a tinfoil hat. They’d covered that one up good. The next day the Junction Gazette released a story claiming the mayor had suffered from fever induced delirium.

I knew better.

Mayor Payne contacted me the night before, begging for help. He claimed aliens were controlling his thoughts and were forcing him to divulge city government secrets.

I spent half the night trying to convince him he was over reacting. Apparently, I hadn’t done that great a job.

Spencer followed me, though reluctantly.

There was a blue sedan parked off the side of the road about a hundred yards ahead. CSI had already arrived on the scene and were busy taking pictures of whoever was inside.

I thought about telling Spencer to try and blend in, but a second look at his attire was enough to convince me it would be a waste of time. I couldn’t imagine that anyone in law enforcement would show up at a crime scene wearing baggy blue jeans and a black Grim Reaper t-shirt.

Well it couldn’t be helped.

Switching on the voice recorder, I slipped between a uniformed officer and the medical examiner.

The woman in the driver’s seat looked to be in her late twenties. There were no obvious injuries, but it was apparent she was as dead as Mister Cray’s yearly garden. Jackson Cray was the elderly gentleman who lived next door to Uncle Sonny. Every year he planted a garden, and every year it was dead by mid summer.

I figured it probably had something to do with Jackson getting drunk and dumping beer on the garden every other night. He insisted it would make the vegetables more nutritious. Who knows, maybe it would, if they actually grew to the point they could be eaten.

Sneaking in a little closer, I started snapping pictures. The expression on the woman’s face was disturbing. Her eyes were as wide as saucers and her mouth open in a silent scream. Whatever had happened, it had sure scared the hell out of her.