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Jenna was standing beneath an opalescent sky, where the moon hung low and heavy over the Sablewood Reservoir Dam. The night air was cool against her skin, carrying the scent of moist earth and aged stone. Perched there alone atop the dam, her eyes traced the outline of the structure, noting how the interplay of light and darkness gave it an otherworldly quality. There was something about the scene that tugged at the fringes of her memory, something important that remained just out of reach.

She heard the sound of rushing water and moved toward the source of the noise. Leaning over the railing at the edge of the dam, she was mesmerized by the spectacle of water gushing forth below her, defying the drought that had held Genesius County in its arid grasp. The spillway, so recently a dry passage of cracked concrete, now churned with violent cascades where foam crested waves spiraled into the air before crashing back into the froth. Now the roar of the deluge was deafening, a constant, thunderous presence that seemed to resonate with the pounding of her own pulse.

Then Jenna’s eyes located an even stranger sight. In the moonlit chaos at the base of the spillway, she saw four boys playing a perilous game in the turbulent waters that flowed there. Their laughter echoed through the night air as they splashed and jostled each other, seemingly unafraid of the powerful current.

But Jenna knew better. She had seen this spillway flowing at other times as she grew up near here, and she’d witnessed its unpredictability. The water could change in an instant, doubling its strength and carrying away anyone who was carelessly in its way. Yet these boys seemed oblivious to any possible danger. All four of them, with the fearlessness of youth, splashed and jostled each other, pushing closer to the cascade as if it were merely another playground challenge.

“Get back!” Jenna called out to them, her instincts as both Sheriff and protector flaring to life. But the roar of the water was a colossal beast, devouring her words whole. Her voice was rendered mute against the sound of nature’s fury.

She clutched the rail. She had to do something, anything. Yet Jenna found that she was no more than a spectator, her authority as Sheriff meaningless to the figures below. The boys continued their dangerous game, oblivious to her presence, to her panic. She wanted to somehow snatch the children from their reckless play, but she was powerless. When she tried again to scream at them, her words dissipated before they could reach their ears.

Then she felt something tapping on her shoulder.

Gasping, Jenna spun around, her movement abrupt. Three men stood behind her, their presence unexpected. She blinked, trying to reconcile the fear-induced adrenaline with the odd calmness that settled over her at the sight of the men. The dam felt real underfoot, yet the atmosphere buzzed with an energy of some kind that defied reality.

“Who—” Her voice faltered, words caught in her throat, as recognition dawned. Somehow she knew that the man who had touched her shoulder was Clive Carroway, or rather his shade. His dark eyes bore into hers, a silent acknowledgment passing between them.

And in that moment, Jenna became lucid.

She knew she was dreaming. That much became clear as she stood atop the Sablewood Dam, staring at the ghosts of the past. It was a realization that lent her a measure of control, or at least the semblance of it, in a world woven from her own subconscious mind. As that realization dawned on her, the relentless roar that had consumed her senses now receded to a gentle hum, the sound of the torrential spillway no longer a force drowning out all else.

Jenna straightened her posture, her innate investigative instincts sharpening with each lucid breath. She knew that ethereal scenes such as this one were not just a product of slumber; each one held a potential revelation, a silent witness to things she needed to know, hidden in the folds of the dream world that surrounded her.

The two other men still flanked Clive Carroway, spectral companions from the past. They were shadows given form, manifestations from the depths of her own subconscious but based on information about real people. She wanted to ask questions of all of them, but it was the first one who held her gaze, his presence a puzzle piece clicking into place.

“Clive,” she addressed the figure who had also been known as Sly, waiting for his voice to reach back to her across the divide between life and death.

“Don’t worry about the boys, Sheriff. They’ll be fine... for now.” Clive’s tone bore the sound of unspoken sorrow as he indicated the frolicking figures below, where youthful exuberance danced dangerously close to oblivion. “Sheriff Doyle will be along soon to chase them away. He always does.”

The mention of Frank Doyle, tethered to both her waking life and this dreamscape, brought Jenna a welcome reassurance. But it was the boys still held her attention—symbols, surely, of something more significant than idle phantoms.

“But who are they?” Jenna asked, managing to keep her voice steady as she always did in this strange state of consulting with departed.

Clive’s silhouette, etched by lunar light, seemed almost contemplative as he regarded this Sheriff who persisted in seeking answers from a realm beyond her jurisdiction. “Actually, they’re not really here at all,” he said, his voice echoing the melancholy that shimmered in the air around them. “They only exist in your mind—and our memories. They’re us—some years ago now.”

As if on cue, one of the other spectral figures—a man with a broad-shouldered frame —managed a chuckle. It was a sound that carried the weight of years lost, a lamentation disguised as amusement. Even here in this odd dreamscape, Jenna instinctively knew that this was Mike Larson. The moonlight caught the edges of his form, highlighting the rugged features that had once been familiar to the patrons of Lohmeyer’s Feed Store.

“Boys will be boys,” Mike said, shaking his head as if dislodging memories too heavy to bear.

“They’re having a great time for a bunch of kids who are only in our heads,” the third figure said. “Don’t deprive them of that, considering what’s in their future. Things are going to turn out bad enough for them—for us, I mean.”

Jenna’s gaze flitted between the laughing, splashing figures in the water below and the trio of men who stood with her atop the dam.

With Clive’s words still lingering in her mind, she pieced together the grim story—the three victims found in the reservoir were here atop the dam with her, sharing in this dreamlike vigil over their younger selves.

But there was an incongruity here. Jenna looked from the men to the boys, their carefree antics a stark contrast to the solemn gathering at the top of the dam. Who was the fourth boy, and why wasn’t he here beside the others?

She knew these phantoms wouldn’t appear to her for no reason, unless they had something they wanted her to other. But as always, they couldn’t express their meaning to her directly. They had to communicate in riddles. And as always, it was up to Jenna to understand why they were here in her dream and what their words meant to her current case. In her lucid state, she could question those she met and remember their answers when she awoke. The problem was usually maintaining the contact, keeping the information flowing long enough to find out something useful. Wherever the spirits of the dead who contacted her came from, they often tended to fade away before she was ready to let them go.

Lucidity meant she could control some parts of a dream, but control was never complete. Her powers seldom extended to stopping a dream from taking a wildly different direction or simply ending. She’d sometimes found it difficult to maintain a conversation with one spirit, and this time there were three standing there before her. Clive Carroway, Mike Larson, and the third one named Jimmy—all linked by the dark waters of Sablewood Reservoir—were surely here to reveal something important, whether about their lives or about their deaths. As Jenna digested this realization and looked at the three spirits, she saw that they all had a faint, shimmering quality to their appearance, like distorted mirages on a horizon.

“Wait,” Jenna urged, the word slicing through the dream’s fabric. “There are only three of you here, but four boys in the water. Who’s the fourth boy?”

The three men shared a look, their eyes communicating volumes in the silence. They turned back to Jenna, and for a moment it seems they all wanted to reveal some secret held tight within their spectral grasp. Clive’s mouth opened, his expression one of somber resignation, Mike’s lips parted as if to echo a truth long submerged. Jimmy hesitated, a flicker of something unspoken playing across his features.

“Who’s the fourth boy?” she asked again, desperately trying to hold onto the connection.

But as their mouths moved, intending to bridge the chasm between life and death with their revelation, the roar of the spillway rose like an indomitable beast, drowning out their voices. The sound swelled, a crescendo that engulfed the dam, the water, and the night itself, severing the tenuous connection Jenna had forged with these echoes of the past.

As the clamor reached its peak, the dream’s grip on Jenna loosened, the edges of her world beginning to fray and dissolve. She fought to hold on, to stay submerged in this realm where answers lurked just beyond reach, but waking reality beckoned with relentless urgency.

Jenna’s eyes snapped open, dispelling the moonlit illusion of Sablewood Dam. Her heart raced, a remnant of the adrenaline that fueled her spectral confrontation. The darkness of her bedroom was punctuated only by the soft, green glow of the digital clock, its numbers a stark reminder that the night has passed while she traversed the strange corridors of her dreams.

Despite the abrupt departure from that other place, some details still clung to her. The faces of the boys, the expressions of the dead men, and the roar of the spillway all persisted in her waking mind. They demanded her attention, refusing to be relegated to the recesses of mere dreams, insisting on their relevance to the waking world and the mysteries that plagued it.

Jenna’s breath steadied as she reconciled the two realities. The urgency of the unanswered question propelled her forward, a driving force not to be ignored or delayed. The vision may have faded, but its implications resonated with a clarity that transcended the boundaries of sleep.

She hurriedly scribbled across the pages of her notebook, trying to capture every fragment of the dream before it could evaporate. She had trained herself to do this, to act as both the medium and the scribe for these nocturnal visitations that seemed more prophecy than fantasy. Shapes and symbols spilled out—a dam, water defying drought, the faces of dead men, and the laughter of young boys—each image a puzzle piece in the unsolved mystery of three murders.

The pen moved as with a life of its own, transcribing the urgency that pulsed through her veins. Finally, she wrote down the echo of a question left unanswered: Who was the fourth boy?

After the last word was scribbled onto the paper, Jenna reached for her phone. She punched in Jake’s number and then pushed the blankets aside, feet finding the cold floor even as Jake’s groggy voice came through the line. There was no time for the niceties of dawn; urgency carved from the night’s visions left no room for such things.

The line crackled with Jake’s awakening alertness, a static undercurrent to his swiftly sharpening tone. His questions were immediate, indicative of his own professional instincts kicking in, but Jenna cut them off with a quiet intensity that brooked no argument. This was not a request; it was a directive. A necessity.

“Jake,” she started without preamble, her words crisp and clear despite the hour. “We need to go back to Colstock this morning.”