Murder at the Water Wheel
Book Four of the Black Mountain Mystery Series
by Ruben D. Gonzales
Book Blurb:
When Liz’s latest fiancé turns up dead in the pond of Black Mountain’s new Historic Water Wheel tourist trap, it turns the town upside down. With a promising holiday season approaching and small businesses up and down Main Street depending on the sales, Mayor Franklyn Shaw asks Emma to look into the case of her ex-sister-in-law, so business, including the Shaw’s businesses, will get back to normal and people’s jobs will be saved. Although hesitant to add the task to her already busy photography business and publishing the biweekly Black Mountain Post, Emma decides to look into the case when Liz’s former boyfriend is arrested for the murder. Will Emma’s ancestral gift of aura reading be enough to solve the case or will an innocent man take the blame and a murderer go free?
Excerpt:
Chapter One
Saturday at Dawn
Like most people, I enjoy a good wedding. Especially when it is someone else’s. But when my big brother’s widow told me that she and Trent Cochran planned to get married in the fall, I thought it was a bit premature. I mean, Becky had only just started seeing the guy. Did she even know Trent? I mean, really know him. Can any of us say we really know a person?
Now, I admit he was good looking, in a tall, dark, and lean way, but getting married? Wow!
“So, what happened to Drew Carter,” I asked when I saw her after I heard her wedding plans, trying to remember if Becky had told me why she ended it with her former boyfriend. “I thought you and Drew were hot for each other. He’s such a nice guy.”
“Drew’s nice, Emma,” she told me then, “but he doesn’t have ambition. He’s just happy to be working at the lumber mill for fifteen dollars an hour. I need someone with more ambition. You know, I have my boys to worry about. Trent has more ambition.”
“What about Eddie Jordan,” I had asked about another nice guy she saw after my big brother, her husband, was murdered. We all grew up with Eddie and now he coached at the Black Mountain High School.
“All Eddie wanted to do was play games. He wasn’t serious about anything if it didn’t involve sports.”
Of course, all that ambition or seriousness doesn’t do you any good if you end up dead the morning of your wedding.
Becky’s opinion aside, I always had mix feelings about Trent, especially his dark orange aura. The color of an aura I associate with people who can’t make commitments.
I’ve always been able to see a person’s aura. When I was young I thought everyone could. It wasn’t until my grandmother, Louise Looking Bird, explained that my aura reading ability was handed down to me by my Cherokee ancestors. A special gift that not just everyone had.
I use my aura reading gift in my portrait photography. I found I got the best results if I clicked the shutter at the moment of a subject’s aura’s rightest moment. My old editor praised my work saying, my shots captured the real essence of people, and their likeness was so real it was as if the subject was only caught between breaths.
So, the wedding plan went forward and the morning after the big rehearsal dinner Trent Cochran threw at the Shaw Winery, I donned my heavy parka, grabbed my camera, and clenching my teeth, I went for a walk with my dog, Blue. The old pro photographers I used to work with always said never go anywhere without your camera because you never know what you might see.
The first freeze of the season swooped down the mountain in the morning catching the small mountain town in a surprise early winter of ice and cold. The kind of cold you meet with strong hot coffee and double layers of clothes. Since I was out so early, I thought I’d take a few photos of the sunrise over the frozen town.
My dog, Blue, never feels the cold like people, so pulled on her leash dragging me along, happy to be outside. I got Blue as a gift for solving a murder two years ago and we started a rough get acquainted period but came out the other end better for our trial. We’ve settled into kind of a mother - teenage daughter type of life together, in the little mountain town of Black Mountain I moved back to after swearing I never would. Except in this relationship, Blue was more the mother and me more the daughter.
We walked along a tributary of the Swannanoa River, right before a wide bend that flows at the northern edge of town. In the old days, like a hundred and fifty years ago, before electricity, the river’s powerful flow turned a big water wheel at the mill. It drove the saw that cut the lumber and crushed the grain that made the Shaw family the richest in the Valley of the Three Forks.
Although I’m part Shaw, I’ve tended to shy away from the recognition because they are a greedy bunch. The Shaw family owns just about everything in town including the bank, general store, real estate company, and the renovated historic water wheel where they sell tourist souvenirs, mountain crafts, wine from their vineyard, and baked goods from the community women who make the best pies in the state.
In a major irony, it appeared that I inherited the same business genetic make-up that drove the founding fathers of the Shaw clan. I returned to my childhood home to open my own business, a photography studio. A good many people, mostly men, laughed at my choice of an enterprise since these days everyone carries a phone camera and thinks of themselves as the next Ansel Adams. But through a varied menu of services and products I’ve managed to survive in the business world, thank you very much.
At the bend in the river, where Main Street straightens out, Blue and I approached a trio of County Sheriff cruisers, lights flashing in the early morning light, and several red trucks and a vehicle from the volunteer rescue squad. A big crowd started to form in front of the historic water wheel complex. Not one to miss an opportunity to capture a moment, I clicked off several shots of the flashing lights reflecting off the water, with the mill a dark shadow looming over the scene.
“What’s going on?” I asked Shelby Shaw when I saw her in front of the mill. Shelby is the mayor’s wife and the manager of the mill. As she stood outside the yellow taped off area, I shot a profile of her with the mill in the background. Even in the morning her aura brimmed out in a dark gold, a sign of people having trouble.
“I can’t believe it,” she moaned.
“What?”
“I found Trent Cochran, down in the water wheel pond,” she said. “Looks like he’s dead.”
Author Bio:
I was born and raised in East LA. After college I spent two years with the Peace Corps teaching elementary school in a small African village by day and reading and writing by candlelight at night. Before I retired from full time work, I was Director of Development for the City of Winston-Salem, NC and spent many seasons traveling throughout the small towns in the Blue Ridge Mountains. Now I write full time and teach part-time with the local community college system.
My first novel of historical fiction was, The Cottage on the Bay, published by Moonshine Cove Publishing and came out in 2018 and my second book, Murder on Black Mountain, the first in a mystery series, came out in 2020 from Fire Star Press. The second book in my Black Mountain Mystery series came out in 2022 by Indigo Sea Press, the third book in the series came out in June 2023, and the fourth book in the series released in August 2025. I have a recent mystery book, Cabana Bay, published with The Wild Rose Press released on May 14, 2025, and an action/adventure book released on September 22, 2025.
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