Trembling With Fear 05/09/21

Murder by Lake by J J Munro

Tonle Sap Lake near Angkor Wat, Cambodia

The largest freshwater lake in Southeast Asia

You can swim the English channel, but you can’t swim in Tonle Sap.  Trust me, I’ve done my research.  That’s why I took my sister to Cambodia, so she could see the Angkor Wat — before she died and let me inherit the family estate.

Picture it.  The snows melt in the distant Himalayas.  The waters rush down the mighty Mekong, clogging its shallow basin.  Suddenly all that water backs up — flowing in reverse, all the way into Tonle Sap.  In Khmer, it means “large, freshwater lake.”

Mostly, the lake covers 965 square miles of Cambodia.  But from late-April, it swells to 6,178 square miles — six times its normal size.  The old Angkor dynasties survived on its fish.  Later, when the water drains out, Tonle Sap becomes a miraculous rice paddy.

Shana and I boarded the little tour boat, like a dinghy on steroids, and carved our way across the great sluggish lake.  In parts, you can’t see the shorelines.  Our young skipper babbled on about landmarks.  Floating schools, churches, basketball courts.  A whole city of lake folk and their fishing boats were left rocking in our wake.

Shana leaned back, let a hand drift in the water.  Our boatman screamed a warning.  “No put hand in!”

Startled, she asked me: “Tom, how deep is the lake?”  

“Nobody knows.  Nobody has ever tried reaching the bottom.”

She peered into the water.  “It’s so brown.  I can’t see a thing.”

“That’s the sediment,” I explained.  “They say the minute you fall in you’re dead.  Let me show you why.”        

I moved closer beside her.  “The lake is full of sediment.  Under that water you’ll find flooded mangrove forests and huge floodplains that grow crops.”  

“So it’s not polluted?”

“The sediment is natural.”

“So why is it dangerous?”

“Because it’s so thick you couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.  Not even the sunlight penetrates the surface.  If you fell into that water and started swimming, you wouldn’t know whether you were swimming towards the surface or swimming toward the bottom.”

“How nice,” she said with a shiver.

Minutes later, our boatman eased our craft to dock beside a floating restaurant.  “Eat, drink,” he said.  “Watch your step.”

We clambered onto the wooden deck of the ancient village house that bobbed in the slack current.  The boatman pointed to the woman who ushered us to a table.  “My wife.”

We nodded a greeting, our hands clasped together Buddhist-style.  

It was pleasant sitting there, watching the sunlight sparkling on the lake, listening to the thrum-thrum-thrum of passing craft.  Shana got up to peer out the doorway.  The boatman and his wife were busy with their children.  Now was my chance.

I pushed my hands firmly into the center of Shana’s back.  She was gone in an instant.  One splash, no more Shana.  I was millions of dollars richer.

I screamed out to the boatman.  “My sister — fell in — ”

He raced to my side, shouting something to his wife.  

“Help,” I begged him.

He nodded, seizing me, spinning me around, his hands plunging into my pockets.  I felt my wallet whipped out.  Next minutes, arms flailing, I was airborne.

The water closed over my head.  Thick, clogged, dark.  I saw what might have been sunlight overhead.  I was a good swimmer.  I struck out swiftly.  The sunlight vanished.  I cut through the thick dense water.  Like swimming in wet cement.  My lungs coped well.  I had air, I had power.

I kept swimming.

Suddenly grazed against a tree branch.

I’d reached the flooded forest.

Not all my millions could save me now.

As my lungs exploded, I settled into the sediment, wondering what the rice farmers would say a year from now.