Darkest Journey

“Charlie, great to see you here,” Nancy said. She seemed a little anxious and a little shy.

As if she meant what she was saying.

Charlie nodded. “Good to see you, too.” She meant it herself. Time had gone by; they were no longer teenagers.

Nancy nodded. “I hear you’re a movie star now.”

“Hardly. Just a working actress. How about you? How is everything?”

Nancy smiled, but Charlie thought it looked a little forced. “I married Todd Camp. The quarterback. We have two kids.”

“Congratulations.”

“Twins.”

“Great.”

“Sometimes,” Nancy said, then shrugged. “Sometimes when Todd is working at the garage all day, I bring the kids here with me, and sometimes they even behave. But I love them. Anyway, I’m so happy for you. You always wanted to act.”

“Well, thanks. I’m not exactly a fixture on the red carpet, though, you know?”

“You’re doing what you want to do, and that’s what counts.”

“Thanks. Hey, how’s Sherry doing? You two were so close. Is she still around, too?”

“Sherry got married and moved to New Jersey.”

“That’s nice.”

“New Jersey? After here? I don’t know. But she has a family, became an LPN.”

“So. Twins,” Charlie said into the awkward silence that followed Nancy’s updates. “No kids for me yet, but one day, I hope.”

“I’m sure it will happen for you. As for me, I just hope for a vacation one of these days. Anyway, what can I get you?”

“Iced tea and gumbo, please.”

“You got it,” Nancy said, and moved on.

She and Jimmy chatted for a minute, and then Jimmy looked down the table at Charlie and mouthed, “Didn’t know she was working here.”

Charlie shrugged. It had been ten years since that awful night, and it was a relief to discover she didn’t really care what had happened to Nancy and the rest of them.

Once Nancy left, they chatted companionably as they waited for their food; they were almost evenly split between gumbo and shrimp and grits, breaking along pretty much the same lines for iced tea vs. frosty beers. For a few minutes the talk revolved around how to film the upcoming confrontation between Charlie and an oil baron. Brad wanted a live location, but Luke was worried about getting the clean sound that he believed the scene warranted. And then, because it couldn’t be ignored forever, the subject of the dead man, Farrell Hickory, finally came up. They were all a little spooked because he was the second reenactor to be killed.

“And we all knew them both,” Jimmy said.

Charlie turned to look at him. “We did?” she asked.

“Most of us did, at any rate,” Barry said, nodding solemnly.

“Can’t say I knew either man well,” Mike Thornton said, pushing back a lock of dark hair. He was a lot like his brother, in both looks and mannerisms. He and Brad had been making movies together since they’d been kids.

“And,” Jimmy said to Charlie, “you didn’t know either one of them, unless it’s from when you were a kid, because you weren’t there for the special reenactment they did on the Journey a week ago—like so many of us were.” He was wearing a brave face, but she could see he was deeply upset by the murders.

He had never really forgiven himself for being involved the night a serial killer had almost killed her.

“Right, I was doing that webisode series. Banshees on the Bayou.”

Brad smiled. “I hope this film is as successful as Banshees on the Bayou.”

“A bunch of us were involved because there was a corporate sponsor, so we were paid pretty decently,” Jennie said, then went quiet for a long moment. “That’s when we met the men who’ve been killed.”

“Who—who else was working that day?” Charlie asked, more worried than she wanted to let on.

“Well, your dad, for one,” Luke pointed out.

“Yeah, my dad. I know. Who else?” she asked.

“Let’s see,” Brad said, looking around. “Me and Mike, Barry and Luke... Jennie did makeup.”

“Todd and I were there, too.”

Charlie spun around to see that Nancy Camp—née Deauville—was standing right behind her. “We earn extra money any time we can. We didn’t hang around, just did the bit they were paying us for, then left. You have to try to make more money than day-care costs or it’s not worth it to work. Tons of locals were there, not just us.”

“Jimmy Smith and Grant Ferguson,” Brad added, then shook his head. “We were just extras. There was a scene between Hickory and Corley, though. I’m sure you already know this, but there was supposedly a meeting between a black Union orderly and a Confederate cavalry captain when the Journey was turned over to the Union. We were extras in that scene. We brought our own uniforms, so they cast us a lot.”

“I have my Confederate infantry uniform and a Union artillery uniform,” Barry said. “I can make money on either side of the Mason-Dixon Line.”

Charlie grinned at that. But her smile quickly faded. “Did you notice anything wrong, anything that was even a little bit off, that day? Was anyone fighting?”

“I think there was a bit of a tiff between Corley and Hickory,” Luke said. “They were both convinced they were historians, not just reenactors, and they disagreed about some detail of the scene. It got a little heated, but then your dad stepped in and calmed them down. But...well, they’re both dead, so it’s unlikely they killed each other.”

“It’s pretty damned stupid for anyone to kill someone over a reenactment,” Jennie said.

Brad shrugged. “People can be crazy sometimes.”

There wasn’t much of an argument to be made against that, so they all fell silent, lost in their own thoughts. Then Jennie made a comment about how good the food was, and the conversation turned to everyone’s favorite restaurants in their favorite cities.

Charlie found herself smiling and laughing along with the others. But all the while she was making mental notes of things she needed to tell Ethan.

Farrell Hickory and Albion Corley had both taken part in the special reenactment aboard the Journey.

They had argued, and her father had intervened.

A number of her friends had also been involved in the reenactment: Brad and Mike Thornton, Jennie McPherson, Barry Seymour, Luke Mayfield, Grant Ferguson, George Gonzales and Jimmy Smith.

She didn’t want to think that any one of them could be the killer.