Darkest Journey

“Oh, man, thanks, Charlene! There is so much we have to be so careful with! Money, you know,” Jennie said. She was a petite blonde, and with her hair in a ponytail, as it was now, she looked to be about fifteen, but she’d actually turned thirty on her last birthday. Brad had met Jennie working on a project in New Orleans. She liked to lord it over George, who was her junior by a year. “We have to be so careful about costs.”

“I’ll stay and help, too,” Grant offered.

“No, you do the books, you do the budgeting, you write the checks—and you’re an extra every time Brad needs one. I’ve got this,” Charlie said. “Go.”

Jimmy and Grant left, looking more like ghostly apparitions than ever as they headed toward their cars. Brad didn’t notice; he was studying shots with Mike, his brother and main cameraman.

“I’m off to look for your missing props,” Charlie said. “Can Barry light up the field for me?” Barry Seymour was in charge of lighting. He was also an electrician, which made him perfect for the job, because he could fix any problems at minimal cost. He came from Baton Rouge, and like Grant, he was in his early forties. He could not only take the time to work on the film but he could invest in it, as well, because he’d once worked as an electrician on one of the big oil rigs in the Gulf. He’d taken his pay and invested heavily in the oil company, and it had paid off.

“Barry! Light the field!” Jennie yelled.

Charlie cringed. She could have yelled herself.

“I can help, too,” Luke Mayfield, their sound engineer and another friend, just a few classes ahead of Charlie and Brad at Tulane, walked over and said to Charlie.

“Great,” she said.

She hurried toward the field where they’d been filming, followed quickly by Luke and George, and then Barry, Mike and Brad.

Even the director worked at keeping costs down.

As she walked, head down, eyes searching the ground, she was glad to be alone with her thoughts. Jimmy telling her about the murdered man had been unnerving. Especially here. She couldn’t help but remember the past. And now something bad had happened again.

Yes, something bad happened somewhere every day, but that was no consolation.

She paused for a minute and looked up at the church.

The area held strange memories for her—some pleasantly nostalgic, some not so great. Now, though, the church and the surrounding landscape had an eerie beauty in the moonlight. The church wasn’t immense or grand, like a cathedral, but it stood proud on its bluff overlooking the Mississippi, and there was even something unexpectedly poignant about it. The cemetery around the church was filled with graves of all kinds, in-ground, “box” graves—literally stone or marble in the shape of boxes—and family mausoleums. Cherubs and angels stood guard everywhere. Grace Episcopal Church still served the people of the parish, and the building and graveyard were well kept without looking manicured.

The mist created by their fog machines was dispersing, but slowly, so a low fog still hovered over the ground, making her search difficult and rendering the scene deceptively surreal.

For a moment Charlie found herself thinking that she could see a distant past when war had raged—and a temporary peace had been found. She could almost see those soldiers, some who had lived and some who had died, making their way through the mist and the moss-draped oaks.

She remembered being young and playing in the graveyard when she shouldn’t have. She’d imagined seeing things then, too....

And then there had been that night in high school when she’d been pledging the Cherubs and ended up tied to a headstone, even though they all knew there was a killer at work not far away.

A serial killer who targeted young women.

Ethan had found and freed her. And she knew, though she hadn’t said anything to Jimmy, that she was especially upset because...

Because she’d become entangled in that last murder when she’d found a dead girl’s bracelet.

Charlie gave herself a serious shake. She’d been living in New Orleans since she’d graduated from college; that’s where the work was. She’d done some national commercials and even a few guest spots on network shows. But...

This was home. She loved it here. And she would be damned if she was going to be afraid out here now. She wasn’t tied up; she wasn’t a kid. She was an adult—ten years older, and making a good living in her chosen field.

Still, she couldn’t help but remember the past.

She’d looked up information on the men who had died in and around the area, especially those who had been buried here. She was pretty certain she’d found the cavalryman whose ghost she’d seen all those years ago; his name was Anson McKee. Anson had been a married man with one son, and he’d been a graduate of West Point. The week before his death he’d written the most beautiful letter to his wife, a letter now preserved in a museum in New Orleans. He’d written of his love for her, his fear not of death, but of leaving her.

Know that I will whisper your sweet name with my last breath. Know that whenever Almighty God may choose to take me home, my time on this earth was the sweetest and most precious any man could ask for. I was blessed to know you, to live with you, to hold you and call you wife.

She sometimes wished that she could see him again and tell him that she’d been blessed because of him.

Anson was buried in hallowed ground. She had visited his grave and brought flowers to it.

And while the cemetery could feel very creepy at night, there was no reason for her to be afraid—not now. Any ghosts there had been good people. Good people did not return to do mischief.

Her own mother had been interred in the family mausoleum at Grace Church. It was a handsome and historic old family tomb that she and her father kept in immaculate shape.

She bit her lower lip. The dull throb of that loss always lived with her, just below the surface. But she and her dad both remembered the good and the love, clinging to the beauty of their memories.

Still, she had too many recollections associated with the graveyard, and that one memory was very scary. If it hadn’t been for Ethan, things might have been much, much worse.

Someone surely would have come back for her—eventually.

But would they have come in time?

The moon shifted. She was close enough to the edge of the bluff that she could see the Journey, the meticulously restored paddle wheeler on which her father worked and lived for large parts of every week, as she made her way up the Mississippi.

The Journey had been in port earlier and would be there early tomorrow morning, as well. She’d gotten to see her dad when he’d had a few minutes of free time after taking his tour group through the Myrtles Plantation and on to see Rosedown Plantation. She would have a few minutes with him again in the morning before the Journey headed to New Orleans.

She was glad of the chance. She was an only child, and her mom was gone, but she had her father, and while these days he was almost always aboard the Journey, its home port was New Orleans, so she was able to see him often when she was home.

“Charlie.”

She turned when she heard her name, trying to figure out who’d called her. The others were busy searching farther away, and no one seemed to even be aware of her.

She caught her breath. The mist from the foggers should have dissipated by now, but it seemed that a real one was rising.

“Charlie.”

There it was. Someone had spoken her name again, and her coworkers were still involved in their own searches.

She could have sworn she saw shapes moving in the mist, just as she had seen ghosts, long ago as a terrified teenager tied to a tombstone before being rescued by a young man who also saw the ghosts in the moonlight but was not afraid.

The ghosts hadn’t been out to hurt her. Ironically, Brad’s movie had hit on the truth—or her truth, at least. She and Ethan had never spoken about it, but she knew that the ghost of the cavalry officer had led him to her that night. He’d seen her distress and found help. She’d wondered time and time again if there was a way to help that soldier. Did he want to pass on? Or did he stay to help others?

Or did he stay because he wasn’t alone? There had been others with him, just none she had seen as clearly as she had seen him.

A long time ago now.

She reminded herself that she was supposed to be working. She was the lead actress and a shareholder. And given their budget, she was also looking for costly props.

She straightened and gave herself another mental shake. She was letting the shadows and the moonlight and history infiltrate her mind and strip away all the logic and common sense she had acquired as an adult.

But she could never be here without first remembering her mother, and then that time, before she’d lost her mom, when she’d been tied to that tombstone.