Darkest Journey Read Online Free PDF Page A

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.
    â€œBarry! Light the field!” Jennie yelled.
    Charlie cringed. She could have yelled herself.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œGreat,” 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