Darkest Journey Read Online Free PDF

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.
    â€œCharlie.”
    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.
    â€œCharlie.”
    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.
    When she’d heard the sobbing. When Ethan had come to save her...
    When she’d found