“Travis and I…Travis and I…Travis is gone.”
Travis Glenn was the male lead, an exceptionally beautiful if not terribly bright young man.
“Okay, where is Travis?”
“Gone. Gone. The pirate took him.”
“The pirate?”
Georgia shook her head. “Maybe he wasn’t a pirate. I didn’t see him very clearly. But he was evil—he was like an evil shadow, skulking in the darkness. Travis was yelling, and he went after the shadow. He was mad. He thought you all were playing tricks. And then this monster came out of the sand, but he wasn’t right, he seemed to jerk around, like his bones were put back together wrong. And he took Travis and I started screaming and ran.”
Jay came back, hands on his lean hips, chest glistening in the darkness. “Slap her! Nessa, don’t look so damned concerned. She’s jerking us around and it isn’t funny. Damn you, Georgia. Look, I realize this isn’t anything major-budget, but the crew has worked hard and everyone is tired—and you’re acting like a complete bitch! It’s just not the time for practical jokes. Slap her, knock her out of it, Vanessa!”
Vanessa glared at him and shook her head. Georgia wasn’t that good an actress. She had disagreed with casting the young woman, but she had looked phenomenal on film.
“Let’s go down to the beach and see what scared her,” Vanessa suggested. She looked back at Lew, a big, broad-shouldered Bahamian man who had been one of their guides. “Do you think there’s anything down at the beach, Lew?”
“Sand,” he told her.
“Let’s go see.”
Georgia jerked away from her, shaking her head vehemently. “No, no, no! I am not going back there. I am not going back!”
Carlos Roca, their lighting engineer, came toward them. He’d been close to both actors, and Georgia liked him. Vanessa did, too. He was a nice guy—eventempered and capable. He took Georgia’s hands. “Hey, hey. I’ll stay here with you, and we’ll sit by the fire with the others while Lew, Jay and Vanessa go check it all out. How’s that?”
Georgia looked up at him. Huge tears formed in her eyes and she nodded. “Travis is dead,” she told him. “Travis is dead.”
Jay looked at Zoe, who worked with the props, makeup and buckets of stage blood they’d been using. He glared sternly at her, then turned to Bill and Jake, the young production assistants, earning credit from the U of Miami. “Hey, you guys didn’t rig anything, did you—any practical jokes?”
Zoe looked at him with incredulous disdain. “No. No, we did not.”
Jay looked from face to face and was obviously satisfied with the chorus of denials.
“All right, we’ll check it out,” Jay said.
“Yes, yes. Come on, let’s do this,” Lew said with his pleasant and easy Bahamian accent. “We’ll find Travis and see what’s going on. Miss Georgia, you’re going to be just fine, honey.”
But Georgia shook her head. “Travis is dead,” she repeated.
“I’ll light some torches from the fire,” Lew offered.
“I don’t believe we’re doing this,” Jay said, tired and irritated as they started down the beach. “I made a mistake in casting, that’s for sure. We’re filming a legend, a horror flick, for God’s sake. She’s letting it all get to her. This is crazy.”
Lew chuckled softly. “Ah, yes, well, that’s the way it is with American slasher flicks, eh? Two young people drink and wander off into the woods or the pines to make love, and then the monster comes upon them. They are mistaken. This is Bimini. There are no monsters.”
Vanessa stopped. They had come to the edge of the beach. A pine forest came almost flush with the water after a rise in the landscape.
“Nothing,” Jay said. “There’s nothing out here at all.”
Vanessa raised her torch to look around. She froze suddenly. There was nothing there now, but just feet from her, the sand looked as if it had been raked, and it was damp as well, as if someone had dumped buckets of water twenty feet inland from the shore.
“Look,” she said.
“Someone was playing a joke on her—on her and Travis, maybe,” Jay said. He swore. “We’ve got one more day of filming to tie up loose ends, and I guess it’s natural that someone just feels the need to play practical jokes.”
“But where is Travis?” Vanessa asked.
Lew was hunkered down by the disturbed sand. “Interesting,” he said.
“What?” Jay asked.
“It does look like something burst outward from the sand—more than it looks as if someone were digging in it,” Lew said. “As if it erupted, and was then smoothed over.”
“We work with great props and special-effects people,” Jay said dryly. “Let’s get back. I’m tired as hell. Someone has to have some kind of sleeping pill Georgia can take.”
“I’m not sure she should be taking a pill—” Vanessa began.
“I am,” Jay interrupted her. “I need to sleep tonight!”
“I’ll take Georgia in with me,” Vanessa volunteered. She surprised herself. She hadn’t disliked Georgia; she just found the woman to be a little…vapid. But that night, she felt sorry for her. Georgia had dropped out of high school, certain that an actress didn’t need an education. She’d spent several years working as a model at car and boat shows, and Jay had discovered her because she’d gotten a local spot on television promoting a used-car dealer. Vanessa had to admit that Georgia might not be the most talented actress she knew, but she had been professional and easy to work with. She was pretty sure that Georgia had never gotten a lot of support from her parents or anyone else.
She also knew that she had been lucky. She had been raised by parents who had cared more about their children than anything else in life. Her mother and father had been avid historians, readers, writers and divers, and they had done everything in their power to put their two children through college. She loved history and she loved diving. Her actual forte was in script writing, but in Hollywood, that was a difficult route, with scripts being rewritten so many times that you seldom recognized your own work at the end, and you seldom received credit for a project, either. It had been necessary, in her mind, to learn cameras as well, and with her background, underwater work was a natural. She was driven and she was passionate about her work, so she’d jumped at the chance to work on this movie when Jay called her.
Jay loved horror movies, and they had loved each other forever. Not as boyfriend and girlfriend—they had known each other since grade school in the small town of Micanopy, Florida. He had a chance with this movie, and she wanted him to have his chance. She wanted this chance for herself, too.
She had said from the beginning that she was in only if she got her own tent.
But tonight she’d bring Georgia in with her and be a mother
