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—even-tempered 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.