For their part, the Wickedly Weird people had brought the canvas totes and boxes that held the expensive prop pieces.
Nate Mahoney bemoaned the condition of what he considered some of his finest work. But then he looked up miserably.
“Wow. I’m sitting here thinking that my artistic talent was wasted—and Natalie and Amelia are dead. I feel like a horrible person.”
“You are a horrible person,” Becca said. “Oh, I just meant that as a tease, Nate. You’re not a horrible person.”
Clara hated seeing them so unhappy. “Hey, it’s just a bad situation.”
Jackson was behind her. “I’m sorry, but this entire prank was in really bad taste, as well,” he said.
Becca sank down on one of the living room’s sumptuous, plush sofas. “It was Natalie’s idea,” she said.
“And Amelia embraced it,” Tommy Marchant added. He sat down, too. He was holding a bloodied piece of leg, but didn’t seem to notice. “I was so excited when we first came here. I mean, here is the thing about Natalie. She really loved doing Vacation USA. She thought that our country was wonderful and that people didn’t realize how diverse. They didn’t need to have the money to run off to Europe or South America, they just needed to know what was right in their own backyard. I remember when I got to come up here on the site inspection for Black Bear Island. When old Justin Crowley brought me about on the snowmobiles, I was so ecstatic! Such a cool, unusual and beautiful place!”
“Then, of course, Natalie came out. And she was whining about production money—as usual,” Becca remembered.
“And,” Nate told Jackson, “saying she couldn’t understand how the money for Vacation USA came from Gotcha.”
“When she was out here herself,” Becca said, “that was when she came up with the idea of inviting the actors from the Fate over. She could get one of her well-sponsored Gotcha segments—and then showcase the beauty of Alaska!”
“What happens now with the company?” Clara asked.
Nate waved a hand in the air. “Well, Natalie was CEO, but there are stockholders. I guess we didn’t even worry about that yet.”
“They’ll make Tommy CEO, I’ll bet,” Becca said. “He’s older. He’s been around.”
“Thanks,” Tommy murmured drily.
Becca didn’t seem to notice. “We’re not that big a company, but we do have a board—mostly slightly rich guys who like to have a hand in television, play like they’re big producers, you know? But, Tommy is the only one who really knows how to pull shows together. Oh, there’s Misty, of course, but she’s kind of a follower, you know?”
“Maybe we ought to be looking for jobs instead of moping around,” Nate said. “Of course, I really think that I’ll be fine. I’m good at what I do.”
“I’ll vouch for that,” Clara murmured. “Well, do you want some help?”
“You want to help?” Nate asked her.
“I’m here—sure. What do I do?” Clara asked.
“Here,” Nate said, handing her a leg. “Peel this stuff off...it’s just garbage. We’ll preserve the leg.”
Clara took the leg and stared at it blankly for a moment.
But she’d said that she’d help. So she sat there, peeling the dried “blood” off the plastic leg.
She noted that Jackson wasn’t amused by any of it; he had brought a laptop with him and she assumed that he had accessed the internet the police techs had gotten working.
At any rate, he frowned while he read.
Looking at the stack of props on the floor, Clara thought that it was going to be a long day; it was good that she was helping.
She started back at it, thinking of the plays she had done, the dramas and the tragedies.
Nothing ever quite this gruesome...
She looked up to find that Jackson was staring across the room.
Amelia had reappeared.
She seemed to waft through the space. And she sank down beside Clara.
“There’s something...” she said. “I feel that there’s something familiar that I’m kind of getting a sense of now...something that sparks memory.” She looked at Clara a little helplessly. “I can’t figure out what it is. It’s important—I know it.”
“Think!” Clara told her.
“Huh? What?” Becca asked.
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking...um, what the heck is this stuff, anyway?”
“Mostly red dye and corn syrup—gone sticky in the days past,” Nate said morosely. He paused and added, “Honestly, hard to tell from the real stuff sometimes. I think you have a fly caught in there, too.” He was quiet. “Really like the real stuff, I guess,” he added.
They all fell silent; they all went back to work.
Amelia remained, an image, perhaps, in Clara’s mind, looking perplexed.
And Jackson stared at the two of them.
*
The cliffs and caves on Black Bear Island were treacherous. Some formations were hard ground, hard rock, piled with earth and snow. Some were just ice. And some were just snow. A wrong step could bring a man crashing down to die on a jagged crop of rock or ice.