“Action!”

Platoons of men, both Union and Confederate soldiers, all wearing sweat-stained Civil War uniforms, charged. Cannons fired. Stuntmen, dressed as soldiers, fell and tumbled near the ground where the earth exploded in dirt, fire, and dust. Men ran through the smoke. Trumpets sounded. Soldiers on horseback cut through the smoldering battlefield, firing pistols.

Jack, and three dozen of his men, ran forward, rifles firing blanks, white smoke billing from the end of the barrels. “Let’s move!” Jack yelled, the troops picking up speed — shooting and reloading. A seventeen-year-old recruit ran behind the first flank, gripping a wooden pole carrying the Confederate flag as the southern forces advanced closer to the Union army.

Jack reloaded, packing the black powder into the barrel of his rifle. His young private looked up and nodded. “This one’s for Shiloh!”

“Atta boy, Johnny. Keep shooting! Advance men!” Jack held his rifle in both his hands, moving stealth-like, stepping around the wounded men, blood capsules oozing red dye through the ragtag uniforms. He fired his rifle and stood to reload powder and paper. He stared through the smoldering battlefield, remembering the instructions the director had given him and the other actors. Jack wondered if he could hear the director yell “cut” over the noise of gunfire.

That was Jack Jordan’s last thought.

A Minié ball slammed through the center of his forehead, the heavy lead bullet blowing the back of his skull off. Blood and brain tissue splattered across the horrified face and chest of the young soldier carrying the Confederate flag. Directly in front of him, Jack Jordan fell dead.

“And cut! Brilliant! Great scene. Let’s reset cameras.”

The young soldier looked up and vomited in the muddy field.

An assistant director stared through the rising smoke. “Oh my God,” he said running around the film crew and actors. “Somebody call nine-one-one!”

O’Brien set the bag of groceries on an empty barstool and approached the man. “I understand you’re looking for me.”

“Are you Mr. O’Brien?”

“Sean will work fine.”

“Good, Sean. My name’s Gus Louden.”

“What can I do for you, Gus?”

The old man looked down at the manila file folder on the bar, and he sat straighter, raising his eyes to meet O’Brien. “I saw your face on the TV news a while back. It was after those terrorists were caught. If the news is to be believed, it seems like you, Mr. O’Brien, were the main fella who found the terrorists. They said you had flushed out that spy who thought he got away with what, in my book, is absolute treason.”

O’Brien was silent, closely watching the man’s liquid blue eyes behind the glasses.

Louden cleared his throat. “I spent four years in service to our country. After the Army, I used the GI Bill for college and eventually started my own company. When I sold it, we had more than a thousand employees. Been retired ten years now. I was born in Summerville, South Carolina. But I call Charleston home.”

“What brings you to Florida?”

“You do, Sean. I was watching CNN the other day and they aired a story about an old photograph that had recently been donated to the Confederate War Museum in Virginia. The photograph is in a small frame. It’s a picture of a beautiful woman in the prime of her life. It was taken either before or during the Civil War. The picture was found in an attic as part of an estate sale. It’d been there a long time. The donor said her grandmother had kept it for years, finally giving up trying to identify the woman in the picture. She tried hard because the story of where and how the photograph was found had deeply touched her heart. The picture was originally found in a battlefield near Chickamauga, Georgia. As the story goes, the photograph was found in the mud and blood between a Confederate and Union soldier. There was no ID on the bodies, and no one knew for sure which man had been carrying the photo. The man carrying it probably looked at it as he lay dying.”

O’Brien was silent, letting the old man continue when he was ready.

“I called the museum and told them I thought the picture was my great, great grandmother. The reason I believe this is because I remember my grandmother had an oil painting that was painted from a picture. And the painting looked identical to the woman in the photograph found between the bodies.”

Louden rested his arms on the bar, fingers splayed. O’Brien noticed something different about the man’s fingernails. The crescent moon shaped lunula, at the base of each nail, was the largest he’d ever seen on anyone’s hands. O’Brien cut his eyes up to Louden. “Did you tell the museum you could identify the woman in the photo?”

“They listened and were very kind. But, when they asked me how I knew it was the image of my great, great grandmother, I could only say I remembered the painting hanging in the living room of my grandmother’s house in Jacksonville, Florida. My grandmother told me that the woman in the painting was her mother.”

“What happened to the painting?”

“After about age thirteen, I never saw it again. My grandparents both died in a horrific car accident. Their possessions were sold to cover the cost of the two funerals and the mortgage. My parents are dead, and I have two older sisters and a younger brother. My family has a long heritage in the South. And that’s one of the reasons I’m here.”

Louden reached for the file folder, opened it, and handed O’Brien a picture of a woman wearing a formal dress. She had long brown hair, high cheekbones, dark eyebrows, and she was smiling, something O’Brien rarely saw in photographs from the Civil War era. The woman was photographed standing near a river. Louden nodded. “I think the lady in the picture was my great, great, grandmother. This is a copy made from the original photograph donated to the museum. The story of the finding was in USA Today, too.”

O’Brien looked closely at the woman’s face. “Where was the picture taken?”

“I never knew. Looks to be here in Florida, the palms and river in the background.”

“Why is it so important for you to prove that the woman in the framed photo is related to you?”

“I mentioned that I was raised in the South, in and around Charleston. Families and their reputations go way back. Honor, commitment, bravery…they are all traits we believe in and don’t take lightly. It’s a handed-down heritage.” Louden, his face filled with concealed thoughts, stared at an open space over O’Brien’s shoulder. He exhaled a deep sigh and met O’Brien’s eyes. “My great, great grandfather was said to have been someone General Robert E. Lee had taken under his wing. My father once told me that he’d heard General Lee so trusted my great, great grandfather that the general assigned him a very important mission. We don’t know whether he succeeded or failed.”

“Why’s that?”

“Because no one ever saw him again. He became absent-without-leave. And, if he was killed in action, his body was never identified. The whispers in the South, in Charleston in particular, grew louder, especially the first fifty years after the war ended. For generations of southerners, they believed he was a coward. A man who ran away, someone who hid, retreated rather than face his sworn duties and the enemy. They believe he was one of the biggest cowards to have ever put on a gray uniform. Some of the elders said he ran from the Confederate Army the night before a battle and hid, finally making his way out West, leaving his young wife and children behind. He was never seen again.”

O’Brien nodded. “So, if this copy of a photo currently housed in the Confederate Museum is your great, great grandmother, it will prove that one of the men found dead on the battlefield was carrying it. And the man carrying it was her husband — a soldier who did not run away but was, instead, a brave man because he fought until his death. Most likely, since the photograph was found next to his body, the last thing he saw was the image of his wife, which he probably pulled from his rucksack as he lay dying.”