Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  “Do you?” Cassie gave her mother a look simmering with amusement. “Well, if you say so, then I must be sorry.”

  Marie’s hand flashed toward Cassie’s face. She stopped the motion and lowered the hand without connecting to Cassie’s cheek, glancing from Barrie to Pru before dropping her eyes.

  Barrie’s face heated until it felt close to the deep red of Cassie’s low-cut T-shirt. She remembered all too vividly how Wyatt had hit Cassie on the night of the play. She’d felt so sorry for her cousin then. She stared hard at the ground to avoid glaring at both Marie and Cassie, wishing she could just turn on her heel, grab Pru’s hand, and head for the car.

  She couldn’t. Not with Obadiah’s threat still hanging over her.

  “I’m ashamed of you, Cassie. The least you could do is meet people halfway when they’re generous to you.” Marie’s voice wobbled, but whether that was frustration or embarrassment, Barrie couldn’t tell, and she made no effort to pull Cassie aside or speak to her in a way that would keep everyone there from hearing. Turning her back on Cassie, Marie moved up and started reaching for Pru’s arm. She stopped before actually making contact, and the gesture turned into an oddly helpless wave instead. “Why don’t y’all come and say hello to the others?” she suggested. “Barrie, I think you’ve met Cassie’s sister, Sydney, haven’t you? But you may not know Pastor Nelson or my mother, Jolene Landry, yet.”

  Herding Pru and Barrie to where the minister, Sydney, and the elderly woman were all deep in conversation, Marie stopped at the chapel door. Barrie peered inside during the introductions and wasn’t surprised to find no one else was there.

  Only the brick walls, floor, and roof of the old structure had been restored. To soften the starkness of the space, someone had dyed four bedsheets a mottled black and hung them from the bare-bulbed light fixture at the center of the ceiling. Each sheet was bunched with white lilies and yards of ribbon and fastened to the walls to form drapes that hung low above several rows of metal folding chairs, and a plain pine coffin stood in the puddled light flowing in from the empty windows.

  “Pru Watson,” the minister said in a hearty, deep bass voice. “I might have known you’d be the first person to hold out an olive branch. Thank you for coming out. It was a very generous thing to do.”

  “It was all my niece’s idea, I’m ashamed to say.” Nodding back, Pru pushed her handbag higher up her arm, and the minister turned to Barrie with a smile.

  “Please call me Jacob,” he said. “I don’t like to stand on ceremony.”

  “Jacob’s father,” Pru continued with a nod, “was the minister at the Baptist church in town back when I was still in school.”

  The pastor’s approval made Barrie feel like the worst kind of fraud, and she was glad all over again that Eight wasn’t there with her. He would have instantly known what a hypocrite she was. Edging closer to Pru, she linked her arm through her aunt’s.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said as cheerfully as she could manage.

  “I must say, it’s nice to see the families coming together. Isn’t that right, Cassie?” The minister slid a glance at Barrie’s cousin as Cassie stopped alongside her mother, but then his gaze slid past Cassie along the path and locked on something that made his eyes dilate with surprise—or shock or some even less-pleasant emotion. Adjusting his wire-rimmed eyeglasses on his nose, he schooled his expression into polite indifference.

  “Ryder,” he said, nodding first at the man Barrie had seen at the bakery, and then at a weedy, thatch-haired guy who looked like he hadn’t slept in half a week. “Junior.”

  Cassie jumped at the sound of the names. Whipping around, she simultaneously stepped backward, lost her balance, and fought to keep from stumbling. The movement left a scrape of red on the gravel that looked like blood, and for the first time, Barrie noticed that the soles of Cassie’s cheap heels were red. Painted red.

  Her throat aching suddenly, Barrie looked down at her own expensive red-soled Louboutins. Then her hands tightened into fists. Because feeling sorry for Cassie was the very last thing she could afford to do. She had made that mistake once already, and it wasn’t as if painting the shoes came from a need for acceptance or a boost of confidence, not for Cassie. It came from the same self-centered jealousy that had driven her to steal Barrie’s necklace—the kind of jealousy that had nothing to do with the Colesworth curse. Shoes had been far from Barrie’s deepest desire the past few days. Or ever. Shoes were shoes. Fabulous but dispensable.

  Fuming about the shoes distracted Barrie, and by the time she realized she’d lost track of what was going on, Cassie had slipped inside the chapel and out of sight. That left Marie to step in front of the two men who had come up the path.

  “What are you doing here?” Cassie’s mother ignored the hand Ryder held out to her. Her voice was at least twenty degrees closer to frostbite than it had been before.

  “Junior and I figured we’d pay our respects. Least we could do. I’d have sent flowers, but Wyatt wasn’t the kind to hold with all that.” Ryder’s hand shook as he lowered it, but he nodded politely to the pastor and Jolene, who seemed to approve even less of him than she did of Cassie. Then his gaze landed on Barrie with an intensity that made her want to squirm. His eyes remained locked on her even as he continued speaking to Marie.

  “Whatever’s past is past. Colesworths ought to stick together,” he said. “You let me know what you need around here, and I’ll be round directly to take care of it. Mowing, fixing potholes, or shoring up the buildings, helping out any way I can.”

  “What makes you think anyone wants your help?” Jolene stepped up beside Marie. “You haven’t been welcome here in years, so you turn right around and get out.”

  Marie put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “No, Mama. Ryder’s right. Whatever disagreement he and Wyatt had, it’s gone and done.” Glancing through the doorway into the silent chapel, she shook her head, then turned back to Ryder and Junior with a smile that wasn’t likely to fool anyone into thinking she meant it. “We’re in no position to turn away friends or family, so you’re welcome here,” she added. “Both of you.”

  The pastor didn’t look happy, either, but he cleared his throat. “I suppose we’d better get started, since we’re running late.”

  Inside the chapel, he helped Marie to a seat in front of the casket. The mottled black swathes of sheeting added to the gloom, and it wasn’t until her eyes had adjusted that Barrie thought to wonder where Cassie had gone. She found her pressed tight against the wall beside the door, staring forward at the coffin with her cheeks streaked with tears. Sydney was there, too, talking to her in a voice too low to hear. When Cassie didn’t answer, Sydney took Cassie’s hand and gently pulled her across the chapel to sit next to her mother.

  Kicking herself, Barrie took a seat beside Pru in the row behind them. She should have realized that Cassie’s rudeness had come from grief.

  Shivering, Cassie sat staring toward the casket as if she was determined to block out everything except the reason for the funeral. Then Ryder Colesworth dropped into the chair on Cassie’s right and leaned in to whisper something into her ear. She flinched away, jarring Sydney, who sat between her and her mother. In three-quarter profile Cassie’s face was so pale, it had taken on greenish shadows, and Junior, the skinny, thatch-haired man who had come in with Ryder, gave a nervous giggle that made the minister turn with a frown as he took his place.

  The service itself was short, the kind of send-off given to a man about whom one could say nothing good. Barrie couldn’t help comparing it to her mother’s service and the service she wanted to have, needed to have, for Mark. By the time the minister had concluded, she had been dragged back down into her memories a hundred times. Her hands hurt from holding them pressed together tightly enough to keep them from shaking in her lap.

  The pastor closed the Bible, and the sound echoed off the chapel’s walls. “I think we can go ahead and go,” Pru whispered. “Marie’s been through e
nough already without us sticking around for the interment.”

  Barrie would have liked nothing better than to have been gone already, but leaving without getting the chance to speak to Cassie would have defeated the whole purpose of coming. “Wouldn’t that be rude?”

  Marie Colesworth rose in the front row and dropped a crumpled Kleenex into her open purse. Whether by chance or because she’d heard Barrie’s questioning, she leaned across the back of her chair. “Thank you both again for coming. I can’t tell you how much it means to me to have you here.”

  Pru nodded without saying anything, and looked relieved when the minister came to confer with Marie about carrying out the coffin. Marie moved to speak with Ryder and Junior, who went to stand at either side of the casket, with Junior on the far end in front of Sydney. Cassie was still sitting in her chair.

  “Cassie! Get up, girl. We’re all waiting on you.” Marie shook Cassie’s shoulder, but Cassie barely flinched. Marie glanced back at Pru with another helpless flush, and it was Sydney who came and took Cassie’s hand again, pulling her into place in front of Ryder. Cassie’s movements were defiantly wooden and disengaged.

  The minister exchanged a look with Marie. “I swear I don’t know what’s wrong with that girl,” Marie said apologetically.

  “Grief and embarrassment and a bit of shame, most likely,” the minister said. “It’s a difficult time to lose a parent. Not that there’s ever a good time for that.”

  He and Marie both helped the four pallbearers carry the coffin. Outside, the temperature had climbed from sweltering to sixth-circle-of-hell in the brief time they had all been inside the church. There was no opportunity to leave gracefully, so Barrie and Pru followed the procession into the cemetery, where the pallbearers slid the coffin onto the rack draped in satin. Leaving it there, they went to take their seats in the row of chairs, and Pru and Barrie reluctantly did the same. Only Cassie lagged behind, standing beside the coffin while the tarp overhead crackled in a thin breeze that failed to dispel the hum of rogue mosquitoes. Seeing her sister still standing there, Sydney went to get her and led her back to sit beside their mother.

  Cassie’s head came up as she passed Ryder’s chair. She looked as if she wanted to say something to him, but he lifted a finger to his lips in a gesture that made her go pale with fury. Sydney pushed her into her seat, and Cassie sat stiff and unmoving throughout the pastor’s service. When it was over, Sydney had to nudge her up again.

  Barrie understood grief. She still felt the numbness that refused to accept an impossible good-bye, and her own grief for Mark and Lula hit her at random moments. In this, she felt for Cassie. It was possible to both love a parent and hate what they had done, or miss them and realize you had never known them at all. But Cassie had set herself at center stage without so much as thinking that her mother, or even her little sister, might have needed her help and support. It was such typical Cassie behavior that it took away any sympathy Barrie might have felt, along with any compunction she might have had about bringing up Obadiah right after the service while Cassie was grieving.

  Unfortunately, Pru seemed inclined to make talking to Cassie impossible. Rising the instant the graveside service ended, Pru collected her purse and nudged down the empty row of chairs behind the Colesworth family.

  “Come on, sugar. Let’s leave the family to their good-byes.”

  Without waiting for Barrie to respond, she turned back toward the moss-covered archway that marked the opening in the wrought-iron fence. Barrie couldn’t think of any reason not to follow, so she walked very slowly.

  “Wait!” Marie Colesworth called from behind them and hurried to catch up. “Ya’ll can’t go yet! Come on up to the house for a bit. Please? I swear, I’ve got food enough to feed six armies, and no one to come and eat it.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Marie’s face was pale enough to reveal a spray of freckles across her cheeks and the bridge of her nose. They, along with the faded blue eyes and the gray strands beginning to thread through her hair, made her seem even more vulnerable. Catching Pru’s questioning glance, Barrie gave a sedate nod she hoped would hide her relief at having an excuse not to leave.

  “We can’t stay too long,” Pru said, “but we’d love to come.”

  Looking up, Barrie found Ryder and Junior staring at her as they approached. She moved off the path to let them pass, but they stopped beside Marie instead, and Ryder watched Barrie with his chin lowered and his arms folded to show biceps that had clearly spent too much time lifting dumbbells. He made her want to take a shower.

  “Those two creep me out.” She fell into step beside Pru on the way to the single-story home the Colesworth family had built to replace the mansion burned by Union soldiers in the Civil War.

  “Best to stay as clear of them as you can,” Pru said.

  The whole house wasn’t much bigger than the restored one-room chapel. Inside, though, antique furniture and bric-a-brac crowded every square inch of floor space apart from a narrow path that snaked across the room. Paintings hung on the walls from waist height to the ceiling. Expensive paintings.

  Cramped as the house was, it wasn’t quite a hoarder’s lair. There was nothing out of place, no sense of haphazard, throw-away-nothing disarray. There was merely too much of everything, much too much, so that it left Barrie with the impression that she had crawled down Alice’s rabbit hole.

  “Come in, come in.” Cassie’s mother wended past an inlaid teak chest, an elaborately carved settee upholstered in indigo velvet, and several dozen lamps and tables that all stuck at odd angles into the path, making it hard to walk. After pausing at a side door, Marie invited them through into the kitchen.

  There, they might as well have been in a different house. The counters were empty apart from a solitary coffeepot, and the walls around the table, refrigerator, and old-fashioned stove were bare of so much as a photograph.

  Marie gave a small and self-conscious shrug. “I expect you’re shocked at the difference, aren’t you? We don’t get many visitors, so I forget how it must seem to people sometimes.”

  “It looks very nice,” Pru said kindly.

  “It doesn’t. The emptiness just makes the rest more awful, but at least it gives me one place in the house where I can breathe.” With a wry twist of her mouth, Marie crossed to the refrigerator and began clattering platters of mini sandwiches, a cheese plate, and a watermelon bowl out onto the counter as the minister and the others filed in behind them. Barrie and Pru helped Sydney move the platters to the table.

  Jolene dropped into a chair and fanned her sweat-sheened face with her hand. “You’d think with all the money that man spent ‘collecting’ for the ‘big house,’ he could have bought a damn ceiling fan. Or air-conditioning.” She nodded at the remaining chairs at the table and gestured for Pru, Barrie, and the minister to sit.

  Marie popped her head up from behind the refrigerator door. “There wouldn’t have been any room for the air-conditioning to circulate anyway, so there would have been no point.”

  Jolene offered empty plates to everyone and took one for herself. Leaning forward, she selected several dainty sandwiches from the platter and sat back again, waving her hand to indicate that Barrie and the others should help themselves.

  “How many times,” she said, speaking to Marie after taking a delicate bite, “did I tell you Wyatt needed to see a shrink? Not sure whether it was an obsession or a delusion, all this ‘collecting,’ but either way, they have drugs for that. And not the kind of drugs he was selling, either. When I think how useless it all was, squandering money fixing up chapels and slave cabins and buying antiques for a house he couldn’t afford to rebuild . . . Now what’s going to happen to you and the girls? The police’ll haul all the expensive things away, and how are you going to sell this place? That’s what I want to know. Who’s going to want to buy it?”

  Marie glanced uncomfortably from Pru to Barrie to the minister, narrowed her eyes at her mother, and then nodded her chin in
Ryder’s direction. “Mama, that’s a conversation for another day . . .” she began, pausing as several car doors slammed simultaneously in front of the house. “Now, who on earth is that?”

  The doorbell rang. Marie pushed past Ryder and Junior, hurrying from the kitchen and leaving a moment of suspended sound and movement in her wake that was broken as the kitchen door swung shut. Jolene sat a moment, then rose and followed Marie as curiosity got the better of her.

  “Here’s our excuse to go,” Pru mouthed.

  Barrie nodded, hoping that in the commotion, she could finally get in a word with Cassie as she said good-bye. Winding her way through the stacked furniture toward the front door, though, she couldn’t find Cassie anywhere. She caught Pru’s hand and hung back as they approached the door.

  Standing in the doorway, a clearly agitated Marie was pointing her finger at an elderly man with a deeply tanned face shaded beneath a wide-brimmed hat. “I don’t suppose Cassie thought to mention that we were burying my husband today?” Marie said with her voice rising. “The last thing I want to worry about is whether to let some archaeologist dig up my front yard.”

  “I apologize. That was my mistake.” The man swept off his hat to show pale skin above the line where his brim had been. “When your husband turned me down after the tunnel collapsed, I never dared hope to have another chance, until your daughter called. It broke my heart to have to tell her I was already committed elsewhere, so she didn’t know I was coming. I didn’t know I was coming until I spoke to Andrew here”—he waved to one of the two men beside him—“and he told me he was willing to head up the excavation.”

  Andrew was younger than the man with the hat, late twenties maybe, and the guy beside him was obviously still a student. They both stepped forward, and Andrew held out his hand. “Andrew Bey, ma’am. I’d be very pleased to work on this for Dr. Feldman, and I’d be honored—”

  “You’re not honored, just greedy,” Jolene stepped forward and cut him off. “You’re after the gold in the newspaper, same as everyone. Well, it doesn’t exist. It’s a figment of Cassie’s imagination. I swear, that girl is as crazy as her father.”