Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  The knife slipped, slicing into Barrie’s finger. She ran her hand under the tap while Pru fussed at her.

  “Hydrogen peroxide and a bandage,” Pru insisted. “I don’t want to hear any arguments about how it’s just a little cut. You don’t know where that shrimp has been.”

  “I’d be more worried about the salad these days,” Barrie said, more to distract Pru than out of genuine concern.

  “That’s true,” Pru called as she ducked into the butler’s pantry for the cardboard box of first aid supplies. “There’s probably a thousand and one different bacteria in organic fertilizer.” She bandaged Barrie’s finger and paused, looking out the window to where Eight was tying the Away to the Watson dock.

  Barrie cringed inside, dreading another argument, but Pru only gathered up the Band-Aid wrappers to take to the trash and said, “If you’re going somewhere, be sure to be back by three—unless you want to miss the horses.”

  “We won’t be long.” Barrie curled and uncurled her finger to take the stiffness out of the bandage. “I want to hear how Eight’s trip went, and we’re going to run over and see the archaeologists.”

  Pru tightened her lips momentarily. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”

  “Yes.” Barrie scraped the shrimp from the cutting board into a storage container with the edge of the knife before popping on the lid. “I promise to be careful, and I won’t trust Cassie.” She kissed Pru’s cheek. “Thank you for being a sweetie.”

  Pru blushed a faint pink, then fluttered a hand at her. “Well, go on, then. No need to have Eight walk all the way up here only to turn around again.”

  A few minutes later, Barrie met Eight below the fountain. Grabbing the crook of his elbow to spin him around, she dragged him with her.

  “Keep walking,” she said. “I barely got out without a lecture on the evils of Cassandra Colesworth. I’d like to keep it that way.”

  “Yes, Highness.” Eight inclined his head. “As you wish.”

  Barrie grinned up at him. “Never mind the Princess Bride jokes. What happened with your baseball thing last night? Did you get on the team? Did you take your dad with you?”

  The tails of Eight’s yellow oxford billowed out behind him as he walked, and his boat shoes crunched in a steady rhythm, a rhythm that was almost in time with Barrie’s heartbeat. His smile fell away. “They’ll give me a spot on the team, but they’ve already given away the scholarship they had originally offered. There’s a small chance they’ll be able to put together something, but I’m not holding out much hope. They’re going to try to let me know tomorrow.”

  “And your dad? Did he change his mind about the money?”

  “Dad? He doesn’t change his mind when I want something. Which is disturbingly ironic, isn’t it?” Eight’s sigh held more outrage than resignation. “And it’s not like parents don’t have enough tools in their arsenals already—guilt, love, and a lifetime of lectures—they get to hold the money card, too. So many different forms of blackmail and all perfectly legitimate just because they’re parents.”

  Pulling him to a stop, Barrie wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her forehead in his shirt, offering silent comfort and at the same time, hiding her shame. She wished she could help him.

  “You’re helping right now,” he said. His breath was warm against the top of her head, and when she tilted her face up, he kissed the corner of her mouth. Then he started walking again. “Come on, let’s get this over with.”

  “So what will you do if Seven doesn’t change his mind?” Barrie asked Eight quietly.

  “I spent the whole morning arguing with him, and there’s nothing I can do except come up with the money myself. I’m supposed to meet with the coach from Charleston this morning to see what they can come up with for me, too, and I’ll have to take what works out the best. Trust me, I know how lucky I am. Normally, I wouldn’t have a chance of even getting back on the team, much less having them give me any financial help. And I can get a job. If Daphne can do it, I sure as hell have no right to whine.”

  They both fell silent, and it wasn’t until they were halfway back across the river that Barrie scraped up the courage to bring the subject up again. “Maybe you should think about going to California, after all. It’s not that I want you to go,” she added hastily. “I know you could get jobs, but with your dyslexia you’re already working harder than most people—”

  “You think I want things easy?” Eight cut the motor to glide in beside the Colesworth dock. “Or are you assuming I can’t manage?”

  Barrie hid her expression as she stood up to loop the mooring line around the pillar. “I know you can do whatever you set your mind to. All I’m trying to say is that I’m not going anywhere, so maybe it’s not worth killing yourself to be closer to me. Four years is a long time, but it’s not forever.”

  Her stomach clenched as she said the words, and even the thought made her feel lost already.

  “You should get a chance to be away from this place,” she continued. “I’ve had the chance to see what it’s like in other places. All right, I admit I haven’t experienced much, but it was enough to know that this, right here, is where I want to be. I think you should have the same opportunity.”

  “You think? Or my dad thinks?” Eight pulled himself up to the dock and held out his hand to steady her. “Because I thought we agreed last night that you weren’t going to make assumptions or decisions for me anymore.”

  He walked up the path toward the top of the rise, his strides long and alive with anger. Not for the first time, Barrie wished a meteorite would fall on Seven’s head.

  She owed Eight the truth. Telling him was never going to get easier. She hurried after him, but by the time he had stopped to let her catch up, they had reached the top of the path. And Obadiah was sitting cross-legged off to the side of the excavation area with his eyes locked on hers.

  Hands on his knees, he looked perfectly relaxed. Even his suit and navy shirt, apparently the same ones that he had worn the day before, didn’t seem to have a speck of dirt or a wrinkle on them, and the archaeology crew, Andrew and Berg and all the other students, simply flowed around him like water around a boulder in a stream.

  “They don’t even know they’re walking around him, do they?” she whispered to Eight. “Wait. You can see him, can’t you?”

  “Yes, and he’s creepy as hell.” Eight shaded his eyes to look around.

  As before, a dozen large black ravens were perched on top of the broken columns of the ruined mansion with their feathers ruffled and their heads swiveling with interest to follow the movements of the dig crew.

  The archaeologists had made good progress. They had cut the grass away from some of the squares around the collapsed tunnel and from most of the area above the hidden room, and dirt had been dug out and hauled away in different sections so that the area now looked like a three-dimensional patchwork quilt. Their movements slow and interspersed with yawns as if they hadn’t slept much, the students were scraping away the soil with trowels and dumping it into buckets. When those were full, they hauled them toward the side of the overseer’s hut, where they ran the dirt through giant sieves to separate out the artifacts. Berg and Cassie, who was still wearing long pants to hide her ankle monitor, were working in adjacent squares above the hidden room.

  They were talking, Barrie realized. Or rather, Berg was talking and Cassie seemed to be genuinely listening. Surprisingly, Cassie was also doing as much manual labor as any of the others, despite her lack of experience.

  None of the crew looked up as Eight and Barrie crossed the grass. Barrie said, “Hello.” But no one answered.

  She stopped in front of Obadiah. “Why don’t they notice us?”

  “The same reason they don’t see me,” he said. “People see what they expect, and that’s not a fraction of what their eyes take in. Most of them are easy to fool, at least while I’m nearby.”

  “Is that what we are to you?” Barrie flushed ho
tly and crossed her arms. “Fools to play with? Entertainment?”

  “Don’t put words into my mouth, petite. Both you and the boy are surprisingly hard to fool.”

  “Meaning what, exactly?” Eight asked, which he did quite frequently, now that Barrie thought about it, as if the world was blurred around him, and he needed his corner of it in clear focus. A realist trapped inside an impressionist painting.

  Or maybe what Obadiah was saying was that the world was more cubist than impressionist. That the human mind couldn’t comprehend all the layers of time, space, and motion and place them into a harmonious image, so it shut its mental eyes to everything that didn’t match its preconceived ideas.

  Maybe that was what she’d been doing too.

  “Are you planning to stand there all day holding that food?” Obadiah rose to his feet in a single sinewy motion and held his hand out to take the cooler. After rummaging through it and the bag Eight had brought, he extracted a sandwich and both the loaves of bread and took them over to one of the slave cabins. The door creaked open, and he crossed the plank flooring of the narrow one-room building. Prying up a loose board beside the brick hearth, he revealed a makeshift cellar filled with clay bowls and various jars. There were stones also, and piles of cracked, yellow bones and rusted straight pins tied together with what Barrie hoped was string.

  Crouched beside the opening, Obadiah unwrapped the two fresh loaves of bread, and lowered them in to replace the two loaves from the previous night, which he removed. At least half of the sandwiches that had been intended for his dinner were also in the cellar, and he tore his current meal in half. After depositing one portion into the hole, he bit into the remaining piece as if he were ravenous.

  “You’re not leaving yourself much food,” Barrie said.

  “It wouldn’t be much of a sacrifice if I didn’t need it myself, now, would it?” He took another bite and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

  The memory of his ceremony flooded back, and Barrie shuddered, chilled despite the outside heat. “I guess it’s better than killing another raven.”

  “Death doesn’t calm an angry spirit, chère. Just the opposite. It takes reminders of life for that, and all the spirits here are so far gone that their humanity is hard to reach.”

  “All the spirits?” Barrie asked with her mouth gone dry.

  “My ancestors and Alcee Colesworth and his wife, mainly.”

  “But wouldn’t the Colesworths want the lodestone found?”

  “Doesn’t much matter what they want—they’re desperate, but they don’t have much strength. The others, though? They’ve got strength and rage—and that adds up to trouble.” Obadiah finished his sandwich and rubbed his hands together. Then he replaced the floorboards, gathered up the stale bread and half-eaten sandwiches from the night before, and stood up again. “If I knew how to set this right, petite, trust me when I say I would. I thought I could bind my ancestors and let them rest while I removed the curse. I’m not sure how to get past them now that they’re fully awake. They’ve been angry so long they won’t listen through their hate.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Emerging from the cold gloom of the slave cabin in Obadiah’s wake, Barrie paused, blinking in the sunlight. Her hand automatically sought Eight’s for comfort. They rounded the corner of the overseer’s cabin and found Cassie coming toward them with a pailful of dirt that needed to be sifted.

  Cassie’s eyes fastened first on Barrie and then on Eight, where they softened and widened and lit with the gleam that Barrie had come to dread. “What are you two doing here?”

  “Just came to see how things were going,” Eight answered, at the same time that Barrie said, “We came to pick up the diary that Andrew was going to copy for me. I forgot it yesterday and I can’t stop thinking about what we saw.”

  Cassie’s nose wrinkled. “Knock yourself out, if you really want to read about that stuff.”

  “That stuff . . .” Eight repeated. “That stuff happened to people. Your family. You really don’t give a damn about anything that doesn’t benefit you directly, do you?”

  “She cares more than she lets on.” Barrie put a hand on Eight’s shoulder, but she didn’t expect he would understand. Not without explanations about what had probably happened to Cassie that weren’t Barrie’s to give him. Barrie had to believe Cassie couldn’t be that callous, that indifferent. Not with the way she’d reacted to what the soldiers had done.

  The same way Cassie was reacting now.

  Cassie’s attention had shifted over Barrie’s shoulder to the woods behind the cabin. The bucket fell from her grasp and clanged on the bricks that lined the edge of the path, spilling soil and rubble across the gravel. Her face had been bled of color, and she was trembling, staring fixedly. Her breath had turned sharp and ragged.

  “Cassie!” Barrie lightly touched Cassie’s shoulder. “Don’t disappear on us. Stay here. Can you hear me?”

  “What the hell is she playing at now?” Eight asked.

  “She isn’t playing.” Barrie turned to look behind her, following the direction of Cassie’s stare. There was only one of the slave cabins and the woods between Colesworth Place and the neighboring subdivision where the old rice fields had been. Nothing looked different.

  “You’re safe, Cassie.” Barrie spun back to her cousin. “There’s no one there. No one is going to hurt you. We won’t let them, but you need to snap out of this.”

  Attracted by the falling bucket, people were starting to converge. Berg jogged to Cassie’s side, and Andrew emerged from the overseer’s cabin.

  “What’s going on here?” Andrew asked.

  Berg stepped in front of Cassie, shielding her. “Don’t touch her. That can make a flashback worse,” he warned. “Cassie, listen to my voice. It’s me, Berg. You’re safe. Everything is all right, and there are people here who want to help you. Nothing can hurt you here.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Andrew took off his cap and ran a hand distractedly across his head.

  “She hasn’t been the center of attention in the last few minutes,” Eight said. “That’s what’s wrong. She’s faking.”

  Berg sent him a warning look. “She has PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a reaction to something she saw or experienced in her past that she’s literally reliving.”

  “What she’s ‘reliving’ is a lifetime of manipulating people to get what she wants,” Eight snapped.

  Muscles tightened in Berg’s face, squaring his jawline, sharpening his cheekbones . . . making him dangerous. “No one wants to ‘fake’ this,” he said. “Flashbacks are agonizing, debilitating, and humiliating. She’s literally feeling something she went through before, as if she’s right there all over again.”

  Eight opened his mouth, but Barrie shook her head at him as Berg went back to soothing Cassie. “Let’s leave them alone.”

  She pulled Eight in the direction that Cassie had been staring—was still staring—even though there didn’t appear to be anything to see. Beyond the line of slave cabins and a shallow, shaded gully, the ground sloped down into the narrow copse of the Colesworth woods. Through the trees, the oversize McMansions of the subdivision were faintly visible, crammed onto their tiny lots around a cul-de-sac.

  In the trees, something rustled faintly, and a twig snapped. Barrie couldn’t tell if whatever was there was animal or human. But a few feet beyond the cabin, where the gully still held moisture from the recent rain, several sets of prints showed the clear impressions of booted feet.

  “You think someone was here and that set Cassie off?” Eight stooped to examine the prints while being careful not to damage them.

  “I don’t know anything about PTSD apart from what I looked up on the Internet. Flashbacks are real. That’s all I can tell you. And this is the third time I’ve seen Cassie have one.”

  “She was never like this before,” Eight said flatly. “You’re too trusting, Bear. You’re letting her manipulate you again. Cassie
has never been scared of anything in her life.”

  Barrie arched her eyebrows at him. “What do we really know about Cassie’s life apart from what we think we know? We all bury the truth of ourselves below the surface. Anyway, PTSD can come on years after an event. It’s not just about fear—it’s a mix of triggered memories and the mind being tricked into thinking whatever happened is still happening, right then, right that moment. You don’t even have to be scared for yourself—you can be scared for someone else, or guilty that you didn’t do more to stop something from happening.”

  “Like locking your cousin in a tunnel, maybe?”

  “You’re taking all this out of context. Anyway”—Barrie pointed at the footprints again—“those definitely aren’t figments of Cassie’s imagination.”

  “They could have been made anytime.”

  “Not before the rain the other night!”

  Somewhere in the subdivision, a car engine fired, and a faint sound of tires on asphalt suggested someone leaving in a hurry. It could have been unconnected, that sound, but Barrie doubted it was. She looked into the trees where the branches had rustled a minute before. It was tempting to try to follow. The chances of finding anything that way were slim, though.

  Grim-faced, Eight, too, stared into the trees. Then he set off down the row of slave cabins. “Whoever that was—if there was someone—they’re gone,” he said. “Let’s see if there are any more footprints here.”

  He and Barrie searched behind the cabins. There were plenty of places where someone could have stood and watched the dig, hidden from the archaeologists. But there was no more evidence to prove someone had been there.

  “You think it was more treasure hunters?” Barrie asked. “Or reporters?”