Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  The twine finally broke. Barrie felt the release in her wrists and her screaming shoulder muscles, and she sat down in the fireplace and breathed a sigh. Twisting and pulling her clammy hands, she managed to unwind the rest of the rope after loosening it enough to pull her hands back through. The first thing she did was reach into her pocket for her cell phone, but Obadiah must have taken it. It wasn’t there.

  With a growl of frustration, she fumbled at the twine binding around her ankles, but the knot was drawn too tight. The fireplace would have been impossible, so after hopping to the area where Obadiah had lifted the oak plank, she pried up the board to reveal the shallow root cellar the slaves had used.

  The desperation struck her then, the desperation to escape, and the desperate sense of helplessness. The magnitude of the impossible hope that she was investing in a few objects in a hidden cellar. She wondered if that was what Obadiah’s family had felt while they were alive, what Cassie had felt.

  Did a prisoner ever stop hoping? When people didn’t see you as a person, when who you had been or what you did made no difference to their opinion of you, how long did it take for hope to turn to resignation?

  Barrie lifted one of the clay urns out and smashed the lip against the edge of the plank. It made a deep thud, and the vibration shook against her fingers. She tried a second time, harder, and a two-inch chunk of the narrow lip broke off.

  Two inches was all she needed. She used the broken edge to saw through the twine around her ankles.

  When she was finally free, her hands and feet throbbed and burned with the effort, and raw red welts around her ankles showed where the twine had rubbed her skin. She ignored that and scrambled to her feet, ducking low to run to the window. Not that it mattered if she kept out of sight. Cassie was still standing in plain view of anyone who happened to look. Cassie’s entire body was rigid as Barrie nudged her aside. Finally in position, Barrie looked out the window.

  At the excavation site above the hidden room, Obadiah lay unmoving on the ground. Two men were using a shovel and a pick, swinging them high and striking hard at the brick that had been exposed.

  Recognition didn’t come until one of the men had turned. Junior Evers, the weedy, straw-haired guy from the funeral, and Ryder Colesworth, the big bull of a guy who had put his finger across his lips at the service to silence Cassie.

  Why hadn’t Barrie connected that back then?

  Because she hadn’t known until later about the PTSD, and because Cassie had left out part of the truth.

  At the funeral, Barrie had assumed Cassie was exaggerating her grief over her father. Like the police this morning, Barrie had assumed the worst because Cassie was who she was.

  Gently, she took Cassie’s hand, placed it on the rough cabin wall, and guided it across the bricks. “Do you feel that, Cassie? That’s the brick in the slave cabin. You can smell the oak boards on the floor and the air coming in from outside where the door doesn’t fit quite right. Outside is right through that door. Outside and escape and safety. I need you to pull yourself together now so that we can go out there together. You have to come back.”

  Ignoring Berg’s warning about not touching Cassie, Barrie stepped in and folded her cousin into a hug. Up close she could hear Cassie muttering, repeating, “Please don’t hurt me.”

  Her own chest aching, Barrie rubbed Cassie’s back and kept speaking to her softly. She left one eye on the window where she could see Ryder and Junior digging. It felt like hours before Cassie’s shaking slowed, but it was probably only minutes.

  Cassie’s breathing became less erratic. Feeling her stiffen, Barrie stepped back fast enough to cover Cassie’s mouth. The scream pressed against her palm. “Shhhhh!” Barrie hissed. “You can’t make any noise. No matter what you see out there— In fact, don’t look out there. Just focus on the sound of my voice, Cassie. Nod if you understand what I’m saying.” She held her breath until Cassie nodded. “Good. We have to get out of here,” she continued. “I’m going to saw these ropes off, and then we’re going to make a run for it.”

  She steadied Cassie and kept her turned away from the window while she went to get the chunk of broken urn. Cassie’s tears were still flowing as Barrie worked at the twine, but Cassie tried to wipe them away by hunching her shoulder against her cheek. Pausing, Barrie used the hem of Cassie’s shirt to wipe away the mascara smudges. Then she knelt and raised the bottom of Cassie’s long pants to reach the twine that bound her cousin’s legs together above the ankle monitor.

  Barrie stared briefly at the box. Then she darted back to the recess beneath the boards and pulled out two of the rocks she had seen there. They were polished smooth, dark gray and almost metallic-looking. One was round and one was triangular with a point that, if not quite sharp, would at least hopefully do what Barrie needed. After returning to Cassie, she bent down again, and wedged her fingers beneath the band of the electronic ankle monitor.

  “Hold very still,” she said.

  “What are you doing?” Cassie tried to pull away, but with her legs bound, she had to fight to keep her balance.

  “Mark and I used to watch that show on television where the thief worked for the FBI. These things are designed to send a signal when they’re tampered with. Hopefully, if I can break the plastic around the electronic bit, that will be enough to get the police out here.”

  “And what are we supposed to do in the meantime? Sit around and wait to be rescued?”

  “No. We’re going to go and hide. If Obadiah was the one who put us in here, those guys probably don’t know we’re here. If we slip around the back, there’s no reason they would ever look for us, but the last thing we want is to be stuck in this cabin with no way out.”

  Eyes dark and wide, Cassie stared at Barrie for several long beats of Barrie’s heart without responding.

  “Don’t zone out on me again, okay?” Barrie slammed the pointed end of the rock into the ankle monitor and felt the plastic break.

  Cassie’s leg jerked. “Ow! Hell, that hurts.”

  “Hold. Still,” Barrie hissed. She inserted the stone back into the hole where she had pierced the ankle monitor and twisted it a few times so the tip of the rock would damage the electronics. “There. Hopefully that’s good enough. Who knows how closely they monitor these things. It’s probably a long shot anyway.”

  She went back to sawing at the fraying strands of the twine around Cassie’s ankles, and then worked Cassie’s hands free, too. When that was done and Cassie was rubbing the chafed skin of her wrists, Barrie peeked back out the window. Junior and Ryder were both still digging. But Obadiah was gone. Junior and Ryder hadn’t seemed to notice.

  Did that mean Obadiah was conscious enough to do whatever disappearing act he had done before?

  Barrie edged over to the door and slowly pressed the latch. It moved, and she eased the door open, waited briefly, and poked her head out enough to see.

  “I don’t think I can go out there,” Cassie said. Her voice was high and panicked.

  Barrie infused as much certainty as she could into her voice. “Yes. You can. You have to.”

  “You don’t understand.”

  “I think I do. I’m afraid I do. They hurt you.”

  “You don’t get it—no one gets it.” Cassie slapped her hand against the wall. “You don’t until it happens to you. Ryder is Daddy’s cousin. Ernesto had him watch me when the cartel took me after Daddy tried to quit working for them. But he was mad because Daddy was trying to quit, so he took it out on me. He said he would do the same thing to Sydney if I told.” Her voice dropped to a broken whisper. “I never told.”

  Barrie decided that “I’m sorry” was one of the most useless phrases in the English language, too easily thrown around and too rarely helpful. She said it anyway.

  Cassie only nodded. “I really can’t go out there,” she said.

  “We’ll go out together, and you’re going to be fine.” Barrie squeezed Cassie’s hand. �
�You’re going to have to, because if you don’t, if you let them take more from you, then they are going to win all over again. And you’re not a quitter—you don’t let other people win. I don’t know you all that well, but I know you enough to realize that much.”

  Cassie stared back at her, her chin puckering as her lip trembled. Then her face sharpened into determined angles, and she wiped her hands on her shirt. “All right,” she said. “We’ll go.”

  “We’ll run to the right and hide behind the cabin until someone gets here to help. That way, we can escape through the woods or slip between the other cabins if it looks like Ryder and Junior are coming this way.” Barrie smiled encouragingly. “We’ll be all right, Cassie. We can do this,” she said.

  She hoped she was right.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  Barrie ran first. She darted through the door and crouched low as she rounded the side of the cabin, then she stopped to wait for Cassie before continuing toward the back. Cassie passed her and ran straight into the woods, ignoring everything Barrie had said.

  Barrie’s throat closed around a fist of panic. Blind panic, because from where she stood, she couldn’t see Ryder or Junior, or what they were up to. Fortunately, Cassie made little noise, maybe because she had grown up playing in these woods, or maybe because she was naturally more graceful than Barrie, or maybe twigs snapping under your feet sounded louder when they were under your own feet.

  Shaking her head, Barrie edged to the end of the building and peered around at Ryder and Junior. They were still working. Still oblivious.

  Should Barrie try to follow Cassie? If she made more noise than Cassie had made, she was likely to bring Ryder and Junior chasing after them both. On the other hand, if Cassie managed to get away, she could bring back help. Or her ankle monitor would send out an alert, if Barrie hadn’t managed to trigger the signal already.

  Her head resting against the rough brick at the back of the cabin, Barrie tried to reconcile herself to staying and waiting, to doing nothing in case doing something made things worse.

  She couldn’t. Her feet itched to run, every nerve ending in her body hummed, and her hands were clammy. Standing still made her breath come too fast.

  Testing the ground at every footstep, she began to walk. She moved from tree to tree, pausing to look behind her, poised to run if she needed to. Telling herself she would run like hell.

  Patience. If she walked carefully, she wouldn’t need to run.

  Placing every step where there was the least amount of vegetation, she finally emerged at the far side of the woods and stepped onto a shadowed verge of grass that bordered the cul-de-sac.

  The street was quiet. Empty driveways fronted tightly clustered houses, and behind them, shallow yards backed to the woods. Cassie was a ribbon of dark hair and a pale flash of fabric cutting across the shadowed lawns a hundred yards ahead, and then she ducked back into the trees of the Colesworth woods.

  Barrie bit off a shout, and wasted a moment looking behind her before sprinting to catch up. Clutching a cramp in her side, she made a mental map of Colesworth Place. From the point where Cassie had cut into the trees, the woods ran into the parking lot near the cemetery, the chapel, and Cassie’s house.

  There was no help in that direction. Cassie should have kept running. Or started ringing doorbells in the subdivision.

  Unless Sydney was at the house.

  Barrie’s skin broke into goose bumps, and she plunged back into the shadowed woods. She thought of the way Ryder had spoken to her at the SeaCow, the way Cassie had locked up at the cemetery and frozen when she’d seen the two men digging. What if Sydney came out of the house, unsuspecting. . . .

  But Sydney had gone with Cassie’s mother, hadn’t she? Barrie stopped, bent nearly double, sucking in air, her hands on her knees. Yes, she remembered Sydney standing beside the open car door, turning to look back at Cassie and the dig crew. Didn’t Cassie remember that?

  Gulping another breath, Barrie wiped the sweat out of her eyes and ran on, doing her best to avoid roots and trees and brambles. The stitch in her side had grown into a ripping knife by the time she emerged above the cemetery. Cassie was even further ahead, already slipping around the back side of the fence and circling behind the chapel.

  Barrie pushed her body back into a sprint. By the time she cleared the side of the chapel, Cassie emerged from the back door of the house with a shotgun in her hand. A shotgun.

  Worse, instead of returning to the subdivision, Cassie ran toward the broken columns of the old mansion, where Ryder and Junior were digging.

  The angel statue above Charlotte’s empty grave blocked Barrie’s view as Cassie separated from the trees. Dirt had blackened the face and worn away the angel’s features, but the fist still shook in the face of God. Barrie thought of Charlotte in the hidden room, waiting for James all through the war, all through her death. Charlotte, who deserved better than what would happen to her body if Ryder and Junior were the first to reach her.

  Barrie forced her feet to move. Running toward danger didn’t get any easier, step by step.

  Cassie reached the ruins and she circled behind the columns. Behind her, Eight was emerging from the Beaufort woods and running toward them in the shadow of the trees. Barrie’s fear suddenly doubled, multiplied. Cassie moved from one column to the next, timing her progress with Junior’s movements as he plied the pick. When she reached the last column, she was only a few feet away from him. Eight was thirty yards away. Cassie stepped into the open, pumped the shotgun, and leveled it at Ryder’s back. Barrie ran forward, but everything was too slow and disjointed.

  Holding the gun steady, Cassie took another step. “Back up and put down the pickax. Move away. Both of you.”

  Junior dove for a rifle that lay beside a metal detector on the ground.

  Cassie’s shotgun roared.

  There was the sound, and the stench of powder, and a piercing scream. Then blood and flesh sprayed from Junior’s knee, and he fell. Barrie saw it, heard it, but somehow her brain lagged behind so it all seemed unreal.

  Ryder dug into the waistband of his jeans and pulled out a handgun. He fired it as he spun toward Cassie, barely aiming. The bullets kicked up dirt and grass, and one smacked the nearest column with a ping and a cloud of mortar as Cassie fired again. Cassie stayed standing. Ryder didn’t. His leg buckled, and he screamed, but he managed to stay half-upright and raise the gun again.

  Cassie shot him again in the shoulder. The gun fell from his nerveless fingers.

  Sensation flooded back into Barrie’s feet and hands, filling her with pins and needles. And horror. She had lost all sense of time. Eight was closer, but not close enough. Sirens were wailing on the road. She turned toward the sound, and when she looked back again, Cassie had reached Ryder and kicked the gun out of reach. She stood over him. Her face was perfectly blank, her eyes glassy and dark. The shotgun shook as she raised it.

  “Don’t!” Barrie shouted. She ran forward, but everything blurred. Movements, sounds. Past and present. She already knew Cassie was going to fire.

  Cassie was going to shoot again.

  Holding the barrel of the shotgun three inches from Ryder’s face, Cassie spoke to him. The sirens drowned out both her words and the answer Ryder gave her with his lips drawn back from his teeth in something that was disturbingly like a smile. Eight gave a shout.

  Cassie’s hands shifted on the gun. Instead of firing it, she swung it at the side of Ryder’s head. It connected with a sound like a watermelon cracking open, and he staggered, falling sideways until he caught himself with his uninjured arm and turned back around to face her.

  Cassie swung the shotgun a second time. She was saying something—her mouth was moving, but they were whispers or prayers or curses spoken beneath her breath. The weapon came down again. Ryder slumped to the churned-up dirt where he and Junior had been trying to expose more of the brick roof to the hidden room.

  Barrie reached Cassie at the same time that Eight prie
d the rifle out of Junior’s hands. All her focus had been on Cassie and Eight. She hadn’t even seen Junior getting up or grabbing the gun. Eight held it pointed at Junior, and Barrie caught Cassie’s forearm.

  “Cassie, stop. You have to stop. He’s down. He’s not going to hurt you anymore.”

  “I was thirteen years old, and he was my daddy’s cousin. His cousin.” Cassie wrenched out of Barrie’s grasp and raised the gun again.

  Arms outstretched to block the blow, Barrie stepped in front of Ryder. “Killing him isn’t going to change that, but it will change you.”

  “Like he hasn’t done that already.” Cassie’s voice was flat. “He made me turn myself inside out until I didn’t know if it was my fault or his, because I couldn’t imagine someone doing that to another person without there being a reason.” The gun was slippery, the weight of the handle pulling the dark barrel through Cassie’s fingers. Drops of blood gleamed red against the wood.

  Barrie glanced back as the first of two police cruisers turned off the frontage road and raced up the long oak-lined drive. “Cassie, please. Put the gun down. Killing him isn’t going to make you doubt yourself any less. It’s only going to push you further away from the person you want to be, and you don’t want the police to make a mistake when they see you with the gun.”

  “So they don’t shoot me, you mean?” Cassie gave a harsh, dry laugh devoid of humor. “That might not be so bad. Haven’t you ever thought about how much easier it would be to have it all just stop?”

  Barrie’s hands shook so hard that she pressed her fists to her thighs to keep them steady. How was she supposed to find words to say what should never need to be said? That you kept fighting, because as long as there was life, there was change. And hope. There was always hope, even if sometimes it was a wisp so thin that it was barely hope at all.

  “If you don’t fight to survive, you will never know how strong you are. I think Berg would tell you that. Also, unless we can find a way to break it, the curse and the binding will pass to Sydney if you die. That isn’t what you want.”