Persuasion (41 page)

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 pried
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.”

“No,” Cassie breathed.

“Then put the gun down and help me figure all this out.”

Opening her fingers, Cassie let the weapon fall. Slowly she sank to the ground and drew her knees to her chest, then rocked back and forth while Barrie held her.

The police took Cassie aside to question her, and the paramedics came. Ambulances and ambulances, but none for Obadiah, who had vanished.

Barrie burrowed into Eight’s shoulder. He was as pale as bone beneath his tan, his eyes darkened to slashes of shadow she couldn’t read as he searched her face as if it were his turn to memorize
her
. “Christ, you scared the crap out of me again,” he said. “You have to stop this. My heart can’t take it.”

“I thought you were in Columbia,” Barrie said.

“I dropped everything to race back here when your aunt called to say you weren’t picking up your phone. I figured you were doing something stupidly brave or insanely stupid, and I was on my way to the tunnel when I heard the picks striking brick. For future reference, next time you see people with
guns, try running away instead of running toward them.”

The police stayed for what seemed like hours, taking statements and photographs. The procedure felt too familiar. Except that the bodies leaving in ambulances were alive this time, alive and under police escort. Barrie hoped it would be a long time before Ryder and Junior went anywhere that didn’t involve armed guards and prison bars.

She sat on the grass leaning against Eight’s knees. Berg and Andrew Bey and a parade of archaeologists, police, various people from the university, and even someone from the coroner’s office milled around the excavation area, trying to assess the damage, and trying to confirm what Barrie had told them she’d deduced from Caroline’s journal. Seven alternately barked into his phone and hovered anxiously nearby. Now and again, he dropped a hand on Eight’s shoulder, as if he needed that connection to assure himself Eight was there.

Pru paced, but she barely took her eyes from Barrie. “How much longer do we have to stay?” she said to Seven after Barrie had given her statement and the police had come back several times with additional questions. “Barrie’s already given her statement. What more do they want?”

“They haven’t finished with Cassie yet,” Seven answered, stopping with his hands in his pockets so that he looked eerily like Eight.

“They’re not going to arrest her, are they?” Barrie swiveled
to look back at her cousin. “That lawyer of hers was crappy at the hearing. Maybe you should help her.”

A sharp denial formed on Seven’s lips, but he bit it off and shook his head. “I don’t think they’ll arrest her, under the circumstances,” he said cautiously. “You and Eight both explained Cassie didn’t shoot until they went for their guns.”

Standing with Dr. Ainsley, the doctor who had stitched up Barrie’s shoulder, a policewoman, and Mrs. Colesworth on the other side of the excavation area, Cassie looked shaken and bewildered, devoid of her usual bravado. Cassie’s mother’s car still stood on the grass with the driver’s door open and the dashboard lights glowing as if she’d left the keys in the ignition. She looked stunned and unsure what to do for Cassie, or what to do with herself. Cross-legged on the hood of the car, Sydney sat with her elbows on her knees and her chin cupped in her palms, watching everything with quiet but avid interest.

“Someone ought to go talk to Sydney,” Barrie said.

She started to get up, but Pru firmly pushed her back down. “Oh no, you don’t. You stay right here,” Pru said. “I’m not sure how anyone is going to explain all this to that poor child, but leave it to her mama and Cassie to do it.”

From beside the excavation site, Berg and the archaeologists went to meet another dusty Prius approaching down the drive. Each of them veered around a nearby stretch of grass
seemingly without reason, walking around it as if they weren’t even aware they were detouring around. It was the same place Obadiah had been lying before he had disappeared, and Barrie leaned forward, staring hard at the spot, as if staring would let her see what the others couldn’t. She had before.

But if Obadiah was still there, he was hiding himself from her now as well as from the archaeologists and police. Maybe he wasn’t there at all.

Dr. Feldman, the head archaeologist, levered himself out from behind the wheel of the Prius. He listened to Andrew and Berg talking while he reached in the backseat for a large square plastic case. He handed the case to Berg, and they all walked over to the police and stood in a huddle, talking rapidly. Two plainclothes police led the way back toward the excavation site.

“Watch that spot over there when they go past it,” Barrie whispered to Eight, pointing to the apparently empty stretch of grass. “Tell me what you see.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Just watch.”

Dr. Feldman, the police, and the others all walked around the same area again.

Eight sat forward. “You think Obadiah’s sitting over there being invisible again?”

“Maybe he was too hurt to go anywhere, so all he could do
was make it look like he disappeared. He could be there sucking up enough energy to make himself strong again. It would make sense, wouldn’t it?”

Dr. Feldman reached the dig. The police, Berg, and Andrew all pointed out various things, talking over each other. He gestured for Berg to give him the case, and then he flipped it open, extracted something that looked like a flexible flashlight mounted to a computer screen, and flipped a switch. Two LED lights flared up brightly. Kneeling beside the exposed brick of the roof, Dr. Feldman fed the lighted end of the scope into the narrow chip that Junior had managed to make with the pickax. Everyone else gathered around, peering over his shoulder at the screen.

“What is that? Some kind of camera?” Barrie asked, looking back at Eight.

“Apparently.”

An excited murmur rippled through the archaeologists, and several pointed at the screen, talking at once. Then something happened. They all drew back, exchanged puzzled looks, and leaned in closer. Dr. Feldman slapped the side of the screen, and flipped the switch on, then off again.

“I think Elijah and Ayita broke their camera,” Barrie whispered to Eight. “But why did they let Ryder and Junior dig in the first place?”

“Maybe they were too weak in daylight? Or they’d used
up their strength pitching that fit this morning? Who knows,” Eight said.

Berg stepped away from the other archaeologists. He looked first toward Cassie, who wasn’t paying any attention, before he crossed to Barrie instead. Worry—or Obadiah—seemed to have aged him five years since that morning. “There’s good news and bad news.”

“Did they see any details before the camera died?” Barrie asked.

His face sharpened. “How did you know it died?”

“Call it a lucky guess.” Barrie shrugged halfheartedly. “What’s the good news?”

“We caught a glimpse of a skeleton. And stacks of boxes that could be just about anything. Exactly what you told us we would find.”

Andrew Bey, looking equally pale and hollow-eyed, stepped up beside Berg and ran a hand through his hair, managing to look both sheepish and elated. “I wish I had made the time to read Caroline’s journal more carefully,” he said. “Because Cassie insisted we start the dig so quickly, I had too little preparation. I only took the time to really study the entries around the night of the fire, and I skimmed the rest. I should have considered that children will often write about events without understanding the significance of what they’ve seen. And I didn’t take into consideration that it
might have taken Caroline years to finally write about that night.”

Barrie’s gaze slipped back to Cassie, who had waited four years to speak about her pain. Ironically, she was comforting her mother while Marie Colesworth cried. But maybe needing to care for someone else would help Cassie come out of herself.

Barrie thought of her own mother, and all that Lula had been through. All the things Lula had never talked about. Pru had said Barrie needed to read Lula’s letters, but Barrie had been so fixated on finding answers to the questions she needed answered herself that she hadn’t been ready. She hadn’t had the courage. Watching Cassie, she was starting to understand that courage took many different paths.

“You think she’s all right?” Berg asked.

Barrie rubbed her thumb across Mark’s watch. “You tell me. How long does it take for someone to become ‘all right’?” She thought of her own memories of the night of the explosion, the suddenness that could make her see everything as if she was right there in the moment. And she
was
all right. Relatively all right. What she had been through was nothing compared to what Cassie had been through, or the things that Berg must have seen in Afghanistan, or what Lula had suffered because of Cassie’s father. What the Union soldiers had done and what the slaves had suffered. How could human beings continue to do so many inhumane things to each other?

Hands clasped behind his back, Berg dropped into his quiet stance, deceptively relaxed. “There’s no easy answer for that. Everyone is different,” he said. “The important thing is that she’s talking and getting help. Or at least, I hope she’ll get help.”

“She will.” Barrie stood up and dusted off her shorts. Eight stood up with her. “What are they going to do about the room? About Charlotte?”

“We can’t risk breaking through from the top with the skeleton down there. We’ll get a bigger crew and excavate around the room until we find a way inside. Since we can’t be certain whether the Union gold is down there or not, we’ll have a guard on-site,” Berg said.