Persuasion (28 page)

“Like it so far?” Daphne asked as Barrie peered over her shoulder.

Black trees, draped black moss, and a round white moon.
Daphne had taken Barrie’s logo idea and digitized it perfectly. She’d even made the fairy lights on the trees look as if they were glowing.

“It’s wonderful.”

“Oh, good.” Daphne grinned at her. “You never know if people are going to be the kind who pick at every tiny detail or if they are the kind who see the big picture.”

“Forest or the trees?” Eight suggested.

“Something like that,” Daphne said. “Would you two mind doing the text for the website? Pru said to leave that for y’all, but I’m at a point where it would be good to have it.”

Pru slid a laptop across the heavy mahogany desk, and after a moment of hesitation Eight pushed it at Barrie and dropped into a chair with his feet planted on the floor and a mulish cast to his jaw that said he wasn’t happy. The expression was uncharacteristic enough that it took her a moment to remember his dyslexia. Was he reluctant to read in front of her?

She thought about all the things he must have looked up—the
yunwi
, and Cherokee witchcraft, lodestones, Raven Mockers, Cherokee history, slavery, voodoo. How long had it taken him to read all the different articles and posts online in the course of the night?

She wanted to slip her hand into his, but his arms were crossed self-protectively over his chest. Settling the computer
on her lap, she scooted her chair closer to his and opened the new home page for the restaurant website and started to type while Eight watched over her shoulder with his lips moving silently.

Come experience culinary magic amid the beauty of the magnificent plantation gardens of Watson’s Landing. Join us for a unique dining experience, eating family-style on the beautiful terrace overlooking

“Don’t use that twice.” Eight touched the screen to point to the text Barrie was typing on her laptop. “Maybe try something about stepping into the past.”

“I don’t want this to be about the past,” Barrie said.

But Eight was still concentrating on the text. “Also, mentioning magic when it’s already in the name of the restaurant is too much. We don’t want to make it seem like an invitation for the crazies to come out. Half the guests are going to refuse to leave before midnight as it is.”

“Might be worth lettin’ folks stay to see the Fire Carrier, so long as they want to pay for it.” Mary dropped the notebook into her lap and looked from Pru to Barrie. “It’s not like most of ’em would see anythin’ anyway.”

“God, no,” Barrie said at the same time that Pru and Eight both said, “Absolutely not,” and the phone rang on the desk.

Setting aside the recipe book she’d been thumbing through, Pru reached over and picked it up. “Hello? . . . What? No.”
Her posture stiffened as she listened to whatever the caller said. She turned to Barrie, her fingers twining the cord attached to the black receiver, while the caller continued speaking. “Yes,” she said finally. “I suppose she’s here.” She held the phone four inches from her face and stared at it with a dazed expression as if she didn’t quite know what it was. Then she slowly shook her head and held it out to Barrie. “It’s your cousin. She says she needs to talk to you.”

Barrie leaned across the desk and took the phone. Eight’s face had been wiped clean of any trace of softness, and Mary sat forward in her chair, her eyes lit with the kind of horrified gleam that people got watching a disaster unfold.

“Hello?” Barrie said.

Cassie’s voice held no pretense at civility, much less friendliness. “You need to get over here. Right now.”

Barrie resisted the urge to whisper in the hope the others wouldn’t hear. They couldn’t avoid hearing. “That’s not possible.”

“I don’t care what’s possible,” Cassie said. “Whatever ghosts you and your tame witch doctor let loose last night are messing with the equipment over here. The archaeologists have been trying to set up all day, and they’re about ready to quit, so you need to get over here and fix it.”

Barrie hoped her voice came out sounding reasonable. “We’re in the middle of something—”

“I don’t give a crap what you’re doing. You figure out how to get here, and bring the creepy witch doctor and get him to undo whatever he did. Do it fast, too, or you’re going to wish you’d never let me out of jail. I’ll announce your little voodoo sacrifice all over the Internet and call every tabloid paper in the country until I turn your life into a living hell. I’m betting your aunt doesn’t know anything about that yet. I don’t expect she’d like it.”

“I’m sorry. I am. But I don’t know what I can do.”

“Figure something out. You fix this or else. My reputation is shot to hell already, so I don’t care what I tell people. But Andrew and Dr. Feldman are the only ones who can dig out the tunnel without the columns coming down—at least the only ones willing to work for free. I don’t have time to find anyone else if they give up, and I need to find that gold.”

Turning her back on Pru’s tight-lipped disapproval and Mary’s evil eye, Barrie couldn’t think what to say. She couldn’t mention Obadiah, and she’d already tried to explain to Cassie several times that whatever was buried at Colesworth Place was more sentimental than gold or money. Her cousin refused to listen.

Eight pried the phone out of her hand. “What is it you want now, Cassie?” he snapped.

Barrie couldn’t hear what Cassie answered, but Eight’s expression grew progressively darker until he seemed to recall
he had an audience. Relaxing visibly, he glanced at Pru and Mary.

“It sounds like fun,” he said, emphasizing the last word enough that Barrie caught the sarcasm. “Maybe we’ll try to make it over in a little while.” He put the phone down without slamming it, but Barrie suspected that was a close call, too.

“I’m surprised at you.” Mary sent a scowl at him to show he hadn’t fooled her. “I can’t believe you’re goin’ to let that girl drag you into more of her mess. I figured you, at least, had a lick of sense.”

Cassie had lied again. That shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone.

Of course the archaeologists weren’t ready to leave Colesworth Place.

After following Eight up the path leading from the burned-out Colesworth dock, Barrie paused at the top of the rise and took in the domed tents that had sprouted in front of the restored slave cabins like lime-green and yellow mushrooms. Two male college students in cargo shorts and hiking boots staggered from a Prius to the old overseer’s house, their arms laden with picks and sieves and things Barrie didn’t recognize.

“Not over there, Jerry! Set the digging equipment in the corner, and go get the printer for me.” A blonde with a long braid swinging from beneath a straw cowboy hat followed
them as far as the doorway, wiping her hands on her shorts.

Closer to where the tunnel had collapsed, two more students were pounding stakes into the grass. After marking each stake with fluorescent tape, they connected them with string to create a gridline of carefully measured squares. Beyond them, where the grass was still torn up from Obadiah’s ceremony and its ghostly aftermath, Cassie stood beside the grad student Andrew Bey. Andrew, his face shielded beneath a Yankees cap, held a laptop computer in one hand and tapped the keys with the other, and did his best to ignore her. Cassie alternated between fussing at him and watching Berg Walters a few feet away.

Berg was wrestling with something that looked like a lawn mower with a computer display on the handles. After pushing it slowly along the grass another yard or so, he stopped abruptly and tapped the screen with his fist. “I’m still alternating between void and static, and the static is spiking the way it did on the other machine.”

“I see it.” Andrew Bey looked up from the computer screen, pushed his hat back, and wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist. He cast a narrow glance at Cassie before turning back to Berg. “All right. Shut it down. We can’t risk a second machine frying out if there’s another pulse. This whole area was a long shot anyway, so we’ll concentrate on the tunnel the way we’d planned.”

Cassie glared at him with her hands on her hips. “You
can’t stop. This is where the gold is buried. I know it is—”

“
How
do you know?” Andrew put his cap back on. “I’ve done my best to check your theory, but without the equipment working, we can’t tell what is down there,
if
there’s anything down there. Yesterday, you didn’t even want to tell us the gold existed. Now today, you know where it is, but you can’t tell us why? Give me some evidence, because common sense says the gold should be over there in the tunnel somewhere.” Swinging around, he pointed to where the two students had set out the gridlines.

Despite the sweltering temperatures, Cassie was wearing jeans, and the chipped red-polished toenails peeking from beneath her sandals and the heavy fabric managed to seem both defiant and pathetic. Barrie couldn’t help seeing everything about Cassie differently now, but even the suspicion that Cassie had been through more trauma than anyone suspected didn’t make her any easier to like.

“Could you at least try digging a little bit right there?” Cassie leaned in close to peer over Andrew’s shoulder.

He shut the laptop and spoke with a show of exaggerated patience. “Archaeology is a careful process. We don’t just take a pickaxe to the ground. Dr. Feldman’s already going to kill me for breaking one radar unit, so I can’t risk even wasting the time to do a shovel test unless you can give me something concrete to go on.”

Tucking the laptop under his arm, he turned to head in the direction of the overseer’s house. That brought him almost face-to-face with Barrie. “Well, hello.” Stopping abruptly to avoid running into her, he broke into a smile. “I saw you the other day, didn’t I?”

“Barrie, tell Andrew this is where he needs to dig,” Cassie said impatiently. “You know there’s something buried here. Tell Andrew it has to be the treasure.”

Where Cassie pointed, loss billowed from the ground like smoke, pressing on Barrie’s temples. Berg Walters had the machine positioned only about a foot to the left of the claw marks in the grass. The memory of what had happened there was a cold, sharp ache like a knife that pierced Barrie’s lungs.

Eight stepped closer and slipped his hand in hers. “I think the archaeologists know their jobs, Cassie.”

Cassie’s eyes narrowed even further. “Tell them,” she said to Barrie. “Or remember that thing I said on the phone? I’ll make sure it happens.”

Behind Andrew, two black feathers still lay like smudges on the ground. Barrie stooped to pick them up. Her fingertips brushed the tips of the vanes, testing their smoothness, as soft as a sigh riffling against her skin, the fingernail texture of the hollow shafts, the stiff tiny barbs as taut as harp strings, the downy afterfeathers.

Examined by itself, a feather was a miracle of design and beauty. The sheer impossibility of a bird held aloft by something this ephemeral made Barrie think of magic. Yet the miracle of a feather was the most believable of all the things that had happened in the past several weeks.

Except the feathers, these feathers, by the very fact of their existence, made the rest impossible to deny.

She searched for something to say that would satisfy her cousin without . . . what? Admitting to the Watson gift in front of Berg and Andrew? Mentioning Obadiah? Barrie wished he were there to explain what was happening.

With a sigh, she rubbed her head, and then stiffened as she recognized the tug of pressure making her ache. Turning with a chill crawling up the back of her neck, she found Obadiah standing in the shadow of the old kitchen building.

He’d been watching her, and he smiled when her eyes caught his.

The feathers dropped from Barrie’s nerveless fingers and drifted to the grass like a plume of shadow.

Had Obadiah been there all along? Or had her wish conjured him from somewhere else? She nudged Eight with her elbow, but before she could tell him to look, Berg gave a shout. “Hey! Hold on. I’ve got a steady reading.”

“I told you to turn it off,” Andrew said.

“I did turn it off. It turned itself back on.” Berg studied
the display on the ground-penetrating radar unit a moment longer, then pushed the machine forward again.

Andrew reopened the lid of the laptop, typed in the login code, and switched into a program Barrie had never seen before. With blurred red, green, and yellow areas marked against a blue background, it looked vaguely like a map of the continents, until Andrew clicked a few buttons and it separated into four distinct images marked at different depths. He bent closer.

“Stop!” he called. “Back up.” He shouted directions at Berg about where to move the radar unit, growing more and more agitated, until he was pacing ahead of Berg and turning to walk backward while he stared down at the computer screen.

“What’s he doing?” Barrie asked. “Did they find something?”

“I don’t know. He must have found something. The radar is sending back reflections from whatever’s underground,” Eight answered about the same moment that Andrew bounded back over to them.