Persuasion (35 page)

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.”

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?”

“Or kids interested in catching a glimpse of the gold. Whoever it was, we probably scared them off, and they’re not likely to be back.” Eight turned to head back to the dig.

“I wouldn’t bet on that.” Berg had come up so silently that he’d given them no warning. His head was down, and a few feet behind Eight and Barrie, he stopped to examine a broken twig that Barrie hadn’t even noticed.

Barrie watched him curiously. “Is Cassie doing better?”

“She won’t talk about anything, so it’s hard to say. Andrew and Stephanie are with her.”

Barrie tipped her head at the unfamiliar name, then realized Berg must have been referring to the blond girl who’d been supervising the setup the day before.

“What did you mean about not betting on whoever it was not coming back?” Eight had gone from studying the broken twig Berg was still idly twirling between his fingers to studying Berg himself.

“Come on. I’ll show you.” Berg led the way back, taking a
slightly different route. “We want to stay clear of the way they went, just in case.”

Barrie cut a sharp look at his profile as she walked beside him. “In case of what?”

There was something different about Berg, a quiet sureness that had settled around him. Or maybe it had always been there, and Barrie just hadn’t seen it. “We had some grid stakes pulled up this morning. Nothing serious,” he said. “We assumed it was kids playing pranks, but based on those footprints, whoever was watching stood here for a while and came back several times. The prints cross over and over each other.”

“Maybe it was a lot of different people,” Barrie ventured.

“Just two. A small guy wearing a size-nine shoe and a big guy wearing a size thirteen, and there’s a bottle of beer kicked under the cabin that hasn’t had time for the label to fade or get wet.”

Eight’s expression took on the familiar stillness that meant his attention was completely engaged. “What did you say you were studying again? Apart from archaeology?”

“I was in the Marines for three years straight out of high school,” Berg said, studying him back.

Barrie remembered Berg talking to Cassie down by the angel statue, telling Cassie about his parents taking him to cemeteries, about how much he’d wanted to escape their preoccupation with the past. But whatever he’d seen as a soldier
had sent him running straight back to archaeology. Barrie couldn’t blame him—it had to be far less painful digging up gravestones than burying your friends.

“That must have been a hard transition for you,” she said.

Berg was silent long enough that she didn’t think he was going to answer at all. But then he shrugged. “It cured me of feeling sorry for myself, I’ll tell you that. My parents never needed much apart from their work and each other, so I convinced myself I wanted to go do something that really mattered. The one thing you learn in places like Afghanistan is that you can’t solve problems until you understand how they became problems in the first place.”

Crouching beside him to peer beneath the slave cabin, Barrie scanned the ground for another beer bottle, or anything else that shouldn’t have been there, but she felt nothing from her finding sense apart from the usual pull of loss that spilled from the hidden room and the migraine that warned her she wasn’t where she belonged.

“Do people with PTSD get better?” she asked.

Berg’s expression sharpened. “Everyone’s different. It can take months or years of thinking you’re perfectly all right before you realize you’re not. Even longer than that to heal. Other times, by the time you start to experience flashbacks, you’re already starting the healing process.”

He paused as the crack of a twig suggested someone else
was coming, and Barrie glanced back to find Cassie moving toward them. Berg’s voice grew deliberately, if only slightly, louder. “PTSD isn’t what most people think,” he said. “Anyone can have it, no matter what they’ve been through. Big traumas, small ones. It’s not about what happened so much as what you do to process that event. Too often, people hold themselves accountable for things beyond their control.”

“You’re psycho-babbling at me again, Iceberg.” Cassie emerged from around the cabins. “Stop it. I’m nothing like your soldiers. I keep telling you that, but you don’t listen.” She stopped beside Berg, the fraying hems of her jeans spilling around her dirty Keds and her face pale and drained. Then she swept a glance from Berg to Eight, and her smile reappeared. A wide, lethal smile that would have seemed like the old Cassie if not for the dead eyes that Barrie was coming to associate with the aftereffects of the flashbacks.

“Now, don’t you listen to any of this crap that Berg’s trying to sell you. He doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He wasn’t even a shrink in the Marines, he was a sniper. I’ll bet he didn’t mention that he killed people. Lots of people. Men, and even a pregnant woman with a bomb once.”