Persuasion (38 page)

After spending most of the night tossing impatiently, Barrie was coming out of the shower when Pru knocked on her door early the next morning.

“Could you be ready in half an hour?” Pru poked her head into the room. “I’ve taken care of the horses already, so I thought we could stop at the restaurant supply in Charleston before we take the list and photographs to the auction house. Mary says we’re going to need some bigger warming trays, and I’ve got an address for a place that sells velvet ropes to keep people from straying off the path in the garden. What do you think?”

“I think the ropes will be something for the
yunwi
to play with,” Barrie said, smiling. “But would you mind very much if I don’t go with you?” Telling herself to be patient was like
telling herself not to scratch an insistent itch. The thought of waiting most of the day to talk to Obadiah, Cassie, and the archaeologists was intolerable, and she fiddled with the dial of Mark’s watch, trying to think of an excuse.

Pru’s expression softened, and she stepped inside the room. “You want to be here when Eight gets back from Columbia, don’t you, sugar? It’s all right. I understand more than you know what that feels like.”

Somewhere in the past days Pru had found time to shop, or at least time to surf the Web, because for once her clothes looked like they’d been bought in the present century instead of the last. Barrie went and gave her an impulsive hug. “You look beautiful, Aunt Pru.”

Pru’s cheeks turned pink, but she smiled widely enough that the first faint creases came out around her eyes. She seemed to look younger every day, and happier.

She pressed her palm to Barrie’s cheek and held it there a moment. “All right. You can stay, but keep the alarm on and the doors safely locked.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Barrie said, which might, she conceded instantly, have been a bit of a tactical mistake.

Pru paused and gave her a hard appraisal. “You’re not planning on getting into any mischief, are you?”

“Of course not,” Barrie said, making a cross over her heart.

Pru held her gaze a few moments longer before she left,
and Barrie waited to hear the sound of the front door closing before she pushed herself into action. After grabbing a couple of cinnamon Pop-Tarts from the kitchen cupboard and dosing herself with a strong cup of coffee, she dug out the fixings for sandwiches and found a loaf of bread in the pantry. Eight had said he would take things to Obadiah on his way to Columbia that morning, so what she was doing wasn’t strictly necessary.

Still, some extra appeasement couldn’t hurt.

After stopping briefly to retrieve the keys and a flashlight from the cupboard beneath the stairs, Barrie made her way to the unused wing upstairs and into her grandfather Emmett’s bedroom, with an escort of dubious
yunwi
trailing behind her. Twila’s ghost was gone, but the room still seemed cold and awful. The
yunwi
grew agitated when Barrie passed through and unlocked the hidden wall panel. She slid it open to reveal the secret room and the staircase that descended to the tunnel that led beneath the river.

“Stop fussing,” Barrie said. “I’ll be back soon.”

They stayed close behind her down the staircase, but hung back when she came to the iron door that had been designed to keep them out.

The tunnel looked much the same as it had when Cassie had locked Barrie and Eight inside. Seven, or someone, had left matches and a modern lighter beside the oil lantern that stood in the niche in the wall, and Barrie opted to use it to save
her flashlight batteries. After a moment of hesitation, she shut the outer door and locked it. The
yunwi
hadn’t crossed the magical barrier by the water before, but until she knew what the Fire Carrier had been trying to tell her about them, she didn’t want to take any needless risk.

The tunnel was cold and dark. Memories swooped in like a cloud of bats, beating at her with leathered wings and sharpened talons. It was claustrophobic, that painful barrage, and it made her want to turn and run. She couldn’t help thinking, suddenly, of Cassie locked within her flashbacks. Shaking off the acrid taste of adrenaline, she tried to still the rapid pounding of her heart.

She hugged the wall, trailing her fingers along the bricks, concentrating on counting her footsteps, reminding herself that every stride carried her closer to the exit. Still, the memories wormed their way past her defenses. Right there in that spot, she and Eight had found the bag of silver, and there the remnants of the suitcase. Here was the place where the skeletons of Luke and Twila had lain, with Luke’s ghost forever grasping for a Twila he couldn’t find.

Barrie blinked away a wet, hot spill of pain for the lives Emmett had stolen in a fit of jealousy. And for Charlotte and James and Caroline, their lives broken by Alcee Colesworth’s greed. How could an emotion as selfless as love create so much selfish tragedy?

When Eight returned from Columbia, she would apologize to him. She would say anything she needed to say, want anything she needed to want, to give the two of them a chance to see where they could go together. If there was a lesson in the history of Watson Island, it was that people made their own curses. They didn’t need magic for that.

Shadows from the newly installed grating broke the sunlight overhead as she emerged through the renovated doorway that led into the Beaufort woods.

She paused then. Sternly, she told herself the hard part was behind her. There was no chance of running into Wyatt or Ernesto. She knew that. In the daylight, in safety, fear seemed like it should have been a conquerable thing, but it loomed larger than any iron door and slowed Barrie’s steps more than any iron grate.

She dropped the grate back into place and locked it, before weaving around the clumps of underbrush and poison ivy, avoiding rocks and fallen limbs where snakes might lurk. In less time than she would have thought, she was clear of the woods and starting up the path toward Cassie’s house.

At the top of the rise, she stopped. The archaeological dig had descended into chaos.

Berg, Andrew Bey, and the archaeology students, all of them haggard, bruise-eyed, and raw as if they hadn’t slept in days, stood clustered at the excavation area above the hidden room. Cassie’s mother and both Cassie and Sydney were with them. Everyone was speaking at once, raising their voices to be heard over each other by two sheriff’s deputies, who scribbled notes and shouted back for everyone to talk one at a time.

But it was the excavation itself that made Barrie’s footsteps falter. The stakes that had formed the gridlines lay splintered, scattered across the ground like some macabre game of pick-up sticks. Beside the overseer’s cabin, the mesh of the two enormous screens through which the archaeologists sifted soil had been slashed into ribbons, and the crate of trowels and digging supplies that had stood there the day before was
missing. On the opposite side of the excavation, the iron rebar and heavy block of concrete that had been set as the default point of measurement had been dug up and tossed aside. The effect was surreal, as if a giant had come through and pitched a fit.

In the center of it all sat Obadiah. His face was serene, and his hands lay on his knees, and as before, his eyes were locked on Barrie. Ignoring him, she waded into the midst of the argument and tugged at the hem of Cassie’s shirt.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Cassie didn’t answer. No one did. No one even turned. Barrie pulled harder, but Cassie only moved her arm as if she was swatting away a pest, and continued shouting to the deputies.

“How can it possibly be my fault?” Cassie demanded. “Try to think that through. How would I do this? That’s the first question. Second,
why
would I do it?”

“I don’t know why,” the taller of the officers said. Reed-thin and stoop-shouldered, as if he spent too much time bending to speak to people or hunched over his notepad, he glanced up to catch Cassie’s eye. “Why don’t you tell me? You’ve done a lot of things I don’t begin to understand.”

Cassie flushed and looked away. “I promise you, I didn’t pull up a hunk of concrete bigger than your ass with my bare hands, in case you haven’t figured that out already.”

“Cassandra!” Cassie’s mother gave the deputy an apologetic glance, although she might have had more authority if she hadn’t been dressed in a pink beautician’s uniform short enough to leave ten inches of thigh exposed.

“We could all be more polite.” Berg pushed closer to Cassie, and there was enough quiet command in his voice that even the two officers turned toward him. “There’s no point blaming anyone before we have all the facts. That block of concrete weighs a good seventy pounds. It wouldn’t be easy to tear it out of the ground like this. Also, the grid stakes were yanked out and thrown aside when we got up yesterday morning. We found some footprints and a beer bottle and assumed it was kids playing around, but maybe it was something more serious. I’ve still got the bottle. There might be fingerprints on it. That could be a place to start.”

The shorter officer seemed to breathe a sigh of relief, looking everywhere but at Cassie. “You might not be wrong about kids. Could be a prank, I reckon. Someone wanting to give the ghost hunters something to get excited about. There’s not much in the way of real damage done. Go ahead and give us that bottle, and then why don’t you call us back if you notice anything suspicious.”

“What kind of suspicious?” Barrie asked, but again, no one took any notice.

Andrew had pushed to the front, his face red and sweating. “To you,” he said, “this may seem like ‘not much in the way of damage,’ but they took all the trowels, shovels, and picks, not to mention slicing the mesh in both the sifting screens.” He gestured to where two and a half widths of brick had been cleared in the excavation, enough to suggest that the ceiling of the room had been domed instead of flat. “That’s going to set us back most of the day.”

Barrie edged over to Obadiah. “Did you do this?” she asked. “Why? What are you up to?”

“Me,
chère
?” Obadiah’s expression was smug and calm. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“How did the equipment get stolen under your nose? Don’t tell me you’re not the one responsible.”

“I have enough trouble tending to the spirits at night. Trust me when I say I have no energy left to pay attention to human thieves and vandals. You want someone to do that, get a German shepherd.”

“Funny,” Barrie snapped.

“I’m not laughing, either. A couple of trowels and shovels? Those are the last things the spirits care anything about. You see that mess over there?” Obadiah pointed at the piece of iron rebar embedded in concrete that had been torn from the ground. “That’s what happens when the spirits aren’t happy.
Things get thrown and people get hurt. And they would have done much worse without me here, I promise.”

He stumbled as he got up, and Barrie automatically offered him her hand. He seemed brittle and creaky. Thinner, and at least a dozen years older than he had the day before. Their skin touched, and a surge of energy rushed through her, quickening her blood and bringing it to the surface of her skin. It ebbed almost instantly, and it left her weak and cold, deeply cold. She shivered.

“Stop that!” Wrenching herself away, she stepped back and glared at Obadiah, her blood pounding too quickly and too loudly in her ears. “What did you just do?”

“Nothing permanent.” He drew himself up and looked at her with a defiant arrogance that reminded Barrie, unexpectedly, of her cousin. “I borrowed a small amount of strength and magic,” he said. “Eat and sleep, and you’ll be fine. I promised you already, I have no desire to harm you or anyone you love.”

Obadiah stumbled again, and without his even touching her, Barrie felt the air around her drain of warmth. She backed away.

“Is that what you’re doing to keep yourself going without sleep? You’re stealing energy?”

“Only from people who have enough to spare. I’m not taking much.”

“That’s why the archaeologists all look so tired? That’s horrible!”

“They’re better tired than dead,” Obadiah snapped. “What do you think I’m spending that energy on? If I took what I needed only from the archaeologists, my strength would have failed a long time ago, and the spirits would be doing more than throwing concrete.”

“So that’s why you wanted me and Eight to come over here, because we have magic? It didn’t have anything to do with sandwiches and coffee, did it?”

“A little energy from you provides more power than I can get from all the others combined. It won’t do you any lasting harm.”

“How am I supposed to believe that, when you haven’t told me the truth about anything so far?”

“When have I lied to you?” Obadiah’s eyes gleamed dangerously.

“Not lying isn’t the same as telling the truth. You never told me you were related to Mary, for instance. But the names aren’t a coincidence, are they? Mary, Daphne, and Jackson. And you said your family was cursed. Mary’s had more than her share of hardships.” Barrie watched Obadiah carefully as she voiced what she’d suspected after reading the diary.