Persuasion (13 page)

Still, the memories weren’t all bad. Driving to the beach afterward with Eight, kissing him, talking quietly as they sat together on the moonlit sand . . .

How was Barrie going to keep Eight from finding out she’d come to the funeral behind his back? He would be furious when he realized. Then there was Seven’s confession, and Obadiah. Too many secrets.

She directed Pru toward the parking lot, which was empty except for a sedate beige Toyota with a
GOD ANSWERS KNEE-MAIL
bumper sticker. After parking alongside the car, Pru sat with her hands tight on the wheel, fixedly staring down the
path that led toward the modern house and the outbuildings Wyatt had painstakingly restored.

“We can’t be the only ones here, can we? Did we get the time wrong?” Barrie opened the door to slide out onto the sweltering asphalt. She rubbed her temple and studied the empty lot.

“This is what was in the paper. Even if no one came for Wyatt, I’d have thought they’d be here for Marie—that’s Cassie’s mama.” Pru got out of the car and pushed the straps of her big white purse up to the crook of her elbow in a movement that suggested she was girding herself for battle. “Marie’s got three sisters, and all of them are married with children. Then there’s
her
mama, Jolene Landry, not to mention the folks on the Colesworth side. Maybe they all parked beside the house?”

From her tone, Pru wasn’t convinced, and when they emerged from behind the line of trees that hid the parking lot from the rest of the property, there were no other cars parked anywhere.

“Well, that’s a shame,” Pru said. “Might not be such a bad thing you and I came, after all. It’d be a shame for folks to punish Marie for Wyatt’s mistakes. She’s got to be feeling bad enough for marrying him in the first place. Much less staying with him all these years.”

“Maybe she couldn’t figure out how to get away,” Barrie said. “Or maybe she didn’t want to leave if it would hurt Cassie
and Sydney. We can’t know what she was thinking.” Barrie was coming to realize that trying to understand a family when you weren’t right there with them was like looking through a window into a darkened house.

She and Pru skirted the Colesworth cemetery, which was enclosed by wrought-iron fencing. A pull of loss seeped out of it and made her wince. Cemeteries were full of loss, but they had never
felt
lost to her before. They’d always been a place people went to find those who had left them behind. Maybe the open grave was what made the difference, like a hole in the earth that symbolized the hole in the world that someone left behind.

Metal chairs and a white canvas awning stood alongside the hole, and all around, crosses and slabs and marble angels gave testament to long-past sorrows. Soon Wyatt Colesworth would be one of them, nothing but a marker above a coffin pinned into place by thousands of pounds of earth.

A tide of panic swept over Barrie so fast and so viscerally that it made her stumble and lose her breath.

Pru reached out to steady her. “You all right?”

“Just caught my heel.” Barrie took a gulp of air.

The thought of being buried . . . Too clearly, she remembered wondering if she and Eight would die in the tunnel when Cassie had locked them there. She remembered how the dirt and bricks had taken on weight and presence, closing
in until she had felt she couldn’t breathe. They had escaped; it had all ended well. But human memory clung to pain and terror so much harder than it grasped at joy.

Collecting herself, Barrie forced the thought aside and hurried to catch up with Pru. They reached the path leading to the restored shell of the old brick chapel.

Set back beneath the oaks a hundred yards from the defiantly broken columns of the old Colesworth mansion, the building was a barren contrast to the overgrown and lovely chapel at Watson’s Landing. If it was due any deference as a place of worship, Cassie refused to acknowledge it. Looking bored and sullen in a bright red shirt and matching slacks that set off her roses-and-cream skin and the long, dark waterfall of her hair, she stood outside the door with her mother; her younger sister, Sydney; an elderly woman; and a thirtysomething African American minister.

In a somber navy dress, Sydney was a pale and more sedate reflection of her older sibling. She, at least, was listening politely to what the minister said, and that fact didn’t seem to be lost on the elderly woman, who, judging by the family resemblance, was obviously Cassie’s grandmother. The narrow-eyed disapproval she threw at Cassie, however, along with the salt-and-pepper hair scraped back into an austere bun, and the deep creases of grimness from nose to mouth, made Jolene Landry appear about as far from grandmotherly
as it was possible to get. She was the one who first noticed Pru and Barrie. Stopping midsentence as Barrie and Pru trod up the path, she elbowed Marie Colesworth in the ribs.

Marie rushed forward. “Pru Watson! Isn’t it kind of you to come? And Barrie, too. Thank you.” She clasped Pru’s hand in both of hers and offered Barrie a smile that managed to be both sad and happy at once, but then she bit her lip and gave a furtive glance around. “You’ll have to pardon the lack of attendance. I’m sure everyone will be along directly. Unless I managed to tell them all the wrong time or day of the week. I swear, I’ve been about as useful as a wig on a porcupine the past few days.”

Her own hair was as stiff as a wig, teased and sprayed and held back with an alligator clip, and the expertly applied makeup couldn’t disguise the deep bruises beneath her eyes. She seemed worn down and worn out, and Barrie wondered how on earth you managed to look yourself in the mirror after discovering that the man you’d been sleeping beside for twenty-odd years was a drug dealer and a murderer. Or had she known all along?

Pru didn’t seem to know what to do, but good manners came to the rescue. “I’m truly sorry for your loss, Marie. I know it’ll be hard on you and the girls without Wyatt here.”

Barrie hadn’t even thought what she would say about Wyatt’s death. How did she express regret she didn’t feel?
Abruptly, she felt ashamed for being there under false pretenses. All she’d been thinking about was how to find a way to speak to Cassie about Obadiah.
That
task had seemed impossible enough. Now here was Cassie’s mother beaming at her, as if everything Barrie had told Pru in the stables was true and not some made-up excuse.

“I’m sorry, too,” she mumbled.

As a statement, it was hopelessly incomplete. There were so many ways she could have finished that sentence:

I’m sorry your husband was a son of a bitch.

I’m sorry your husband killed my father.

I’m sorry your husband burned my mother and ruined her life.

I’m sorry your husband tried to kill me.

Pressing her tongue into the roof of her mouth, she stared at the small gold cross that hung in the V of Marie Colesworth’s stark black dress.

After releasing Pru, Cassie’s mother reached down and clutched Barrie’s hands. “The lawyer told me what you did, speaking to the judge for Cassie. I know she doesn’t deserve your generosity after what she did. But I’m grateful. We’re all grateful.” She glanced back at the door, where Cassie had half-turned away, still pretending boredom, while the minister, Sydney, and Jolene Landry made an obvious effort toward polite conversation. “Cassie, honey, come on over here and say ‘thank you.’ ”

Standing three feet from the wall of the chapel, Cassie still managed to give the impression that she was leaning nonchalantly, observing the scene as if it had nothing to do with her. At first when her mother called her over, she didn’t respond at all, and then she approached very slowly and offered up one of her dazzling Scarlett O’Hara smiles.

“Imagine seeing you here, Cos,” she said. “You didn’t have anything else to do today?”

“Cassie!” her mother snapped. “You owe Barrie a debt of gratitude, not to mention an apology. I know you’re sorry for what you did.”

“Do you?” Cassie gave her mother a look simmering with amusement. “Well, if you say so, then I
must
be sorry.”

Marie’s hand flashed toward Cassie’s face. She stopped the motion and lowered the hand without connecting to Cassie’s cheek, glancing from Barrie to Pru before dropping her eyes.

Barrie’s face heated until it felt close to the deep red of Cassie’s low-cut T-shirt. She remembered all too vividly how Wyatt had hit Cassie on the night of the play. She’d felt so sorry for her cousin then. She stared hard at the ground to avoid glaring at both Marie and Cassie, wishing she could just turn on her heel, grab Pru’s hand, and head for the car.

She couldn’t. Not with Obadiah’s threat still hanging over her.

“I’m ashamed of you, Cassie. The least you could do is
meet people halfway when they’re generous to you.” Marie’s voice wobbled, but whether that was frustration or embarrassment, Barrie couldn’t tell, and she made no effort to pull Cassie aside or speak to her in a way that would keep everyone there from hearing. Turning her back on Cassie, Marie moved up and started reaching for Pru’s arm. She stopped before actually making contact, and the gesture turned into an oddly helpless wave instead. “Why don’t y’all come and say hello to the others?” she suggested. “Barrie, I think you’ve met Cassie’s sister, Sydney, haven’t you? But you may not know Pastor Nelson or my mother, Jolene Landry, yet.”

Herding Pru and Barrie to where the minister, Sydney, and the elderly woman were all deep in conversation, Marie stopped at the chapel door. Barrie peered inside during the introductions and wasn’t surprised to find no one else was there.

Only the brick walls, floor, and roof of the old structure had been restored. To soften the starkness of the space, someone had dyed four bedsheets a mottled black and hung them from the bare-bulbed light fixture at the center of the ceiling. Each sheet was bunched with white lilies and yards of ribbon and fastened to the walls to form drapes that hung low above several rows of metal folding chairs, and a plain pine coffin stood in the puddled light flowing in from the empty windows.

“Pru Watson,” the minister said in a hearty, deep bass
voice. “I might have known you’d be the first person to hold out an olive branch. Thank you for coming out. It was a very generous thing to do.”

“It was all my niece’s idea, I’m ashamed to say.” Nodding back, Pru pushed her handbag higher up her arm, and the minister turned to Barrie with a smile.

“Please call me Jacob,” he said. “I don’t like to stand on ceremony.”

“Jacob’s father,” Pru continued with a nod, “was the minister at the Baptist church in town back when I was still in school.”

The pastor’s approval made Barrie feel like the worst kind of fraud, and she was glad all over again that Eight wasn’t there with her. He would have instantly known what a hypocrite she was. Edging closer to Pru, she linked her arm through her aunt’s.

“It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she said as cheerfully as she could manage.

“I must say, it’s nice to see the families coming together. Isn’t that right, Cassie?” The minister slid a glance at Barrie’s cousin as Cassie stopped alongside her mother, but then his gaze slid past Cassie along the path and locked on something that made his eyes dilate with surprise—or shock or some even less-pleasant emotion. Adjusting his wire-rimmed eyeglasses on his nose, he schooled his expression into polite indifference.

“Ryder,” he said, nodding first at the man Barrie had seen at the bakery, and then at a weedy, thatch-haired guy who looked like he hadn’t slept in half a week. “Junior.”

Cassie jumped at the sound of the names. Whipping around, she simultaneously stepped backward, lost her balance, and fought to keep from stumbling. The movement left a scrape of red on the gravel that looked like blood, and for the first time, Barrie noticed that the soles of Cassie’s cheap heels were red. Painted red.

Her throat aching suddenly, Barrie looked down at her own expensive red-soled Louboutins. Then her hands tightened into fists. Because feeling sorry for Cassie was the very last thing she could afford to do. She had made that mistake once already, and it wasn’t as if painting the shoes came from a need for acceptance or a boost of confidence, not for Cassie. It came from the same self-centered jealousy that had driven her to steal Barrie’s necklace—the kind of jealousy that had nothing to do with the Colesworth curse. Shoes had been far from Barrie’s deepest desire the past few days. Or ever. Shoes were
shoes
. Fabulous but dispensable.

Fuming about the shoes distracted Barrie, and by the time she realized she’d lost track of what was going on, Cassie had slipped inside the chapel and out of sight. That left Marie to step in front of the two men who had come up the path.

“What are you doing here?” Cassie’s mother ignored the
hand Ryder held out to her. Her voice was at least twenty degrees closer to frostbite than it had been before.

“Junior and I figured we’d pay our respects. Least we could do. I’d have sent flowers, but Wyatt wasn’t the kind to hold with all that.” Ryder’s hand shook as he lowered it, but he nodded politely to the pastor and Jolene, who seemed to approve even less of him than she did of Cassie. Then his gaze landed on Barrie with an intensity that made her want to squirm. His eyes remained locked on her even as he continued speaking to Marie.

“Whatever’s past is past. Colesworths ought to stick together,” he said. “You let me know what you need around here, and I’ll be round directly to take care of it. Mowing, fixing potholes, or shoring up the buildings, helping out any way I can.”

“What makes you think anyone wants your help?” Jolene stepped up beside Marie. “You haven’t been welcome here in years, so you turn right around and get out.”

Marie put her hand on her mother’s shoulder. “No, Mama. Ryder’s right. Whatever disagreement he and Wyatt had, it’s gone and done.” Glancing through the doorway into the silent chapel, she shook her head, then turned back to Ryder and Junior with a smile that wasn’t likely to fool anyone into thinking she meant it. “We’re in no position to turn away friends or family, so you’re welcome here,” she added. “Both of you.”