“You have to take off the curse,” Grandpa Lee said. “That’s the only way to set them free.”
Nick sat back in the chair and turned to his granddad.
“How do I do that, then?” he asked.
“You have to kill him,” Grandpa Lee said.
“Who?” Nick said, but his gut had tightened, and he was convinced he knew the answer.
The Overseer.
Glancing warily at the late afternoon sky, Grandpa Lee rose from his chair. He hefted the shotgun over his shoulder and shuffled to the front door.
“It’s gonna be dark soon,” Grandpa Lee said. “You’ll need to be on your way. Let’s get inside and I’ll tell you what I can.”
32
The clock above the fireplace mantel read half-past five in the afternoon. Nick and Amiya had arrived there that morning around nine o’clock, meaning they had spent about eight hours there.
To Nick, it felt like eight days.
He didn’t have access to a sunset calendar, but in mid-April, he believed that dusk would settle around eight that evening. Nightfall would arrive in less than three hours.
Then the Overseer rises . . .
The two of them sat at the small kitchen table. Grandpa Lee lit a candle and placed it in the center, giving the shadowed chamber the atmosphere of a midnight séance. He had brewed a pot of coffee on the wood-burning stove and set a chunk of hard bread and a slab of cured pork on a wooden platter at the table’s edge. Nick poured himself a steaming mug of coffee and tore into the meat and bread between sips.
“They call him the Overseer.” Grandpa Lee sat across from him, his face in alternating layers of shadow and light. “He’s not like any of the others. He was there in the beginning.”
“You mean when Westbrook, the plantation, was founded,” Nick said.
Grandpa Lee grunted. “Eighteen twenty-three.”
“I see.” Nick didn’t know what else to say.
“I know you’re a man of science, son.” Grandpa Lee sipped a bit of coffee and puckered his lips. “You’re thinking, how could a man who was living in the early 1800s still be walking this earth? I appreciate science, too, but Westbrook has nothing to do with such things.”
“I saw what happened when someone with the mark tries to cross the bridge,” Nick said. “I saw with my own eyes how it catches fire. I can’t explain it scientifically.”
“You’re going to have to suspend your scientific inclinations a lot more to understand what Westbrook is all about. The Overseeristhe curse. He was a man at one time—a Black man.”
“A Black man was in charge of supervising other Black slaves?” Nick had set down his coffee mug. He grimaced. “I’ve read history books about that happening, sometimes.”
“The position gave him power, respect. It earned him special disposition from the master of the plantation, Robert Westbrook. A Black man eager and willing to punish, push, and chase down his own people and feed them back into the plantation’s profit engine. He was a special breed indeed.”
“What was his name?” Nick asked. “No one’s been able to tell me his name.”
“I can’t tell you his name,” Grandpa Lee said. “You’ll have to find that out on your own. I believe he’s kept that a secret for a reason. An old belief is that if you know the name of a thing, that gives you power to control it.”
“He was a man, at one time,” Nick said. “What happened?”
“A great fire, born of a slave insurrection.” Reflections of candle flame danced in Grandpa Lee’s lenses. “The Overseer was an uncommonly cruel man, even by the standards back then.From the stories I pieced together from my father, the Overseer had exacted an unusually cruel punishment on a respected family that had worked the plantation for years, for some trivial act of disobedience. It tipped the scales too far this time, and the slaves decided to revolt.
“They set the estate and most of the buildings on fire. If you’ve seen any of them, and I believe you have, you would recognize the signs of a conflagration?—”
Nick nodded, thinking of the fire-ravaged barn and the other structures he’d seen.
“—so you can use your imagination to visualize the destruction that had torn across Westbrook at the time. Robert Westbrook and his family died in the blaze. Many others died, including some innocent. The Overseer died.”
