Illusion Read online

  “Eight’s scared to talk to you,” Kate said as soon as Barrie had said hello. “He’s not even carrying his phone with him anymore.”

  “Is he all right?” Barrie let out a breath, not sure if it was relief or pain, and she walked away from the steps, past the trucks, and back up the driveway toward the big tree at the bottom. “Kate, help me out. What I can do? Even if he really doesn’t want to see me, I need to be sure he’s safe and happy. But I also need to keep Watson’s Landing safe, and I’m starting to suspect that can’t happen without Beaufort Hall. I need to know what your father knows—anything he’s admitted to Eight—”

  “Admitted? You’re acting as if Dad’s on trial. I know about him not telling us about the Beaufort binding, and you not telling Eight when you found out. I thought that was why Eight is so furious with you both. Is there something else?”

  It wasn’t that Kate didn’t deserve to know what was going on. She did. Barrie had withheld information from Eight in large part because it had seemed as if it would hurt less if his father confessed the lies himself. Even now, despite knowing how badly her silence had hurt Eight, she found that the instinct to protect Kate was still the same. And Eight had asked her not to get Kate involved.

  “Come on, Barrie.” Kate’s voice dropped into a whisper. “Remember how you felt when you first got here? You didn’t sit around being the only person who didn’t know what was going on. You went looking for answers. So tell me what happened to stir everything up.”

  Barrie almost laughed at that. “I happened. I came here with the finding gift. Then Cassie wanted me to find the treasure for her, and Wyatt was afraid I would find out about his drug smuggling, and the explosion put everything in the news, so Obadiah came and wanted me to find the lodestones—”

  “Who’s Obadiah? And what lodestones?”

  Barrie let out a sigh and picked an old acorn hat up out of the grass, rubbing her finger across the intricately patterned surface. “How about if we trade for information. I’ll tell you everything, and you tell me what’s going on with Eight.”

  “You first,” Kate said.

  Barrie sat down in the grass and picked up another acorn hat as she began to explain. Several yunwi who had followed her started to pick up hats as well and brought them to her, until by the time she had finished the explanation, she had a mound of them piled in front of her. She smiled at the yunwi and held up her hand for them to stop.

  “Now you,” she said to Kate. “You promised to tell me about Eight.”

  “He’s packing to go to Columbia to stay with a friend until school starts.”

  Barrie’s heart snagged on the words, and on the idea of not seeing him. Of not having any more chances to fix things between them. “Is that definite? You have to stop him.”

  “I’m not sure I can. He and Dad screamed at each other nonstop, and now they’re barely speaking.” Kate’s voice was more serious than Barrie had ever heard it.

  How had everything become such a mess?

  “Please, Kate. I need to talk to him. You have to try to get him to speak to me, at least so I can tell him about the lodestones. Tell him it’s important. Tell him anything you have to tell him so that he doesn’t leave without talking to me first.”

  Kate said nothing for several awkward beats. “Don’t put this all on yourself. Eight’s been broken for a long time. Our family’s been broken, and we just didn’t know it. That wasn’t your fault, but what comes next if you tell either of them about the lodestones, that will be your responsibility. They’ll both pressure you to give the stones to Obadiah if that’s what it takes to break the bindings. Then you’ll have everyone pushing you, and you’ll cave, even if you don’t want to. Not everybody wants what’s good for them.”

  “You sound like Eight.” Barrie shook her head, stood up, and headed back to the house. “Like a Beaufort.”

  “I am a Beaufort. My gift may not be as strong as Dad’s or even Eight’s, since he’s the heir, but that just means I have to be better at the nonmagical part. People are like books. The information’s all in there if you know how to read it, and I pay attention. Like, for instance, I know how much you want to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. Everyone but yourself. You don’t trust anyone to trust you. At the same time, you want to fix everything that’s been wrong here for three hundred years. You’re too nice.”

  “Naïve, you mean.”

  “Potato, po-tah-to,” Kate said. Then she hung up.

  Barrie reached the front steps and stood aside as two more of the appraiser’s staff came down carrying furniture out of the house. Sweat dripped down their faces and darkened the fabric of their blue overalls, and they wrestled the heavy pieces onto the waiting trucks.

  Above on the portico, Pru and a balding man with a flat, large-pored nose had emerged from the front door and stood flipping through documents on a clipboard, while a fourth man inched a Searle chest past them.

  Pru frowned, then stepped after him. “Hold on, not that one!”

  “Again?” The man with the clipboard wiped his forehead as Barrie climbed the last steps to where they stood. “You sure this time?”

  “This piece is heavy, Miss Pru. Is it coming or going?” The workman exchanged a look with the appraiser.

  Pru pushed her fine, pale curls behind her ear, her expression unexpectedly hesitant, frightened almost, the way that she had looked right after Barrie had first arrived and Seven Beaufort had rung the doorbell. As if the thought of standing up for herself was petrifying.

  “Staying,” Barrie said. “Definitely staying.”

  The appraiser waved his fingers back in the direction of the house, and the mover turned to take the chest back inside. Consulting his clipboard, the appraiser flipped through several pages before he found the item and scratched it off. “That’s the twelfth time you’ve changed your mind about a piece we agreed on. At this rate, there won’t be anything left, and we’re going to go back with an empty truck.”

  Barrie threaded her arm around Pru’s waist. “The list we sent over was just the things Pru wanted you to look at. That’s the whole point of an appraisal, isn’t it? So you can tell us how much you’ll pay or how much you think you can get for it on consignment?”

  “People usually stick to the list. My prices are more than fair,” the appraiser said in a sullen mutter. He looked as if he intended to keep arguing, but in no mood for anyone else to push Pru around, Barrie gave him a hard stare and squeezed Pru to keep her from apologizing.

  When the man had gone, Pru leaned over and kissed Barrie on the cheek. “Thank you for standing up for me. I don’t know why I turn into a mess around people like that.”

  “Bullies, you mean?” Barrie steered Pru into the shade of the portico. “Ignore him. You don’t have to give up anything you want to keep.”

  “I do love you, sugar.” Pru gave Barrie a slow and blinding smile. “You’re good for me. And you’re right. I was letting him walk all over me like my father did, which is the main reason I wanted to get rid of all this furniture and start over with fresh memories in the first place. Now, what happened to you?” She reached over and touched Barrie’s shorts and top. “My goodness, your clothes are wet.”

  “That’s a long, dull story, and I could really use a shower.” Barrie forced a smile. “For the record, though, you didn’t let your father do anything. He did it. That’s different.”

  “True, and I could give away every last stick of furniture he ever touched, and it wouldn’t change what happened. That’s what I realized when I saw all these pieces going out the door—I’m not only throwing away the bad memories, I’m losing all the good ones. Bits of my mama, and my grandmother, all the Christmases and Sunday suppers, all the shenanigans Lula ever pulled.”

  “So we’ll sell Lula’s furniture instead when it gets here.”

  “You sure you wouldn’t mind?” Pru’s face pinched into a frown.

  “Asking Mark to send Lula’s furniture here seemed like a good
idea because I thought you couldn’t afford to replace what the yunwi were taking apart—but that’s obviously not true. Anyway, my thinking was all tangled up with grief, and missing home, and wanting to help you because I couldn’t do anything to help Mark or my mother. All I really need are a few things, and we can sell the rest.”

  Pru laid a palm along Barrie’s cheek, and in the shade of the fluted columns of the portico, Pru’s face appeared a little less pale and drawn. “You and I have both been a bit of a mess, haven’t we? But we’re like the furniture. All those scars and scratches just prove we can survive whatever’s thrown at us.”

  Barrie hoped that was true, because at the moment, it seemed like there were a lot of knives in the air, and most of them seemed to be pointed in her direction.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  After working for several more hours, the appraisers left with only a fifth of the furniture that Pru had originally thought she was going to sell. Barrie, Pru, Mary, and Daphne rearranged the rest to leave room for the pieces from San Francisco that Barrie definitely wanted to keep, and it was only when Barrie finally escaped to the kitchen for lemonade that she had a chance to retrieve her phone from where she’d left it to recharge her battery.

  She found a whispered voice mail from Kate. “Why aren’t you picking up? You ask me to help you, then you don’t even answer when I call.”

  Barrie bolted up the stairs to her bedroom and paced the Oriental carpet until Kate finally answered. “What’s going on?”

  “Hold on a second.” Kate was whispering again. There was a long silence, and then her voice came back on the line in a more normal tone. “Man, your timing’s bad. Dad confiscated my phone when he found out I had called you earlier, so I had to steal it back. Thank goodness I had it on vibrate, or he would have killed me.”

  “I don’t even know where to begin with that.”

  “Forget it. I’m calling because I figured you’d want to know that Eight stopped packing. The sheriff called, and Dad went up to talk to Eight, and they started screaming at each other again. Then Dad came out of Eight’s room, and Eight stood there with an armload of shirts he was about to put into the suitcase, and he turned around and put them back inside his drawer.”

  “What did the sheriff want?” Barrie asked, grabbing the bedpost.

  “I don’t know. They mentioned something about someone being seen in Port Royal. They didn’t mention any names that I could hear.”

  Barrie thought instantly of Ernesto. She dropped down onto the edge of the bed so abruptly that the yunwi who had followed her upstairs dove under the armchair in the corner, and a handful of dried purple and yellow blooms of bougainvillea fell with a hiss from the sweetgrass basket on the desk. She told herself she was jumping to conclusions—there was no reason to think the conversation had anything to do with him. Except that Port Royal was just west of Saint Helena Island, where Pru had mentioned there had been break-ins.

  “Barrie?” Kate said. “You still there?”

  “Did you find out anything else?” Barrie asked.

  Kate’s voice was softer than usual when she spoke again. “No, but I’ve been thinking. Remember what I said about not telling Dad about Obadiah wanting the lodestones? Don’t let Pru tell him, either. And don’t tell Eight anything more than he knows already.”

  “I’m not keeping any more secrets from Eight.”

  “What if getting the lodestones kills him? Or Dad? Or even you? You’ve guilted yourself into helping Cassie and Mary and Daphne and whoever else, but it’s too risky to just throw the gifts away. I don’t blame you for wanting to keep your magic.”

  “I never said I was throwing it away.” Every part of Barrie recoiled at the idea that her gift was something to be disposed of, like the furniture. Drawing her feet up onto the embroidered quilt, she hugged her knees and stared down at the chipped polish on her rainbow-painted toes. “And what do you mean by ‘kill’?”

  Kate hesitated briefly. “I did actually overhear something else. Dad told Eight that our grandfather died trying to take apart the wall of a fountain that supposedly has something to do with our gift. A blood vessel burst in his brain, and he died. What if that had something to do with the lodestone being booby-trapped, like you said?”

  “I’m working on getting more information,” Barrie said, trying to keep her composure. “What else did your dad say? Did he know for certain how the fountain is related to your gift? Did he mention that the lodestone is there, or are you guessing?”

  “If I’m guessing, so will Dad. Don’t you see? If he finds out that giving the lodestone to Obadiah would break the binding, he’ll be tempted to take the fountain apart. That’s why you can’t tell him what Obadiah said. You haven’t seen him since things blew up with Eight. He’s so desperate, and how do we know he won’t do something crazy and stupid, figuring it would be worth the risk?”

  “Your father’s not like that—”

  “You don’t know! Anyway, I’m a Beaufort, too, and I deserve a vote. I don’t want to throw the gift away.” Kate hung up before Barrie could say anything else.

  Barrie wasn’t even sure what else there was to say. Hunched on the bed, she realized the edge of her thumb was sore from rubbing Mark’s watch, and she sat on her hands to keep from doing it again. As if they sensed her despair, the yunwi emerged from the corners of the room and crawled up beside her to offer comfort.

  “It would be so helpful if you could explain the binding and all the rest of this to me,” Barrie said. “You were here. You know what happened.”

  They had never had more than a one-word answer for any question she had asked them, so it didn’t surprise her when that was all they gave her now in their resonant, silent voices. It was a word she had heard them use before, the first time she had ever encountered Obadiah.

  Beware, they said.

  “Beware of what?”

  Was it her imagination, or had the yunwi become more shadowy and translucent? Were their bodies colder as they pressed against her?

  First one and then the rest vanished out the door and down the hallway. With a growl of frustration, Barrie slid down off the bed. Left alone, she stood staring down at the pattern on the carpet.

  What Kate had said scared her as much as everything that had happened with Obadiah. Because what if Eight or his father decided to test whatever was going on with the Beaufort fountain? What if they tried to find the lodestone? What if it was booby-trapped?

  Even if they didn’t touch it, what if the fountain at Beaufort Hall had something like the energy Barrie had felt out by the Scalping Tree? What would that do to someone who reached into that unprepared? The energy had grabbed hold of her and threatened to suck her under, and who knew what would have happened if Pru hadn’t brought her back to herself and pulled her away. Obadiah had warned her that energy could get addictive.

  She had to warn Eight. Make him listen to her. Explain the danger.

  They had to talk. If Eight wouldn’t answer her calls, and he wouldn’t see her in person, that left only one other option.

  She took her laptop out to the balcony and slumped down with her back against the wall. She had never written an actual letter, and she had no idea how to start one. Normal emails and texts were brief, and emojis and pics were shortcuts for feelings and information that were too hard to string together. Maybe it was impossible to say with words what she felt. But defeatist thoughts like that were fireflies trapped in jars; they were already dying by the time she caught them.

  Across the river, Eight’s window was dark and empty, and she wondered where he was and what he was doing. It felt wrong not to know.

  She focused on the laptop with renewed determination.

  Dear Eight,

  First, no matter what you do, DON’T go to the fountain. The lodestone could be booby-trapped, and you could end up dead like your grandfather. If that’s all you read in this letter, that’s okay, but I hope you’ll keep reading, because I have a lot more to tell you. />
  I took Daphne to meet Obadiah today, and I ended up telling Berg everything as well. Daphne was pretty shaken up, but Berg took it calmly. Then again, after what he must have seen in Afghanistan, there probably isn’t a whole lot that scares him. Not even Cassie. Lately, I feel like I probably wouldn’t recognize myself if I weren’t afraid.

  I’m afraid that having found a place and people I love, I’ll wake up to find it was only a dream.

  I’m afraid that a brief taste of happiness is all I’ll ever have, and that it will have to be enough to last the rest of my life.

  I’m afraid that something beautiful and wonderful will be lost forever at Watson’s Landing if I don’t find the right way to help Obadiah. I’m afraid to trust him too much—or not enough.

  I’m afraid to let down Cassie and Mary and Daphne if I don’t find a way to break the curse.

  I’m afraid that giving Obadiah the lodestones to break the curse will have consequences we wouldn’t want to live with.

  I’m afraid that something bad will happen to you if we don’t understand the consequences before we act.

  I’m afraid that you will never understand why I fight to protect Watson’s Landing and the magic, even when it’s that same magic that would keep us apart. The magic is part of me. Giving up something you can’t give up is not a choice, and any relationship that requires sacrificing yourself is built upon a lie.

  The most important thing you should know today is that you were right. About many things, including about the Raven Mocker. Obadiah claims he doesn’t actually take life from other people, only the natural energy that everyone absorbs from their environment and stores in their heart, among other places. If that doesn’t make him a Raven Mocker, maybe there’s more to the story than what we’ve found so far. Maybe there’s an older story that’s gotten confused the same way the story of the Fire Carrier has been confused. Stories seem to change every time they’re told.