Illusion Read online

  Eight set Obadiah down and raised his hands, the cogs in his head spinning so obviously that it would have been comical if Barrie’d had any ideas of her own to contribute. Pru was the one who strode forward calmly to meet the deputies, as if there were nothing unusual in what she was doing there in the middle of the night.

  “Good evening,” she called. “Would y’all mind coming and giving us some help here?”

  “Shhhh. What are you doing?” Barrie hissed.

  “Trust me,” Pru said without looking at her.

  Behind them, from beside the overseer’s cabin, the dig crew members were also calling to one another and standing up, looking in their direction. Berg poked his head out of the tent nearby. Clearly, whatever invisibility or distraction spell Obadiah had woven had dissipated when he’d become unconscious.

  “Go pound on Cassie’s door and tell her we need her over here,” Eight said to Kate. “Right now. Don’t argue.”

  Kate opened her mouth, then closed it silently as Daphne sprinted toward the house, her white shirt streaming behind her. Pru raised her voice again, speaking to the deputies, who were approaching Obadiah with puzzled expressions.

  Pru didn’t give them time to ask any questions. “I’m so glad you two are here,” she said. “This is Mary’s cousin Obadiah, and we’ve got to get him over to a sofa and get him some ice. I think he fainted—low blood sugar, maybe, or the heat.”

  As excuses went, it was hopeless, but Pru spoke with quiet authority and complete assurance, as if no one could doubt her. The deputies peered at her, and then blinked and gave her a sheepish smile.

  “Oh, it’s you. Miss Pru, Ms. Mary. How y’all doing?” The deputy who spoke had a narrow head made even narrower by buzz-cut hair bisected by a widow’s peak and wide shoulders balanced out by a wide torso encased in a bulletproof vest. He examined Obadiah dubiously. “You sure that’s all that’s wrong with him? Looks like we ought to maybe call an ambulance. And where’d y’all come from anyway? What are you doing here in the dead of night?”

  Obadiah groaned where he lay on the ground, his head resting on the toe of Eight’s battered leather boat shoes, and he reached over to clamp a hand around Eight’s leg. Eight staggered a bit, and Barrie pushed between them to nudge Eight away, letting her own bare calf rest against Obadiah’s skin.

  “I know you, don’t I?” Pru smiled at the deputy. “My memory these days is not what it was, but you’ve got the look of a Price about you.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Jeffrey Price. Ms. Emma’s grandson.” The deputy grinned at Pru with a dip of his head.

  Pru’s smile widened coquettishly, and Barrie blinked, because if Pru wasn’t channeling Cassie, she was channeling someone else—Lula maybe, someone dazzling and charming and bigger than life. “My goodness,” she said, “the last time I saw you was at my father’s funeral. Wasn’t it?”

  “That’s right. I’d just finished up training for the sheriff’s department. Now, what’s going on here? I don’t know what happened, but we never even saw you arrive.”

  “Listen to you.” Mary waggled her finger at him. “First you fall asleep on the job, and then you stand around doin’ nothin’ while my cousin Obadiah’s on the ground. You should be ashamed of yourself!” She gestured to Kate. “Child, you pick up his feet, and you”—she pointed at Eight—“stop dawdlin’. We need to get the man up to the house.”

  Unwilling to risk letting Obadiah take energy from Eight for a third time that night, Barrie shook her head. “Let me help Obadiah. I think Eight might be feeling a little under the weather himself. Maybe we all ate something that didn’t agree with us.”

  She maneuvered herself into position, but one of the deputies came and picked Obadiah up beneath the shoulders while the other deputy took over carrying his legs as Berg, Andrew, and the rest of the archaeology team arrived. Barrie motioned for Berg to help.

  “What’s going on here? Where’d you all come from?” Andrew’s gaze slid past Obadiah to the cross and concentric circles that were still chalked inside the rectangle of police tape. “Is that a Bakongo cosmogram?”

  Mary rounded on him, hands propped on her hips. “We’re layin’ ghosts to rest. What did you think? That fancy equipment of yours broke all on its own the second you found a skeleton down in that room? Open graves need closin’. Now, y’all goin’ to stand around here all night or you goin’ to do somethin’ useful?”

  The two deputies exchanged a glance. Jeffrey Price smiled to himself, and his partner, a short, grizzled man with loose jowls and a narrow mustache, shook his head. “No spirit nonsense, now, Ms. Mary. You’re all going to have to go on home.”

  “You believe in the Fire Carrier, but the Colesworths can’t have a ghost of their own, is that it?” Mary said. “Or is it because I’m the one tellin’ you there’s a ghost? Now you listen to me, young man. You take my cousin right inside and stop meddlin’ in what you don’t begin to understand.” Mary waved her hand at the deputies, gesturing to where the front door of the Colesworth house stood open. Cassie and her mother had emerged, and Daphne was obviously finishing her explanation. Cassie looked up at Barrie, who waved her toward Obadiah.

  The deputies carried Obadiah a few more steps, but he suddenly raised his head and struggled and tried to kick his legs free. “You go ahead and put me down,” he said. “I can walk.” Suppressing a groan, he sagged a little between the officers as they set him on his feet. They braced him between them and guided him in the direction of the house while Cassie went to meet them.

  Andrew, meanwhile, had peeled himself away from the rest of the crew and wandered to where the fallen police tape fluttered along the ground. Just before he reached it, he stopped as if he’d run into an invisible wall. Brow furrowed, he peered back at Barrie. “I don’t understand what you were doing. And how did we not notice you coming over?”

  Gingerly disengaging himself from the two deputies and leaning on Cassie instead, Obadiah walked back to where Andrew stood and waved the rest of the dig crew and the deputies closer. Still leaning on Cassie and taking energy from her, he touched them one by one, speaking in a calm and confident tone. “There was nothing to see tonight, no cause for alarm. You’re growing tired now, and you want to be back where you started the evening.”

  The sound of his voice made Barrie think of the way he’d made her forget the first few times she had seen him. Or rather, it made her remember that she’d forgotten. Had he spoken to her like this then, too?

  “Hypnotism?” she asked. “Or magic?”

  “It’s a fine line, isn’t it? The difference between persuasion and compulsion,” Obadiah said with a shrug. Then he wiped his forehead and briefly closed his eyes.

  The deputies returned to their car, and Andrew and everyone on the dig crew returned slowly to their tents. Barrie grasped Berg’s elbow and held him there. He shook his head, looking bemused, until Obadiah touched him, and he came back to himself. Then Obadiah’s knees buckled. Despite Cassie’s help, he crumpled like a rag doll. Eight and Berg swooped in to catch him as he fell.

  Together the two of them supported Obadiah the rest of the way to house, the tops of his feet dragging in the gravel and scratching his shoes as he tried to walk. By the time he had reached the stoop, he seemed to have drained away every ounce of strength he had managed to borrow, and he stopped. “I need to rest a minute.”

  “What went wrong back there?” Eight asked.

  “Talking to the spirits took too long, and Mary said the exact wrong thing. All we accomplished was to give Ayita a taste of freedom. I warned you that she and Elijah didn’t have a lot of humanity left in them.”

  “So what do we do now?” Barrie asked.

  “You live up to your end of the bargain. I kept them contained like I promised.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Back in the Watson’s Landing kitchen forty minutes later, Eight slumped down at the table. Pru tossed the keys to the Mercedes onto the counter, drank a glass of water, and gave Barrie a
stern look.

  “Do you think you can please try not to get into any more trouble tonight?” she asked. “I’m not going to have to take the key to the tunnel to bed with me to keep it away from you, am I?”

  “No, Aunt Pru. I’ll go up to bed as soon as Eight leaves. I promise.”

  Pru sighed and set her glass down in the sink, then kissed Barrie briefly and pushed her way through the swinging door back into the corridor. Barrie and Eight both listened to the sound of her footsteps retreating against the soft backdrop of beach music from the radio on the counter.

  Eight leaned back in the chair and stretched his legs out. They were hard-muscled, long, and tanned. His sun-lightened hair fell across his forehead, rumpled-looking like his yellow shirt.

  The air thinned in the room around Barrie, became something forbidden, and she fidgeted with the stacked collection of notebooks, sample restaurant menus, and newspaper ads for the opening that lay beside the roses on the faded countertop. Her fingers felt cold.

  “What are you thinking?” Eight asked.

  “I’m thinking that hope is possibly the only inexhaustible resource on earth. What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking that you are like a compass. You veer off course when you hit an obstacle, but I can always be sure you’re going to find your way back to the right direction.”

  “Is this the right direction? I’m not sure this was the result we wanted.”

  Eight rested his forearms on his knees and shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore. Can we have a few minutes where we’re not thinking about bindings and curses and magic? Listening to Mary and Daphne was a good reminder that I don’t have nearly as big a stake in all of this as anyone else, and I don’t have a right to complain about much of anything. Not when ‘getting through’ is still the best that a lot of people can hope for.”

  “We can know we’re lucky and still feel a little overwhelmed.” Barrie’s voice wavered, not quite a crack, but close.

  “A little?” Eight asked with a crooked grin.

  Moving with the usual grace that made everything he did seem effortless, he shifted to his feet and crossed toward her. “I keep telling myself I’m going to put some distance between us, and the next thing I know, I find myself reaching out to touch you,” he said. “I seem to need to touch you.”

  His touch was gentle as he cupped her face with his palm, then he pulled her close and rested his chin on her hair. He smelled like himself, like root beer, and cloves, and cherries. She didn’t know why that surprised her, that his smile and the smell of him hadn’t changed.

  Slowly, she slipped her hands to his back and slid them up to burrow into the thick cords of muscle that throwing a baseball and swinging a bat had given him, reveling in the solidness and warmth against her fingers. She had seen him without his shirt: the wide planes of his chest, the rippled stomach, the ridges of muscle above his hips. The shift of fabric across his skin was pure temptation, like a present waiting to be unwrapped.

  Her breathing had fallen into rhythm with his, both of them breathing harder, their hearts beating faster, the only sound in the room except faint chords of beach music from the radio.

  He pulled away.

  “We should have music, if we’re going to have a reconciliation. It won’t matter if Cassie can’t give a big speech. Just inviting people there will be enough, and we’ll get people dancing and laughing. That’ll be a start. It’s a good idea, Bear. You were right. Hey.” He tipped her chin up. “Did your mama ever teach you the Carolina Shag?”

  Barrie shook her head, choking on a sudden bittersweet longing, because as much as it hurt for him not to kiss her at that moment, at least he was there with her. She remembered the joy of dancing in his arms in the cemetery beneath a red umbrella while the rain poured down. But she also remembered her mother dancing to beach music, moving painfully, shuffling with her odd gait to the beat of the Drifters and the Tams, the Midnighters, the Ravens, the Zodiacs, and the Platters, like her own peculiar form of a ring-shout. Had that been Lula’s way of getting through? Of surviving? Thinking of the beach music that had seeped out into the house from beneath her mother’s closed bedroom door at odd hours of the day and night, Barrie wanted desperately to understand what that dancing and that music had meant to Lula.

  “Whatever you seem to think,” she said to Eight, “you haven’t lost much of your gift at all. You still know what I want—what I really need.”

  “Maybe I just know you,” he said.

  “If that’s not magic, it’s something even better.”

  The radio was playing “Drift Away” by Dobie Gray. Eight dialed it louder and held Barrie’s hand firmly wrapped in his. “Start with your right foot,” he said, “and then it’s step-together-back and back-in-place.”

  He demonstrated and helped her through it, then put it all together.

  “There. You’ve got it. That’s the ‘basic’—easy, right?”

  Barrie frowned up at him, wishing for high heels, confidence, and some of her cousin’s sex appeal. “What do I do with my other hand?”

  “Just keep it at your waist.” He squeezed the hand he was holding lightly and then eased up a little. “You want to feel where I lead with this one, and let me feel where you want to go and how you want to get there. Shag is an improv. You get the foundation and then set off on your own or together into spins and fancy steps. You meet at the turn.”

  He moved her back and forward—step-together-back, back-in-place, rock-step. Step-together-back, back-in-place, rock-step. When Barrie had the rhythm, he took his place in front of her and kept going, same steps, his left foot to her right, his right to her left, holding her hand and moving apart and back together again. The same push-pull that had always been there between them. But the push all along had been mostly hers, her fear to trust her own feelings as well as his. She let go this time, let herself believe that when they came apart, the rhythm of the dance would bring them right back together, as inevitable as the tide of the Atlantic sweeping up the mouth of the Santisto. As inevitable as the breath that whispered in her lungs and the blood and the binding that sang in her veins when he pushed his thumb against hers, stepped to the side, and pulled her smoothly into a spin, moving around her and bringing her back.

  They danced as the songs changed, as the mood changed, their feet moving low and fast, so smooth that it was easy to forget the movement and see only Eight’s eyes on hers, always on hers. It was freeing, careless, exhilarating, alive. So alive.

  Ultimately, wasn’t dance a whispered question? A story told through the position of a foot, the tilt of a head, the touch of a hand, the brush of an eye. A rite of passage. A claiming.

  “Too Late to Turn Back Now” by Cornelius Brothers and Sister Rose came on the radio, and Barrie knew it had been much too late for much too long. Eight kept her close as he finished a turn. He pulled her closer, and he kissed her, so slowly and breathlessly that she was dizzy with remembering where they had begun and who she had become because of him. Who she was becoming with him.

  The air was charged around them. The avocado kitchen with its years of meals and hopes and fears melted away, and there was only them. Her and him. So alive in that moment that it made her ache.

  But just when they were so fused together that she couldn’t tell where one of them began and the other ended, he pulled away. Maurice Williams’s “Stay” was playing on the radio, and she whispered the word, changing it into a plea.

  “I can’t,” he said. “We have disasters to avert in the morning, remember?”

  “We haven’t really talked yet.”

  “If you don’t think we’ve been talking, you haven’t been listening, Bear. The dance and that kiss, that was all a conversation. I heard every word you said in here”—he tapped his hand above his heart—“and it reminded me that if you and I had both been listening to our feelings more carefully all along, we wouldn’t have had a problem.”

  “So do we?”r />
  “Do we what?” He lowered his brows in confusion.

  “Have a problem?”

  He smiled at her so beautifully that it made her want to close her eyes. “Ask me again if I want to stay.”

  “Do you want to stay?” She caught his shirt in both hands and pulled him closer.

  “So much that I have to go.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Seven o’clock in the morning shouldn’t have been allowed to exist when people didn’t go to bed until after midnight. Nevertheless, Barrie was resolved to have one day that began without her feeling like she was letting people down. Since Miranda and Batch had arrived, Pru and the yunwi had done all the work at the barn, and it was time that she pulled her weight.

  Squinting against the infusion of light, she threw on shorts and a tank top, but the pair of muddy hot pink Kate Spade sneakers with the bloodstain on the toe was still the only bit of practical footwear that she owned. Promising herself that she was going to get online and order some new sneakers, some cute flats, and a pair of polka-dotted rubber boots before Eight picked her up and the rest of the day spun beyond her control, she headed down to the kitchen. Then, mindful of her more important promise to Pru, she left a note before heading out to the stable surrounded by a curious huddle of yunwi.

  Miranda was still lying down in her stall, shavings like daisies dotting her long Friesian mane. She raised her head and whickered softly before rolling to her feet.

  Barrie rested her forehead against the wide space between the mare’s dark eyes. “Hello, sweet girl. Sorry to wake you up, but it’s time for breakfast.”

  The building smelled of old wood, new shavings, and the oddly pleasant mix of horse and manure. Bedding rustled while Batch scrambled to his feet in the next stall over, and Barrie and the yunwi worked together hauling feed and hay and water, and mucking out the stalls and grooming the horses the way that Pru had shown her. She was slowly working the tangles from Miranda’s mane when the already humid air went still.