Persuasion Page 2

  “Piracy,” Barrie said. “Call it what it is.”

  “Privateering sanctioned by the Jefferson Davis government,” Seven corrected, “at least in this instance. Although, in typical Colesworth fashion, Alcee never shared his last prize with anyone. His ship sank outside Charleston Harbor, and by the time they managed to raise it, the gold had disappeared. It’s not a stretch to assume he kept it for himself.”

  Not long ago, Barrie would have argued Seven’s assumption. She would have said it was unfair to jump to conclusions merely because of the feud that had existed between the Colesworths and the Watsons and Beauforts for three hundred years. Barrie was, after all, a Colesworth, too, on her father’s side. But she had learned the hard way that the feud existed because the Colesworths weren’t capable of being honest with anyone, or of accepting a hand offered to them in friendship. Why her mother had ever run off with one of them, Barrie would never understand. But Lula had spent the remainder of her life paying bitterly for that mistake.

  The idea that Cassie had actually told the truth about the treasure . . . about anything? Barrie didn’t believe that, and what her finding gift had sensed at Colesworth Place hadn’t felt like gold or money.

  She stared through the trees to the dark water of the Santisto, gleaming with the dull sheen of tarnished silver. On the opposite bank, the jagged columns and shattered chimneys that were all that remained of the ruined Colesworth mansion stood atop a shallow rise. As always, the sight made Barrie thankful that Watson’s Landing was still intact. A little frayed at the edges, like one of her aunt Pru’s well-worn sundresses, but perfect and beautiful and familiar.

  Only the boats were wrong. Barrie shivered as she remembered the last boat the Fire Carrier had encountered, and her breath came easier once the river was out of sight.

  The Jaguar crawled to a stop in the circular drive below the columned portico. At the top of the wide front steps, one of the double doors flew open, and Barrie’s aunt hurried down to meet them. Barrie was barely out of the car before Pru was there, flinging her arms wide and then squeezing hard enough to make Barrie’s stitches groan.

  “Lord, I’ve missed you! It seems like a month since you left.” Pru stood back to look at Barrie critically before giving Seven a baleful frown. “Didn’t you feed this child while you were gone, Seven Beaufort? She’s likely to disappear on us.” Leaning forward, she kissed Barrie on the forehead. “Now, don’t you worry, sugar. We’ll get you straightened out in no time. I’m making a beef roast with sweet potatoes for supper, and I’ve got bourbon chocolate cake for dessert. That’s the only upside to having the tearoom closed: there’s plenty of time for cooking.”

  Barrie shifted the box to her other arm and gave a reluctant nod.

  Pru eyed the box a little wildly. “Is that . . . Oh, honey, have you been holding him all this time?”

  “I couldn’t put him in the luggage.” Barrie was pleased her voice didn’t tremble.

  “Do you want any help finding a place to put . . . him?” Pru turned helplessly to Seven, but he was watching her as if she were a slice of his favorite whoopie pie cake and he wanted to eat her up.

  Barrie couldn’t help an inward smile. “You and Seven go do whatever you need to do in the kitchen.” She held her hand out to Eight as he popped the trunk to get the suitcases. “Eight can come and help me.”

  Apart from needing to find a safe place for Mark, she and Eight hadn’t had a moment all day to be alone.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The box slipped in the crook of Barrie’s elbow. It grew heavier the longer that she held it. How was it possible that with all the rooms at Watson’s Landing, all the Sheraton cabinets, Hepple-white sideboards, and Chippendale tables, there didn’t seem to be a nook or cranny where Mark would fit? None of the antiques were as too-perfectly preserved and off-limits as those that Barrie’s mother had collected, but none of them felt like Mark.

  The library wasn’t any better. Pausing on the threshold, Barrie took in the new bowl of flowers Pru had put on the table between the wingback chairs and the new chintz curtains hanging in the windows. It was a beautiful room, but no amount of cleaning or redecorating could erase the fact that it had been the inner sanctum of a man who had murdered his own brother. The fog of his sins seemed to fill the room.

  Murder. The word was still impossible to process. Barrie was related to murderers both on her Colesworth side and on her Watson side.

  “Maybe we should try in the front parlor again,” she said, turning to go.

  “Bear, we’ve been in there twice already.” Gently, Eight folded her free hand into his. The rough baseball calluses were familiar and comforting against her skin, and his grip was steadying. “You have to let him go,” he said.

  I can’t. Barrie wanted to scream the words.

  She had thought she was doing all right, surviving the blows one at a time. Discovering the skeletons of Luke Watson and Twila Beaufort in the tunnel and being locked in the tunnel herself by her cousin Cassie, that had shaken her. But she had held herself together. She had managed to escape when Ernesto and her uncle Wyatt had tried to kill her after she discovered their drug smuggling operation. The same smuggling operation that years before had made Wyatt set the fire that had killed her father and left her mother scarred.

  With Eight’s help, Barrie had survived the whole long, awful night and finding out that Mark had died. She had made it through the trip to San Francisco and sorting through the last of Mark and Lula’s things. But how was she going to survive saying good-bye to Mark? How was she supposed to let him go? She didn’t have the strength for that.

  “Let me do it.” Dropping a kiss on her nose, Eight removed the box from her hand. After he set it on the corner of the desk and took the urn out, a piece of paper fluttered to the Oriental carpet.

  Barrie stooped to pick it up, but she knew what it said by heart.

  Isn’t this a hell of a thing, baby girl? The damn cancer is growing faster than I thought, so I better write down everything I don’t have the courage to tell you on the phone.

  Don’t you ever, ever forget that I love you, all right? Raising you is the best thing I’ve done. You’re my legacy, so remember your promise to put mileage on those fabulous shoes for both our sakes. And if that number Eight of yours is what’s going to make you happy, go after him with a pitchfork.

  Now, baby girl, here’s the hard part. I’m leaving it to you to decide what to do with my ashes. You’ll probably hate me for that awhile, but you’re the one who is going to need the ceremony. I’ll be okay with anything you decide, and anyway, I’m planning on sticking around to watch what you make of yourself. Make it interesting for me, would you?

  Make me proud.

  There was no salutation or signature. No closing. No closure.

  “I need to find the right place. It’s the one last thing I can do for him.” Barrie smoothed the crumpled paper and put it back into the box. “You don’t have to wait with me.”

  “I’m not going anywhere.” Eight studied her with his eyes drawn and worried. Then he caught both her hands. “Bear, I’ll be here for however long it takes you to find the perfect spot for Mark. You know that, but this indecision isn’t about a place. You couldn’t find anywhere that felt right in San Francisco, either.”

  “Mark deserves respect. He deserves everything.”

  “Of course he does.” Eight’s jaw grew even more square and stubborn, and he held his palms out, the rolled-up sleeves of his oxford slipping down to catch at the crooks of his elbows. “What about putting him in the glass case here for now, where he’ll be safe? At least, until you find someplace permanent that speaks to you. Do you know where Pru put the key?”

  “It’s probably on the key ring in the center drawer.” Barrie pointed to the desk.

  Eight gave her the kind of grin that always made her heart catch against her ribs. “There. That wasn’t so hard, right? It’s a good spot, and you have to admit, from everything you’ve told
me about Mark, he would have gotten a kick out of invading your grandfather’s space and giving Emmett a big up-yours.”

  Smiling when she wouldn’t have thought it was possible, Barrie picked the urn up from the desk while Eight retrieved the key. She traced the seams of gold in the dark blue lapis. They had reminded her of the kintsugi pottery she and Mark had seen at a museum once, simple vessels repaired with gold so that they were all the more beautiful for having broken. That was Mark. He had been the gold that ran through her life and made it whole.

  She moved to the cabinet as Eight fitted the key into the lock, but raised voices from down the corridor behind her made her pause. The kitchen door creaked open, and determined male footsteps echoed on the mahogany floorboards. Barrie listened for her aunt’s kitten-heeled tread escorting Eight’s father out, but Pru didn’t leave the kitchen.

  Barrie clutched the urn to her chest and blinked at Eight. “You want to go see what they’re fighting about?”

  “Not even a little bit. Stop trying to distract me.” He unlocked the cabinet door and held it open.

  Barrie instructed herself to move, to place the urn on the shelf, but her muscles seemed to belong to someone else.

  The problem was, Mark couldn’t be gone.

  “Bear?” Eight’s voice was gentler. “Do you want me to do the honors?”

  “I can manage.” She succeeded in pushing her feet forward, raising her arms. Each of the mechanical motions that should have been automatic required thought and force. She set the urn in position, stepped back to study it, and moved it one shelf up before putting it back again where she had originally set it.

  Eight waited to see if she would change her mind again. Then he shut and locked the cabinet and stood jiggling the keys in his palm as if he couldn’t decide what to do with them. As if he were contemplating appropriating them to save Barrie from herself.

  That would be exactly like him.

  “You can put the keys back in the drawer,” she said. “I’ll stop being neurotic.”

  “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.” With another teasing smile, Eight leaned in and kissed her. A light kiss, that was how it started, but she cupped his face in both hands to hold him close. He pulled back and gave her a searching look, and then his lips met hers with the kind of hunger that sent goose bumps up her spine and made her cling to him while she still could before he left her.

  She wished he weren’t going to school in California. She wished he would stay, because then she might have a chance to make things work with him. At USC, he would meet lots of girls. With his looks, and charm, and baseball scholarship, they would be all over him. How could she compete?

  He pulled away, and she felt lost again. His expression was dark and serious. “This is a pause, not a halt. I don’t want to start something more when Pru might come in, so I’m putting a bookmark right here.” He tapped her lip with his index finger. “I refuse to wait until after dinner to tell you what I need to say.”

  “I want to talk to you, too. About the boats and what’s going on.”

  Eight’s eyes gleamed in anticipation. “Me first,” he said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A whisper of wind down the oak-lined avenue cooled Barrie’s cheeks as Eight led her out the front door and around to the right side of the house. The shadow shapes of the yunwi crowded around her, surging ahead and darting impatiently back. She struggled to keep her footing in the strappy high-heeled sandals she had chosen that morning because they were a perfect match to her dark denim jeans.

  “Where are you dragging me, caveman baseball guy?” Barrie asked, forcing a smile because Eight was taking her somewhere, and because she was home, and because she hadn’t truly felt like smiling since the night Mark had died.

  “Haven’t you been to this side of the house?” Eight paused, his head tipping as he considered that. “I guess I keep forgetting that you haven’t had time to just wander around this place.”

  “I’ve been a little busy.”

  “Well, come on then. It’s out of sight of the river, and we won’t be interrupted by Pru or anyone else.”

  “There is no one else. The tearoom’s closed.”

  Eight shook his head at her, took her hand, and started walking. They cleared the side of the house and crossed the lawn toward a row of ruined outbuildings covered in vegetation. Although Barrie had seen the slave cabins and restored kitchen, icehouse, and chapel at Colesworth Place, she hadn’t so much as asked herself whether any of those structures still existed at Watson’s Landing. They weren’t visible from her room, standing as they did level with the main house, away from the path to the river.

  There weren’t any slave cabins, thank goodness. The closest building was a stable. A laced web of wisteria, resurrection fern, and Spanish moss decorated the bricks, making it eerily beautiful, an impression that was only intensified as a shadow flew over Barrie’s head and a raven landed in a nearby oak.

  At first glance, the stable complex looked neglected. Closer up, though, the masonry stood solid, and there was a structured harmony to the moss and vegetation that wasn’t truly wild. Even the wooden floors inside appeared intact when Barrie peered through a window. A heavy, heart-shaped iron padlock barred her entry, and the wooden door barely budged on its hinges when she shook it.

  “Is there any way inside?” she asked Eight across her shoulder.

  “Leave it for now. There’s something else I want you to see.”

  He bypassed the stand-alone kitchen and some other structures. The chapel was the only ruin. Charred by fire and roofless, it stood at the center of a fenced cemetery, with a congregation of angels, crosses, and tombstones of every possible size and shape, rank after rank of them, mourning above the silent graves outside its walls. Inside the chapel, an oak tree had taken root and spread its branches wide overhead to create a living ceiling.

  Eight paused beside the fence. “Beautiful, isn’t it? In the winter, when the leaves are off the trees, it’s visible from my room. I’ve always wanted a chance to come over and poke around.”

  “So basically, wanting to kiss me was only an excuse?”

  “Other way around.” Eight stepped closer and his eyes focused on her lips. “I’ll use any excuse to kiss you.”

  Instead of kissing her, though, he grinned and took her hand again to help her clamber over the waist-high fence. His touch lingered on her skin as he led the way through the empty arched entry into the chapel, where light filtered through the oak canopy to create streaks across the grassy floor. He grabbed the top of the doorway and leaned forward, rocking slightly on his toes as if he were testing the strength of the building. Nothing moved, not so much as a trickle of mortar crumbling from between the centuries-old bricks.

  How much of that preservation was due to the yunwi, and how much was due to the same sort of protection magic that had kept the tunnel beneath the river in perfect repair? There was still so little about Watson’s Landing that Barrie understood. The word “magic,” though—the idea of magic—still ran through her with a rush. Her gift had always been part of her, so much so that she’d never really thought of it as something special. Now, knowing that magic existed, and she was part of it, filled the world with possibility.

  “We have to find a way to get rid of the people on the river,” she said. “All the reporters and ghost hunters.” She turned back to look at Eight after slipping past him through the doorway. “It seems wrong for people beyond Watson Island to know about the Fire Carrier. Like too many people knowing will spoil it, the way you’re not supposed to tell a wish when you blow out a candle.”

  “I’d buy a billboard in Times Square if that was all it took.” Letting his hands drop from the doorway, Eight crossed the threshold.

  Barrie’s eyes widened. “You’d really get rid of your gift?”

  “You wouldn’t? Think about it. You wouldn’t have to deal with migraines, and you’d be free of Watson’s Landing.” He gave an easy one-shouldered shrug,
as if it didn’t matter.

  “I don’t want to be free of Watson’s Landing.”

  “Things would be a whole lot simpler.”

  “ ‘Simpler’ doesn’t mean ‘better.’ ”

  “Don’t let’s argue.” Eight caught Barrie’s hand and led her deeper into the chapel to where a waist-thick branch of the oak hung low and then snaked up and out through a glassless window. Leaning back against the branch, he pulled her toward him.

  “Don’t you hate people knowing about our gifts? About him?” Barrie whispered.

  “There’s no harm in a myth. That’s all people will assume the Fire Carrier is. Practically every plantation in the South has a white lady walking around in a nightgown, and every lonely road has a hitchhiking specter. So what if we have ghostly fire? Let people believe it or assume it’s a hoax, whatever they want. It doesn’t change anything for us.”

  “Tell that to Mary.” Barrie sniffed indignantly. “You realize she’s worked here most of her life, and now with the tearoom closed, she doesn’t have a job? And what if someone tries to sneak into the woods and the Fire Carrier hurts them? What happens then?”

  “He never has so far.”

  “He killed Wyatt and Ernesto!” The words came out so fast, it was as if they’d been bottled up in Barrie’s throat since the night of the explosion. Maybe they had been.

  Eight’s brows sloped inward as he studied her, but after a moment, he adjusted his hands at her waist and drew her even closer. The heat of his fingers burned through her synapses, making it harder to be afraid.

  “You listen to me, Bear. Wyatt and Ernesto, that was not your fault. Running drugs and trying to kill you were choices they made all on their own. The same applies to anyone who trespasses in the Watson woods. You can’t be responsible for people’s stupidity. You worry too much as it is.”

  “Worrying is what you do when you have strangers camped on your doorstep. And what happens to the restaurant we were going to open? You’ll be going to school in a month, so if we have to wait much longer, you won’t be able to help. Tourist season will be over soon after that. If we don’t open in July, there’s not much point starting until next summer. Wait, why are you turning away?” Barrie broke off as Eight’s eyes slid away from hers.