Compulsion (33 page)

The knowledge of what Cassie had done gnawed at Barrie while she dried off and put on her pajamas. She had been stupid to think her cousin’s feelings could have been hurt by what Eight had said. Cassie had bent to tie her shoe only so she could pick up the necklace. The whole time Barrie had been feeling sorry for her—the whole time Barrie had been promising to come back to help her—Cassie had been in the process of stealing Barrie’s necklace.

Family. What a joke.

It was all Barrie could do not to say as much when Pru came back and fussed over her, wrapped her ankle with a compression bandage, and fed her chicken soup—like chicken soup could fix strained muscles or ligaments.

“You need to eat, sugar,” Pru said. “Is your ankle feeling
worse? Maybe we ought to take you in for an X-ray.”

“I’m fine. I want to go to sleep, that’s all.”

Pru laid the back of her hand against Barrie’s forehead, as if her rudeness had to be due to fever. It was almost funny. Rolling onto her side, Barrie buried her face into the pillow and let Pru assume whatever she was going to assume. It didn’t matter.

“Call me if you need a drink or fresh ice—anything at all. And I’m leaving the letters on the desk for you.” Pru kissed Barrie’s forehead. “To be honest, I feel relieved having read them. I’m sad, too, and angry, and confused, and a lot of other emotions I haven’t sorted through yet. But I’ve been living in a fog all these years, and now that I know what happened, that fog has cleared away. I want clarity for you, too. Read the letters. They’ll make you feel better. I promise they will. Lula mentions headaches. You probably need to read that if nothing else.”

Headaches. Barrie started to reach for the letters, but her hand shook and she couldn’t make herself pick them up. Not if they were about her. Not after what Cassie—family—had done. She’d had enough family betrayal.

Even without the letters, pieces of the various puzzles were falling into place. By her own admission, Pru had been full of energy since that morning. Coming out of her fog probably had less to do with the letters and more to do with whatever had happened when Barrie had washed her bloody
hands in the fountain and the water spirit had appeared to accept a binding Barrie hadn’t meant to offer—a binding Barrie didn’t understand.
That
was what had changed. It had transferred something from Pru to Barrie. The headaches that kicked in every time Barrie left Watson’s Landing had been worse since then. So much had changed in the past few days, she hadn’t recognized what her own gift had been trying to tell her after she’d fallen at Colesworth Place.

Cassie had stolen from her.

The necklace was the only sign of approval Barrie’s mother had ever given her, the only acknowledgment that Lula had felt connected to Barrie’s art at all. Barrie hadn’t even begun to sort through what she felt about that.

Cassie had the necklace, Barrie knew it, but how could she prove it? All she could do was ask Cassie to give it back, and she could picture the smug look on her cousin’s face, the way Cassie would feign innocence. If Wyatt hated Barrie now, she couldn’t imagine what he would do if she accused Cassie of being a thief.

Still, she had to at least try to talk to Cassie.

She slept very little. The Fire Carrier came and went. Dawn paled the moon and tinted the sky in gold. Barrie eased out of bed, scattering the shadows around her. She tried out her bandaged ankle. It hurt, but it was tolerable. She hobbled to get her sketchbook.

Back on the bed with her foot elevated, she let her pencil drift with her thoughts: Cassie and Wyatt, Lula and Pru, the horrible old man from the library painting. The lines on the page took on a life of their own, the style growing thicker and bolder, more like her mother’s than her own.

She went back to the desk to retrieve Lula’s sketchbook and laid it flat on the bed for comparison. The oak alley. The fountain. The kitchen. The views from the balcony. It was funny how little Watson’s Landing had changed. It was mainly the emotion behind the pictures that was different.

The drawings showed Watson’s Landing as seen through Lula’s heart. It was the first real glimpse Barrie had ever had into her mother’s internal landscape, and she had never imagined Lula could be so passionate, so enamored with little details.

Had she ever known Lula at all?

Barrie’s mind reeled through all the missed opportunities. The things they had never said, the never-hads, the never-woulds, the could-have-beens of her mother’s death. Not just the landmarks of her life that Lula had already missed, but the moments Lula would never get to see. She wouldn’t come to Barrie’s high school graduation. She wouldn’t even have the chance to refuse to go. Then college graduation. Assuming Barrie went to college—but how could she?

And a wedding? Marriage? She thought of Eight leaving,
and Pru’s husk of a life here at Watson’s Landing, Lula’s life in San Francisco.

Barrie’s phone was in her hand before she remembered it was still the middle of the night on the West Coast. Mark would have a heart attack if she called him now. He would expect that something horrible had happened.

She had to stop calling him, had to stop needing—to hear his voice.

She flipped back through the sketchpad, looking for any glimpse of Lula she could find in her mother’s work. After the last sketch, there were at least a handful of pages missing, as if Lula had torn them out. Maybe she’d been bored with drawing architectural details. Barrie examined each sketch more carefully. Something in them nagged at her like a toothache.

At first glance she found nothing out of the ordinary. There were views of the river, of Beaufort Hall and Colesworth Place, of the gardens around Watson’s Landing and rooms she had never seen, of the master bedroom with carved panels on the walls. Pru’s room had framed photos of interesting building and bridges, and gauzy curtains blowing in the open windows. Lula’s was a clutter of photographs and hair ribbons, tiaras and sashes hanging on the wall. Homecoming Queen, Homecoming Princess times three, Miss Glass Slipper Queen of Hearts, Miss Southern Grace, Miss Magnolia, Miss South Carolina BBQ Shag. Lula must have been proud of them. The
letters were meticulously stenciled and readable in the sketch.

What had Lula imagined her life would be when she had walked across a pageant stage? Or waved to her admirers from the backseat of an open-topped convertible?

Barrie shoved the sketchbooks away and flopped back on the pillow. What was left of the dawn passed in restless thought and short gasps of sleep. She woke with her fists balled and her ankle aching when Pru came in at ten o’clock.

“Good morning! How do you feel? I brought you some breakfast. Also, Cassie’s downstairs asking for you.”

Of course she was. “Tell her to go away.”

“She’s on her way to work, but wanted to see how you are.” Pru set the tray on the desk, then crossed to the balcony to open the doors. The air already held the promise of scalding heat. “We should soak that ankle in Epsom salts before I leave for the afternoon.”

“Where are you going?”

“I have to see Seven for a bit and take care of some other errands. You should keep your foot propped up. Do you want me to tell Cassie you’ll call her later?”

“Whatever.”

Pru turned with the morning light behind her. “What happened between you two? Anything I need to know?”

“Nothing.” Barrie retreated behind closed eyelids.

She tried not to think about Cassie when Pru had gone,
tried not to picture Cassie’s alligator smile, her hand closed around Lula’s necklace. What was her cousin doing with it now? Trying to sell it? Rejoicing in the fact that she had it and Barrie didn’t? To think Barrie had been happy to have a cousin. To have more family. Rolling over, she chased sleep again and tried to quiet her racing thoughts, without much success.

Pru came back a couple of hours later with more ice and another tray of food. “Eight is downstairs asking to see you,” Pru said.

“Tell him I’ll call later,” Barrie said, not ready to see anyone. Even Eight. Especially Eight. “Or here, he can call me if he wants. Give him this.” She tore an empty corner from her sketch and scrawled her phone number on it.

“So I should give the number to Eight, but not to Cassie?” Pru peered at the scrap of paper, then at Barrie. “Sweetheart, you’re going to have to tell me what happened last night. The whole story.”

“Nothing happened—I wish you’d stop asking me. I’m tired, that’s all.”

Pru was silent; then she nodded. “All right,” she said, sounding tired and hurt. “I have to go out again, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you need anything, Mary’s here until six. Call the house phone and she’ll pick it up.”

“My ankle isn’t that bad. Honest. And I’m sorry I was—”

“You know you can trust me, don’t you? I’m worried about you.”

“I know that. Thank you, Aunt Pru.” Swinging off the bed, Barrie tested her weight on the bandaged leg. Limping slightly, she went to give Pru a hug.

When her aunt had gone, she stood in the middle of the room, unsure what to do with herself. Eight’s boat swayed gently at the Watson dock, and across the river, Beaufort Hall stood calmly on its hill. She took Lula’s sketchpad to the armchair in the corner and flipped through it again. Lula’s room, Pru’s room—each of them reflected their owner’s personality, but the pictures of the master bedroom showed little evidence that a woman had shared it with Emmett: a silver hairbrush on the vanity, a jewelry box on the dresser. Even the walk-in closet behind the bed looked sanitized and bare. Although Lula had drawn studies of the heavily carved paneling around the door, the room inside had no clothes or shoes, no jumble of belts and scarves, nothing but empty shelves. Why would someone put a closet behind the bed?

Unless it wasn’t a closet.

Unless they didn’t want anyone to find it.

And where was this bedroom with the heavy carvings on the walls? Barrie had opened every door off the corridor while looking for her cell phone. She thumbed back to the sketch of her mother’s bedroom and examined that more
closely too. The difference was there, now that she knew to look for it. Although she was used to seeing Beaufort Hall to the left when she stood on the balcony, Lula had drawn it to the right. The sketch of the view from Pru’s room was nearly identical.

The family hadn’t lived on this side of the house while the girls had been growing up. All of those bedrooms were in the wing with the terrible sense of loss.

Moving gingerly on her sore ankle, Barrie wriggled into a clean pair of capris and an orange shirt almost the same color as Mark’s hideous Isaac Mizrahi dress. The color looked better on her than on Mark, but not by much, and yet it made her smile. She pulled her phone off the charger and dialed his number.

“I’m wearing that horrible melon shirt you bought me,” she said. “I love it.”

“Did I tell you, or what? What are you and your hottie up to today? Tell me something good, baby girl.”

“I’m staying in for a change. Learning Lula’s drawing technique. Trying to figure her out.”

“Good luck with that.” He coughed out a laugh. “Maybe in my next life, or the afterlife, I’ll ask her what in the hell she was thinking all those years.”

He sounded tired and small.

“I thought you were coming back as Cleopatra,” Barrie
said, trying to picture him, to keep him from fading away. “You don’t believe in an afterlife.”

“Life looks different as you near the end. You want to have faith in something bigger than you are. And maybe my lack of faith was always more about me than God. I guess I thought if God couldn’t believe in me the way I am, there was no sense in me believing in him.” Mark’s laugh cracked and turned into a splintered cough that went on so long, he told her he’d have to call her back.

Except he didn’t.

Barrie waited five minutes, then ten. She redialed and got sent straight to voice mail. Redialing again, and then again and again, her emotions ricocheted between frustration and fear.

“Come on, Mark. Pick up.” After the fifth try, she stuck the phone into her pocket. She needed to move; she needed to
do
something so she wouldn’t panic. Because there was no reason to panic. Mark was fine. He was with the nearly-deads, and they had probably drawn him into a game of poker, or pulled him away to watch a DVD of
Veronica Mars
or
Buffy
. There were absolutely a dozen, a hundred, perfectly reasonable explanations why he hadn’t called her back.

Barrie wished she could make herself believe any one of them.

After having left her alone for most of the day, the
yunwi
swarmed around Barrie, interested and eager as she emerged from the cocoon of her room. She limped into the abandoned wing, following the finding pull that drew her toward the end of the hall. Curiosity made her open all the doors she passed. The motion left half-moon streaks on the dusty floorboards. No one had been in any of the rooms for years, but there seemed to be nothing unsafe about them.

Lula’s room was the third door from the end. Although Barrie recognized the furniture, Emmett had stripped the room of any personal effects or signs of personality, as if he’d been trying to stamp out every trace of Lula. Barrie closed her eyes, trying to feel Lula’s presence. There was only a hairpin half-wedged under the baseboard, and a strip of pictures from
a photo booth that had been forgotten behind the bed. Pru and Lula, side by side, their faces pressed together. Lula beautiful and undamaged, and looking so very much like Pru. Like Barrie.