Compulsion (34 page)

Barrie closed her fingers around the hairpin. In the photos, Lula’s hair was drawn back into a sleek ponytail. Had she fought with it the way Barrie did, caged it with pins to try to make it behave, while all the time she herself wanted to rebel? To break her father’s rules? To run away with Wade?

The emptiness of the house swelled around Barrie. Pru wasn’t back yet, and when Barrie glanced at her watch, it confirmed that the tearoom had closed and Mary would already have left. She stayed late only on Friday nights to prepare for the weekend.

Barrie had never been alone in a house, not once. But being by herself at Watson’s Landing wasn’t liberating. It was a thorny tumbleweed of a feeling that stirred up the need to scream, to play music with the volume all the way up, to run and kick the walls. Things she had never done, never could have done, in Lula’s house. For as long as she could remember, Barrie had been a ghost in her own life, quiet to compensate for not being wanted, always tiptoeing around Lula’s moods.

No, that wasn’t fair. Mark, at least, had wanted her. Mark had fought for her.

Until he was dying, and having her around got to be too hard and he, too, pushed her away.

Wow.
Wow.

The realization struck Barrie as if she had kicked a wall and it had kicked her back. Was that what she’d been doing sulking in her room? Pushing Eight and Pru away before they could hurt her too?

She hit redial, but Mark’s phone still went straight to voice mail. “Dammit, Mark! Where are you? I’m worried. If you went off to Pier 1 for more throw pillows, I’m going to have to come out there and smack you.” She paused and swallowed. “Please just call me. I love you and I’m worried.”

She strode to the last door in the corridor and threw it open. Her head was splitting from the loss seeping from inside the room. Groping the wall, she found a switch, but the light from the dust-coated chandelier overhead did little to dispel the darkness. She stepped into the room to go open the green velvet drapes drawn across the balcony doors.

Something moved beside the bed.

The hair bristled on Barrie’s neck, and her instinct to run was nearly as strong as the sense of loss clawing at her head. She tried to convince herself the white whisper of light was only the dust motes stirring. But the figure was too human-size, too translucent, too much like the woman in the fountain.
It moved as if it were falling to the floor. Then it disappeared, only to appear and fall again.

A spirit. Another spirit.

Barrie backed toward the door, but the
yunwi
rushed into the room to form a circle around the apparition. There were more
yunwi
than she had ever seen in one place. They stood, still as mourners, and the only movement came from the ghost. But unlike the water spirit or the
yunwi
, this one didn’t react to Barrie. It was only the
yunwi
who turned and looked at her, their fire eyes pleading with her for something, wanting something from her the same way the Fire Carrier wanted something.

“What?” Barrie asked. “What is it you need?”

But they only stood and stared.

Barrie glanced desperately around the room, looking for some kind of clue. Didn’t ghosts always want something? Wasn’t that why they haunted a place?

She found no answers to her questions. Down to the stiff silver-backed brushes, the room looked the same as it had in Lula’s sketches. It was hard for Barrie to think. Loss raked at her, making her head throb. It wasn’t the ghost, though, or not just the ghost. There was something inside the dresser too, but the darkest, most nauseating sense of loss radiated from beyond the bed.

The carved paneling Lula had drawn was closed, leaving no sign that a room lay hidden behind it.

Barrie climbed up onto the dark mahogany bed. A seam ran from the floor to the ceiling where Lula had shown an opening, but no matter how Barrie pushed or tried to pry it apart, it wouldn’t budge. Though there was no trace of a lock or lever, Lula must have found one to make the panel swing inward.

Or had she?

With the heavy bed in front of it, Lula couldn’t have found the room by accident. Someone else must have left it open long enough for her to get a glimpse inside. Yes, that made more sense. If Lula had come back later, searching for a way to open the paneling again . . . that would explain why she had been fascinated enough by the individual carvings to want to draw them.

Leaning across the headboard, Barrie prodded at the fleur-de-lis, the roses, the bearded faces around the seam. She imagined her mother pushing at these same carvings, trying to reach the room beyond the wall, to follow the finding pull even though Emmett had told her to ignore it. Even though he had told her the Watson gift was evil.

What if Lula had stumbled on the reason he had said that in the first place? Emmett’s warnings about the Watson gift and the Fire Carrier could have all been a lie to keep his daughters from finding whatever was in the room behind the
bed. Maybe
this
was the secret Lula had promised her father she wouldn’t share.

There had to be a pattern. Barrie went back and retrieved Lula’s sketchbook. Then she sat cross-legged on the dusty bed, studying the carvings on the panel behind it and comparing them to the last drawing her mother had made, the bearded face—Pan or Zeus? Some god with his eyes closed. Lula had drawn the carving skewed slightly to the right, as if it were twisting open. That was clear enough. What Lula hadn’t done was provide any hint to identify that one face from the hundreds of identical faces in the paneling all around the room.

Barrie’s eyes blurred on the thick pencil lines and delicate details of Lula’s sketches. She had been studying them too long. If there was a clue hidden in them, she couldn’t find it. Maybe Lula had left a message on one of the pages she had torn out. That could have been part of whatever deal she and Emmett had made. But if so, then Barrie would never learn the truth.

No. That wasn’t happening. Barrie wasn’t going to live at Watson’s Landing and leave that awful loss gnawing at her from beyond the wall.

She went back to studying the paneling. Rose, fleur-de-lis, leaves, bearded face. The same pattern as in the sketchbook. She knew the order, but where had Lula started? Barrie traced the lines of the sketch with the tip of her finger while staring at the nearest rose carving on the wall, trying to put herself into
her mother’s frame of mind. It was only then that she realized what she was seeing—and what she wasn’t. The rose in Lula’s drawing had a petal missing. She checked it twice more before she was certain.

She moved on to the next sketch in the book. The fleur-de-lis had an extra leaf.

Lula might have missed a petal, but she wouldn’t have consistently drawn what wasn’t there.

Her breath coming faster and her fingers tingling, Barrie leaned over the headboard, and finally . . . there. A rose with a petal missing. Followed by, yes, a fleur-de-lis with an extra leaf. All the way through the pattern, each carving had the same subtle anomalies that Lula had drawn, including a bearded man with an extra line between his brows.

“Gotcha,” Barrie said.

The headboard dug into her ribs as she leaned over to reach the bearded face. She prodded it, and nothing happened, but when she twisted, the face swiveled to the right and revealed a keyhole. For a key Barrie didn’t have.

The finding compulsion grew even stronger. Barrie threw down the sketchbook, sending the shadows scurrying along the floor. Climbing down from the bed, she followed the other pull of loss to the dresser, skirting behind the ghost and the yunwi gathered at the foot of the bed.

Surprisingly, clothes still filled the drawers. Men’s yellowing
undershirts and tightie-whitey underwear lay stacked in obsessive perfect rows. Starched, collared shirts in solids and conservative stripes were also precisely folded, and the sock drawer held at least thirty pairs of identical black socks. The only thing out of place was the Bible stuffed beneath four pairs of paisley pajamas.

Barrie pulled out the book. Her head spun with the loss roiling from its pages. Giving herself a mental shake, she opened the Bible, ruffled through it, and shook it out above the dresser. It fell open naturally. About three quarters of the way through, a section carved from the pages created a hollowed compartment. A locket and a diamond ring were nestled in the recess. An engagement ring.

She tipped both the necklace and the ring onto her palm. Her blood quickened. Beads of sweat dampened her lip and forehead. Prying open the locket with a fingernail, she found Luke Watson smiling at her from a faded photograph. Except for the navy uniform and the fighter jet beside him, he looked much as he had in the yearbook. Only now he wore a navy uniform and stood beside a fighter jet.

The shock of recognition rushed through Barrie. What was Luke’s picture doing in a locket in Emmett’s room?

She closed her fingers around the jewelry. Whose had it been? Not her grandmother’s. Twila would likely have given Emmett back his ring when she’d broken off their
engagement. But there was no reason he would have had her necklace, and his wife, Pru’s mother, certainly wouldn’t have had a locket with Luke’s picture inside.

Her mind churning with questions, Barrie turned from the dresser. She came face-to-face with the ghost.

Not the vague, pale apparition she had seen before. A ghost who was recognizably Twila Beaufort, a Twila not much older or different from how she had looked in the high school yearbook. A ghost girl in a miniskirt and red, shiny boots, her arms raised as if she were dancing with a lover. Her head was tilted and her lips were puckered. Kissing. Twila was kissing someone. Then she whipped around, her eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream.

Barrie nearly screamed. Horror had contorted Twila’s face. She collapsed to her knees, reached out for something—or someone—on the floor. Half-turning, she screamed again, and threw up her hands to protect her head. She fell sideways to the floor.

Hand over her mouth, Barrie stared in shock.

Murder. Twila had been murdered.

At that moment Barrie hated Watson’s Landing.

Twila had been kissing someone. Was that who she’d been reaching for on the floor? No. There would have been two ghosts if two people had been murdered. That seemed logical, if logic applied in situations like this.

The ring and the edges of the locket dug into Barrie’s palm as Twila’s ghost faded and began the cycle again. Twila kissing someone, screaming, falling to her knees, dying again, over and over like playing back a video, echoing the last moments of her life. With each repetition, Barrie hoped the scene would end differently. It never did. Twila must have been caught in this loop for forty—fifty—years.

Who had Twila been kissing here in Emmett’s room? Luke or Emmett? Had Luke caught her here with his brother and killed her? Was that why he’d run away?

Shivering, Barrie drew a sad face in the dust on the dresser and brought her finger away coated in grit as thick and dark as everything else in the room. The murder sickened her, the stillness sickened her; the loss sickened her.

She had to find the key.

She slipped the ring and necklace into her pocket and searched the rest of the room. Opened every cupboard. Ran her hand under each piece of furniture, behind each drawer in case something was taped back there. Threw open the curtains out to the balcony and sneezed at the flurry of dust. Then she peered back around the room, trying to think.

Downstairs the grandfather clock chimed seven times, seeming to echo in the stillness of the empty house. Seven? It had been more than two hours since Mark had promised to call her back. Barrie pulled her phone out of her pocket. She
still hadn’t heard from him. She dialed his number again, and what his silence might mean slowly sank in.

She had to brace herself against a wall as she got the hospice number from information. She waited while the hospice transferred her three times before connecting her to someone helpful. The nurse was one she remembered meeting when she’d gone to look at the place with Mark—a heavy blonde who’d bracketed all her sentences in “wows” and exclamation points.
Wow, we’re so happy to have Mark coming! Wow, he’s going to love the place! Wow, fantastic shoes!
There were no exclamation marks now, only discomfort punctuated by the click of a pen.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We had to transfer Mark to the hospital early this morning.”

“But I just talked to him a couple of hours ago. What’s wrong with him?”

“Pneumonia. If you’ve talked to him, maybe he’s feeling better already.” The forced cheerfulness was already creeping back into her voice.

“Why didn’t anyone call me?” Barrie asked. “I’m his emergency contact.”

“He asked us not to call. He wanted to do it himself as soon as he heard what the doctors said. I think he just didn’t want to worry you. You know how it is, honey. You have to keep a positive attitude, and Mark’s the best. We love having him around here.”

The pep talk grated on Barrie’s nerves. She thanked the nurse and asked her for the hospital number before finishing the call. Then she dialed the information desk and hyperventilated through the transfer to Mark’s room. Even when he picked up with a ragged “hello,” she couldn’t seem to take in air.

“What are you doing telling people not to call me?” she yelled at him. “I’m supposed to know if you are in the hospital! I should be there with you, not stuck out here not knowing anything.”

“The doctors don’t know anything either,” Mark said. “You’d fit right in.”

Barrie sank to the floor and hugged her knees. The smile was back in Mark’s voice. Thank God. She took a deeper breath. “So what
are
the doctors saying?”

“Nothing. They’re pumping me full of antibiotics and sticking oxygen up my nose. But it’s no big deal. Trust me, baby girl. The old bats at the hospice were afraid of getting sued, that’s all. I’m fine. I’m sorry for worrying you. I forgot to charge my phone last night, and the battery died so I couldn’t call you back. Have you been calling?”