Persuasion (3 page)

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.

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.

It took a while to process what his silence meant; there were still too many thoughts flying at her all at once. “You knew,” she said, feeling stupid and kicking herself. “All the time we were in California talking about recipes we wanted to try for the restaurant and I was babbling on about tables by the fountain and candles in the water, you knew the tearoom was closed and our plans weren’t going to happen.”

“You
wanted
to be distracted. Dad and Pru thought—”

“What? That I couldn’t handle it?” Heat spilled across Barrie’s cheeks. She tapped him on the chest with her finger, wishing he could read her feelings or her
reasons
instead of just what she wanted most, because she wasn’t positive she could explain. She had never been good at explanations.