Compulsion (37 page)

L. Watson.
Luke, who was supposed to have deserted the navy, deserted Watson’s Landing, but never had.

Barrie ran her fingers over the letters and felt the click again and then a lightness. A release. Peace. As if not only the spirits, but the walls, the ground, the very air around her sighed.

Luke’s ghost vanished. Maybe recognition was all his spirit had needed to move on.

All this time, the Watson gift had been screaming for someone to find the bodies Emmett had wanted hidden. It couldn’t have been coincidence that Lula had discovered the hidden room the night she had run away. The night Emmett had locked her up. What would Emmett have done to keep the secret of what he had done to Luke and Twila?

What was it Mary had said? That
plat eyes
were the spirits of the unburied dead. Barrie had assumed Mary was mixing up
plat eyes
and
yunwi
, using some Gullah superstition to explain what she didn’t understand. But the way the
yunwi
had behaved, the way they had reacted to the ghosts, the way they stood now, looking at the skeletons so solemnly, they clearly wanted Luke and Twila found.

Emmett had stolen more than life from Luke and Twila. He had left them unacknowledged. Ungrieved and unremembered. He had left their spirits lost.

The wings and name tag from Luke’s uniform dug into Barrie’s fist. “Their bodies have been here all along,” she said. “Luke was a hero, and Emmett made him look like a deserter. He and Twila were in love, and Emmett kept them apart even after they were dead.”

Eight gathered her in again to drop a kiss onto her hair.

In the silence there came a sudden rustle of plastic and the clatter and clank of metal hitting metal. Eight spun around. “Who’s there?”

Barrie dove for the flashlight. In its faded beam, her cousin’s face shone furious and guilty. She was dragging the bag of silver backward toward the door.

“What are you doing?” Rage at her cousin bubbled up and made Barrie’s voice harsh and clipped.

“I’m leaving!” Cassie pulled the bag of silver more quickly.

Eight sprinted forward.

Barrie needed to create some kind of distraction to slow Cassie down. “Hold on a second,” she said. “Tell me what you’re doing. What is it you want?”

“Besides the silver, you mean?” Cassie shook her head. “I’ve spent my whole life not being as good as the Beauforts and the Watsons. But your grandfather killed his own brother! And look at the stuff he just threw away down here like it didn’t even matter. Look at you. You strut in here with your gold watch and diamonds, acting so innocent. You’ve got Eight
and
Watson’s Landing, when they’ve never—he’s never—even given me a chance. You Watsons get away with anything. Even murder.”

She stepped through the open door and pulled the bag through to the other side with a triumphant glare at Eight, who had almost reached her.

“Wait.” Barrie struggled to find something to make Cassie pause. “Don’t you see? Now you’ll have the pleasure of telling everyone what Emmett did.”

“That would be fun, but I’m going to help you cover up your murder and protect your perfect reputation instead. No one will ever need to know.” Cassie gave a shove, and the door closed with a bang that bounced off the walls.

Reaching the door too late, Eight slammed both fists against the iron. Cassie had already locked it behind her. “Damn it, I left the key in the lock. What kind of an idiot am I?”

“The same kind I am.” Barrie dropped into a crouch along the wall and let her head fall back against the bricks. “We didn’t know Cassie was going to follow us. I didn’t even think to lock the kitchen door to keep her out.”

The
yunwi
had fixed the security chain, and she had left it dangling.

“
I
should have known what she was going to do,” Eight said bitterly.

Barrie looked up at him. “Cassie probably didn’t even know until after we had gone inside. But blaming ourselves is useless. Cassie’s going to have to come back eventually, right?
She’ll change her mind just like she did with my necklace. She gave it back as soon as she thought she was going to get caught.”

“That’s exactly why she won’t come back. Taking your necklace was one thing, but locking us down here? That’s a whole other level of stupid.” Eight braced his forearms against the door and rested his head against the iron.

“She’ll say it was a prank.”

“Who in this town would believe her over us?”

“She wouldn’t leave us here to die. Would she?”

Eight kicked the door again and didn’t answer.

A dry, aching cold shivered down Barrie’s arms and seeped into her bones. Her chest tightened, squeezing until there was no room for air.

No one knew this place was here. All Cassie had to do was throw Lula’s sketchbook into the hidden room and close the panel behind the bed.

Given how resistant Pru was to using the gift, she probably wouldn’t even think to check the abandoned wing. Even if she managed to piece the clues together, she wouldn’t have the key.

Barrie dug her phone out of her pocket. No bars. Of course. And screaming wouldn’t help. No one was going to hear them this deep underground.

She shifted Luke’s wings and name tag into her other
hand and dug Twila’s ring and locket out of her other pocket. Holding them all together in her palm, she tried to think. She spun toward the
yunwi
, who still stood motionless, well away from the door.

“Do something, can’t you? If you can dismantle shutters and stairs,” she told them, “a lock can’t be any problem.”

Eight turned toward her. “Who are you talking to?”

“The
yunwi
.”

“They’ve been here all along?” He looked around sharply when Barrie nodded. “Well, even if they are here, I doubt they can go near the door,” he said. “I’ll bet that’s why it’s made of iron in the first place. The screws I took out of the shutter for Pru were galvanized steel, but she had me replace them with iron. She probably thought that would keep the
yunwi
from working them loose again.”

Pru had said something to Mary about using iron in place of wooden pegs, and most of the
yunwi
had fallen back before they’d reached the bottom of the narrow staircase. Iron had to hurt them, if it made them so afraid to touch it or even go near it. The few who had come into the tunnel with her must have been very determined to make sure she found Luke’s and Twila’s bodies.

Barrie cut the flashlight back to Luke—her great-uncle—and to the girl he had loved. Love had been written in every line of Luke’s body, in the yearning of his spectral fingers as
he’d reached out to Twila. Were the two of them back together now? Barrie tried not to imagine that she and Eight might be trapped down here long enough to turn to dust and bones. She played the beam of the flashlight past the bodies, but the floor just faded into darkness.

“This tunnel has to go somewhere. There has to be a way out.” Barrie shone the light back at Eight.

His attention sharpened on the wall near the door. “Hold on. Shine the flashlight back over there.”

Barrie trained the thinning trickle of light on a recess two bricks thick and two feet high. Inside it an old-fashioned lantern hung from a hook, with an age-stained tin box on the ledge below it. Eight picked up the lantern and examined it.

“That can’t possibly work,” Barrie said. “Come on. We’re better off trying to find an exit before the flashlight dies.”

“No, look.” He sloshed the oil inside the lantern. “It’s sealed up tight. All we have to do is get it lit, and this is a tinderbox. They did a demonstration with one at the Charleston Museum. They’re not that hard to use.”

“This isn’t the time for a geek moment,” Barrie said as he opened the box and held up a piece of rock and a wad of yarn scraps.

“Actually, it’s the perfect time. The flashlight’s going to give out any minute.”

After placing the yarn into his left hand, Eight struck the
flint against the fire steel. A spark lit but missed the yarn. He let out a huff of breath, adjusted the flint, and struck again.

“I told you it wouldn’t work,” Barrie said.

But even as she spoke, a curl of smoke rose from the yarn. Eight blew gently to fan it. Barrie pulled the candle out of the tinderbox and tipped the wick into the yarn. It caught with a nose-stinging
pppfft
and lit the small triumphant gleam in Eight’s eyes. He took the candle from her and used it to light the lantern. The flame guttered, then steadied. Reflecting in the mirror at the back of the lantern, it gave off a surprising amount of light. Eight blew out the candle, turned off the flashlight, and tucked it into the waistband of his shorts. He reassembled the tinderbox before sliding it into his pocket.

“Ready?” he asked.

With the light and triumph playing across his features, he looked even more beautiful than usual. Things, and people, were always more beautiful when you were afraid to lose them.

Barrie’s throat felt raw, and she swept past him. “Man, I hate being underground. Let’s at least hope this tunnel isn’t collapsed like the Colesworth one.”

“It looks pretty stable. Thomas or whoever went to a lot of trouble bricking it in.”

“By ‘whoever,’ I take it you mean the slaves?”

“Why are you mad at me again?” Eight reached out and took her hand as he walked beside her. “I just meant you didn’t
have to worry. I know slavery was awful. I just meant that labor-intensive things tend to last. Think of all the building the Romans did underground that has held up all this time. The drinking fountains in Rome still feed from the original ancient aqueducts, which are two thousand years old. What’s three hundred years compared to that?”

What was seventeen years in comparison? There were so many places Barrie hadn’t been. She hadn’t been anywhere, really. She didn’t even have a bucket list. Dying without a bucket list was worse than dying without finishing one.

“I want to go to Rome before I die,” she said.

“Fine. I’ll take you. Or you’ll take me. We can take each other.” Eight squeezed her hand.

The
yunwi
milled around them for a while, subdued and harder for Barrie to see in the lantern light. She and Eight had been walking some five minutes before she registered that the tunnel had been sloping gently downward. Now it leveled out, and another lantern hung in a niche cut into the wall. She pulled free of Eight to retrieve it.

“We’ve probably got enough light already,” Eight said. “Let’s just go. We have to be close to the river by now.”

“What if the tunnel goes straight under to the other bank?”

His forehead creasing, Eight peered ahead. “I doubt it. The whole reason for the tunnels would have been to get away during the Yamassee uprising. Or maybe other Indian raids
before that. Or away from other pirates, if Thomas was paranoid. He would have wanted to escape on the river.”

“You’re not escaping if you are still on an island. As long as someone was going to all the trouble of making a tunnel this elaborate, why wouldn’t they go all the way across?”

“You think it goes to Beaufort Hall?”

“I doubt it would go to Colesworth Place.” Barrie started limping ahead with renewed determination.

Twenty yards ahead, the tunnel split. She walked a few steps farther, then paused to picture the geography above-ground. Eight tugged her toward the left. “This way should come out in the Watson woods. Apparently old Thomas believed in hedging his bets.”

“Hold on.”

The
yunwi
weren’t with them anymore. Barrie turned back and found them standing a few yards behind where the tunnel branched, as if they had reached another invisible barrier they couldn’t cross.

It was absurd to worry about leaving them. But they watched her so forlornly, and she was leaving them locked up here alone in the dark. Not that it would be for long. There had to be two ways out of the tunnel to choose from now. At least one of them was bound to work. Maybe.

“I’ll come back and let you out,” she told the
yunwi
, with more confidence than she felt.