Persuasion (2 page)

“Can’t do much even now. The Santisto’s a public river,” Seven said.

Barrie swung her attention back to him. “What does this have to do with the river?”

“There are a few boats using it to watch what’s going on here. Reporters and people hoping to see the Fire Carrier.” Seven pushed the car back into gear. “Don’t worry. The excitement will die down after your cousin’s hearing and
Wyatt’s funeral. Everything will go back to normal.”

In front of them, the black iron gate trembled and began to slide. A dozen or more knee-high figures with mischievous, childlike faces rushed through the opening toward Barrie’s side of the car. Their shadow-shapes were hard to see because of the daylight and the speed with which they moved, but their eyes etched dim trails of fire and gold into the air behind them. Barrie smiled and rolled down the window to stretch out her hand.

A movement on the six-foot wall beside the gatepost made her pause.

There was a man sitting up on top. He was dark from head to toe, dressed in a black suit with a sheen that blended into his skin and an aubergine silk shirt, and he was reading a newspaper so casually, he could as easily have been sitting at home on his sofa. He turned and looked dead at Barrie. Thick rows of dreadlocks swung past his shoulders, and when he lowered the newspaper, something white flashed in sharp contrast against his wrist.

Barrie shaded her eyes, and he smiled . . . and vanished. Between one blink and the next, the top of the wall was empty except for a large raven sitting in the spot where the man had been. The bird peered at her with its head tilted considerably.

“Bear? Are you all right?” Eight grasped Barrie’s shoulder. “What happened? You’ve gone as white as a sheet.” He
managed to avoid the five-day-old stitches where a piece of her uncle’s exploding speedboat had sliced into Barrie’s muscle as she’d tried to swim across the river, but she flinched anyway, and shivered.

“There was a . . . ,” she began, but before she could mention the man she had seen, she couldn’t remember what she had meant to say.

Eight’s forehead creased into worried lines. “There was a what? A person? Another reporter? Someone snooping around?”

Barrie tried to focus. She was supposed to remember something. . . . Her thoughts were sluggish, as if she were trying to think through quicksand. What had she been looking for? Why was she staring at an ordinary raven on the wall?

“Sorry. Nothing.” She shook her head to clear it. “It was nothing.”

The look Eight threw her was as sharp as it was reproachful. “One of your ‘nothings’ usually means there’s something. You’re not going to start keeping secrets again because we’re back, are you?”

“Pot, kettle, black, baseball guy. You’re the one keeping secrets.”

She watched the raven fly away until it was only a smudge of receding darkness. She was going crazy; that was all there was to it. Not that it was any wonder, with everything that
had happened and the migraine that hadn’t let up in days.

Seven had stopped to look around instead of driving through the gate, which wasn’t helping any. Rubbing the ache at her temple, Barrie nodded toward the entrance. “Can we please just
go
?” she asked.

The relief was instantaneous. The moment the car tires crunched on the white oyster shell and gravel of the avenue between the oaks, the Watson gift released its grip, as if Barrie had merely been another lost object that she was compelled to return to its proper place.

She sagged into her seat and filled her lungs with air scented by jasmine and magnolia. Fingers of moss hanging from the oak canopy overhead swayed in the breeze from the river, and the graceful old mansion at the end of the drive glowed white and gold in the waning sun. For once, all the dark green shutters hung straight and properly in place.

Ghost hunters or not, it was a relief—a joy—to be back. Barrie took in the wide lawns and the maze of hedges between the house and the Watson woods where the ground sloped gently toward the river that formed the boundary between Watson’s Landing and the Beaufort and Colesworth plantations on the opposite bank.

But a blue-canopied speedboat and two smaller craft marred the view.

Barrie wasn’t prepared for the way the sight felt wrong.
The boats staked out beyond the rippling expanse of marsh grass made her muscles tighten as if her whole body had turned into a charley horse and needed to be unclenched.

She wasn’t afraid; the claustrophobic feeling wasn’t one of her usual panic attacks, which, thank goodness, were becoming rare. This was something different, an anger that came from an urge to protect Pru and Watson’s Landing. Barrie wasn’t even sure how much of that emotion came from a natural sense of violation on hearing about the intruders, and how much stemmed from the magical binding that connected her to Watson’s Landing more strongly day by day.

With a glance at the
yunwi
running alongside the car, she drew the box with Mark’s urn closer to her chest. “Those are the boats you were talking about, the ghost hunters? How does anyone know the Fire Carrier was involved? Eight and I never told the police—or anyone.”

“You didn’t need to mention it.” Seven’s voice and eyes had both grown cold. “Enough people have claimed to see the flames on the river over the years, or at least they’ve heard the legend of the fire at midnight. Someone was bound to put two and two together when Wyatt’s boat exploded at that time of night—”

He broke off abruptly, but it was too late. Tears pricked Barrie’s eyes, and the memories swept in before she blinked: the face tattooed on the back of Ernesto’s skull, the strength of
his grip, the ache of his booted feet connecting with her ribs. None of it had faded from her nightmares yet, but it was her uncle’s voice that haunted her. Wyatt’s voice ordering her into the boat so they could take her out to kill her.

She couldn’t be sorry that he and Ernesto were dead.

She refused to be sorry.

A muscle ticked along Eight’s jaw as he read her, and he leaned toward her in concern.

She shook her head and turned back to Seven. “There isn’t anything you can do about the boats? There has to be some way to get rid of them.”

The instinct to protect Watson’s Landing was so new, she didn’t understand it herself. She didn’t expect Seven to mirror her outrage, but his eyes flashed, something real and raw sparking behind them before he seemed to get hold of himself. Then he rubbed his head with an exhausted wince, as if Barrie’s migraine had been contagious.

“Better to let the interest die down on its own,” he said. “Anything we do is only going to create more publicity. Your aunt’s put up
NO TRESPASSING
signs around the dock and shoreline, and so far that seems to be working. She hasn’t seen anyone coming ashore here the way the treasure hunters have done at Colesworth Place—”

“Treasure hunters?” Barrie’s voice was sharp. “I thought we were finally done with Cassie’s imaginary treasure.”

Seven swerved to avoid the white peacock and pair of peahens that had strayed too close to the road. “The treasure might not be so imaginary after all. One of the reporters found an old newspaper article while he was snooping around. Alcee Colesworth took up the family tradition of privateering during the Civil War—”

“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.

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.