Compulsion (14 page)

Barrie’s pulse and the throb in her temples hammered together at the undertone in Wyatt’s voice that didn’t match up with the friendliness of his words. Was he going to say anything about following them to the beach that afternoon? Should she say anything about it?

Maybe it had been someone else, or maybe he was embarrassed about it now. He had lost his brother. Of course he would hope that Lula had passed on some final message.

“I’m sorry.” What was Barrie supposed to say? “Lula didn’t really talk about living here.”

“You see, Daddy? You’re making Barrie uncomfortable.” Cassie threw him a stare, then smiled at Barrie. “Excuse us a second.” Grabbing her father’s arm, she marched him away so that her furious whispering wasn’t audible.

“Don’t worry,” Beth said. “They’re always like that. The man’s a piece of work, but Cassie knows how to handle him.”

Wyatt pointed back toward Barrie. Cassie shook her head. Wyatt started to step forward, and she put her hand on his arm and spoke to him with the kind of body language a parent used with a child who was about to do something unreasonable. It was an odd exchange, stranger still because Barrie couldn’t hear it.

Cassie must have won. Wyatt waved at Barrie and strode toward the exit, and Cassie returned to the table.

“Sorry about that.” She slid back into the booth with a blinding smile. “Your daddy was his only brother, so he’s been anxious to hear all about you and Lula. I told him I wanted you to myself for tonight. There’ll be plenty of time for you to come over and catch up on family history. Daddy’s got lots of photographs of Uncle Wade to show you.”

Wyatt probably knew a lot more about why Lula and Wade had run off than anyone else in town, and Barrie should have jumped at the chance to see photographs of her father. She should have wanted to say she would love to go to Colesworth Place. But her warning radar was stuck in the on position. Which was stupid. Wyatt had been more than friendly. The wrongness in the pit of her stomach had to be a leftover effect from the afternoon and the things Pru and Eight had told her. It didn’t make Barrie proud to realize she had bought into their paranoia about the Colesworths.

She leaned back as the waitress brought their Cokes and
passed them around. After scrunching the paper wrapper down her straw as tight as it would go, she eased it off and dribbled a few drops of water over it. The paper unwound like a snake, as unruly as Barrie’s tongue, which still refused to cooperate. She couldn’t make herself say she wanted to spend time with Wyatt when she didn’t.

“You’re not worried about my daddy, are you?” Cassie eased forward on her elbows, watching Barrie. “I can tell you didn’t like him. Please don’t let him put you off! You’ve probably heard stories about him, haven’t you? The only people you’ve spent real time with so far are Watsons and Beauforts, so you’re bound to have the wrong impression of us. Daddy can be a little odd sometimes, I’ll admit. But the thing is, we’re all dying to know.”

“Know what?” Barrie asked.

Cassie made a face that stopped just shy of an eye roll. “Which family trait you ended up with. What did you get? The Watson gift or the Colesworth curse?”

Goose bumps ran along Barrie’s skin. Cassie mentioned the gift so casually, out in the open, in front of the other girls. And they only looked at Barrie with idle curiosity. As if
of course
everyone knew about the gift.

Or maybe the shiver came from the other word.

“What curse?” she asked.

“You don’t know? Really?” Cassie’s expression hovered
somewhere between scorn and disbelief. “Didn’t your mama tell you? Or Pru—or Eight?”

“Why don’t you tell me?”

Cassie seemed to surge with energy, as if someone had turned a three-way bulb up a click. She jumped to her feet. “Let’s move outside. I can’t shout over the music.” She winked at Barrie. “Plus we need better atmosphere.”

Gilly and Beth gathered up their silverware, so Barrie did the same. Cassie tossed a five-dollar bill onto the table, paused to tell the waitress they were moving, then hurried out to the back deck that overlooked the water.

A fire crackled in a circular brazier, like a campfire on the beach. Old sails draped from end to end created a canopy overhead and fluttered in the wind, while music filtered at a more bearable volume from the windows.

They settled onto a bench at a table in the far back corner. The fire painted Cassie’s face in a blend of shadow and light that made Barrie’s fingers crave a sketchpad, and when everyone was seated, Cassie leaned forward with the air of someone about to tell a secret. She spoke in a theatrical half whisper that carried over the noise. Even so, Barrie found herself tipping close to listen.

“It all started,” Cassie began, “with three younger sons of good English families: Thomas Watson, Robert Beaufort, and John Colesworth. They went to the Caribbean to make their
fortunes, and since piracy was legal then, as long as you had a letter of permission from the king and you only went after England’s enemies, they became privateers on a ship called the
Loyal Jamaica
. They collected a huge treasure before the ship ran aground near Charleston on a supply trip. With nice manners and plenty of gold, they weren’t unwelcome, and the governors of the Carolina colony gave them grants to settle in the area. Then one night before the land deals were official, Thomas Watson had too much to drink and lost half his share of the gold while gambling with one of the governors.” Cassie raised her eyebrows at Barrie. “Are you following all this?”

“The man who built Watson’s Landing was a pirate, a drunk, and a gambler. Yes,” Barrie said dryly, “I think I’ve about got it.”

“Now, don’t take offense, sugar. They were
all
pirates. I’m sure they all drank and gambled, but Thomas Watson had a bad night, and he accused the governor of cheating. Robert Beaufort and John Colesworth saved him from pistols at dawn by apologizing, but the governor was still plenty mad. He gave Thomas Watson land on a haunted island to get revenge.”

“Haunted?” Cold etched itself deep into Barrie’s bones. She thought of the sphere of fire and the dark figure by the river. Maybe what she had seen last night hadn’t been a dream or a product of her imagination.

Did that make her feel better or worse? She wasn’t sure.

The waitress came with their food, but Cassie talked on as if she didn’t care that the woman would overhear.
As if everyone already knew the story.

“Yes, haunted. Thomas Watson’s island was inhabited by the Fire Carrier, the ghost of a Cherokee witch who had cleared his tribal lands of malicious spirits,
yunwi
, and pushed them down the Santisto until they’d come to the last bit of land surrounded by water on every side. The Fire Carrier bound the
yunwi
there, and kept them from escaping, with fire and magic and running water.”

“Excellent,” Barrie said. “Pirates, gold,
and
evil spirits.”

“You can laugh. Thomas laughed too. At first. Until every brick of the mansion he tried to build disappeared every night, and every field he plowed or seeded was flooded or trampled. He spent most of his gold on the plantation, with nothing to show for it. He was about to give up, leave his friends, and go home to England, when John Colesworth offered to get one of his slaves to trap the Fire Carrier and force it to make the
yunwi
behave.”

“How would he do that?”

“Voodoo,” Cassie said with a narrow smile.

Well, that wasn’t what Barrie had expected. “Seriously?”

“A lot of the slaves came from the West Indies. This one was a voodoo priest. He trapped the Fire Carrier at midnight when the spirit came to the river to perform his magic, and
he held the Fire Carrier until the witch agreed to control the
yunwi
and make them leave Thomas Watson alone. Then Thomas replanted his fields. He built a new house that stayed up, but by then he was out of money. He couldn’t afford a mansion as nice as Colesworth Place or Beaufort Hall across the river. So he and John Colesworth trapped the Fire Carrier again, and this time they made him let Thomas Watson get back what he had lost. The plan worked better than anyone had expected. The
yunwi
returned what they had stolen, and the governor gave back the gambling money.”

“But that isn’t how it works!” Barrie exclaimed.

“So you
do
know about it.” Cassie pounced. “You have the gift, don’t you? I was sure you did.”

Barrie felt her face burning, but at the same time, a cold ache spread through her stomach. She pushed the dull knife through her sandwich—pulled pork with sauce on a white bread bun. She speared a forkful of coleslaw and made a show of chewing while she arranged her scrambled thoughts.

“I didn’t say I had it. Or knew about it. What I meant is the story isn’t logical. If the Fire Carrier gave Thomas Watson the ability to get back what he had lost, why would that pass on to his family as a gift, or let him find things other people had lost?”

“It might not have, but that isn’t the end of the story.” Cassie edged back, and in the shadow of the canvas sails overhead,
her expression was impossible to read. “Robert Beaufort fell in love with a woman from town, a woman who was already in love with John Colesworth. Robert didn’t care. He and Thomas Watson trapped the Fire Carrier again without John Colesworth this time, and demanded the witch help Robert win the woman’s heart.”

Cassie paused to let the story sink in. “From then on, Robert Beaufort knew how to give his love whatever she wanted most. He brought her jewels in the perfect color to match her gowns, rebuilt Beaufort Hall so she would love it, and he always told her exactly what she wanted to hear. Little by little, she stopped loving John Colesworth. Finally she agreed to marry Robert instead.”

The moisture wicked out of Barrie’s mouth.

Robert Beaufort had known
what someone wanted
. He had
known
.

Cassie veiled her eyes with heavy lashes. With her hands folded on the edge of the table, she studied the way her thumbs formed a cross, almost as if she were warding off some sort of evil but didn’t want anyone to see the gesture.

Suddenly she looked back up at Barrie. “John Colesworth put up with all that betrayal as long as he could,” she said. “But the night before Robert Beaufort was supposed to marry the woman John loved, John snuck back onto the island and trapped the Fire Carrier a fourth and final time. All he wanted
was to get back what he’d had before. Except the Fire Carrier was done with being trapped. His magic overwhelmed the priest. And instead of giving John his wish, the Fire Carrier cursed the Colesworths in generations yet unborn to be poorer and unhappier than the Watsons, who would always find what was lost, and the Beauforts, who would always know how to give others what they wanted.”

The sun was setting. In spite of the fire and the humid night, Barrie felt like she might never warm up again.

Thomas Watson had chosen sides between two friends and betrayed John Colesworth by forcing,
tricking
, a woman to love Robert Beaufort. That was the foundation of Eight’s gift. And of hers.

Cassie’s features tightened until her high cheekbones were blades and her beautiful eyes shone like glass. “No one has ever inherited more than one magic from the Fire Carrier. So which one do you have? Gift or curse? Are you a Watson—or a Colesworth?”

Barrie picked up her napkin and dabbed her mouth to buy a moment to respond.

It was just a story, she told herself.

Only, it didn’t feel like a story. Not to her and, judging from the gleaming expressions of the other girls, not to them, either. They had stopped eating, and sat looking back and forth between her and Cassie the way RuPaul, Mark’s Siamese
cat, used to watch Mark and Barrie playing Ping-Pong on the deck.

And Barrie had seen the Fire Carrier herself. She had the Watson gift. Everyone on the whole island seemed to know more about what that meant than she did. Why not just admit it?

Something held her back. She crumpled her napkin and dropped it onto her plate. “I don’t believe in curses,” she said.

“Really?” Cassie coiled like a snake prepared to strike. “You don’t
believe
? Look across the river when you get home. Colesworth Place is a ruin, but not Beaufort Hall or Watson’s Landing. They’re still standing as good as the day they were built, and we are forced to—” She bit her lip, swallowed, and started again. “The Watsons could have helped us protect our house, our
family
, during the war. Your mother could have helped us get our fortune back. Instead she stole Wade away and ruined his life, ruined my daddy’s life. And it sure wasn’t Lula who died the night of the fire, now was it?” Cassie’s breath came fast and ragged. “Lula
Watson
got out, and my uncle didn’t. Watsons are always lucky. The Colesworths aren’t. Now you tell me that’s not a curse.”

Barrie thought of her mother’s life, of Lula’s scars. She considered telling Cassie exactly how
lucky
Lula had been. But the idea of perfectly lovely Cassie feeling sorry for Lula made her fingers curl.

“You have the gift. Don’t you?” Cassie pushed back her silky hair from an unscarred face and smiled at Barrie. “You do. I can see you don’t want to admit it, but you have to help me. We’re family, and you’re the only Colesworth ever to have any Watson blood.”

“What is it exactly that I’m supposed to help you do?” Barrie asked tiredly.

“I keep forgetting you don’t know anything.” Cassie cast a
Help me
look at Beth and Gilly. “I want you to help me find what’s left of the Colesworth fortune! My great-great-great-whatever-uncle Alcee buried all our valuables before the Yankees burned Colesworth Place. We’ve been looking for them ever since. Or we should have been looking for them.” Cassie spread her hands and gripped the edge of the table. “Look, you
have
to help me. If I—
you
—could find the treasure, I could get out of this ridiculous town. I would give anything to get out of this town. Will you please, please help?”