Compulsion (17 page)

“I did something I’m not sure you’re going to like, and I’m so, so sorry for not telling you sooner.” The words tumbled out. “I was feeling homesick, and Mark and I were talking about Lula’s furniture and clothes, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her belongings being auctioned off to strangers. So I asked him to send it all here instead. I know there’s plenty of furniture here already, and I don’t mean to say Lula’s things are better. I would never say that, but maybe there are some pieces
we could use, and we could sell the rest or give it to charity.”

“We’re not going to sell Lula’s—your—things.” Pru’s voice was firm. “We can make room.”

“I don’t want you to give up your furniture.”

“Honey, half the pieces in this house are worn, and the other half are broken. And nothing here has ever been mine. Lord knows our ancestors have always bought whatever caught their fancy. You should see the attic crammed full of who knows what.” Pru gave a nod. “Yes. It’s past time we clear out the junk. Sweep out the cobwebs, open up the windows. We can make a project of it. I’m sure Lula’s things are nicer anyway. Too nice.” Her gaze locked on the cabinet door that she had fixed; Pru was always making repairs.

“How can anything be too nice?” Barrie asked.

“The Fire Carrier isn’t the only spirit on the island. That’s part of Cassie’s story I know for a fact—”

Pru cut herself off, but Barrie’s brain was already whirling around and around like a top, facts spinning ever more slowly until finally they settled.

“Are you saying the
yunwi
are making the house fall apart?” she asked.

Pru flinched as if she hurt to hear the words aloud. “I don’t know exactly what I’m saying.” She glanced at her watch. “Look, sugar, it’s getting late, and the tearoom is open today.
You’d better scoot upstairs and get ready, if you’re going to come out to help me. At this rate I’ll never have the garden done before Mary gets here.”

“But—”

“Go on now. We’ll talk about it later.” Pru’s tone was the one Mark used when a subject was off-limits.

Barrie trudged upstairs, brushed her teeth, and slathered on a coat of sunscreen. When she came down again, she found a pair of gloves on the kitchen counter, along with a wide straw hat and a note.

You’ll need these for the sun. Come on outside when you’re ready to work.

Twisting her hair up, Barrie picked the hat off the counter and settled it onto her head. A screwdriver that had been half-hidden beneath it rolled a few turns before it came to rest. It reminded her that Pru had to have been up at dawn to have started breakfast and repairs so early, and her aunt had still been up when Barrie had gone to bed. When did Pru ever have time for herself? She was constantly fixing one problem or another.

A swell of half-hysterical laughter pressed up through Barrie’s chest. For all of Pru’s seeming frailness, she was so much stronger than Barrie would ever be. Or maybe it was
a matter of perspective. All Barrie could see was problems. Look at all the assumptions she had made since she’d arrived at Watson’s Landing. She had assumed the house was falling apart because Pru couldn’t afford to fix it. She had assumed Pru would be upset about Lula’s furniture showing up. She had let Pru and Eight make her nervous about meeting Cassie and Wyatt. Even Wyatt had turned out to be not so terrible.

The
yunwi
and the Fire Carrier and trying to find Cassie’s lost fortune? They all seemed like problems now, but Barrie would find solutions.

Pausing at the bottom of the terrace steps, Barrie spotted Pru picking up the mammoth blue bowl from beside the three-tiered fountain. Despite its size, Pru lifted the bowl easily, braced it against her hip, and lugged it toward the far edge of the maze, where roses and carefully tended flowers edged the boxwood hedges.

Barrie went to join her. “What’s that bowl for?”

“Cuttings.” Pru lowered the bowl to the ground and knelt beside it to trim a rose from the bush with her pruning snippers.

Barrie lifted an eyebrow and swept a glance down the neat rows of blossoms along the hedgerows. There wouldn’t be a single flower left if Pru filled a bowl that size every day the garden was open to the public.

“Exactly how many tables are there in the tearoom?” she asked.

Pru sucked in her cheeks. She studied the bowl as if she had never seen it before, then slowly raised her eyes to meet Barrie’s gaze. “The bowl isn’t only for cuttings. I also use it to leave nuts, fruit, and honey for the
yunwi
.”

“
That’s
what you meant by appeasement?”

“It doesn’t matter what I call it, so long as it keeps the spirits happy. I feed the
yunwi
, and they maintain the garden. That’s one less thing I have to worry about.”

“Is it? If the
yunwi
are so happy, why are they taking the house apart?”

“I don’t know!” Hunching her shoulders, Pru looked away.

Barrie blew out a breath of exasperation. “I’m sorry, Aunt Pru. I don’t understand any of this. How can you be afraid of the Fire Carrier and not the
yunwi
, when he’s basically only here to guard them?”

“The fact that he locked them up doesn’t mean he’s necessarily any better than they are.” Pru used the green-handled snippers to gesture around the garden. “Look around. How could I possibly keep up with all this by myself? Daddy fired the help after Lula left. He holed up in the library until he died. Watson’s Landing started to fall apart, and no matter how hard I worked, I couldn’t keep up. I’d come out here in the evening and eat a sandwich while I did the weeding. Then one night, I was too tired to eat. I came back the next morning,
and the sandwich was gone, and so were all the weeds.” Her chin rose and her eyes grew defiant. “I suppose that’s the bottom line. The
yunwi
have never bothered me. They were willing to help me, and Daddy wasn’t.”

Daddy
sounded like a piece of work.

For the first time Barrie took inventory of the garden: the gravel paths unsullied by weeds, hedges neatly trimmed, lawns manicured and unmarred by a single leaf. Everywhere flowers bloomed.

Her aunt and her mother really were alike. Pru had made her peace with the
yunwi
and taken refuge in the garden, never mind what happened on the rest of the property. Lula had hidden inside the house, inside herself, inside her pain.

Pru seemed to be finished talking. She settled down to work with her back turned to Barrie, and her humming and the
snick
of the shears and the
shush
of the river all combined into a lulling rhythm. Barrie was too tired to dig for information anymore. It was easier to lose herself in the simple, repetitive task of cutting flowers, and not to argue.

It was only after she had been lost in thought awhile that she noticed the shadows skittering at the periphery of her vision. They vanished when she turned her head, and returned when she went back to the flowers. More curious than worried, Barrie sat back on her heels, pretending to concentrate on
cutting flowers. Sure enough, the shadows sprang back to life. As long as she didn’t look at them, they danced and swayed in time to Pru’s melancholy humming. Watching them, Barrie didn’t see the snake until her hand was nearly on it. She shrieked and scrambled back.

The snake slithered deeper into the lilies and stopped with a snip of tail exposed.

Appearing beside Barrie, Pru patted her on the shoulder. “It’s only a rat snake. You scared it as much as it scared you.”

“I highly doubt that.” Barrie removed a glove and wiped the sweat dampening her hairline.

“It never hurts to be cautious. Just because that one was harmless doesn’t mean it couldn’t have been poisonous. There are copperheads, water moccasins, even rattlers around here. The dangerous ones mostly have triangular heads and elongated pupils. You’ll learn to tell them apart soon enough.”

Barrie had no intention of getting close enough to look any snake in its eyes.

The snake shimmied the rest of the way into the clump of lilies, and from there rustled away beneath the hedge, presumably to chase mice somewhere else. Assuming there were mice to chase. So far, Barrie had seen only birds, squirrels, and insects—including a few bird-size mosquitos—and, of course, the fat, pink earthworms the peahens were always chasing. She’d heard frogs from the marsh and seen the nearly
human-shaped footprints left by raccoons—or maybe that was the
yunwi
, for all she knew.

Barrie raised her eyes to the shadows darting across the green expanse of lawn to the edge of the woods. She tried not to focus on the pull coming from somewhere amid the trunks and tangled underbrush, but the more she tried not to feel it, the more she felt the compulsion calling her from deep within the trees. She sat back on her heels.

“Leave those woods alone. I can see you looking at them.” Wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, Pru left a smudge of dirt behind.

Barrie struggled to spool in her awareness, the way the Fire Carrier spooled the flames after they’d been spread across the water. “Don’t you feel the draw from in there, Aunt Pru? How can you not feel it?”

“Feel what?” Eight’s voice came from a few yards away.

“Nothing.” The denial was automatic, uttered before Barrie remembered she didn’t have to hide her gift from him. Or from anyone else on Watson Island. It was too new a feeling to provide much relief.

She stared at Eight resentfully. She hadn’t heard the growl of his car or the
slap-slap
of his flip-flops, but that was because he was wearing rubber-soled boat shoes. He needed to wear a cowbell around his neck to warn her when he came over. And why did he and Seven worry about someone sneaking in
through the front gate, when the two of them, or anyone else for that matter, could walk up from the river anytime they liked?

Eight’s green eyes gleamed with amusement. “I came to invite you out on the boat. I promised Dad I’d pick up steaks for dinner tonight, so I’m heading into town.” He turned to Pru. “You need any groceries from the farmers’ market?”

“I’d love to save Mary a trip. I’ll make you a list.” Pru flicked a warning glance from Barrie to the woods and tugged off her gloves.

“What was that about?” Eight asked, watching Pru hurry toward the house.

Barrie started to say something biting about how he should know what Pru was thinking, but it wasn’t worth the argument. “Long story,” she said.

He studied her a moment. “I’ve got time if you want to tell me. I’d hoped you’d be done being mad at me about the Beaufort gift.”

“I’m not mad.” Barrie started off after Pru.

Although, suddenly, she was. Of course she wanted to tell him what Pru had said, but she wanted him to ask because
he
wanted to know, not because
she
wanted to tell him.

“How can I tell what’s real between us when you are always eavesdropping on what I want?” she asked. “If I can’t keep anything private from you, I’m not sure we can be friends. That’s not an equal relationship.”

“Knowing
why
someone wants something is always more interesting than knowing that they want it. I can’t know the why unless you choose to tell me.”

Barrie stopped on the path and turned to face him. “So share one of your secrets. What’s the most important thing
you
want? And tell me why you want it.”

His eyebrows dropped, and his mouth opened and closed without a word. Barrie waited. But when Pru came out of the house with her list, Eight practically loped off to meet her.

Barrie’s hands curled into balls of frustration. Eight could have given Barrie an answer. Any answer. Instead he’d chosen to avoid the question. The Beaufort gift would never give her that luxury. Eight would always know what she wanted. Just once, someday, it would be nice for them to have a conversation that didn’t devolve into her wanting to shout at him.

He and Pru met Barrie on the path, and she snatched the grocery list from him and stuffed it into her pocket. She marched toward the dock.

“Come on. Don’t be like this.” Eight kept pace beside her.

“Then stop using your Beaufort gift.”

“Stop in general?” He raised his brows. “Or stop using it on you?”

Barrie considered that a moment. “
Can
you stop? Because Pru claims she quit using the Watson gift—but then, she says
her gift was never as strong as Lula’s. And mine got stronger when my mother died.”

“It’s more of a first-born thing. My sister still sees what people want, but it’s easier for her to decide if she wants to act on what she knows. I have a harder time not giving in to people. It’s a constant battle for me, and I think it’s even worse for my dad.”

“Exactly.” Barrie nearly sighed in relief that he understood. “Pru doesn’t want me to use the gift, but the compulsion just gets stronger if I try to ignore it. She doesn’t understand what that’s like. The woods, a drawer in the library, the closed-off wing upstairs—the pull keeps getting more intense. I can’t imagine living like this for years or even months.”

“What are you going to do?”

Barrie ignored him. “My grandfather told Pru and Lula the gift is evil,” she said.

“What do you think?” he asked in a neutral tone.

The crushed white shells on the path were blinding in the full morning light, which made it all the more strange to see how the shadows chased one another. Barrie raised her eyes to the river, where the dock and the tall reeds gave way to a channel of coursing water.

“You may as well ask if a snake is evil because it’s venomous,” she said. “Is it wrong for the snake to defend itself or kill to eat? Like you said, the
why
always matters. We can use our
gifts badly, or we can use them well.” That was even more true for Eight than for her.

“Are we still talking generalities, or about you and me specifically?”

Barrie shrugged, curious to see what he would answer if she didn’t specify.

“It’s hard to choose not to help someone when I know what they want,” he said, “but what I decide defines the kind of person I want to be. What people want isn’t always good for them—or for other people.”