Compulsion (31 page)

Barrie pressed her knuckles against her eyes. More than ever she wanted to run upstairs to Pru, to hold her. For them to hold each other. It had to be getting late, though. She stopped at the balcony doors and looked across the river. Eight was already starting down the slope of the Beaufort hill toward the
Away
.

Throwing the sketchbook into a drawer in the desk, she dislodged a bloom of bougainvillea and ruffled the tag that hung from the handle of the sweetgrass basket. The same label Pru used on all the gifts she sold in the tearoom. The sketch of Watson’s Landing on it was almost identical to one of Lula’s drawings in the sketchbook. Same view, same style, same artist.

Barrie dialed Mark’s number as she left the room. “How could Lula not tell me she could draw like this?” she demanded before he could say hello. “She never commented on a single piece of artwork I did.”

“She didn’t tell me, either, baby girl. Trust me. I’d strangle the woman, if she weren’t already dead. I knew you’d be hurt, and I wasn’t sure if I should send it to you. But I know you. Ten minutes from now you’re going to be studying every line of her sketches and figuring how she got so much passion in there. It looked to me like she hated the place as much as she loved it.”

Barrie thought back to the drawings. Yes, there had been both love and hate in all of them. Light and darkness. It seemed to be a theme with Lula.

“Does the place still look like that?” Mark asked.

“Yes.” Barrie pushed down the sick sense of outrage and started down the stairs. “How are you feeling?”

“Not dead yet.” Mark did his usual Monty Python impression, but he sounded tired. And weaker. “Hold on,” he continued. “We’re still on you. Are you going to be okay? You know Lula not telling you about her art wasn’t personal, don’t you?”

“How is it not personal?” Barrie shoved through the swinging door into the kitchen. “Whatever talent I have came from her. When I think about all the sketchbooks I left lying around accidentally on purpose, hoping for her approval—”

“You had her approval, baby girl. She was proud when you won those prizes.”

“She never said so.”

“Lula was never good with words.”

“I just wish she’d told me.” Barrie let herself out onto the terrace and turned to wave at Mary in the tearoom before heading down the stairs. “Or shown me. Anyway, how could she stop drawing? Some of those sketches are good enough to go in museums.”

“Artists need to go places,” Mark said gently. “See new things. She probably got tired of drawing the same view from different windows.”

Barrie hurried past the fountain, shivering as it misted her skin. She started down the slope to the river, where Eight and the
Away
were approaching the Watson dock.

“So,” she said to change the subject, “you remember the hottie?”

“Your hottie?”

“Well, he might be mine. You’d love him. Except he plays baseball and he’s bossy. Bossier than Lula. But he kisses very nicely, thank you.”

Mark sputtered into a laugh that turned into a deep, guttural fit of coughing that went on too long.

“What’s with the hacking?” Barrie asked when he finally stopped. “Aren’t you taking care of yourself at all?”

“Don’t you nag me too. One of the nearly-deads gave me a cigar, that’s all. I figure I may as well enjoy new vices while I can. Now tell me, are we talking literal baseball or second base, third base kind of stuff?”

“Literal, of course. Who do you think I am? I’ve known him about five whole minutes!”

Which was crazy. Certifiably insane.

Eight waved at her. Barrie raised her hand and felt herself smiling.

The silence on the other end of the phone was the ominous kind. The kind that suggested Mark was trying to find a way to “save” her, the way he had used to try to “save” her, back when she’d been small enough and stupid enough to tell him about every stolen lunch, hurtful whisper, and so-called friend she’d lost. Except Mark’s “saves” usually involved him rushing off to call the principal, a teacher, a parent, because
he
needed to do something. His “saves” usually made things ten times worse, but also a hundred times better because he loved her.

“Earth to Mark?” Barrie said. “I told you I kissed a boy. Aren’t you going to say anything?”

“I warned you about falling in love with him, didn’t I? I told you to have a good time. Have a fling, I said. Why don’t you ever listen?”

Barrie’s lungs deflated. “Who said a thing about love?”

“You don’t need to say it. But so we’re clear here: I told you not to fall for him.”

“And I told you orange was not your color, but you still ordered that Isaac Mizrahi dress. Don’t give me I-told-you-sos.”

“The dress had bows that tied at the elbows. How was I gonna pass that up?”

“Easy. You could have moved on to something better.”

“That’s exactly what
I’m
saying—”

“This is a boy, not a dress!”

“Which only makes him harder to return!” Mark took a deep, long breath that ended in another cough. “All right. Clearly you’ve already fallen for your number boy. So you might as well figure the pain is coming and make sure the crash is worth it.”

“What do you mean?” Barrie stopped where the path ended and the dock began and turned away so Eight couldn’t see her face.

“The things I regret right at the end of my life aren’t the ones that left me hurt. I regret all the things I never had the courage to do.”

“You have more courage than anyone I know.”

“Overcompensating for being scared isn’t the same as being brave, baby girl.” Mark sounded so tired that Barrie wanted to crawl through the telephone line and wrap her arms around him. “I was scared of being myself, so I put on a show. And I kicked ass, but it wasn’t real. When they put you in my arms at the hospital and you looked up at me . . . that was my one true act of courage. I told myself I had to choose between you and the show. I told myself I was being brave because I
fought to stay with you through all of Lula’s bullshit—and don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade a second with you. But I was still cheating. Deep down I knew no audience was ever going to love me the way you did. I should have tried harder to give you a better life.”

“You gave me a great life.”

“I never taught you not to be afraid. Maybe too, if I had ever left the house for more than a few hours, Lula would have been forced to step up and be your mother. That’s what I’m realizing now. It doesn’t matter how great your shoes are if you don’t accomplish anything in them.”

Barrie glanced back at Eight. If leaving Watson’s Landing meant living in the kind of pain she’d experienced today, she wasn’t sure she had the courage to go too far. In her heart she didn’t want to try. Mark was her core. Without him, bound or not, all she had left was here at Watson’s Landing.

Which raised the question: What was she going to do about Eight and Cassie? Because one way or another, her happiness here was tangled up with them.

Sneakers squelching in the mud, Barrie followed Cassie from the Colesworth dock uphill toward the columns and shattered chimneys of the old plantation house. Although Cassie’s family maintained the upper portion of the property for the tourists, they didn’t bother with the area by the river.

“Careful.” Eight steadied Barrie when she stumbled for the second time on what had once been a gravel path. Where thick trestles dug into the hillside formed steps on the steepest portions, the wood was splintering and rotten. Weeds, mud, and stagnant puddles of water colonized the rest.

Barrie paused to get her breath and her bearings. The Colesworth property was only a few acres across, with thick woods bordering the Beaufort land on one side and the subdivision on the other side. The foundation of the old mansion
was far enough away that the sense of loss Barrie had felt after the play hadn’t reached her yet. From under the creeping green vines of ivy and wisteria that blanketed entire trees and buildings near the restored slave cabins, though, she felt an ache and something ugly pulsing at her temples.

“Can y’all please hurry up?” Cassie stopped above them on the path. “What are you looking for? Did you see a boat?” Shielding her eyes, she turned to scan the river.

“Expecting someone?” Eight didn’t bother disguising the contempt in his voice.

Barrie dug her elbow into his ribs. “Hey. Be nice. You agreed to this.”

“Yeah, but why is she so jumpy,” Eight asked quietly, “if Wyatt isn’t coming back until tonight?”

Cassie did look anxious. Her face had taken on a gray cast that had little to do with the dappled shadows from the overhanging cypress branches. She stood with her hands on her hips, and her usual languid grace was missing.

“I’m sure it’s fine,” Barrie said with an inward sigh. “Your friend said he would call if Wyatt’s boat came in.” She wished it were all over with so she could get back to Pru and Watson’s Landing. Blood or no blood, if she never saw Colesworth Place or her uncle again, it would be too soon.

Eight made a show of crooking his elbow and holding it out to her in invitation. “Well, shall we?”

With a mock curtsy, Barrie linked her arm with his. He bumped her with his shoulder playfully and set off, keeping her close, the warmth of his skin on hers both distracting and reassuring. Barrie freed herself as they reached a steeper section of the path.

“You go ahead,” Eight said, moving aside as the steps narrowed.

Barrie concentrated on where she set her feet, until a slither of brown serpentined across the path a couple feet ahead and vanished into the reeds. Startled, she jumped back and landed on the edge of a rotting trestle. The wood crumbled out from under her. Arms windmilling, she clipped Eight’s jaw and knocked herself sideways. She landed on her knee with a heavy thud, her foot twisted underneath her.

“Bear!” He lunged too late to catch her. “Are you all right?”

She shook her head, caught in the blinding pain of a twisted ankle. She hoped it was only twisted. After edging around to sit, she braced the ankle with her hands and tried straightening her leg.

Eight crouched beside her. “What can I do? Tell me what hurts.”

Everything. Her pride mostly. “There was a snake,” she said. “It looked poisonous.”

“Sure it did.” His lips twitched. “But never mind that. Did you break anything?”

“Give me a sec.” Barrie winced as she tried to move her foot.

Behind her the sound of footsteps from up the path announced that Cassie, too, was coming to be amused at her expense. And in case sitting on her ass in the mud wasn’t humiliating enough, her ankle was already swelling around the top of her sneaker. Didn’t it just figure she would break her leg the one time she actually wore “sensible” shoes?

The path up the slope suddenly looked daunting. They had to have steepened it on purpose somehow. This was ridiculous. Why had she ever agreed to come?

“I told you it was a stupid idea.” Eight pushed his hair back and let his arm drop with an endearingly helpless motion that almost kept Barrie from wanting to strangle him. Almost. “You don’t owe the Colesworths anything,” he said, glaring at Cassie over Barrie’s head. “And you aren’t going to fix the feud no matter what you do.”

“I never said she owed us,” Cassie said.

“Both of you stop it. It’s only a twisted ankle. Eight, help me up, and I’ll be all right.”

Eight slipped his arm around her waist and supported her as she straightened. “Careful,” he said. “There’s a difference between brave and pointless, and I think you’ve crossed the line.”

“Drop dead, would you?” Barrie bit her cheek. She took a
quick inventory: ankle, throbbing; knee, skinned and aching; seat of her shorts, covered in mud. Pain shot up her leg when she tried to put weight on it, and her elbow still twinged from falling down the stairs the night before. But that was nothing compared to the shock wave of finding pressure that hit her as she took a step. Her head felt like it was filled with shards of glass pressing on her brain.

“That’s it,” Eight said, watching her. “You’re done. We’re out of here.” He bent and, one arm beneath her knees and the other on her back, swung her off her feet.

“Hey, hold on,” Cassie said. “Where are you going? You don’t have to leave. Just take her up to the house. I’ll get her some ice, and she’ll be fine in a minute. It always hurts like hell when you first twist your ankle.”

Every small and large hurt in Barrie—her foot, her head, her elbow, the loss, even her scraped-up feet—all fused into an overwhelming, exhausting ache. She dropped her head against Eight’s shoulder. “I can’t, Cassie. Not now.”

Eight threw Cassie a look that might as well have been a weapon. “Are you seriously this selfish?”

“But it wouldn’t take her any time at all! And who knows when we’ll have another chance with Daddy . . .”

“With Daddy
what
?” Eight prompted. “What is going on that’s making you so paranoid?”

Cassie’s head snapped up. “Nothing. I’m frustrated, all
right? You can’t leave me hanging like this again. Just carry her up there. Let her show me where the treasure’s buried, and we’ll be done for good. It’ll be—”