And a wedding? Marriage? She thought of Eight leaving, and Pru’s husk of a life here at Watson’s Landing, Lula’s life in San Francisco.
Barrie’s phone was in her hand before she remembered it was still the middle of the night on the West Coast. Mark would have a heart attack if she called him now. He would expect that something horrible had happened.
She had to stop calling him, had to stop needing—to hear his voice.
She flipped back through the sketchpad, looking for any glimpse of Lula she could find in her mother’s work. After the last sketch, there were at least a handful of pages missing, as if Lula had torn them out. Maybe she’d been bored with drawing architectural details. Barrie examined each sketch more carefully. Something in them nagged at her like a toothache.
At first glance she found nothing out of the ordinary. There were views of the river, of Beaufort Hall and Colesworth Place, of the gardens around Watson’s Landing and rooms she had never seen, of the master bedroom with carved panels on the walls. Pru’s room had framed photos of interesting building and bridges, and gauzy curtains blowing in the open windows. Lula’s was a clutter of photographs and hair ribbons, tiaras and sashes hanging on the wall. Homecoming Queen, Homecoming Princess times three, Miss Glass Slipper Queen of Hearts, Miss Southern Grace, Miss Magnolia, Miss South Carolina BBQ Shag. Lula must have been proud of them. The letters were meticulously stenciled and readable in the sketch.
What had Lula imagined her life would be when she had walked across a pageant stage? Or waved to her admirers from the backseat of an open-topped convertible?
Barrie shoved the sketchbooks away and flopped back on the pillow. What was left of the dawn passed in restless thought and short gasps of sleep. She woke with her fists balled and her ankle aching when Pru came in at ten o’clock.
“Good morning! How do you feel? I brought you some breakfast. Also, Cassie’s downstairs asking for you.”
Of course she was. “Tell her to go away.”
“She’s on her way to work, but wanted to see how you are.” Pru set the tray on the desk, then crossed to the balcony to open the doors. The air already held the promise of scalding heat. “We should soak that ankle in Epsom salts before I leave for the afternoon.”
“Where are you going?”
“I have to see Seven for a bit and take care of some other errands. You should keep your foot propped up. Do you want me to tell Cassie you’ll call her later?”
“Whatever.”
Pru turned with the morning light behind her. “What happened between you two? Anything I need to know?”
“Nothing.” Barrie retreated behind closed eyelids.
She tried not to think about Cassie when Pru had gone, tried not to picture Cassie’s alligator smile, her hand closed around Lula’s necklace. What was her cousin doing with it now? Trying to sell it? Rejoicing in the fact that she had it and Barrie didn’t? To think Barrie had been happy to have a cousin. To have more family. Rolling over, she chased sleep again and tried to quiet her racing thoughts, without much success.
Pru came back a couple of hours later with more ice and another tray of food. “Eight is downstairs asking to see you,” Pru said.
“Tell him I’ll call later,” Barrie said, not ready to see anyone. Even Eight. Especially Eight. “Or here, he can call me if he wants. Give him this.” She tore an empty corner from her sketch and scrawled her phone number on it.
“So I should give the number to Eight, but not to Cassie?” Pru peered at the scrap of paper, then at Barrie. “Sweetheart, you’re going to have to tell me what happened last night. The whole story.”
“Nothing happened—I wish you’d stop asking me. I’m tired, that’s all.”
Pru was silent; then she nodded. “All right,” she said, sounding tired and hurt. “I have to go out again, but I’ll be back as soon as I can. If you need anything, Mary’s here until six. Call the house phone and she’ll pick it up.”
“My ankle isn’t that bad. Honest. And I’m sorry I was—”
“You know you can trust me, don’t you? I’m worried about you.”
“I know that. Thank you, Aunt Pru.” Swinging off the bed, Barrie tested her weight on the bandaged leg. Limping slightly, she went to give Pru a hug.
When her aunt had gone, she stood in the middle of the room, unsure what to do with herself. Eight’s boat swayed gently at the Watson dock, and across the river, Beaufort Hall stood calmly on its hill. She took Lula’s sketchpad to the armchair in the corner and flipped through it again. Lula’s room, Pru’s room—each of them reflected their owner’s personality, but the pictures of the master bedroom showed little evidence that a woman had shared it with Emmett: a silver hairbrush on the vanity, a jewelry box on the dresser. Even the walk-in closet behind the bed looked sanitized and bare. Although Lula had drawn studies of the heavily carved paneling around the door, the room inside had no clothes or shoes, no jumble of belts and scarves, nothing but empty shelves. Why would someone put a closet behind the bed?
Unless it wasn’t a closet.
Unless they didn’t want anyone to find it.
And where was this bedroom with the heavy carvings on the walls? Barrie had opened every door off the corridor while looking for her cell phone. She thumbed back to the sketch of her mother’s bedroom and examined that more closely too. The difference was there, now that she knew to look for it. Although she was used to seeing Beaufort Hall to the left when she stood on the balcony, Lula had drawn it to the right. The sketch of the view from Pru’s room was nearly identical.
The family hadn’t lived on this side of the house while the girls had been growing up. All of those bedrooms were in the wing with the terrible sense of loss.
Moving gingerly on her sore ankle, Barrie wriggled into a clean pair of capris and an orange shirt almost the same color as Mark’s hideous Isaac Mizrahi dress. The color looked better on her than on Mark, but not by much, and yet it made her smile. She pulled her phone off the charger and dialed his number.
“I’m wearing that horrible melon shirt you bought me,” she said. “I love it.”
“Did I tell you, or what? What are you and your hottie up to today? Tell me something good, baby girl.”
“I’m staying in for a change. Learning Lula’s drawing technique. Trying to figure her out.”
“Good luck with that.” He coughed out a laugh. “Maybe in my next life, or the afterlife, I’ll ask her what in the hell she was thinking all those years.”
He sounded tired and small.
“I thought you were coming back as Cleopatra,” Barrie said, trying to picture him, to keep him from fading away. “You don’t believe in an afterlife.”
“Life looks different as you near the end. You want to have faith in something bigger than you are. And maybe my lack of faith was always more about me than God. I guess I thought if God couldn’t believe in me the way I am, there was no sense in me believing in him.” Mark’s laugh cracked and turned into a splintered cough that went on so long, he told her he’d have to call her back.
Except he didn’t.
Barrie waited five minutes, then ten. She redialed and got sent straight to voice mail. Redialing again, and then again and again, her emotions ricocheted between frustration and fear.
“Come on, Mark. Pick up.” After the fifth try, she stuck the phone into her pocket. She needed to move; she needed to do something so she wouldn’t panic. Because there was no reason to panic. Mark was fine. He was with the nearly-deads, and they had probably drawn him into a game of poker, or pulled him away to watch a DVD of Veronica Mars or Buffy. There were absolutely a dozen, a hundred, perfectly reasonable explanations why he hadn’t called her back.
Barrie wished she could make herself believe any one of them.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
After having left her alone for most of the day, the yunwi swarmed around Barrie, interested and eager as she emerged from the cocoon of her room. She limped into the abandoned wing
, following the finding pull that drew her toward the end of the hall. Curiosity made her open all the doors she passed. The motion left half-moon streaks on the dusty floorboards. No one had been in any of the rooms for years, but there seemed to be nothing unsafe about them.
Lula’s room was the third door from the end. Although Barrie recognized the furniture, Emmett had stripped the room of any personal effects or signs of personality, as if he’d been trying to stamp out every trace of Lula. Barrie closed her eyes, trying to feel Lula’s presence. There was only a hairpin half-wedged under the baseboard, and a strip of pictures from a photo booth that had been forgotten behind the bed. Pru and Lula, side by side, their faces pressed together. Lula beautiful and undamaged, and looking so very much like Pru. Like Barrie.
Barrie closed her fingers around the hairpin. In the photos, Lula’s hair was drawn back into a sleek ponytail. Had she fought with it the way Barrie did, caged it with pins to try to make it behave, while all the time she herself wanted to rebel? To break her father’s rules? To run away with Wade?
The emptiness of the house swelled around Barrie. Pru wasn’t back yet, and when Barrie glanced at her watch, it confirmed that the tearoom had closed and Mary would already have left. She stayed late only on Friday nights to prepare for the weekend.
Barrie had never been alone in a house, not once. But being by herself at Watson’s Landing wasn’t liberating. It was a thorny tumbleweed of a feeling that stirred up the need to scream, to play music with the volume all the way up, to run and kick the walls. Things she had never done, never could have done, in Lula’s house. For as long as she could remember, Barrie had been a ghost in her own life, quiet to compensate for not being wanted, always tiptoeing around Lula’s moods.
No, that wasn’t fair. Mark, at least, had wanted her. Mark had fought for her.
Until he was dying, and having her around got to be too hard and he, too, pushed her away.
Wow. Wow.
The realization struck Barrie as if she had kicked a wall and it had kicked her back. Was that what she’d been doing sulking in her room? Pushing Eight and Pru away before they could hurt her too?
She hit redial, but Mark’s phone still went straight to voice mail. “Dammit, Mark! Where are you? I’m worried. If you went off to Pier 1 for more throw pillows, I’m going to have to come out there and smack you.” She paused and swallowed. “Please just call me. I love you and I’m worried.”
She strode to the last door in the corridor and threw it open. Her head was splitting from the loss seeping from inside the room. Groping the wall, she found a switch, but the light from the dust-coated chandelier overhead did little to dispel the darkness. She stepped into the room to go open the green velvet drapes drawn across the balcony doors.
Something moved beside the bed.
The hair bristled on Barrie’s neck, and her instinct to run was nearly as strong as the sense of loss clawing at her head. She tried to convince herself the white whisper of light was only the dust motes stirring. But the figure was too human-size, too translucent, too much like the woman in the fountain. It moved as if it were falling to the floor. Then it disappeared, only to appear and fall again.
A spirit. Another spirit.
Barrie backed toward the door, but the yunwi rushed into the room to form a circle around the apparition. There were more yunwi than she had ever seen in one place. They stood, still as mourners, and the only movement came from the ghost. But unlike the water spirit or the yunwi, this one didn’t react to Barrie. It was only the yunwi who turned and looked at her, their fire eyes pleading with her for something, wanting something from her the same way the Fire Carrier wanted something.
“What?” Barrie asked. “What is it you need?”
But they only stood and stared.
Barrie glanced desperately around the room, looking for some kind of clue. Didn’t ghosts always want something? Wasn’t that why they haunted a place?
She found no answers to her questions. Down to the stiff silver-backed brushes, the room looked the same as it had in Lula’s sketches. It was hard for Barrie to think. Loss raked at her, making her head throb. It wasn’t the ghost, though, or not just the ghost. There was something inside the dresser too, but the darkest, most nauseating sense of loss radiated from beyond the bed.
The carved paneling Lula had drawn was closed, leaving no sign that a room lay hidden behind it.
Barrie climbed up onto the dark mahogany bed. A seam ran from the floor to the ceiling where Lula had shown an opening, but no matter how Barrie pushed or tried to pry it apart, it wouldn’t budge. Though there was no trace of a lock or lever, Lula must have found one to make the panel swing inward.
Or had she?
With the heavy bed in front of it, Lula couldn’t have found the room by accident. Someone else must have left it open long enough for her to get a glimpse inside. Yes, that made more sense. If Lula had come back later, searching for a way to open the paneling again . . . that would explain why she had been fascinated enough by the individual carvings to want to draw them.
Leaning across the headboard, Barrie prodded at the fleur-de-lis, the roses, the bearded faces around the seam. She imagined her mother pushing at these same carvings, trying to reach the room beyond the wall, to follow the finding pull even though Emmett had told her to ignore it. Even though he had told her the Watson gift was evil.
What if Lula had stumbled on the reason he had said that in the first place? Emmett’s warnings about the Watson gift and the Fire Carrier could have all been a lie to keep his daughters from finding whatever was in the room behind the bed. Maybe this was the secret Lula had promised her father she wouldn’t share.
There had to be a pattern. Barrie went back and retrieved Lula’s sketchbook. Then she sat cross-legged on the dusty bed, studying the carvings on the panel behind it and comparing them to the last drawing her mother had made, the bearded face—Pan or Zeus? Some god with his eyes closed. Lula had drawn the carving skewed slightly to the right, as if it were twisting open. That was clear enough. What Lula hadn’t done was provide any hint to identify that one face from the hundreds of identical faces in the paneling all around the room.
Barrie’s eyes blurred on the thick pencil lines and delicate details of Lula’s sketches. She had been studying them too long. If there was a clue hidden in them, she couldn’t find it. Maybe Lula had left a message on one of the pages she had torn out. That could have been part of whatever deal she and Emmett had made. But if so, then Barrie would never learn the truth.
No. That wasn’t happening. Barrie wasn’t going to live at Watson’s Landing and leave that awful loss gnawing at her from beyond the wall.
She went back to studying the paneling. Rose, fleur-de-lis, leaves, bearded face. The same pattern as in the sketchbook. She knew the order, but where had Lula started? Barrie traced the lines of the sketch with the tip of her finger while staring at the nearest rose carving on the wall, trying to put herself into her mother’s frame of mind. It was only then that she realized what she was seeing—and what she wasn’t. The rose in Lula’s drawing had a petal missing. She checked it twice more before she was certain.
She moved on to the next sketch in the book. The fleur-de-lis had an extra leaf.
Lula might have missed a petal, but she wouldn’t have consistently drawn what wasn’t there.
Her breath coming faster and her fingers tingling, Barrie leaned over the headboard, and finally . . . there. A rose with a petal missing. Followed by, yes, a fleur-de-lis with an extra leaf. All the way through the pattern, each carving had the same subtle anomalies that Lula had drawn, including a bearded man with an extra line between his brows.
“Gotcha,” Barrie said.
The headboard dug into her ribs as she leaned over to reach the bearded face. She prodded it, and nothing happened, but when she twisted, the face swiveled to the right and revealed a keyhole. For a key Barrie didn’t have.
The finding compulsion grew even
stronger. Barrie threw down the sketchbook, sending the shadows scurrying along the floor. Climbing down from the bed, she followed the other pull of loss to the dresser, skirting behind the ghost and the yunwi gathered at the foot of the bed.
Surprisingly, clothes still filled the drawers. Men’s yellowing undershirts and tightie-whitey underwear lay stacked in obsessive perfect rows. Starched, collared shirts in solids and conservative stripes were also precisely folded, and the sock drawer held at least thirty pairs of identical black socks. The only thing out of place was the Bible stuffed beneath four pairs of paisley pajamas.
Barrie pulled out the book. Her head spun with the loss roiling from its pages. Giving herself a mental shake, she opened the Bible, ruffled through it, and shook it out above the dresser. It fell open naturally. About three quarters of the way through, a section carved from the pages created a hollowed compartment. A locket and a diamond ring were nestled in the recess. An engagement ring.
She tipped both the necklace and the ring onto her palm. Her blood quickened. Beads of sweat dampened her lip and forehead. Prying open the locket with a fingernail, she found Luke Watson smiling at her from a faded photograph. Except for the navy uniform and the fighter jet beside him, he looked much as he had in the yearbook. Only now he wore a navy uniform and stood beside a fighter jet.
The shock of recognition rushed through Barrie. What was Luke’s picture doing in a locket in Emmett’s room?
She closed her fingers around the jewelry. Whose had it been? Not her grandmother’s. Twila would likely have given Emmett back his ring when she’d broken off their engagement. But there was no reason he would have had her necklace, and his wife, Pru’s mother, certainly wouldn’t have had a locket with Luke’s picture inside.
Her mind churning with questions, Barrie turned from the dresser. She came face-to-face with the ghost.
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