Not the vague, pale apparition she had seen before. A ghost who was recognizably Twila Beaufort, a Twila not much older or different from how she had looked in the high school yearbook. A ghost girl in a miniskirt and red, shiny boots, her arms raised as if she were dancing with a lover. Her head was tilted and her lips were puckered. Kissing. Twila was kissing someone. Then she whipped around, her eyes wide, mouth open in a silent scream.
Barrie nearly screamed. Horror had contorted Twila’s face. She collapsed to her knees, reached out for something—or someone—on the floor. Half-turning, she screamed again, and threw up her hands to protect her head. She fell sideways to the floor.
Hand over her mouth, Barrie stared in shock.
Murder. Twila had been murdered.
At that moment Barrie hated Watson’s Landing.
Twila had been kissing someone. Was that who she’d been reaching for on the floor? No. There would have been two ghosts if two people had been murdered. That seemed logical, if logic applied in situations like this.
The ring and the edges of the locket dug into Barrie’s palm as Twila’s ghost faded and began the cycle again. Twila kissing someone, screaming, falling to her knees, dying again, over and over like playing back a video, echoing the last moments of her life. With each repetition, Barrie hoped the scene would end differently. It never did. Twila must have been caught in this loop for forty—fifty—years.
Who had Twila been kissing here in Emmett’s room? Luke or Emmett? Had Luke caught her here with his brother and killed her? Was that why he’d run away?
Shivering, Barrie drew a sad face in the dust on the dresser and brought her finger away coated in grit as thick and dark as everything else in the room. The murder sickened her, the stillness sickened her; the loss sickened her.
She had to find the key.
She slipped the ring and necklace into her pocket and searched the rest of the room. Opened every cupboard. Ran her hand under each piece of furniture, behind each drawer in case something was taped back there. Threw open the curtains out to the balcony and sneezed at the flurry of dust. Then she peered back around the room, trying to think.
Downstairs the grandfather clock chimed seven times, seeming to echo in the stillness of the empty house. Seven? It had been more than two hours since Mark had promised to call her back. Barrie pulled her phone out of her pocket. She still hadn’t heard from him. She dialed his number again, and what his silence might mean slowly sank in.
She had to brace herself against a wall as she got the hospice number from information. She waited while the hospice transferred her three times before connecting her to someone helpful. The nurse was one she remembered meeting when she’d gone to look at the place with Mark—a heavy blonde who’d bracketed all her sentences in “wows” and exclamation points. Wow, we’re so happy to have Mark coming! Wow, he’s going to love the place! Wow, fantastic shoes! There were no exclamation marks now, only discomfort punctuated by the click of a pen.
“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “We had to transfer Mark to the hospital early this morning.”
“But I just talked to him a couple of hours ago. What’s wrong with him?”
“Pneumonia. If you’ve talked to him, maybe he’s feeling better already.” The forced cheerfulness was already creeping back into her voice.
“Why didn’t anyone call me?” Barrie asked. “I’m his emergency contact.”
“He asked us not to call. He wanted to do it himself as soon as he heard what the doctors said. I think he just didn’t want to worry you. You know how it is, honey. You have to keep a positive attitude, and Mark’s the best. We love having him around here.”
The pep talk grated on Barrie’s nerves. She thanked the nurse and asked her for the hospital number before finishing the call. Then she dialed the information desk and hyperventilated through the transfer to Mark’s room. Even when he picked up with a ragged “hello,” she couldn’t seem to take in air.
“What are you doing telling people not to call me?” she yelled at him. “I’m supposed to know if you are in the hospital! I should be there with you, not stuck out here not knowing anything.”
“The doctors don’t know anything either,” Mark said. “You’d fit right in.”
Barrie sank to the floor and hugged her knees. The smile was back in Mark’s voice. Thank God. She took a deeper breath. “So what are the doctors saying?”
“Nothing. They’re pumping me full of antibiotics and sticking oxygen up my nose. But it’s no big deal. Trust me, baby girl. The old bats at the hospice were afraid of getting sued, that’s all. I’m fine. I’m sorry for worrying you. I forgot to charge my phone last night, and the battery died so I couldn’t call you back. Have you been calling?”
“No, not much. I have things to tell you, but I’ll wait until you get out of the hospital. That will give you a reason to hurry up and get better.”
“Do they have to do with your hottie?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know? So chop, chop. Get out of there. I better hear from you tomorrow.”
The line went so quiet, Barrie heard the faint hiss of the oxygen. “Maybe not tomorrow, baby girl. You know how doctors are. Anal. And not a McDreamy or a McSteamy in sight. This place is a whole wasteland of hotness.”
Barrie sat in the center of the master bedroom after they’d hung up, watching the ghost rise and fall. The room seemed to spin, or maybe it was only her thoughts whirling. She couldn’t stop picturing Mark lying by himself in a hospital bed, scratchy sheets and an IV drip, drip, dripping antibiotics into his arm. He hated hospitals. He didn’t even want chemo or radiation. He didn’t want to be in a hospital.
The lack of control made her heart stop, then race ahead as if it were trying to outrun the ache it knew was coming. The yunwi crowded around her, the same way they had crowded around the ghost. She wondered if they sensed her loss.
She couldn’t just sit there. She had to do something.
The key to the panel behind the bed had to be somewhere at Watson’s Landing. It had to be. And she was going to find it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Pru was still out when Barrie retrieved the keys she had seen in the top drawer of the desk in the library. It didn’t surprise Barrie to discover that none of them fit when she tried them in the keyhole of the master bedroom panel.
She thought of Mark in his sterile white hospital bed, of Pru stuck at the plantation all those years, of Lula’s letters, of poor murdered Twila, and of Eight across the river practically packing up his suitcase. She thought about leaving Watson’s Landing, about running to Mark, about running away from here. Again the thought brought a flail of panic.
She was damned if she was going to be like Lula, wasting her life without even trying to live. Or like Pru, locked up here stifling the gift. Or like Emmett, the bastard, who’d stuffed anything he didn’t want to deal with into a drawer and pretended it wasn’t there.
“This place doesn’t own me,” she said to the shadows that hovered at the edges of her vision. “You don’t own me!”
If she was going to stay on Watson Island, it was going to be on her terms. She needed to separate what she wanted from what Watson’s Landing wanted of her.
With the house still empty, she went room by room, searching for keys and simultaneously clearing out the clutter of misplaced things, tracking down every ping of loss, from an earring wedged behind a dresser to a mound of buttons, receipts, and hairpins. She even retrieved a silver fork pushed under the carpet in the dining room.
With the possible exception of the fork, every object she found was new. Newish. Nothing older than the prescription bottle she had found from 1969. Which confirmed what she had begun to suspect. Until Emmett had scared Pru and Lula out of using the gift, other Watsons must have used it. Emmett—she refused to call that man her grandfather—must have used it himself. Nothing of his was lost. Barrie didn’t find so much as a tie clip.
Emmett had made his daughters suppress
the gift and endure the pain of stifling it. He’d told them that the Fire Carrier would hurt them. He’d scared them, punished them—locked Lula in her room for finding the panel, and he’d beaten both Lula and Pru with a switch when Lula had gone into the woods.
The woods still contained something lost.
A few minutes later, dressed for snakes in a pair of Pru’s rubber Wellingtons and jeans that made her skin itch in the heat, Barrie let herself and a horde of yunwi out the kitchen door. She’d barely set a foot on the terrace when she felt the warning click and saw Eight’s tousled head appear on the staircase, his smile wide and blinding-bright when he saw her.
“That’s a new look for you.” He eyed the ugly green boots. “Going native?”
“Didn’t you know? Swamp-chic is the latest trend.” Barrie put one hand on her hip and the other behind her head and gave him her best runway strut, complete with unfashionable limp. “Now step aside. I’m on a mission.”
Eight goose-stepped sideways and swept out his arm to bow her past him. “After you, mademoiselle. Where did you say we were going?”
“I’m busy. Qu’est-ce que tu veux?”
“Sorry, ‘mademoiselle’ was it for me.”
“It means ‘What do you want?’ ”
“Sounded better in French. But what do I want? Hmm, let me think.”
He spun her toward him, his eyes intent on her the way that only his eyes had ever been. His head tilted so his mouth came down on hers with just the right amount of lingering and hunger and expectation.
For a few blissful moments Barrie let herself forget Mark and the ghost and everything lost. She sank into Eight’s kiss, melted into him the way the ocean melted onto the beach. He relaxed when she leaned on him, but he held her steady, held her up. Except, he wasn’t someone she could count on. And she didn’t want to lean on anyone anymore. She pulled away.
“Are you about done?” she asked.
He followed her onto the lawn. “Are we going to argue again?”
“Only if you want to disagree with me.”
“All right.” He slid his hands into his pockets. “So where are were going?”
“Into the woods.”
Eight’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline. “Why?”
“Because I’m looking for something. If you promise not to yap at me about it, I’ll let you be all He-Man and beat off the snakes and alligators. There’s still plenty of light, so no excuses. We’re not going to see the Fire Carrier.”
“Not so sure you can count on that.”
“He wouldn’t hurt me anyway. I think we have a deal.”
Eight looked at her as if she had gone insane. “What kind of a deal, exactly?”
“Not a very exact one.” Barrie allowed herself a smile. “The short version of a long story is that I cut my hands and accidentally made a blood bond with a water spirit in the fountain, and I sort of on purpose fed blood to the yunwi. Now they want me to find something, but all I’ve found so far is your great-aunt Twila’s engagement ring and locket, along with her ghost. Which is in the master bedroom, by the way, because that’s where she seems to have been murdered. Probably by Emmett, who seems like he could be a murderer. He was definitely a total bastard. Except I think he really did love Twila. So maybe it was Luke who murdered her and ran away. Or Luke ran away because Emmett murdered her. That last bit’s a little confusing, and I haven’t worked it all out quite yet.”
“Take a breath.”
But now that she’d started, Barrie couldn’t stop. “I also found a hidden room behind the master bedroom,” she continued, “and I think whatever I’m supposed to find is in there, but I need a key to get inside. I’ve looked everywhere in the house, so the woods is the only place it might be. Which presumes Emmett didn’t throw it away. I don’t think he was the type to throw things away, though. He was the type to hide them somewhere close and obsess over them, like the way he kept Twila’s ring and the letters my mother sent to Pru for thirteen years. Bastard, right?”
“Bastard,” Eight agreed. “You have been a busy Bear, haven’t you? And when were you going to tell me about all this?”
“I just did.” Barrie couldn’t help a sputter of laughter at the smacked-dumb-by-a-two-by-four look on Eight’s face. But the fact that he wasn’t arguing about going into the woods gave her an extra boost of courage. Throwing her arms around the back of his neck, she pulled him down to kiss him on the lips. Then she sauntered away, or at least she did the best imitation of a saunter she could manage with a limp. “You coming?” she called back over her shoulder.
“Try getting rid of me before you’ve explained all that.”
She told him while they walked, and he listened without—as far as Barrie could tell—trying to calculate the quickest route to the nearest exit. She left out only the part where Cassie had stolen Lula’s necklace. That admission stuck in her throat, as if saying it aloud would make the betrayal real. As if keeping quiet would make it all less true.
Her hair snagged in tendrils of Spanish moss as she and Eight entered the woods. The tang of decaying leaves scented the syrupy air, and she paused to search for the source of the finding pull.
“It’s this way, I think,” she said.
The underbrush thickened, but the trees grew sparser. A few minutes later, the shadows of the yunwi hung back as if they had reached some kind of invisible barrier that kept them from going farther, and soon Barrie and Eight stepped into a clearing around a tree nearly as large as the Devil’s Oak. Its trunk was easily eleven feet thick, gnarled with the weight of wide-spreading branches and the knotted remnants of long-dead limbs. The undisputed king at the heart of the woods, it had rooted out every tree for a good hundred feet around it.
Barrie pointed at the base. “That’s where the pull is coming from.”
“I’ve heard of this tree.” Eight followed her toward it. “The natives around here used to call it the Scalping Tree and hang the scalps of their enemies on it.”
The tatters of Spanish moss did look eerily like scalps. Barrie shivered despite the still-warm air. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know which tribe it could have been. None of them, probably. The Fire Carrier was Cherokee, but since he brought the yunwi here from somewhere else, he clearly wasn’t local.”
Barrie edged closer to the tree and stumbled over a half-buried branch. Eight caught her and pulled her up. “Be careful, Bear.”
“You’re always saying that.”
“Well, you’re always falling on your ass.”
She let out a pent-up breath, and scraping together the shreds of her dignity, she marched to the trunk of the Scalping Tree. The finding pull urged her toward the roots. A thick layer of leaves covered the ground, and she stooped to brush them away.
“Hang on.” Eight caught her hand. “Snakes, remember?”
He found a stick and used it to clear the leaves, exposing a layer of rocks wedged into a recess between the roots. Flicking them away one by one, he paused when one gave a metallic thunk as it landed.
Barrie picked it up. While it had looked like an oval rock at first, it was actually a fist-size metal box. It clanked when she shook it, a loose rattle of metal on metal. A gust of wind played with her hair and rustled the leaves above them.
The finding pull let her go. Even the tree looked happier.
Excellent. Now she was having delusions of happy trees. Because talking to the yunwi wasn’t bad enough. Watson Island was going to turn her into one of those crazy old ladies who doddered around having conversations with plants. Really, all she was missing now was an extensive cat collection.
Shaking her head at herself, she turned the box over and tried to open it. It didn’t budge. She fought down a surge of disappointment and bent to hit the hinges with a rock.
“Hang on,” Eight said mildly. “There’s probably a screwdriver or something back at the house we could use to open it without maiming ourselves. Or damaging the key, if you thi
nk that’s what’s in there. Maybe you shouldn’t get your hopes up, though. Why would Emmett—or anyone, for that matter—hide a key out here in an iron box?”
“Emmett hid everything. In the strangest places,” Barrie said. “But you’re right. Pru has a toolbox in the closet.”
When they emerged from the woods, the yunwi were waiting for them. The spirits surged around Barrie and jumped to get her attention, but her eyes shot beyond them to where Cassie was hurrying up the path.
“There you are!” Long, dark hair flying like a banner behind her, Cassie gave a careless wave, as if it were just another evening, just another visit. A swell of finding pressure crashed into Barrie, a pull so strong, it made her vision blur and ripple. She staggered and grabbed Eight’s arm. Cassie not only had Lula’s necklace; she’d had the nerve to bring it with her.
Eight stopped and turned her to face him. “What happened between you two?” he asked quietly. “Besides being her usual self, what did she do to make you wish you’d never met her?”
Barrie shook her head. She couldn’t decide which she wanted more, to run away before Cassie reached them or to march up to her cousin and slap her in the face.
“Hey, y’all. Barrie, sugar, didn’t you get my messages? I’ve been calling and calling. I’ve been so worried— Hey, what’s that?” Her eyes dropped to the box Barrie held, and she reached for it, because apparently she felt entitled to take anything of Barrie’s that she wanted.
Barrie pulled the box away and handed it to Eight. “What are you doing here, Cassie?”
“I told you. You didn’t answer any of my messages.” Letting her hand drop, Cassie made her lip tremble in a good imitation of someone whose feelings were honestly hurt. Not that Cassie had an honest bone in her body. “I wanted to see if you were okay. You’re not mad at me, are you, Cos?”
That was how she was going to play it?
“Is there a reason I should be mad?” Barrie asked. “Come on, Cousin. Think hard.”
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