Illusion

by Martina Boone

  The yunwi pressed in close to Barrie and made her shiver.

  It wasn’t as though the contact were cold . . . exactly. She felt warmth from them. It was more as if her body reacted to them by producing a cold sensation, and their touch was strangely electric, amping up her awareness much the way that her senses had sharpened when the water spirit had bound her to Watson’s Landing, or when she had connected to the spirit path in the Watson woods.

  The yunwi tugged her across Miranda’s stall toward the open window. Outside, a shadow swept across the ground. The bird circled and passed again. It wasn’t a raven. The seven-foot wingspan was too big, and the color wasn’t dark enough as it rode the air.

  An eagle.

  Barrie had never seen one in the wild. It plummeted from the sky in a nearly vertical dive. She held her breath, and when it seemed certain the bird would hit the ground, it stalled its wings and extended its yellow talons to snatch up a luckless rabbit that had been hopping for cover across the grass.

  The rabbit screamed as it died.

  Its death shivered through Barrie like a draft.

  The yunwi bowed their heads and stood motionless, but the electric current of their contact increased in volume. Energy hummed through Barrie from them, and then disappeared when their hands dropped away. Once again, their shapes were clearer and their eyes were brighter.

  “Is that what you were trying to show me? You absorb energy like Obadiah?”

  They looked back at her silently, then returned to work. But Barrie couldn’t help noticing how frequently they flitted by and touched her. She was still pondering the significance of that, or wondering whether there was any significance to it, when she let herself back into the kitchen later.

  She’d been gone less than an hour, but Daphne was already at the table working on her laptop, and Pru and Mary were bickering about the open house at Colesworth Place. They had settled on a crab boil and some simple Gullah dishes, and Mary suggested they call Amber at the CopyCat about getting an extra order of the miniature cake boxes with the restaurant logo and website done up.

  “At least then we’ll get some somethin’ out of all this work. I only hope it’s not a disaster when everybody gets there,” Mary said.

  Pru frowned at her, then turned to Barrie. “Mary’s still insisting that she isn’t coming. I was hoping that Daphne would have convinced her by now. Tell her it’s going to look odd if she isn’t there—and there will be a lot of people who take their cues from her. If she doesn’t go, others will stay away.”

  “There’ll be plenty of folks to steal energy from without me askin’ them to go and have it stolen from them,” Mary said. “And someone needs to do the regular work, or the restaurant won’t open on time. Folks’ll expect openin’ night to be perfect, and that won’t happen by itself.”

  “It will be perfect,” Daphne said. “We’ve all worked hard enough. But, Gramma, how do you know how many people is going to be enough? Obadiah himself said he didn’t know. What if he needs just one extra bit of energy to break the curse, and thanks to you, he doesn’t have it?”

  The two of them tried to outstare each other, neither willing to back down. Barrie wandered to the coffeepot and poured herself a cup of sultry, dark French roast. She took a sip, letting the heat scald her throat, and returned to the table, intending to work until Eight came to pick her up. Then she realized she needed to change, and dashed upstairs.

  • • •

  Showered and dressed in the red-and-white Louboutin Jeffersons that reminded her of Mark, white capris, and a loose blue-and-white flowered top, Barrie felt both more and less like herself as Eight held the door to the SeaCow open for her a short while later. The shoes reminded her of her first night out with Eight, and they reminded her of Mark, but they felt more like San Francisco than Watson’s Landing. She hugged the memory of Mark close to her chest as the hiss of the espresso machines and the murmur of conversation stopped when she entered the bakery and moved with Eight toward the center of the seating area filled with pink-and-brown-striped booths and small, round walnut tables.

  You want more confidence? Mark had used to tell her. A pair of killer heels makes it easier to look fear in the eye.

  Cheeks flushed and hot, Barrie stood beside Eight as he raised his arm to signal for attention and smiled his trademark Beaufort smile. Beauforts had probably been charming the locals with that exact smile for the last three hundred years. A smile and a sword—the way to conquer kingdoms.

  “Hey,” he said. “How y’all doing? Mind if Barrie and I interrupt your breakfast for a minute?”

  The room went quiet. Barrie looked quickly around at the collection of curious faces, searching for Berg, and found him already seated at a booth along the side. He gave her a nod that held more than a hint of amusement.

  Eight stood perfectly at ease, his blue oxford just the right degree of rumpled with its tails hanging over the faded red of his shorts. “I wanted to let you know that we’re having an open house and cookout at Colesworth Place tomorrow night,” he said when the murmur of greetings and a handful of small jokes had settled down. “We’d appreciate it—we’d be grateful—if all y’all would stop by. The whole town. There’ll be food and dancing—”

  “Why are you having a cookout at Colesworth?” someone shouted out.

  “The whole town’s having a cookout.” Eight twitched the rolled-up sleeves of his shirt toward his elbows nonchalantly. “Which, Parker Elliot, includes you, unless you’ve moved without telling anybody. Right now, with Wyatt dead, we’ve all got a chance to practice a little forgiving and forgetting. It’s past time we buried some hatchets, and punishing Sydney and Cassie—or even Marie—for what Wyatt did makes no sense.”

  Barrie’s palms were slick, but she made herself nod in agreement. “I know I live at Watson’s Landing, and I was raised as a Watson, but I’m a Colesworth, too. That’s why I hope you’ll all come. Pru and I both do. Wyatt hurt a lot of people, but he hurt his own family worse. You’ve all been generous and more than kind to me ever since I got here. You’ve never made me feel as though Emmett’s mistakes, or Lula’s, were my fault, and you’ve never made me feel like I needed to be ashamed of where I came from. I hope you’ll be willing to give Sydney and Cassie the same kind of chance you’ve given me.”

  The silence lasted long enough for her throat to begin to close. Then an older man in a red-checkered shirt sitting in the back shouted out, “What time’s that going to be?”

  “Seven o’clock,” Eight said, grinning more widely. “And bring your own chairs.”

  “They find the gold out there yet?” someone else called.

  “Sure. Trainloads of it,” Barrie said, then laughed to show she was joking, and was relieved to see the faces around her smile back. Her eyes slid automatically to the booth where Berg was sitting. “Seriously, I wouldn’t believe all the rumors. Right now, Charlotte Colesworth’s skeleton is the only thing we know for sure is down in the room the archaeologists found. Except possibly some very angry spirits.”

  That got a smattering of laughter and a few more smiles, but since it was Watson Island, enough people went still that Barrie suspected the rumor of ghosts would spread, and she was glad.

  Eight waved to Berg to hold on while they got coffee and pastries. When they came over to sit down, Eight let Barrie slide first into the booth, and Berg pushed his plate and cup aside to make room for the tray Eight was carrying. Barrie took the tall cup Eight handed her, but her fingers were still trembling slightly as she set it down, and the foam spilled over the side onto the table. “I figured telling people about the ghosts couldn’t hurt,” she said, wiping the spill with her napkin. “Maybe it will keep a few of them clear of the room, but darn, it made me nervous.”

  “Good thing you’ve got coffee to calm you down,” Berg said, smiling.

  “Says the guy who orders a triple shot.” Eight nodded at the note scrawled on the side of Berg’s cup.

  Berg held Eight’s ey
e, then leaned back in the booth and shifted his focus back to Barrie without altering his calm expression. “I didn’t have much luck finding out how to break curses or remove spirits—or how much energy it might take to do that. But this morning, I did get an answer back to an email I sent asking about the fountain. It was mentioned in a letter, along with a description of Eliza Watson Beaufort’s garden and that of another local landowner.”

  Barrie breathed in the caramelized, smoky scent of her coffee. “I didn’t think a Watson could marry a Beaufort. Eight, did you know about that? But I guess if she wasn’t the oldest child, maybe it didn’t affect the binding?”

  “I know she had a brother,” Eight said.

  “Yes, but the brother was younger,” Berg interjected, “and Eliza’s father was the governor of Antigua while he owned Watson’s Landing, so he was off in the West Indies most of the time. Eliza ran all three of the family plantations before she married Robert Beaufort. I’ve never thought about it before, but Barrie’s right. How could that happen, unless the binding didn’t exist back then? If her father was governor, he had to function at least fairly well, so he probably didn’t have the migraines.”

  “Who did Eliza marry? Robert the pirate or someone else?” Barrie asked.

  “Robert the privateer,” Eight corrected mildly, and probably incorrectly. He stretched his arm along the bench behind Barrie. “And no. Eliza married his son, who was also Robert.”

  “So that had to be years after the original bargains, right? What else do you know about Eliza?” Barrie asked, looking from Eight to Berg.

  “She was brilliant,” Berg said. “Not only did she run the plantations when she was seventeen, but she hired an expert from the West Indies to help her develop the first strain of indigo seed that grew well in the colonies, and she shared it with the other planters. That started the whole American indigo industry.”

  “Indigo, like the blue color?” Barrie asked, popping a gooey piece of her maple pecan sticky bun into her mouth and licking her fingers.

  Berg grinned—he had a nice grin. “Mostly the dye back then, but yes. It was the third-biggest export before the Revolutionary War. Then Eliza married, and there’s not much written about her after that, except for the reference to her rose garden. The fountain was designed to provide irrigation from an underground spring.”

  Outside the window, a family of beachgoers hurried past the bakery, their faces red and tired. The air had grown thick and syrupy enough to shimmer in the late-morning sun. Barrie licked her sticky fingers again.

  “Doesn’t it seem like too much of a coincidence to have a Watson build a fountain with the Beaufort lodestone embedded in it?” she asked.

  “Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence,” Berg said.

  “I’m starting to believe in those less and less,” Barrie said, “but if Eliza married a Beaufort, then I’m even more anxious to have a look in the Beaufort library.” She looked at Eight. “Think there might be something there about her or the Roberts?”

  “The long, dull line of Beaufort lawyers never met a piece of paper they didn’t squirrel away in there.” Eight stood up from the table. “Fortunately, I happen to know someone who’s good at finding things. We just have to hope Dad went into the office this morning.”

  They said their good-byes, and weaving back through town toward the harbor, Eight walked beside Barrie, scowling and thinking so furiously that just a few days ago, Barrie would have made a joke about smoke coming out of his ears, or about him hurting himself by thinking too hard. Or maybe something more original. Now she was too afraid of opening wounds, and she hated the distance that self-consciousness created between them.

  “What are you thinking about so hard?” she asked. “Eliza, or the open house?”

  “Neither.” Eight ducked behind a yellow-painted clapboard storefront and cut through a driveway to the next block over. “I was thinking that it’s frustrating to have to work so hard to understand what people want.”

  “Is what they want really so different from what they say?”

  “Words are only seven percent of a conversation. I’ve never had to worry much about that other ninety-three percent before.”

  Barrie stopped on the sidewalk, earning a glare from a mother pushing a toddler in a complicated stroller who had to swerve to get around them. Curving her lips into a seductive half smile, Barrie looked up at Eight from beneath her lashes.

  “What’s my body language saying now?” she asked.

  “Exactly what I like to hear,” Eight said. Taking both her hands, he pulled her toward him, staring pointedly at her mouth. “Want to speak to me some more?”

  “Hah. You obviously still see some things with perfect clarity.”

  “I see right through what you’re trying to do now, for example.”

  Barrie laughed, but she felt very serious. Eight had once compared people to layer cakes, but that was true only for the outer layers. At some point, there was nothing left but the core of a person, and Eight’s core was a protective shell formed around a bruised and generous heart.

  “You don’t need your gift to read people,” she said. “Your intuition is good. Trust it, and trust yourself. I worry more about your father. He’s relied on the gift even more than you have—imagine how he feels. Maybe you should talk to him about that. At some point, you two are going to have to figure things out. Cassie isn’t the only one in this town who needs to build some bridges.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Barrie pushed the fourteen-foot-high ladder along the specially made groove in the floor of the Beaufort library before climbing it again to continue her systematic search. Behind her, Eight sat perched on the edge of the desk, reading a book report on The Wizard of Oz penned by what must have been a very young Seven Beaufort. It was marked with a big fat B-minus in red pencil.

  Eight grinned at it delightedly. “This is fantastic.”

  “It can’t be that great if he got a B-minus,” Barrie said.

  “You should have heard the lectures he gave me when I brought home anything except an A.”

  “So he wanted you to do better than he did. Also not a surprise.”

  Eight’s expression lost its gleam of humor, and he set the report aside to continue sifting through the growing pile of lost things that Barrie had been collecting from various shelves, from behind, between, and inside the books throughout the library. Eight had been right about the Beauforts never throwing anything away. There was everything from a thousand-dollar bill to a collection of thirty-eight four-leaf clovers someone had tucked into a book of poetry by William Butler Yeats. Apparently, someone had thought the Beauforts needed all the luck they could get.

  The next ping of loss yielded a handwritten note about a long-forgotten legal case, but beyond that, on the upper shelf, the pull was even stronger. Leaning over as far as she could, Barrie still couldn’t reach it, and she asked Eight to push the ladder over.

  “About three feet to the left. There,” she said. “Stop.”

  She clung to the rungs until the ladder shuddered to a halt, then she ran her hand across a row of untitled spines in dirty jewel tones of reds and greens. Three of them called to her, stronger than anything she had found so far. She tried not to let that get her hopes up as she worked loose the nearest book. The cover was stuck to the one beside it, and separating them tore off a bit of leather. The paper—or possibly parchment—inside the book was yellowed and filled with writing in small, even, and beautifully proportioned letters. The script on the flyleaf read:

  Letterbook of Eliza Watson Beaufort, 1739–1743

  Barrie climbed down and set the journals on the desk, trying to keep her voice calm. “Look at this.”

  The yellowed pages of the first volume were filled with a jumble of notes, drafts, jotted memorandums about incoming correspondence, and tucked here and there between the sheets, actual letters from Eliza’s father or her friends. Barrie flipped all the way through and handed it to Eight, w
ho’d been looking over her shoulder. She picked up the next.

  “I’ve never heard of a letterbook, but I guess it made sense to copy things out,” she said. “There weren’t any Xerox machines or computers back then.”

  Eight plucked two sheets of Kleenex from the box on the desk and took the first volume to the sofa, using a tissue to open the book and turn the cover page. “This includes the dates when Eliza’s father inherited from Thomas. Maybe she’ll mention the bindings. Here. You read while I turn the pages,” he said. “That’ll be faster.”

  “We can both read,” Barrie said, hating the faint flush of red that stained his cheeks because of his dyslexia.

  The flush deepened, and he shoved the book and the tissues into her lap and bounded off the sofa. “I’ll flip through the other two volumes, in case there’s anything that jumps out.”

  Feeling guilty, Barrie skimmed through receipts and correspondence and dinner party menus. Nine pages in, the Colesworth name jumped out at her near the beginning of a letter, and she went back to read more carefully. After three paragraphs, she raised her head and called to Eight, “Hey, listen to this.”

  To my dear brother, James,

  I flatter myself to think you shall like this part of the world when you arrive in it. I find it more preferable to the West Indias each day.

  We have an excellent acquaintance with 6 families nearby, from whom we have received much Civility. The Beauforts who live across the river are most agreeable. The same cannot be said of their neighbors at Colesworth Place, who are disregarded by every body. The Colesworths appear to be intent on revenging themselves upon our family for the strangest circumstance, of which my Father neglected to tell me. No doubt, he expected it should make me afraid. I wonder if he knows me at all!

  I shall recount the story to you as I heard it, for I am certain it cannot fail to amuse you. It seems we have a Ghost on our island. He is engaged here in the protection of a number of small Spirits much like our Fairies or Brownies, through the application of a Ceremony which he nightly performs. You will laugh when I promise you ’tis true, but I have seen the fire on the river myself, and the Servants and Merchants here speak of it all quite openly. Rest assured that we ourselves have nothing to fear. Our safety, I’m told, is protected by a Pact that Great-Uncle Thomas negotiated with the assistance of a Cherokee woman who lived across the river. This pact is at once an inconvenience and a blessing. I had hoped to persuade Papa to let me clear additional acreage to the east of the house for rice, but the woods there contain some portion of the Power that protects the magical spirits, and this we are not allowed to touch.