Illusion

by Martina Boone

  Pru’s hands had flown to her throat, and Eight’s muscles bunched, ready for a fight that was long since over. And neither of them—none of them—could do anything to change what had happened. Except that now, now that Barrie had told them, they would all have to make choices about what she had done. Truth wasn’t merely a knife that could set you free. It could sever relationships and leave you bleeding. Or it could damn you.

  Meeting Seven’s eyes was hard, but she forced herself to do it. Because he had already hated her, in one way, it was easier to watch for his reaction than to wait for the understanding of what she’d done to descend on Eight or Pru. Then again, Seven was a lawyer. An officer of the court. And Barrie had just confessed to murder.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  They all examined the ground where Ernesto had disappeared. Apart from a few drops of blood on a handful of leaves, they found nothing. Where the ulunsuti stone had come through the tree, the blood was gone entirely—and so was any sign that the stone, or anything else, had ever pushed its way through the bark.

  “I’m not saying that I don’t believe you.” Seven crouched beside the spot where Ernesto had fallen and looked doubtfully at the stone still clenched in Barrie’s hand. “But you have to admit that there should be some sign—churned earth or even just an indentation in the wood. When you add something or subtract something, you have to account for the space it takes up.”

  “You’re seriously arguing physics? It’s magic,” Eight said.

  He stood behind Barrie with his arms wrapped around her. His warmth slowly seeped into her marrow and filled up the hollowness she had been feeling. It made it easier for her to think. It made breathing easier.

  Seven stood up and dusted off his hands. “I’m sure that even magic has rules. We may not know what they are, but they can’t defy the laws of nature.”

  Thinking of the moment when she had first touched the stone and felt as if she had been broken down into particles so small that they barely existed, Barrie shook her head. “Magic is nature. Maybe the laws of physics are only symptoms of the few bits of magic that humans understand.”

  “Which doesn’t change the fact that we can’t explain any of this to the sheriff’s department. We can’t even be certain what’s down there under the soil. Would we find Ernesto’s body if we dug for it?” Seven shrugged, and then he set off to walk around the perimeter of the tree, searching the ground as he went, as if something would be different this time than it had been a minute before when he had done the very same thing. When that brought no results, he came back to the spot where Ernesto had fallen. Crouching low, he started to pick up and examine individual leaves.

  Pru handed the gun to Barrie. “Hold this.” She marched over to Seven and stood over him. “What are you doing now?”

  “Getting rid of evidence.” Seven held up a leaf with tiny dots of blood on it and let her examine it before stuffing it into his pocket. “It was self-defense anyway, but it never hurts to be safe. There’s not much blood. We’ll throw the stick into the river and take any leaves that caught the splatter and shove them down the garbage disposal. The laws of nature and physics can be damned. Without a body or any evidence, we can pretend that none of it ever happened. If we report this to anyone, we’d only be exposing Barrie, Watson’s Landing, and the Fire Carrier—the whole town—to more upheaval and danger.”

  Almost frantically, as if she welcomed the distraction, Pru went to work beside him, checking each leaf and placing a few here and there into the pocket of her sundress. She hadn’t bothered to put on shoes before running out of the house, and her faded pink bedroom slippers were speckled with dirt, leaves, and broken bits of dried Spanish moss.

  Eight squeezed Barrie’s arms, trying unsuccessfully not to grin at the sight of his father with leaves sticking out of his bulging pockets. Barrie closed her eyes and let herself slump against his chest. He gathered her even closer. She buried her eyes in the crook of his elbow, giving herself a moment of relief before pulling away. And she needed to pull away. She needed a minute. She needed to touch Miranda and make sure the mare was okay. She needed to check the yunwi. She needed . . . so many things.

  “Take a minute, Bear.” Eight’s eyes were dark and as soft as moss. “Everything else can wait. We can cancel the open house if we need to. We’ll figure out some other way to get rid of Ayita and Elijah and the curse.”

  Seven grunted softly in disagreement. “Better not. Until we’re positive no one knew Ernesto was coming here, we need to do everything exactly like normal. Especially in front of Mary and Daphne, because we don’t want to endanger them or make them accomplices.” He gave Barrie an encouraging smile. “You can do that, can’t you?”

  How could anyone act “normal” when they’d killed someone? Barrie couldn’t imagine it. Then again, hadn’t they all proven they were good at keeping ugly secrets?

  “I’ll be fine,” she made herself say. She forced herself to stoop and start examining leaves and to look for scuff marks in the dirt. To start putting bricks up over the memories, like Edgar Allan Poe’s brick wall, even as she talked Pru and the Beauforts through everything that had happened and what the Fire Carrier had shown her. And through it all, she held the ulunsuti that the Fire Carrier and the tree had given her pressed tightly against her side, because she didn’t dare to let it go.

  Seven didn’t say anything until they had finished cleaning up the evidence. Then he walked over to Barrie and held out his hand. “Let me take a look. Where is the stone trying to pull you? Is it the river or Beaufort Hall?”

  Barrie started to drop the crystal into his palm, but as she lowered it, he jerked away as if it had burned him before it even touched him. “That’s really hot,” he said. “And awful, in a way that has nothing to do with temperature. It feels . . . wild . . . elemental? I’m not sure that’s the right word, either.”

  Barrie pulled the stone back, and touched it with her other hand. It was hot—and the vibration still sounded in the back of her ears, but it wasn’t unbearable, as if she had adjusted to it. Tuned in to it.

  It was hard to know what she felt anymore; too much had happened.

  “Let me try,” Eight said, approaching the ulunsuti more cautiously.

  Seven caught his arm. “Be careful. It could be that the aneurysm my father had was related to the stone itself and not to the binding.”

  “I was standing inches behind Barrie and I didn’t feel anything except that Barrie’s skin felt hot,” Eight said.

  Pru laid the back of her hand on Barrie’s forehead, then drew back. “Put that thing down right this minute. It’s doing something dangerous to you.”

  Barrie shook her head. “I don’t feel it—I don’t feel hot anymore, so maybe whatever it’s doing is adjusting to me, or me to it. Seven’s right, though. We should see where it wants to lead me.”

  She relaxed her muscles, and the stone tugged her arm up and toward the river. With the others trailing behind her, she let her feet follow the pull, picking her way through brush and around trees, until she had reached the edge of the marsh grass near where the Fire Carrier came out of the woods every night. The line of her arm pointed straight to the Beaufort garden and the fountain beside the house.

  She shifted position, walking up the bank a stretch. The stone reoriented, still pointing to the garden.

  “Well, that’s pretty conclusive,” Eight said.

  “Should I try to take it over to Beaufort Hall and see what happens?” Barrie asked.

  Seven checked his watch and stopped pacing the riverbank behind her. “There’s no time now. We have to appear normal, and Mary and Daphne will be showing up here any minute. I’m supposed to be meeting Darrel at the hardware store about tables and stoves in half an hour.”

  “So, what do we do with the stone?” Eight asked. “Barrie can’t exactly push it back into the trunk of the Scalping Tree for safekeeping.”

  “Since apparently no one else can touch it, we don’t need to put
it back,” Barrie said.

  Taking a quick look around the area, she spotted a cypress tree with a hollowed knot above a low-hanging branch. She climbed up onto one of the tree’s knobbed knees, and she pushed the ulunsuti down inside the cavity.

  Around them in the woods, there were only the ordinary sounds, the birds and squirrels going about their business, and no suggestion of outsiders anywhere nearby. Barrie pushed her senses out, looking for otherness or something that didn’t belong, but all she felt was the energy of the trees and shrubs flowing together like a giant web of life. She was the one who felt smaller with her hands empty. As if the stone had amplified her and joined her to the universe more completely than before.

  The full weight of having taken a life swept down on her, and she wondered if that had diminished her, too, made her less of a person.

  “I’m going to head over to check on Miranda,” she said, partly because she needed breathing space and crying space. “I’ll meet you all back in the kitchen.”

  She walked away, steeling herself as she headed out of the woods toward the house, the cold of what she had done seeping deeper. How was she supposed to appear normal and pretend that nothing had happened? She had killed Ernesto. Her hands itched, as if his blood were crawling through her skin from the outside in, and she scrubbed at the heel of her hand long after any trace had disappeared.

  Eight stayed behind talking with Pru and Seven a few moments. Then he jogged to catch her at the edge of the lawn. He turned her toward him as if she were a spun sugar construction instead of something lethal and awful, and his carefulness made her eyes well. Softness, thoughtfulness, none of that was what she deserved or needed. Right now, she needed motion. She needed to outrun her feelings and her memories.

  “Look at me, Bear,” Eight whispered. “Are you listening? You made a decision that saved your life. Probably saved Pru’s life. You protected Watson’s Landing. If you had died . . .”

  She waited for him to continue, but he shook his head. Logically, Barrie knew he was right. Still, in her mind’s eye, she could see Ernesto’s spirit blowing toward the water, cleansed of the blackness that had gripped it in life. It felt as if he had torn away a small part of her own soul as well.

  She went stiff as Eight wrapped his arms around her. “Please don’t shut me out,” he said. “I don’t need to be able to read you as well as I could before to know that you want to run away from what’s happened. But running doesn’t solve anything. That’s why I’m staying, why I’m going to be here beside you as long as you want me to be. I know what I want now, remember? What I want—and I know that you are up high on that list.”

  “Even after this?”

  “Especially after this. We’ve been through too much together to think that that’s ever going to change now. What happened with Ernesto can’t make any difference to how I feel about you. So tell me what you need. If you need space, I’ll give you that, but don’t internalize what happened and blame yourself. This, Ernesto—you can’t blame yourself for any of it.”

  “Don’t you understand? I killed someone! A person. However bad he was, he was alive, and now he’s n-not.” Without realizing she was moving, Barrie took the step forward into Eight’s arms, and he held her, rocking her back and forth until the motion lulled her back into feeling numb.

  “Maybe whatever the Fire Carrier did was meant to help you see that you have to let go, as much as what he did was meant to set Ernesto free,” Eight said against her hair. He kissed her forehead, then watched her with a permission-asking expression that made it clear the next move was hers. When she didn’t pull away, he dropped his mouth to hers, and it was exactly what she needed. Reassurance, and warmth, and a moment of forgetfulness.

  She kissed him as if it were going to be the last chance she ever had to kiss him. When she thought of the ceremony that night and the power of the ulunsuti stone and what had happened to Eight’s grandfather, kissing him that way seemed to her to be only common sense. As long as you loved somebody, each kiss was hope and wonder, but it was also the potential for good-bye.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  For hours after that, they baked, frosted, and decorated desserts in the hot kitchen, with the radio playing more loudly than usual, the beat of the music accompanied by the tap of knives and swishing whisks and the oven door opening and closing. There was comfort in cooking, beauty in pouring love and care and creativity into what could have been a purely mechanical need to eat. Even more than the food, having everyone working in the kitchen together helped to plug up the holes through which Barrie’s memories crept. That and the mingled sweet scents of dough and baking fruit made it almost possible for her to lock away what she had done in a dark corner of her mind for later examination. She thought she was doing all right, but she still found Pru and Eight, and eventually even Mary, watching her with worried expressions.

  By three o’clock, every surface of the kitchen, butler’s pantry, and dining room overflowed with miniature pecan and strawberry tarts, not to mention bite-size chocolate, hummingbird, Coca-Cola, and candy bar cakes. Barrie and Daphne filled the black-and-silver cake boxes they’d had printed up with the restaurant logo, and Eight stacked them into the crates for transport.

  When they were done, Mary wiped her newly washed hands on a dishcloth and lifted one of the boxes to examine the way the moon, the river, and the branches of the silver trees spilled across the four main surfaces. “These did turn out beautifully, I’ll admit it,” she said. “I hope they’ll bring more people in. Of course, when it all goes sideways this afternoon, folks’ll associate it with the restaurant, and no one will want to come when we open.”

  “First, nothing will go wrong.” Daphne pushed the final six boxes across the table. “And second, the whole opening week is full already. We’ve had to turn forty-three people away for Thursday, and almost as many for the other nights this weekend. We have so many people bidding extra in the auction for seats that it looks like we’ll have at least five thousand in donations to give to whatever charity we decide on.”

  “In that case, we’d better finalize what that’s going to be,” Pru said. “I’ll ask Seven to look into it. He’s got some other legal work he’s already doing for us.”

  Barrie paused on her way to the sink to wash her hands. “I’d love to donate to someone who provides after-school tutoring,” she said, thinking of Jackson. “Or, Mary, what have you been doing with the money that Obadiah sent?”

  “I always give it to Pastor Nelson as an anonymous donation and let him pass it on to the folks who needed it the most,” Mary said, putting down the cake box she’d been holding. “We probably need to be more formal with this kind of money.”

  Pru nodded. “But I doubt people will be as generous once the novelty of the seating auctions wears off.”

  While Barrie went to rinse her hands, Eight set the final crate full of cake boxes on top of the stack of others. “As long as the food is good and we can create a good experience, I think they will,” he said distractedly. “It’s human nature to want to help others.”

  “That’s not my experience of human nature.” Daphne retrieved a cloth to wipe the table. “For the sake of the ceremony tonight, though, I hope you’re right. I hate the idea of Obadiah having to destroy Elijah’s and Ayita’s souls if they can’t let go of the curse.”

  “Let’s hope he has enough energy to do any of this when the time comes. We still don’t know how many people are coming, or how many would be enough,” Eight said, handing Barrie two of the stacked crates of cake boxes to carry and picking up three to take himself.

  Daphne shot a dark look over at Mary, who was leaning against the table. “I really wish you’d change your mind about coming, Gramma.”

  “So do I,” Pru said. “I’m worried that a lot of people are going to hear you aren’t there and change their minds about coming, too.”

  “I haven’t said a word to anyone one way or the other, but you can tell me up one side and down
the other that this is safe, and I still won’t like it. I have no intention of sendin’ other folks over there to have Obadiah take pieces of them without their permission.”

  “You keep saying that.” Daphne slapped the cloth down against the table. “But what about Elijah and Ayita? Doesn’t it feel wrong to have them stuck there? Or to have people getting hurt because of them? To have Brit and Jackson hurting—”

  “We don’t know that’s the curse.”

  “We don’t know otherwise, do we?”

  The two of them glowered at each other until, with a sniff, Mary went off to the pantry. A moment later she emerged carrying a large bushel full of corn on the cob. Eight nudged Barrie with his elbow and nodded toward the door. He pushed through and held it open while Barrie exchanged a rueful smile with Daphne.

  They made several trips back and forth from the car to the kitchen, until all the crates and boxes were packed into the trunk of the Range Rover that Eight had borrowed from his father. When they’d finished, Barrie slid into the passenger seat and fidgeted against the searing heat of the leather that seeped through even her mosquito-defying skinny jeans.

  “You look beautiful,” Eight said as he eased in beneath the steering wheel and gave her a sidelong You doing okay? glance he knew better than to put into words.

  “I keep thinking what I did should show on the outside, like a scarlet letter, or one of those fleur-de-lis marks in The Three Musketeers. Also, what if Mary’s right? Is it wrong to bring people over there so Obadiah can steal their energy without giving them the chance to refuse? What if he accidentally kills someone? Or Elijah and Ayita kill someone? That would be more people on my conscience. I picture all that energy swirling around people, and Ayita and Elijah sucking it up and turning into giant Stay Puft marshmallow ghost monsters—”

  “You spent your childhood watching too many old movies.”