Persuasion

by Martina Boone

  “You have no idea what you do to me,” he said, his voice so deliciously rough it left her dazed. “I can barely remember my own name when you touch me, but at the same time, you make me think. You make me better. When I’m with you, for the first time in my life, I feel like someone sees me and thinks that I’m enough.”

  Barrie pressed her chin into his shoulder and took a shuddering breath. How could she hurt him after that?

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  So long as the boats were on the river, Barrie couldn’t do anything about setting up the lights, but she assumed they would eventually disperse for dinner the way they had the past few nights.

  In the kitchen, Pru and Mary had been working like whirlwinds on the restaurant, and there wasn’t much left for Barrie to do. After quietly pulling Mary aside and filling her in on the change of plans for the trial run dinner, Barrie ducked into the butler’s pantry. Feeling the need to accomplish something of her own, something visible and tangible, she retrieved a box of canning jars she had seen in one of the cupboards, and collected a box of the LED Fairy Globes, some fishing line, and some of Pru’s silver ribbon.

  “What on earth are you going to do with those old Mason jars?” Pru asked.

  Mary slid her glasses down her nose. The glow from the computer screen turned them an eerie shade of blue.

  “It’s a surprise. You’ll see.” Barrie grinned and pushed out through the swinging door, pausing only long enough to grab the toolbox from beneath the stairs before she walked up the two flights to the attic accompanied by a group of curious yunwi. The antique stroller she was looking for was still in the corner behind the trunk of old quilts. It was perfect.

  If only her first DIY project had involved red satin instead of silver ribbon, Mark would have approved. Hell, he would have cheered.

  The reminder that Mark wasn’t with her, that Barrie couldn’t run into the next room to spill all her problems in a rush of words, made her eyes fill so suddenly she had to stop to wipe them. It still surprised her that memories could cause such physical pain.

  She wasn’t weak. She was starting to discover that. Still, her life had changed so much, and she missed Mark so much . . . Lula’s death, too, was starting to hurt more and more. A shrink would probably have told her it wasn’t healthy to want to push her feelings about her mother into the locked recesses of her brain, but right now she didn’t have the emotional strength to deal with them.

  With the yunwi dispersing to rifle through trunks and boxes, Barrie retrieved the stroller, turned it upside down, and tried to unscrew one of the large, old-fashioned wheels, which resulted in scraped knuckles and choice curses more than in any form of success. She sat back on her heels and blew her hair out of her face.

  She felt a brush of air on her cheek as one of the yunwi reached up to touch her. Another took the screwdriver from her hand, and then several worked together to pull all four of the wheels from the stroller. They looked absurdly pleased when they had finished, their eyes burning and faces turned to Barrie for approval. She laughed and slid one of the wheels toward her.

  “I should have remembered that you guys are geniuses at taking things apart. Now if you could fix everything else that’s broken, we’d be in business.” Tapping her chest over her heart, she settled herself in a cross-legged position. The yunwi gathered around her, and a couple pressed close enough for the strangely cold-warm sensation of their bodies to dispel some of the stifling attic heat.

  Barrie worked quickly, removing the tires from the wheels, dropping three Fairy Globes into each Mason jar, wrapping a loop of fishing line around the lid, and hiding it with silver ribbon and a bow. When the miniature lanterns were finished, she spaced them evenly along the rim of the stroller wheel and attached them with more fishing line to create a chandelier. After going around the house from the front and climbing back up the steps to the porch to avoid being seen, she hung the chandelier from the underside of the balcony above one of the two tables Pru and Mary had set out.

  From inside the jars, the bright glow of the Fairy Globes picked out the metallic threads in the silver bows. The sparkling effect made Barrie think of the kind of picnics she might have had if she’d grown up on Watson Island, catching fireflies after dusk. It made her think of Eight’s blue ghost fireflies, and ghost stars, and ghost girls, and ghost smiles.

  She was struck again by the sense that time moved at a different pace on Watson Island, or at least that the past was never truly past. It bubbled to the surface like the wants Eight had seen in Obadiah’s tar pit of a heart.

  The boats were still out on the river, so with a growl of frustration, Barrie went back upstairs to the attic. She made a second chandelier, and was standing on the table to hang it when Pru poked her head out the door. The Mason jars swayed on the fishing line with a soft clink of glass.

  “Mind if we come and have a look?” Pru asked.

  “You’ve got ’em upside down,” Mary said, stepping out to stand beside the door. “The holes need to be on the bottom, if you’re lookin’ to catch the pests.”

  “There aren’t any holes, and I’m not trying to catch anything.” Barrie seethed at even the idea of anyone trapping the yunwi.

  Pru came to slide an arm around her waist. “The chandeliers are beautiful. People are going to love them. And they’re the perfect finishing touch of whimsy for out here.”

  Barrie smiled at that. Mark had always said that life demanded whimsy.

  She imagined him beside her, hooking his arm through the crook of her elbow and giving her one of his wide, wide grins.

  Look what you did, baby girl, he would have said, and they would both have known that even if the chandelier wasn’t brain surgery or even art, it was something. Making a place more beautiful was always something.

  “I’d like to bury Mark in the cemetery,” she said to Pru. “There’s a spot beside the wall of the church. I think we should bury Luke and Twila there, too—whenever the police release their bodies. What do you think?”

  “I think it’s a wonderful idea,” Pru said simply. “I’ll speak to Seven about Twila, and do you want me to talk to Jacob about doing a service for Mark?”

  “Give me a bit to think about that first,” Barrie said.

  The boats stayed out on the river until after nine, and she worked on laying out the ads for the restaurant, checking the window now and again until she saw that the boats had gone.

  Lying flat on her stomach at the end of the dock a few minutes later, she dipped one of the AquaLeds into the water and studied the effect. The orange glow spread beneath the water, rippling as the current passed around it. Pretty enough, but still a pale shadow of the real thing. There was something missing that Barrie could not define. Magic, she supposed.

  A squadron of brown pelicans flew by, low above the water, their prehistoric shapes like awkward old airplanes flying in tight formation. Barrie turned over onto her back to watch them fly out of sight, then set to work tying the rest of the AquaLeds to varying lengths of fishing line, weighting them, throwing them out into the river, and anchoring them to the dock at staggered points. The current did the rest. When she had finished, the lights glowed downriver to the creek across from Colesworth Place, and she sat dangling her legs with the yunwi around her until the sound of an approaching outboard motor broke the temporary peace.

  She scrambled to her feet, gathered up the empty boxes, and hauled them back to the house. At the top of the terrace steps, she stopped to look back. The boat had docked at Colesworth Place, and two people had gotten out. There was a big guy, and a smaller one—Berg and Andrew Bey, most likely. Their flashlights and the glow on the river cast them in silhouette as they started up the path.

  Mary had gone when Barrie returned to the kitchen, but Pru came outside to look at what Barrie had done. Smoothing her palms down her wash-faded sundress, Pru opened her mouth and closed it again soundlessly, and then she wandered to the edge of the porch and caught the railing.

 
“Is that what the Fire Carrier looks like to you?” she asked, finally turning back to Barrie. “That intense? That beautiful?”

  Seen from the porch, the lights swayed gently in the river current, making the glow shift and shimmer beneath the water. Barrie squinted, trying to consider it from the perspective of someone who had never clearly seen the river on fire. Without the flames dancing above the surface, it was too static, too unwild, too underwhelming.

  Alike and not alike.

  “The real thing is far more beautiful,” she said. “Maybe it’s silly to hope that this will change anything. It probably won’t even work. But I guess it’s my way of claiming the river. I refuse to be afraid to walk down to our own dock because people will be watching, and I hate the idea of people waiting here for the Fire Carrier to emerge from the woods. I just want it to be over.”

  Pru pulled her into a hug, and while that helped, it didn’t solve the problem.

  The past was never over. It cast a shadow over the present and the future.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  Through the closed French door to the balcony, Barrie tried not to stare across the river into Eight’s room while she waited for Pru to go to bed. His window was dark, so he was probably still on his way home from Columbia.

  She didn’t step outside. There was still too much to do, to think about. In the confusion at the dig that afternoon, she’d forgotten to get the copy of Caroline’s diary from Andrew, but the newly functioning Internet let her search for information about the night Colesworth Place had burned. Few of the results were helpful. General Sherman had ordered his Union army to leave occupied houses unharmed, but his troops had taken out their wrath on the entire state of South Carolina for leading the charge of Southern succession. A burned house was not unusual. To generals and politicians, wars were about ideology, but to soldiers they were personal. The men Barrie had seen threatening that little girl with rape hadn’t been thinking high-minded thoughts.

  Maybe the Union officer had been angry overall, or he’d been sent to get the gold back, or maybe rumors of wealth or buried treasure had sent him scavenging closer to Charleston than most of Sherman’s troops had ventured on their way from Savannah to Columbia.

  But why hadn’t Alcee’s wife just told him where the gold was buried, if that was what he’d been after? And why had Alcee been hiding in the woods?

  Obadiah claimed that “why” was the most important question, but “who” was always harder to understand. It was people who made things happen, and their decisions were the sum of a million individual experiences. Someone could be ordered to burn down a house, to kill a man, to rape a child. If he chose to follow those orders, it was because of who he was and who his life had made him.

  Barrie thought of Cassie, curled in a fetal ball and shivering, lost in her memories after seeing the slave girl threatened. What had happened to Cassie after Ernesto and the cartel had ordered her kidnapped?

  Four years ago, Cassie would have been thirteen. Thirteen.

  How did anyone think that exploiting the vulnerable was a show of strength? The whole idea made Barrie so furious that she felt helpless. She looked up a few websites about flashbacks and PTSD, but they only made her frustration worse. There was nothing she could do for Cassie, but she had to believe there was a reason the ghost house had appeared and the events of that horrible night had echoed into the present.

  People assumed there would always be someone around to tell their stories. That wasn’t true. Maybe that was the real purpose of Barrie’s gift. Every lost object was a story, and every story needed to be heard.

  It was nearly midnight. Barrie wound a black scarf over her hair. Despite the heat, she changed into black yoga pants and a dark long-sleeve tee. After easing the door open, she tiptoed out of her room. Downstairs she tugged her feet into a pair of Pru’s outsize Wellingtons and let herself out of the house.

  The motorboat was still tied to the Colesworth dock, and the speedboat with the canopy had come back again. It lay at anchor closer to the marsh grass near the Watson woods.

  To avoid being spotted, Barrie didn’t cross through the hedge maze and go down to the dock as she’d planned. Instead, she ducked down low and traversed the lawn far from the river and skirted the edge of the trees.

  Ducking into the dark woods as late as possible, she blinked and tried to get her bearings. The yunwi, who had run beside her, abandoned her at the edge of the grass, as they always did. She wished she’d brought a flashlight to use, not for illumination but as a weapon.

  Hopefully, she wouldn’t need it.

  After the explosion, she had been too disoriented to pay much attention to her surroundings. Now she picked her way through the concealing woods filled with carnivorous brambles and fallen branches, searching for the place on the bank where she had emerged from the river.

  When she finally found it, she retreated to a spot a short distance back from the water’s edge and sat on a crumbling cypress log to wait. The passage of time seemed to have slowed to a trickle. Her nose filled with a sensory overload of decay and rich new life, and her ears hummed with frogs, insects, and the occasional disgruntled hoot of an owl.

  She had become impatient lately, mostly with herself and how even her best-intentioned decisions seemed to go awry. Not that anything could possibly go wrong with her current plan. Of course not. She was only sitting alone in the dark, in the middle of a wood filled with ghosts and snakes and alligators and who-knew-what-kind of human predators.

  She had barely experienced the prickle of goose bumps generated by that thought when the first faint hint of sage smoke mixed with the forest smells, and the orange glow lit the trees at the farthest edge of her peripheral vision. Hugging her knees to her chest, she turned her head.

  Despite the treacherously uneven ground, the Fire Carrier moved as sure-footedly as if he were floating. He was as real as he had been the night he had saved her, as young and alive, as somber. His red-and-black mask of war paint made the whites of his eyes stand out in the darkness, and the black feathers of his cloak and feathered cap fluttered with every step.

  He watched her, but she didn’t move to stop him. Instead, she followed while he carried his burning sphere into the river and unspooled threads of fire onto the water like a ball of yarn unrolling across a floor. The flames spread upriver as far as Barrie could see, and downstream to the creek opposite the Colesworth dock, where the fire turned and raced toward the left branch of the Santisto River on the other side of Watson’s Landing. Rather than watching the ceremony, Barrie hid in the darkened woods and watched the occupants of the canopied speedboat. The men were drinking beer, their feet splayed, backs braced against each other as if they were too bored to even sit up straight. Once again, nothing changed when the flames sped past them. Despite the fear that leaped into Barrie’s throat and tied knots in her lungs, the boat didn’t burn.

  She had known that. Boats had been here several times during the Fire Carrier’s ceremony without burning, and the dock and the marsh grass didn’t burn every night when the spirit spun his magic. Seeing it up close was different. Barrie could no longer pretend that the Fire Carrier hadn’t changed his spell or changed his intent the night of the explosion, changed it because he’d tried to save her.

  She was grateful. And her gratitude frightened her.

  The fact of Wyatt’s death, and Ernesto’s death, two deaths on her conscience, frightened her. Yet looking back at the Fire Carrier, she felt no fear.

  He finished his ceremony and recalled the flames to himself, spun them back into a ball of fire, and turned toward the Scalping Tree at the center of the Watson woods. Now Barrie did step out onto the path to stop him.

  “Tell me what you need. What do you want from me?” she asked. “I know you want something. I feel it, but I don’t understand what I’m supposed to do, and I need to know about the bargain you made with Thomas. All the bargains.”

  He watched her, and as real as he was, as clearly a
s she saw the definition of his muscles and the tracing of veins beneath his skin, he was also transparent. Through him, the Santisto rolled inevitably toward the ocean.

  His eyes were as sad and solemn as the night that he had saved her, and he remained just as silent. But he raised his hands and blew on the sphere he carried. It split in two, and as he continued to blow, the fire in each hand took the shape of a small person, or a child—no, a yunwi. Even as Barrie made the connection, the shapes changed, melted together again, first into a circle of flame and then into a bird. A raven?

  “What does that mean?” The tug of frustration that knitted Barrie’s brows together was becoming all too familiar. “Are you trying to warn me about Obadiah?”

  The Fire Carrier didn’t answer. He gathered the flames into a ball again and walked back toward the Scalping Tree.

  She ran beside him, peppering him with questions. When he didn’t so much as look at her, she reached out to grasp his arm, needing to hold him back. Her hand passed through him, and she felt only a thickening of the air, a slight resistance and a cooling of temperature. She stopped walking, her mind clouding as if the cold had made her lethargic, and by the time she looked up again, the Fire Carrier had gone.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Eight took forever to come over the next morning, long past breakfast. Barrie picked up her phone eight or nine times with her finger poised to press his number. But she chickened out. Because as much as she wanted Seven to have gone with him, to have told him everything . . . What if Seven had told him, and Eight was furious that she had kept it secret?

  The delivery trucks came with the sweet feed and hay and salt blocks for the horses, and another truck dumped a big pile of wood shavings behind the stables. Barrie waited until the driver packed up. Then she left the yunwi happily shoveling the shavings into the stalls.

  Back in the kitchen, she concentrated ferociously on washing mesclun greens and prepping shrimp instead of checking her phone every couple of minutes. When she finally looked up through the kitchen window and saw Eight walking down the shallow Beaufort hill toward the dock, she half-hated herself for the surge of relief that ran through her. He was carrying a cooler, and the yellow Labrador retriever bounded happily around him.