Compulsion (5 page)

“Wait.” Trying to make eye contact with Barrie, Eight walked backward across the grass. “Would you please stop? I’m a jackass, okay? Don’t be mad. Come back to the house. Whatever I said, I’m sorry.”

He was apologizing, but he looked confused. He deserved to be confused. Barrie herself didn’t know what she was doing. Running with nowhere to go. Running from herself.

“You’re fine,” she said on a long, slow sigh. “It’s been a nightmare week.”

Instead of relaxing, Eight’s face creased, and he stuffed his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “You haven’t had a chance to process yet. Dad says I holed up in a closet for three weeks after my mother died.” He turned to walk beside her, his shoulders hunched up as if to deflect the memory, and it took
him a few beats before he continued: “I was ten. Apparently they hauled me out once in a while, hosed me off, fed me, and let me crawl back in because they knew I needed time.”

Did his mother’s death still hurt as much? Or did dead-motherness eventually wear off?

For Barrie, Lula’s death was all tangled up with Mark’s cancer. She couldn’t say where grief ended for one and started for the other, grief and love and unfairness. Why Mark? Why either of them?

“At least you knew your mother. You know how to remember her.” The words came from the scraped-out, dark place inside Barrie. “I’ll bet she was wonderful, wasn’t she? The kind of mother who baked oatmeal cookies. Put cartoon character Band-Aids on your knees. Walked you to the bus stop every morning. Or do you not have bus stops around here?”

Eight’s chin lifted, but the rest of him stilled to attention. “I take it your mother wasn’t like that.”

“Lula? No.” Barrie’s breath hitched on the last syllable and she paused beside him. “She was the kind of mother who locked herself in her room and surfed online auctions for designer clothes no one would ever see her wear because she hadn’t left the house in seventeen years. The kind who didn’t let anyone, not even me, see her scars. Who didn’t tell her twin sister she was still alive. Who dropped dead of a heart attack when her best friend—her only friend—told her he was dying
of cancer, so she wasn’t there for him the one time he really needed her.”

Grinding to a halt, she shook her head. Eight’s mouth hung open—literally open, like a fish on a hook. He probably thought she was psycho. She rubbed her temple to relieve the pressure.

“Okay. You have a little baggage.” Eight rocked back on his heels.

“You have
no
idea.”

“Come here.” He pulled her against him gently, and held her. His heart beat, strong and steady, against her ear until her breathing and her own heart slowed and the world shifted back to solid beneath her feet.

How had she not realized how furious she was at Lula? For dying and stealing the last months of Mark’s life. For dying and leaving only unanswered questions to mark her passing.

“I thought I was doing okay,” Barrie whispered.

There had been so much to do. Making funeral arrangements. Finding the hospice. Dreading the days until she had to say good-bye to Mark. Struggling not to run back to him as she shuffled between too many people in the long security line at the airport. Trying not to hyperventilate when she was buckled into her seat and forced to sit still while the plane took off.

She had been fine until she’d stopped moving.

She couldn’t stop moving. If she stopped, the loss, the change, the newness, would all catch up with her. Head down, refusing to look at Eight, she set herself in motion again. One foot and then the other.

“What was going on back there in the kitchen anyway?” she asked, because Eight was still watching her with a puzzled expression. “What were you hoping to overhear?”

“Explanations,” he said, as if he’d expected the change of subject. “There’s no way my dad should have known where to find the first aid kit. Or that Pru should have known peanut butter whoopie pie cake is Dad’s favorite dessert.”

“So? They were friends.”

“That’s just it. I don’t think they were. Or they shouldn’t have been.”

“Why not?” Barrie asked, and when he didn’t answer right away, she paused to study him, which wasn’t a hardship by any means. His solid jaw was a little stubborn, but it spoke of steadiness, and in contrast his eyes were kind. And worried.

He smiled abashedly when he caught her watching, and gave a one-shouldered shrug. “You have to understand. Watson Island is all about history, and the Beauforts and Watsons had been friends since the Stone Age. But that ended when my great-aunt Twila ran off with your great-uncle Luke. As far as I know, until your aunt called my dad about the legal work for your move, they hadn’t spoken since they
were in school together. Not that anyone speaks to your aunt very much.”

“What? Why?” It was an odd way to phrase it.

“No one sees her much.” Eight took a moment to arrange his thoughts. “Look, from what I’ve heard, Emmett—your grandfather—was strange after Twila left. The two of them had been engaged, but Twila broke it off to run away with Emmett’s brother. Then when Lula took off too, someone else running away from him, I guess Emmett really lost it. They all holed up here on the plantation, and no one saw much of them after that.” He paused, and his lips tipped in a wry smile. “Now it’s your turn. Why was your aunt kneeling on broken china?”

He had the whole good-guy thing down to an art; Barrie had to hand it to him. He walked beside her without pressing her, as if he knew she needed space, as if he knew exactly what she needed. Which probably meant he wasn’t a good guy at all.

“Pru didn’t know Lula was scarred from the fire that killed my father. I knew she’d been gorgeous before the fire; Mark told me that much. But I never stopped to wonder what it had to be like for her to go from being beautiful to having those awful scars. The way Pru reacted, it was as if being pretty was all Lula cared about.”

“Was it?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know her well enough.” It was hard to admit that to herself, much less to say it aloud. “I didn’t even
know she grew up here. That she had a twin or any relatives.”

“There might have been a reason she kept it quiet.”

“What do you mean?” Barrie stopped walking.

“Your grandfather told everyone she died in the fire that killed your father.”

“Are you saying he knew she didn’t? That he knew she was alive?”

“I’m not sure I know what I’m saying. Except that either there’s an empty casket in the Watson cemetery or they buried someone else in your mother’s place.”

“Mistaken identity,” Barrie said.

But that made no sense either. There had been only two people in the fire.

Eight pushed his hands deeper into his pockets. “Emmett would have had to go out to San Francisco to provide an identification. Or he sent them DNA or dental records. Something. They wouldn’t have shipped the wrong body all the way out here for the funeral.”

The droning buzz of mosquitoes had grown loud in Barrie’s ears. “How do you know there even
was
a funeral?” she asked.

“Because this is Watson Island. Everyone around here knows everything about everyone. Especially about you. About
us
. The three founding families. We’re the island’s favorite hobby.”

Barrie rubbed her temples with clammy fingers. The ache
had become too insistent to ignore, but it was more than the horror of Eight’s words making her head hurt. Something lost had been pulling on her Watson senses.

“Hey! What are you doing?” Eight blocked her path before she could set off toward the trees. “You can’t go into the woods.”

“Why not?”

His jaw clenched and then unclenched. His eyes slid toward the right.

As a tell, that was damning. You could never trust a guy who told a lie too fast or a truth too slow—Mark had taught Barrie that. Of course, there was a third option. A slow lie, the kind that made it clear the teller was winging it as he went. Barrie suspected Eight was too experienced a liar for that.

He nodded toward her shoes. “You aren’t dressed to play in the woods at night,” he said, “and there are snakes, and alligators that come up from the river. Anyway, your aunt will be wanting us back.”

The truth. Too much truth, and told too slow.

All right, so he was not a natural liar. But finding pull or not, it
was
darker beneath the trees. And Barrie was no fan of snakes.

Eight’s eyes caught hers. He studied her, keenly, strangely, as though he were reading what was going on inside her. No one had ever looked at her like that. As if she held the answers
to the mysteries of the universe, every star, moon, and planet. Then his face shuttered tight, and he strode toward the house.

Moisture sprang to Barrie’s eyes, turning the fairy lights into shimmering ribbons. God, why couldn’t she stop wanting to cry? As if Eight didn’t already think she was a nutcase. She curled her fingers into her palms and dug in deep, exhaling and willing herself calm. It helped when the pressure in her head grew fainter as they left the woods behind and approached the boxwood maze.

In the open, the shadows had deepened on the ground, and the river had become a Turner painting of liquid moonlight. Between Beaufort Hall and the subdivision downstream, an engine sputtered. Eight stopped walking and turned toward the sound.

A darkened speedboat glided toward an almost invisible dock. On the hill above it, spotlights lit the skeleton of another mansion: three jagged chimneys, wide stairs, and eight tall, white columns, partially blocked from view by a stage or some kind of scaffolding. Farther back on the property the windows of a smaller house glowed like eyes.

The ruined mansion would have been eerie anywhere. Downriver from Beaufort Hall, downriver from Watson’s Landing, it reminded Barrie of the aftermath of a tornado. Damage with no context, no reason, no logic. Two great houses survived while a third lay crushed and broken.

“You mentioned three founding families,” she said. “I assume that meant three plantations. Is that what those ruins are?”

“Eight? Barrie? Come on back. You’ve been out long enough.” Seven’s voice carried across the garden.

Eight had been scowling, but at the sound of Seven’s voice, he broke his stare and took Barrie’s hand again.

She was sick of nonanswers. Tired of him pulling her around. She folded her arms across her chest. “Why can’t you answer a simple question?”

“It’s complicated—”

“Nothing’s that complicated.”

“It’s Colesworth Place.” He watched her expectantly while he said the name.

“Colesworth?” Barrie’s mental landscape shook with the rumble of things falling into place. How had she not guessed? “So my father grew up here too? He and Lula went out to San Francisco together?”

“You didn’t know?” He looked at her with sympathy that set her teeth on edge.

The idea of her mother and father eloping together made no sense within the context of Lula’s hatred. Barrie shook her head, and the movement didn’t feel connected to her, as if she weren’t controlling her motions.

“What happened to the mansion?”

“Burned by Yankees. Sherman on his march to Columbia. Wyatt—that’s your uncle, your father’s brother—is trying to rebuild it, which is certifiably crazy.”

Eight’s pity made Barrie feel even smaller than usual. She was used to being small, and not unused to being pitied, but coming from Eight, with his beautiful-boy, pink-shirted confidence, it was hard to take.

“Don’t look at me like that. I don’t know anything, okay? My mother didn’t tell me anything about this place.”

The lighted ruins shone against the sky. Barrie could almost picture the mansion burning.

It struck her that fire had been a theme in her father’s life. Maybe that was appropriate. Lula had always said she’d hoped Wade burned in hell.

Her mother had seen to it that Barrie was officially, legally, a Watson, so it was only Barrie’s first name, her real name—Lombard—that served as a reminder of Lula’s bitterness. Lombard, after San Francisco’s crooked street, and in memory of Wade Colesworth, Barrie’s crooked father. Lula had meant the name as a warning, according to Mark, a reminder not to fall in love with charming, deceitful men.

“Does Wyatt have any family?” Barrie asked.

Eight put his hands back into his pockets. Another delaying gesture.

“Please? Tell me.” Barrie had never had family. Only
Mark, who counted for everything but blood, and Lula, who’d counted for blood and not much else. Now there was Pru, and an uncle . . .

Eight waited another beat, then two, as if he couldn’t decide, and just when she thought he wasn’t going to answer at all, he sighed. “Your cousin Cassie will be in your class next year,” he said. “Sydney’s a year younger, so she’ll be a junior.”

Two cousins. Girls. Sisters. Barrie’s toes gave a little bounce. “What are they like? Do they know about me? I can’t wait to meet them.”

“Hold on. I wouldn’t count on being friends with them.”

“Why not?”

Eight cast a skeptical glance at his father’s long frame silhouetted by the light spilling from the kitchen. “Can you please stop dawdling and come back to the house?”

Barrie started walking. Eight fell in beside her, his strides slowed to match her shorter ones. “Basically, think of any feud you can name. Montagues and Capulets, Hatfields and McCoys. It was Colesworths versus Watsons and Beauforts around here for three hundred years, before Luke Watson and Twila Beaufort ran off. Now it’s just the Colesworths against everybody else in town.”

He glanced at her, gauging her reaction, but she didn’t really know what to think. “It all sounds very hyped up, but kind of romantic. Very Romeo and Juliet,” she said. “Anyway,
what does any of it have to do with my cousins?”

Eight tensed, and if he wasn’t good at deceiving, he was even worse at hiding how he felt. “Don’t dismiss it just because it sounds silly. You haven’t lived here long enough to understand. The Colesworths have been pissed off for centuries, so they’re dangerous. And Wyatt has been asking questions about you and Lula. Dad thinks he’s hoping to get his hands on Lula’s money—your money—since he’s your uncle. That would be the typical Colesworth reaction. Figuring the angle, working out what’s in it for them.”