Persuasion (33 page)

“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.

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.