Compulsion (25 page)

Eight shut his door and put the car back into gear. “You know, if we argue, we could make up.” He shot her a grin steeped in mischief. “Especially if your aunt’s gone to sleep.”

“I don’t know if she has. I hope she isn’t waiting up for me,” Barrie said with a pang of guilt.

It had been selfish to leave, especially since she knew her aunt would worry. It was funny: Barrie had spent so much of her life trying to keep her mother from panicking at the thought of being left alone, but it was Pru who’d never had anyone. And Pru would be alone again when Barrie left for art school next year.
If
she left. Did Pru feel as anxious about that as Barrie felt about Eight leaving?

Barrie stared out the window, watching the gleam of the river from between the live oak trees. All her life she had drifted around on currents of other people’s making. She didn’t want to be a drifter. She ought to be more like Cassie, who, right or wrong, made life happen. Cassie went after what she wanted. Eight did too. He seemed to navigate all his decisions as easily as he guided the car to a stop in the circular drive beneath the white-columned portico.

“You’re dangerous when you get quiet.” Eight walked her to the door. “What do you have brewing in that head of yours?”

“Like you don’t already know.”

“The head and the heart are different.”

“Sure they are. Good night, baseball guy.”

He kissed the tip of her nose. “Why do you feel like you have to fix everyone’s problems, Bear?”

“I’m not fixing anything for you.”

“Pru will love you even if you leave. People are going to like you even if you don’t try so hard.”

“You think that’s what I’m doing?”

“Isn’t it?”

“Must be nice to be you. Always having all the answers.” Easy to make people love you when you could give them exactly what they needed, what they wanted so deep in their hearts that they didn’t even know it themselves.

Was that what he was doing with her? How much of what she felt for him was genuine, and how much was he using his gift to make her like him?

She was going around in circles, and it was enough to make her crazy.

“Aaaand she’s mad again.” Eight stepped back and tipped her face up to look at him. “
Now
what did I do?”

She turned her head away. “Do me a favor? Teach me how to drive a car?”

He studied her and pushed his hands into his pockets. “Driving won’t give you control of your life, you know. It may seem that way.”

“It’s a start.”

“Anyway, how do you not know how to drive? Didn’t you need a car in San Francisco?”

“The things I don’t know would amaze you.”

“So make a list. We’ll do them all.”

How was it possible to feel so much for him already? Barrie had only known him a few breaths in the comparative span of a life. It had to be the Beaufort gift. Grabbing two fistfuls of his shirt, she pulled him closer and rose onto her toes to kiss him. Because kissing Eight was the kind of magic she liked. As long as his lips were on hers, as long as they shared breath between them, most of her worries, her question marks, disappeared.

Until he pulled away again.

“When do you actually leave?” she asked. “The exact date.”

“You’re adorable when you’re mad.”

“I’m not mad, and that is one of the cheesiest lines ever invented by stupid boys.”

“Maybe I’m the one who’s mad, then. Because I’ve been stuck around this island my entire life and nothing interesting has ever happened. Now here you are.”

“Here I
go
. That’s my cue to say good night.”

Before he could say anything she couldn’t be sure he meant, Barrie let herself into the house, leaving him standing on the step looking almost as confused as she felt. Maybe that
made her a coward, but she needed time to think. Falling for a guy was hard enough. She didn’t need extra complications to make her doubt herself. She stood for a minute, leaning back against the door, shoring up her strength. Then she headed into the kitchen.

She had hoped it would be deserted, but Pru stood at the counter slicing the crusts off a loaf of thin, white sandwich bread. Her eyes went straight to the wind-tangled mess of Barrie’s hair. “Is everything all right, sugar? I was getting worried. You were gone so long.”

“Eight and I went to the beach to talk after the play was over.” Barrie washed her hands and got another knife and a cutting board from the cabinet. After stacking eight slices of bread on top of one another, she took pleasure in hacking off the crusts. She looked up to catch Pru watching her with the same expectant kind of silence Mark had always used to get her to talk. Go figure. Maybe there was some sort of secret parental interrogation manual. She stacked more bread and guillotined the crusts.

Pru cleared her throat. “How was Cassie’s play?”

“Fantastic,” Barrie said brightly. “They did this thing where they projected the scenery behind the stage, and Cassie was excellent.”

Pru waited another couple beats, then prompted: “So you didn’t have any trouble?”

Barrie reached for another stack of bread.

“If you don’t mind my saying so, you don’t look like a girl who had a good night.” Pru came over and put her hand over Barrie’s. “Is it Eight, honey, or did something happen at the play? Wyatt wasn’t there, was he?”

Barrie felt as if all the air had been sucked out of the room, and she searched for a way to answer without resorting to an ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’ “Wyatt was there, but it wasn’t . . . Oh, who am I kidding? He was awful.”

Pru went still. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“N-no.” Barrie hated the catch in her voice. “No. Not me,” she said more firmly.

After a moment of continued stillness, Pru got a glass and poured herself a shot of brandy from a bottle in the cupboard. Then she went and sat down at the table. “All right. I’m ready now,” she said. “Tell me all about Wyatt.”

And what was the point of keeping quiet? By tomorrow Eight would have told Seven everything.

Barrie put down the knife and went to sit in the chair across from Pru. “He really was horrible,” she said, resting her elbows on the table. “He accused me of going over there so I could look down on them, and he told me I was nosy, just like Lula. I don’t even know what made him so mad. He seemed nice enough last night.”

“I wonder if something happened between him and
Lula before she left. She did mention him in her letter.”

Barrie looked up sharply. “Like what kind of something?”

“Lord only knows.” Pru took another sip of brandy. “Lula was always liable to say whatever popped into her head. If she had her heart set on leaving with Wade, and Wyatt tried to stop them? I don’t know.” She set the glass down with a
thump
. “I should probably call Seven and ask him for help.”

“Help doing what? Nothing happened that a lawyer can fix. Anyway, I think Cassie calmed Wyatt down.” Barrie wasn’t going to let anyone else fix her messes for her anymore. Not Eight, not Pru, and certainly not Seven.

Pru gave her a sympathetic look. “I’m sorry. I know how much you wanted to be friends with the girls. It’s a shame that won’t work out.”

It had to, though. Barrie owed Cassie that much. She had to make Pru understand.

“It has nothing to do with our being friends. None of this is Cassie’s fault—and Sydney seems genuinely sweet. I feel really bad for them. Wyatt hit Cassie, right in front of us. In front of her sister.”

Pru rose, wiped her hands on her apron, and went back to the counter before she said anything. “Was Cassie all right?”

“More embarrassed than hurt, I think. But I can’t help wondering how often that happens.” Barrie’s throat knotted. “You see why I can’t
not
be friends with them, right?” She
glanced at Pru. “What kind of person would I be if I walked away when Cassie and Sydney were nice and it was only Wyatt who was horrible?”

Pru gazed back at the brandy she’d left on the table as if she were contemplating drowning in it. She picked up a block of cream cheese instead and opened it meticulously. “So let me make sure I have this right. You’re saying I should let you be friends with Cassie because you know her father is violent, even though I thought it was a bad idea when we only suspected he was violent.”

“Well, if you’re going to put it
that way
 . . .” Barrie blew out a breath and smiled. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what I’m saying.”

Pru dumped the cream cheese into a bowl with an emphatic
splat
. “Just promise me one thing,” she said. “Promise you won’t go anywhere near Wyatt. Or anywhere he might show up. I’ll talk to Seven, too, and we’ll see if there’s anything he can do.”

“Cassie begged me not to call the police. I think that would make it worse for her.” Barrie crossed the counter and picked up a peeled cucumber from the counter, and started cutting it into nearly transparent slices. Her burst of energy seemed to be draining from her.

“None of this is easy, is it?” Pru came over and kissed her on the cheek. “I know you’re trying to do the right thing. It’s not always obvious what that is.”

Smiling sadly, she turned back to the counter and began combining cream cheese, mayonnaise, dill, salt, and pepper together into a cream. Barrie finished slicing the cucumbers and put them into a bowl with salt and lemon juice.

“We’ll leave the assembly for tomorrow,” Pru said. “Otherwise the bread gets soggy.” She covered the plates and bowls in plastic wrap and stored them all in the refrigerator, then hung her apron on the hook in the butler’s pantry. “There. That went faster with your help, even with our conversation.”

“Thanks for not being mad, Aunt Pru.”

Pru’s eyebrows rose. “Why would I be mad at you?”

They locked the house together and went upstairs. The dim light of the corridor sharpened the hollows of Pru’s face, making her look much older, as if Barrie’s arrival had woken her from a magical sleep and the years had caught up to her. Barrie felt a twinge of guilt for making her aunt worry. Then the guilt was swallowed by rage—at the circumstances, at Wyatt, at Lula, at Cassie, and most of all at herself for feeling guilty.

Too many emotions were all crammed inside her. That and the pressure from the empty wing made her feel like she was going to burst as she neared the top of the stairs. She couldn’t control Wyatt’s violent temper, or Eight’s leaving, or that Mark was dying. Whatever was lost down the dark
corridor, though, and in the library or anywhere else in the house, that much she could fix. Pru didn’t need to know.

She paused outside her door. “Good night, Aunt Pru.”

“Sleep well, sweetheart.” Pru gave her a quick kiss before continuing to her own room at the end of the hall.

Barrie pulled on clean pajama shorts and a thick pair of fuzzy socks, but she was too restless to read or sketch, let alone to sleep. Leaning on the balcony railing, she let the night sounds blanket her thoughts until a movement upstairs at Beaufort Hall claimed her attention. The distance couldn’t disguise the silhouette of Eight’s body in the window. He always moved as if he knew exactly where he was going. Barrie needed more of that.

It wasn’t quite midnight yet. She peeked into the hallway. No light seeped under Pru’s door, and there was no sound when she laid her ear against the wood. She crept toward the staircase. Every creak and groan of the time-warped floorboards made her wince and pause, and she let out a sigh when she reached the top of the steps. Then it occurred to her that
she couldn’t turn on the light in the corridor to the empty wing, not without the risk of Pru seeing it through the crack beneath her door. She would have to save that section of the house for daylight. In the meantime, there was still the library.

Even clean and exorcised, Emmett’s sanctum was grim, as if it had absorbed the man’s personality over the years. Barrie already knew enough about her grandfather to know she was glad she had never met him.

His keys, surprisingly, were in plain sight in the top-right drawer of the desk. There were eight on the ring, three of them too large and ornate. Four were too small. Barrie went straight to an old-fashioned brass key that looked about the right size to fit the bottom drawer. The lock
snicked
open on the first try, but the drawer was empty.

That made no sense. The finding pull clearly came from that drawer, and the sense of loss was stronger now that Barrie had it open. She leaned forward in the desk chair, sliding her fingertips across the smooth sides and top of the empty recess, probing until a pinky-size section released.

A panel at the back of the drawer popped open. Barrie reached inside the cavity, half-expecting to feel spiders skittering up her arm or the cold steel of a loaded gun. Something as unpleasant as Emmett himself. Instead paper crackled in her grasp, and she pried a bundle of yellowed envelopes out of the drawer. They were held together by an ancient rubber band
that broke into several pieces as soon as she touched it.

Frowning, she stared at the envelope on top. It was five years old and addressed to Pru in Lula’s familiar combination of flamboyance and pain-racked, shaking script. One by one, Barrie flipped through every envelope, through eleven years of postmarks, eleven years of letters addressed either to Pru or to Emmett. All of them had been neatly sliced open across the top by a letter opener or a sharpened knife.