Persuasion (31 page)

“Dad can take care of that. He’ll bully people into coming, if necessary. He’s good at it.”

They passed the turnoff for Alyssa’s barn and continued on to where the first straggling houses of Watson’s Point began, and Eight pointed across Barrie to a tiny patch of lawn on her right. “That’s a bottle tree over there, by the way. In case you’re interested. That looks like it was a dead magnolia someone made over, but people make them out of old boards and nails, or wire, or plastic. Virtually anything.”

The ten-foot tree looked like it was still rooted in the soil, but in place of leaves, a blue wine bottle had been stuck upside down onto the end of every branch. Eight veered onto one of the more residential roads and pointed out another example where the bottles had been threaded onto the branches like oversize Christmas ornaments. Not just trees, either. Bottles hung from the roof of a porch like wind chimes, and someone else had used old Coke bottles to make a chandelier. One house even had a multicolored garden of jelly jars staked along the walkway.

“Clearly,” Barrie said. “People aren’t superstitious at all on Watson Island.”

“It’s not superstition if you know magic is real and dangerous.” Eight took his hand off the wheel and waved it at the houses along the quiet street. “Around here, we’ve all lived with the Fire Carrier and the
yunwi
and the devil digging for lost shoes a lot longer than you have. If you’d ever heard some of the local Gullah stories about boo hags, you wouldn’t blame them.”

“Boo hags?”

Eight sent her a sideways glance. “Ghosts that steal energy and borrow a person’s skin to be able to walk around. I thought about Obadiah being one of those, too. Still not convinced he isn’t something like that.”

“A ghost or a witch? Because that sounds a lot like the
Raven Mocker, doesn’t it? Hell.” Barrie shook her head too hard then regretted it, as that made the throbbing headache behind her eyes even worse. “It’s all starting to sound alike,” she said.

Turning back down toward the main road, Eight said, “That’s not surprising. You throw slaves from all sorts of places and religions all together, and you get a melting pot of folklore and magical systems: hoodoo, voodoo, obeah. A few people here still believe in root medicine and using spirits to help with everything from curing coughs to casting curses. Mostly, it’s because they can’t afford doctors—or don’t trust them, or because their parents used root, and their parents before that.”

Barrie stared out the window, searching for more bottle trees. “This root medicine traps spirits like Obadiah was trying to? Like John Colesworth’s slave trapped the Fire Carrier?”

“I think medicine is more about asking than trapping, and I don’t know what Obadiah was doing with the raven. Something a whole lot darker.”

“If it was real,” Barrie said. “I’m still not sure.”

Then again, she wasn’t sure about anything when it came to Obadiah. Something, whether it was intuition, or her gift, or something else entirely, had been telling her he wasn’t that bad—she couldn’t get past the belief that beyond his threats and the promise of removing Eight’s gift, there was more. But maybe that was wishful thinking more than anything else.

Her gift was definitely growing, changing. She wished she understood that better, too.

Attempting a practical application, she closed her eyes and tried to sense where Darrel’s Tools and Tackle might be located. The slight tug on her finding sense was instant. Even before Eight turned on the blinker, she knew that the store was down the street to the left and that the turn after that would be a right. As soon as she walked under the brown-and-gray-striped awning hung with potted begonias and entered the crowded little shop, she knew where to find the boxes of small pillar candles on the shelves. Knew without having any way of knowing except that they were something she needed.

Darrel, the store owner, was a whip-thin man with a sunburned, balding head and a pleasant smile. Unlike everyone else Barrie had met on Watson Island, he didn’t seem curious about her, or at least he kept his curiosity well contained. As Barrie and Eight walked up, he wrestled a stack of medium-size cardboard boxes out from behind the register and set them on the counter beside a display case of chewing tobacco and a box of fishing lures.

“Like I told Pru, I’m happy to get rid of these. I’ve got twelve cases taking up room on my shelves after a tourist ordered them and never picked them up. Still, I got to thinking after I hung up with Pru, and I’m wondering if y’all might not do better with the AquaLeds we got in for the Fourth of July
celebration a few years back. The mayor never used the orange ones ’cause he figured folks would think something was on fire, but that might be just what you’re looking for to make folks think they’ve seen the Fire Carrier, if that’s what you’re after. I’d charge admission, if it was me. Throw the gates open at midnight, take the money, and run—and keep running with it as long as I could. Said so to Pru when she called.”

“You never know who would come prowling around if Pru and Barrie did that,” Eight said.

Darrel pursed his lips, thinking it over. “I reckon that’s true enough. Wouldn’t be safe, would it? Say, did Beezer get that new security system put in yet?”

He and Eight started discussing microwave barriers and perimeter detection, and Barrie excused herself. Letting the finding sense guide her along the shelves, she gathered up the candles and lead sinkers that she wanted, but the finest-gauge fishing net she could find still seemed too big to hold the fairy globes securely. She grabbed some fishing line and, with her arms full and the box of sinkers balanced between the candles and her chin, headed back to the counter.

“Is there a fabric store around here anywhere?” she asked.

Eight came and took the stack of packages from her. “There’s Alice Loly’s place, Threadbare Crafts. It’s just down the road.”

“Would they have netting? Or cheesecloth maybe?”

“My wife bought some of that stuff they use to make ballerina dresses there last year for my granddaughter’s dance recital.” Darrel steadied the boxes Eight set on the counter, and then went back to ringing up a stack of word search puzzles Eight had taken from a carousel of audiobooks and travel games.

“What are the puzzles for?” Barrie asked.

Eight’s grin was uneven, a little sheepish, and too charming for Barrie’s equilibrium. “I figured, since you wanted practice looking for answers,” he said, “they would come in handy.”

Every time Barrie ever started to doubt, he showed her exactly why her intuition had chosen him. She stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek.

After she had paid for the lights and supplies, Darrel helped them carry the boxes out and stack them in the trunk. Instead of getting in the car when they were done, Eight took Barrie’s hand and headed down the sidewalk. “Threadbare Crafts is only about eight doors down,” he said. “We might as well walk.”

His long legs made his pace faster than strictly comfortable, and Barrie had to hurry to keep up. “I keep forgetting that you know what you know,” she said. “There are times when I hate your gift, but then you do something like this. . . .”

“I know exactly when you forget because that’s when you
stop trying to convince me you want something other than what you really want.” Eight’s lips twitched, and his head cocked to the side as he looked at her.

“I’m sorry.” In her head, Barrie made the apology a blanket statement, covering everything from going to Cassie’s without him to not telling him about his father or Obadiah. Hurting Eight was the last thing she would ever want to do, but her gift was part of her. She couldn’t give it up.

Eight stopped walking. “I lied earlier when I said that I wouldn’t stay mad at you if you didn’t want me to be mad,” he said. “That’s only part of it. Mostly, it’s hard to stay mad at you when what you want most so often has to do with making someone else happy. I know you agreed to look for Obadiah for me today. I wasn’t fair earlier.”

“I’m trying to do the right thing,” Barrie said. “I just wish I knew what the right thing was.”

A beige Ford that had been driving by suddenly pulled to the curb, and the passenger window descended. Eight caught Barrie’s elbow and started walking again even faster than before.

The car followed them, keeping pace, the red-faced driver leaning across the passenger seat to shout out the open window. “Hey, aren’t you Barrie Watson? I recognize you from your picture—I’m Carl Abrams from the
Journal of Parapsychology
.”

“Keep walking,” Eight said to Barrie.

The driver stayed with them. “Hey, no. Please. Can’t you give me just a minute? I’ve been trying to get ahold of you or your aunt to ask if I can set up some equipment at Watson’s Landing. And I’d like—”

Whatever else he’d been going to say was lost in the jangle of a cowbell above the door of the craft shop as Eight pushed Barrie inside. She looked back through the glass. The reporter had been leaning across the passenger seat with the window rolled down, but already he was straightening and throwing the car into park to come after them.

Eight propelled Barrie past a startled-looking white-haired woman wielding a pair of scissors at a fabric-cutting table. “Hey, Alice. Reporter.” He hooked a thumb behind him at the sidewalk. “Can you head him off while we duck out the back?”

To the left of the fabric counter, a curtain made of long strings of buttons marked the entrance to a back room. The strands clanked gently as Barrie followed Eight through, and then settled back into place behind them. They had only just fallen silent when the cowbell rang out in the shop to signal that the front door had opened.

Barrie hated running away. Part of what she loved most about Watson Island was the sense that she didn’t need to hide anymore, not her gift and not herself. But wasn’t that exactly
what she was doing now? Hiding herself at Watson’s Landing. Hiding the Fire Carrier. Hiding what she was doing and what she knew. She didn’t want to live like that.

As she and Eight ducked back through the hardware store on the way to Eight’s car, she stopped long enough to buy every box of orange AquaLeds that Darrel had. If she and Eight were going to have to keep Obadiah fed, they would need to shuttle between Watson’s Landing and Colesworth Place. Eight would be back and forth from Beaufort Hall. They would all have to come into town to shop for supplies. None of that was going to be possible with ghost hunters watching them and reporters jumping them at every opportunity, so she had to do something about them once and for all.

She hadn’t changed her mind about what she’d said to Darrel. She had no intention of trying to fool anyone by re-creating the Fire Carrier’s flames in the water around Watson’s Landing. At least not for money.

The reporter from the
Journal of Parapsychology
remained on the sidewalk looking after them as Eight drove away. He made no move to follow, and Barrie let herself relax against the seat.

“Okay, you can slow down,” she said. “Before we leave town, can we loop back around to the QuickMart and park without being too obvious?”

“Why, exactly?”

“To pick up a cooler and sandwiches so you can drop them off for Obadiah. It’ll save me from having to sneak something out of the pantry.”

“So
I
can drop them off? You don’t give up, do you?”

“Not when it’s important, no. And can you stop on your way home tonight? Please?”

Eight left the car in the street behind the QuickMark, and
they ducked through a driveway and a low hedge to reach the small parking lot behind the store. Inside, the aisles were narrow and crammed full of everything possible, most of it geared more toward tourists than regular residents. Exactly what Barrie had hoped to find.

Her finding sense led her toward the carousel of thin, neon-colored beach towels in the back corner, but she nearly barreled into a pyramid display of toilet paper on the way. Swerving around it, she knocked a bottle of Cheerwine off the shelf onto the yellow-gray linoleum, where it bounced, rolled, and finally came to rest against a bottom shelf of dusty camp stoves and generic look-alike NyQuil bottles. Eight stooped to pick it up.

Three sun-faded Styrofoam coolers stood on the shelf beside the window. Even better, a deli in the back of the store made sandwiches to order. Barrie bought two chicken salad and a couple of roast beef, as well as two loaves of Italian bread, a package of ham, a box of Pop-Tarts, and a gallon jug of drinking water. Finally, she found a thermos and filled it with viscous coffee that looked like it had been warming on the burner most of the day.

“Also a bag of ice, please,” she said to the guy behind the cash register as she pulled out her credit card again.

“You can pick that up from the freezer in the parking lot.” The kid, wearing his ball cap backward on his freckled
forehead, had his eyes glued on her and his elbows splayed across the counter. He shifted the toothpick in his mouth to the other side and flicked a look at Eight before ringing her purchases up.

All told, the shopping spree had taken less than fifteen minutes, but Barrie stopped to check the street before she stepped back outside. “Hey, what’s parapsychology anyway?” she asked.