Chapter Forty-Five Holly
Chapter Forty-Five
HOLLY
There is dead silence in the honeymoon suite as we all take in the ruin of the cake. It’s a huge, five-tiered structure, almost as tall as the bride, finished in white frosting and a floristry of white sugar blooms. Or at least, that was how it was designed to look.
Someone has taken a large knife to every part of the cake, hacking and cutting in what could only have been a frenzy.
The perfect frosting is gouged in ugly lacerations, exposing naked cake innards in about a hundred wounded fissures.
Sugar paste flowers are scattered like fallen blossoms on the cake board.
Words are cut deeply into the bottom layer with the straight blade of a knife:
TRINITY IS COMING
Petra seems to jerk suddenly to life. She raises her camera and snaps a picture, but her heart doesn’t seem quite in it. Georgia’s usually reserved expression is furious.
‘Petra,’ she hisses. ‘Not now.’
Adrianna is blinking rapidly. She turns to Georgia. ‘Get Mark on the phone,’ she says. ‘I want him here by tomorrow. If this is someone’s idea of a prank—’ She stops.
From the corner of my eye, I see Silky, her face a picture of wide-eyed terror, begin to sway on her feet. I only just manage to grab her as she falls.
‘Silky?’ Adrianna steps toward us.
‘I think she’s sick.’ As I take her weight, Silky rocks back in my arms, eyes fluttering up in her head.
Georgia puts a hand to the smooth dark skin of her forehead. Her brown eyes, under their arc of neatly defined lashes, track back to the ruined cake.
‘Probably too much Valium on the plane,’ she decides. ‘Let’s just … put her to bed in one of the cabanas. I’ll see if we can get a medic.’
I help Georgia move the now-staggering Silky out of the Tower Suite. Silky now seems more like a drunk, wavering on her feet and mumbling, eyes half-slitted shut.
‘You think she’ll be OK?’ I ask Georgia as the elevator doors open at the base of the cliff.
A sandy path leads out toward the turquoise sea, meeting with a crescent-shaped wooden jetty.
Six more jetties point off it, like rays from a sun, each culminating in a straw-roofed wooden hut, standing on stilts over the water.
Ordinarily, I’d be impressed, but I’m too preoccupied with Silky, and thoughts of the mutilated wedding cake.
Georgia nods. ‘Don’t worry about Silky. She’s scared of flying. Always takes a whole box of downers. She probably just mistimed it and they’re kicking in now. That’s happened before. Every time we take an international flight, in fact.’
We walk the drooping-eyed Silky toward the beach. She sways from left to right, and seems to have little sense of her surroundings.
‘What do you think happened back there,’ I ask Georgia, ‘with the cake?’
Her mouth sets tight. ‘Maybe someone’s idea of a prank,’ she decides finally. ‘Like Dri said.’
‘Why would they write “Trinity”?’ I ask.
‘Oh.’ Georgia stops a moment to redistribute Silky’s weight.
‘Trinity was like … a scary story from boarding school. Kind of. The older girls would freak out the new boarders with tales about Trinity.’ She catches my confused expression.
‘Trinity was supposed to come in the night and steal your three best things.’
I absorb this. ‘Like a ghost?’ I guess the police had no reason to connect Adrianna’s name for her kidnapper with her time at boarding school.
‘Kind of. The way the older girls spun it, some of the younger ones took it really seriously. Silky in particular. Dri too, though she’d never admit it.’
‘What about you?’
Georgia hesitates, looking at me a fraction too long as if deciding whether I can be trusted. ‘I was never afraid of Trinity,’ she says finally.
Silky moans. Georgia closes her mouth and sets her eyes on the cabanas ahead.
Suddenly, Silky switches back and begins walking toward the opposite end of the beach, forcing us to switch with her.
‘Silky,’ says Georgia, ‘that’s the wrong way.’
‘No,’ Silky lifts her hands and points toward the jungle. ‘That’s the school bell tower. See?’
She’s looking in the direction of a large forbidding fence, pasted with signs that warn DANGER. UNDER CONSTRUCTION. KEEP OUT in both English and Spanish.
I lift my gaze to the tall jungle. Is there a building further back, hidden by leaves and canopy? It’s impossible to see with the sun behind.
‘We don’t use that part anymore,’ says Georgia, physically turning Silky around. ‘Come on, it’s this way.’
But as we turn back along the beach, Silky keeps glancing back, her red-painted lips moving, as though she is deeply disturbed by something.