Chapter Fifty-Five Holly
Chapter Fifty-Five
HOLLY
I take in the bamboo wall of the beach hut with its pinboard of images. It’s … like a crazy person’s lair. Adrianna Kensington. Everywhere. Small notes have been stuck beneath several pictures. A fan whirrs silently above us, making her images flutter in a smiling dance.
‘This is … insane,’ I murmour. ‘Silky must have been working on this while we all slept.’
It’s an unsettling thought. The images all seem to be showing a lot of skin – beachwear, nightclub attire.
My eyes focus on a picture of Adrianna in a bikini, her head thrown back, laughing.
The words ‘Bitch. Mega bitch.’ have been scrawled over her face. A string connects to another shot. Adrianna at a bar. A man pours her a drink. More words are scrawled. ‘Whore. Unfaithful.’
My eyes drift around. Everywhere we look are more images.
‘Kind of a theme going on,’ murmurs Fitzwilliam. ‘Sexualized images, wouldn’t you say?’
I nod. ‘Social and sexual obsession.’ My eyes skirt over the images. ‘Those aren’t of Adrianna.’ I point out. ‘What’s that one?’
To one corner is a cluster of shots that look like they were taken on the island. Old tumble-down buildings. A swimming pool. A stone tower. Dilapidated and covered in creepers and jungle plants.
‘Where is that?’ asks Fitzwilliam. ‘Somewhere on Elysium?’
‘Looks that way,’ I say. ‘I can make out the Kensington Crest on one of the buildings, but we didn’t see anything that looked like that on the way in.
Could be the Old Bell Tower, right?’ I point to the taller building, and think some more.
‘When Georgia and I took Silky to her cabana, she was looking back at something in the jungle to the north of the island. Looked like the top of a stone tower. Georgia guided her away.’
I walk a little closer. There’s a clutch of pictures showing what looks to be a vast open pit of soft earth surrounded on all sides by jungle. It’s hard to see but …
‘Is that … bones?’ I ask.
I turn my head, trying to understand what I’m seeing. White blurry lines on a dark pit of open soil. They’re out of focus. Unclear, but … Is it skulls and ribcages I’m seeing?
Fitzwilliam moves nearer. ‘I … I think it could be,’ he says, his voice soft. ‘If it is, there are a lot of them. Like a … mass grave.’
There’s silence while we digest the horror of this.
Skeletal remains? On Elysium? What could it mean?
‘The soil sample Simone left in her ring,’ I say slowly, ‘contained human bone. And the message on the birthday invitation: Six feet under. What’s the betting this is what she wanted us to find?’
Fitzwilliam nods slowly. ‘Question is, where is this bone pit?’
‘There’s some kind of building to the side,’ I say, ‘Just out of shot.’ I tilt my head to look. ‘Is that … the same gray stone Fortune House is built from?’ I ask. ‘Next to the pit.’
‘Could be,’ says Fitzwilliam. ‘Can’t be Fortune House though. There’s no land like this anywhere near it.’
My eyes drift back around the array of images on the walls. The scrawling hate-filled words labeling Adrianna. The blurry shots of the dark open earth, with bone-like shapes in smudged white relief.
‘It looks like Elysium has a secret history,’ I say grimly.
Fitzwilliam opens his mouth to reply when footsteps sound on the gangway outside the room. Someone is walking up to the door.
We look at each other.
Fitzwilliam grabs my arm. ‘Hide,’ he decides, pulling me out toward the deck.
We tumble outside, squinting in the morning sun twinkling on the ocean, scouting fruitlessly for places to conceal ourselves.
‘There’s nowhere,’ I whisper, taking in the little private plunge pool, and deep-hued hammock.
‘The sea,’ decides Fitzwilliam. ‘We can hide underneath the hut.’
‘I’m not a great swimmer.’
‘It’s shallow. Waist-deep.’ Fitzwilliam takes my hand and pulls me toward the edge.
‘There are sharks in there!’
He slides into the silty waters below. The sharks scatter.
‘Holly!’ he hisses from down beneath me. ‘Hurry!’
I look desperately back at the door. The handle is moving. I close my eyes, and plunge into the salty water.
Almost immediately, I hit the sandy bottom, and come up spluttering. Fitzwilliam pulls me into the darkness beneath the planks that form the hut floor. They are slick with green seaweed, and studded with barnacles. Even at this early hour, the water around my hips is the temperature of a warm bath.
From the gaps in between I can see the red underside of a pair of designer wedge shoes. They walk out onto the deck where Fitzwilliam and I stood moments ago, then return to the room.
The designer undersoles pass back into the room, and out again.
I let out the breath I didn’t realize I was holding. ‘Do you think that was Silky?’ I say.
‘Probably,’ says Fitzwilliam. ‘Maybe she forgot something. Came back for it.’
Something brushes up against me in the water and I stifle a squeal. ‘What is that?’
Fitzwilliam glances across. ‘Strange. It looks like … paper.’
He lifts a sopping page from the water. ‘There’s more of them,’ he says. ‘Look. They must have drifted in on the tide.’
I begin lifting them carefully. ‘Unreadable,’ I say. ‘Water damage.’
My eyes settle in the middle distance, where a thick clutch of them float as one mass. It’s then I see a shape in the water, floating by the rocks.
Human proportions. Someone swimming.
But … the shape isn’t moving. I squint my eyes against the sun. A bad feeling is swirling in me, like the sharks in the water.
The shape is rippling at the edges. A cloudy border just under the water.
‘Fitzwilliam,’ I say, ‘is that …?’
‘My God,’ he says. ‘It looks like a body.’