Butterfly Island by Bomann Corina

Author:Bomann, Corina [Bomann, Corina]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781477819951
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2017-06-13T04:00:00+00:00

8

Hill Club Hotel, May 2008

The rain made a mess of Diana’s plans. For the next two days it poured down in bucketfuls. It made it impossible to go up to the plantation—in those conditions, she would have found the hazardous local driving style even more dangerous than usual, and hiking would also have been extremely difficult.

“Do you think the monsoon’s begun earlier than anticipated?” she asked Jonathan over breakfast. “I did hear people saying on the train that it would be starting soon.”

“It’s possible. But I don’t think this is monsoon rain yet. Maybe we’ll get an opportunity in the next few days to hike up to the plantation.”

Diana nodded, a little despondent. She had been hoping so much to gain some clarity soon, but all she had to date were fragments, and the palm leaf still hadn’t been deciphered. All kinds of wild notions ran through her mind as she stared out of the window at the green landscape and low-lying clouds, but she suppressed them. No, she wouldn’t prejudge her ancestors. She would allow the facts to speak for themselves, and only once she ran out of discoveries would she allow her imagination to fill the gaps.

Shortly before meeting Jonathan for dinner, she switched on her laptop again to look through her emails. The hotel Internet was sluggish, and it took ages for all her messages to download.

You should be grateful that there’s a connection here at all, she told herself.

Looking down the list, she sighed.

Messages from Eva keeping her up to date with work were the pleasant side. But Philipp had also written to her three times, each email without a subject line, as if he hoped that would make her more likely to read them.

Diana suppressed the impulse simply to delete them. I’ll look at them later. Maybe he’s even announcing his intention to seek a divorce.

The email from Mr. Green promised to be much pleasanter. He gave a brief report on life at Tremayne House and said that he’d had to call in a handyman because part of the guttering on the main part of the house had come down. This was followed by a request for her to open the attachment and look at the contents closely. It was a picture, entitled simply “IMG7635489.” Had Mr. Green taken a photo of the new gutter?

Diana groaned when she saw the size of the file. How could she pick up five megabytes with this poor connection? Perhaps I should save the message until we’re back in Colombo, she thought. Why would he go to all this trouble for a photo of a gutter? But her curiosity got the better of her. The file can load while I have dinner with Jonathan. It should be here by the time we’ve finished.

She clicked on the button, got up, and went downstairs.

Over dinner they talked about colonial rule in Sri Lanka and about the Tamils.

“If we have time, we really should visit one of the mountain temples,” Jonathan suggested. “The Hindus built magnificent temples, even if they themselves didn’t have much to live on.

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