Island of Secrets by Rachel Rhys

Author:Rachel Rhys [Rhys, Rachel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473570481
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2020-04-21T00:00:00+00:00

14

DOWNSTAIRS AGAIN, WEARING blissfully dry clothes, Iris finds the guest house silent and dark. Unable to shake off that sense of unease she’d felt standing in her room surveying her case, she decides to head towards the main house in search of company. She gets as far as the swimming pool before second thoughts set in. They are so exhausting, these Hardmans, with their shifting dynamics and murky family history and the way they turn first this side to her and then that, never showing quite the same face from one time to the next so that she cannot get her bearings. And though she’d felt close to Eugene and Joe back there in the taxi, all of them linked by their rain-sodden clothes and their outsider status, what does she really know of them, after all? She has not forgotten what Eddie said in the restaurant of the Nacional – that if someone in the wedding party really is working for the CIA, it will turn out to be Joe.

Next to the swimming pool, the backs of the recliners form hunched shadows in the dim light coming from lamps at either end. Iris makes her way towards the nearest one. The cushion will be soaking, but she can take it off and stretch out on the wooden base, watching the stars.

She is already lying down, having laid the cushion on the ground next to the chair, when a rustling and a creaking noise alert her to the fact she is not alone out here. Her heart stops. Two recliners along, a large cocoon of blankets changes shape in the dark.

Iris shoots upright with a sharp intake of breath.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to startle you.’ The voice is as insubstantial as smoke, as if the air itself has just breathed loudly.

‘Faye? Are you all right?’

The bundle of blankets shifts and a face emerges, ghostly pale in the dim light.

‘Yes. Thank you. I like these moments when the rain stops and the earth seems, I don’t know, washed clean, I guess. Don’t you?’

‘It certainly makes a jolly nice change from the wretched heat.’

‘Is it really always foggy in England, Iris? I heard you can’t see your hand in front of your face. I have to say I kinda like the idea that you can hide from your own self like that.’

‘We do have other kinds of weather as well. Sometimes it’s even warm enough not to wear a coat, though naturally, one draws the line at taking off one’s cardigan.’

‘Are you joking, Iris?’

Faye Mickelson sounds like a child and Iris regrets her levity, particularly when she remembers what Hugh told her about Faye’s disturbed emotional state.

‘You must come to visit. Then you would find out for yourself.’

‘I’m not really one for travel. I would never even have come this far if not for Lana. I wish they would have just got married in California, instead of having to come all the way out here, where the sun is so fierce,

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