The Secret Path by Karen Swan (summer beach reads TXT) 📕

day thirty. Not to mention the realities of the wet season, when the rain fell like glass spears and the humidity meant nothing – not clothes, hair nor skin – could ever quite dry . . . And the second Holly ran out of anti-mozzie spray, shit would get real, real quick.

For the first time, Tara noticed a large coconut poised among the palm fronds above her head. She tried to remember the statistic for the number of people killed by falling coconuts each year. Was it a hundred and fifty? Something like that.

She sank into her thoughts. One hundred and fifty people killed every year by a falling coconut. It was such a . . . random way to die. Ridiculous, really. Like the two killed per annum by vending machines falling on top of them. Or the two and a half thousand left-handers who died from using right-handed products. The medical world was littered with anecdotes about inane deaths and oversights. They were taught in med school that more than seven hundred patients every year (an average of two per week) were sewn back up after surgery with some part of surgical waste left inside them – a swab, a forceps; one time she’d heard of a pair of pliers. Maybe even that would have been better than a teeny-tiny samurai-sharp scalpel blade. Less lethal.

‘. . . waterfall!’

Tara was torn from her thoughts. ‘Huh?’

‘Jed mentioned a waterfall yesterday. We could go there, after the clinic?’

‘Yes, that sounds fun.’ She swung her leg out of the hammock and struggled up to standing, feeling a sudden urge to move and escape her thoughts. ‘I’ll go and speak to him about it if you want to tell the boys?’

Holly looked surprised. ‘Okay. I hadn’t meant right this second, but sure.’ She got up – her bottom all sandy – and ran down to the water’s edge.

Tara turned towards the bar, towards Jed’s comforting shape in the shadows, when she heard a heavy thud behind her that vibrated through the ground. She turned and looked back. The hammock was now twisted on its strings so that it bellied out upside down, a coconut in the sand beside it. It was the coconut that had been right above her head a moment earlier.

She stared at it in shock. One hundred and fifty people in a global population of seven billion.

Suddenly she wasn’t sure she liked those odds.

Chapter Fourteen

The open-top Jeep rumbled through town, the shadows of trees casting lacy patterns on their faces. Jimmy was strapped into the boot and waving at all the stallholders and street vendors as they passed. Most waved back at him with fleshy palms and gappy grins, encouraging him further.

Tara had forgotten the sheer vibrancy of the place, the weather-boarded buildings painted in nursery colours of yellow and blue, hot pink and turquoise. People sat in pairs and small groups along the sides of the buildings, perched on stools, leaning on countertops, sprawled over car bonnets. There were no pavements; pedestrians and drivers shared the tarmac in a way that would be impossible in London; telephone wires were looped slackly overhead. People parked where they liked – sometimes it wasn’t clear if they were parked or in fact just stopped – driving around in open-sided fruit trucks, Vespas, bikes, Jeeps, no one in a hurry, brown arms stretched casually along open windows.

Some children were playing around a yellow fire hydrant, running through the spray, the water droplets catching the lunchtime light. Sides of buildings were painted with Coca-Cola signs and hand-decorated hoardings were layered in piles on signposts, pointing the way to surf hire shops, cabanas, hostels . . .

Tara kept an eye out for three out-of-breath cyclists, but saw no sign of them. She hoped Miles and Zac weren’t showing off and taking Rory on some ridiculous overly long ride, though she wouldn’t put it past them. Rory was in decent shape but his long hours meant he couldn’t – and didn’t – give the same dedication to the gym as her brother and his husband.

‘Nice work if you can get it, Jed!’ Holly called from her seat in the back as they sat at the rudimentary traffic lights, people calling Jed’s name and hailing him from the streets. ‘What are you? Mayor?’

‘I wish!’ Jed laughed, nodding his head in amusement, but Tara noticed the way people’s eyes slid from him over to her in the next instant, as though they knew who she was too. It was an easy enough calculation to make – everyone knew he and his father worked for her family – but she realized now that the relative anonymity her family had enjoyed on her childhood trips over here had been superseded by their profile as the largest single private landowner in the country. The new national park was big news, and her father’s face probably had the same recognition factor as the President’s now. But hers too? She had made a point of keeping herself out of this project.

She kept her gaze as light and flitting as a moth, not hovering anywhere too long, not making eye contact. She admired the stalls selling baskets of every size and shape, all intricately woven from grass; she smiled at the sight of brightly coloured ceramics displays, pineapple stalls, tourist shops flogging lilos and postcards, beach shacks pegged with tie-dye t-shirts and cotton pareos.

The sea was to their left, a high tide covering the dark gold beach, and she watched as some surfers caught the barrels, scudding in on white waters and silhouetted against a clear sky. Jed turned a sharp right, waiting for a banana truck to come past before heading down one of the long, straight back roads that led inland and towards the distant hills. The sky looked turbulent over there, dark clouds twisting and bumping into one another, a mist falling to the ground like a privacy screen.

The buildings became steadily more spread out and lower to the ground, high, dense hedges marking the start of the residential district. The houses were