Page 7 of Villa of Secrets

1 cup of coconut oil.

1 cup of beeswax.

8 drops of lemon essential oil.

She’d forgotten something . . . honey, that was it. She pulled the kitchen cupboard open and reached for the jar. The cruise calendar and a photo of Costa and her boys were taped inside the cream-painted door.

Uplifted by thoughts of her husband, she placed a hand on her cheek the way he did when he said, ‘I love you, Naomi.’

Costa would be prepping breakfast for the rich and lonely, before they disembarked at the port of Kos.

Naomi recalled the time she had sailed to that island on the fast-cat ferry and met Costa at the port. They dashed about the town where he showed her the ancient plane-tree under which Hippocrates had taught his disciples of medicine. Like tourists, they scrambled through the town’s archaeological site in the blazing sun, and admired antique mosaics underfoot. Eating cheap ice cream from McDonald’s, they wandered about in Freedom Square, taking in the mosque, the museum, the spice market, and then the castle.

Naomi kissed her finger and touched Costa’s photo.

She scooped ingredients into a jar that stood in a pan of hot water. The fragrant tang of lemon flooded the room. In a short time, the components would meld together, ready to be whipped, potted, and labelled.

If only life were that simple.

She reached into the kitchen drawer, withdrew the gun barrel, and prepared to wrap it. First, she polished her prints off the metal. You couldn’t be too careful with a lethal weapon. So that Rebecca wouldn’t recognise her handwriting, Papas Yiannis had written a note to go with the parcel. The only words were: INSTRUCTIONS TO FOLLOW.

*

Naomi power-walked through Paradissi Village, striding towards the airport. A favourite exercise route. Perhaps subconsciously, she wished to greet her boys home from university, or her husband at the end of the season, or one day, her sister. In fact, the walk had no other purpose than to burn a few calories and calm her nerves before she faced the post office.

She passed the infamous sex shop, currently the talk of the village, and longed to go in and investigate. Costa would be shocked but thrilled, if she surprised him in something red, and flimsy, and outrageous. Naomi shook her head and walked on. She was saving for a new sofa.

Orange butterflies flitted between roadside blooms of tansy and yellow tobacco blossoms, stealing their nectar. The dawn air, getting warmer by the second, was laden with fragrances: jasmine, honeysuckle, and night-flowering cactus. She sniffed, and analysed, and considered how to reproduce the perfumes using essential oils.

Somewhere, a caged canary trilled. Naomi wondered if birds enjoyed the wonderful scent of flora at daybreak. Few people realise the power of scent, how it prompts our hunger or satisfaction, and can make us hot with desire, or recoil in revulsion.

The edge of a distant cloud sizzled gold like a firework fuse, warning Naomi she hadn’t long to reach her turning point before sunrise. The small knapsack tapped a steady rhythm on her back, spurring her onward.

She wondered why Rebecca couldn’t respond to Bubba’s correspondence and save Naomi from all this melodrama. Naomi understood her sister not answering the first letters, when tempers were still frayed, but years passed before Bubba wrote again. The outcome remained the same. No reply. She found it difficult to believe Rebecca would hold a grudge for so long.

Naomi doubted the conspirators would get the reaction they hoped for. Yet, she hadn’t the heart to go against them. Since the night of the hurricane, Bubba had dedicated her life to Rebecca and herself, and Papas Yiannis had always been ready to offer support.

She recalled the day they delivered the bad news, two days after the storm.

‘Take your sister for some fresh air,’ Bubba said, placing baby Rebecca in the pram. ‘Don’t forget to use the brake when you stop.’

Naomi, proud of her baby sister, didn’t need telling twice.

When she returned, the priest was in the house. He and Bubba were red-eyed and oddly breathless.

When Papas Yiannis told her the news, he held Bubba’s hand, squeezing it until his knuckles turned white.

Odd the things that stay in a child’s mind.

‘Naomi, I’m sorry, but we think your father had a problem with Elevtheria,’ he said, gulping between words. ‘Your parents are lost at sea, koritsie.’ Even now, he still called her koritsie, my girl, occasionally and it always reminded her of that day.

She accepted the information as she accepted everything adults told her.

That Mama and Papa never said goodbye made her unreasonably angry. Furious with the world, she had punched a girl in class who called her a liar and said her parents were dead. Naomi found it impossible to say why she’d behaved so badly, and it got her into awful trouble.

She couldn’t grasp the situation, and didn’t know how to deal with the information she’d been given. As the days passed, Naomi came to realise Mama and Papa really weren’t coming home any time soon. Splinter by crack, her heart slowly shattered. She wouldn’t talk to anybody about it because, secretly, she expected her parents to walk through the door at any moment. She truly believed Papa had found that safe haven he talked about. How could anyone be sure he hadn’t?

A globe the size of a football stood in the corner of Naomi’s classroom. At the end of the lessons, she would look at it and study how much sea there was to get lost in. Her father had to be out there, she convinced herself, lost because of the storm. After all, there were no road signs in the ocean. He’d be desperate to bring Mama back to his girls and Bubba. Papa was certain to find the way home eventually. He was very special, amazingly strong, and always right.