“No, go on, now,” Pearl said. “I still have to finish up. I’ll see you out there.”
“All right, later,” Bunny said, wiping her hands on a dishrag.
“Walk good,” Pearl said, as she crouched down and reached under the counter for more confectioner’s sugar. When she stood up again, Bunny was already crossing the next room.
On the afternoon of the wedding, the black cake was wheeled into the reception hall under a veil of white lace. There was the traditional moment of silence as four attendees lifted the veil. The guests cheered and applauded Pearl’s latest creation, but Covey just stood there, staring at the cake, her face blank. It was as if the girl wasn’t even in the room. It took her a few moments before her face began to change. First, she looked confused, just as Bunny had. She looked up at Pearl and back at the cake, and then her face softened. Finally, Covey understood what she was looking at. It was small consolation, but it was something.
No one was more shocked than Pearl by the suddenness of what transpired soon after. At about four o’clock that afternoon, Clarence “Little Man” Henry, aged thirty-eight, ruthless moneylender and occasional murderer, stood up from the table where he and his new bride, Coventina “Dolphin” Lyncook, nearly eighteen, had been finishing their plates of rum cake, stumbled backward over his chair, and dropped dead on the white tile floor.
Pearl hurried across the room, trying to get to Covey. But when she reached the other side, Covey was gone.
Lin
“Mister Lyncook?”
Lin looked up. He hadn’t been called by his English surname in a long time. Most people still called him Lin, including the police officers who frequented his store. Only his woman and his schoolteachers had ever called him Johnny. But this evening, he was Mister Lyncook to everyone here. His daughter had gone missing and she was suspected of murder and the police were now deferring to protocol, including this young man who now approached him, followed by the police girl who, earlier, had gathered his daughter’s wedding gown from the sand where it lay and handed it to Lin, gently, as if it might break.
“We’re calling off the search for the night,” the policeman said. Lin knew this officer. He was Bunny’s older brother. Lin had gone to the cockfights with this man’s father. He had watched this young man grow up. This boy used to call him Mister Lin. This boy used to be as narrow as a river reed.
Lin looked down at Covey’s wedding dress, balled up in his arms. Lin had hoped that this would resolve everything, Covey’s marriage to a wealthy man, but Covey had accused him of selling her to Little Man to pay off his debts. And now this. His daughter, running away in the only way she knew how, toward the sea.
“Couldn’t you…？” Lin began. “Isn’t there…？”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Lyncook,” the policeman said. “Look at the sky.” Lin narrowed his eyes at the darkening canopy, listened to the thudding force of the waves as a storm moved in. Not even Covey could survive out there alone for very long. He kept telling himself it was too late, but what if it wasn’t? What if they were giving up too soon?
The policeman turned his back to the water and walked away, followed by Lin, who, dragging his shoes through the sand, head down, didn’t see two of Little Man’s thugs running toward him. Little Man Henry had been that powerful. His brother hadn’t hesitated to order an attack on Lin, not even with police officers present. It was a widely known secret that the police tolerated most of the Henry family’s illegal antics, anyway, helped along by strategically placed envelopes of cash. But this public ambush was going too far.
When the police pulled the thugs off Lin, he had only a couple of superficial cuts. But the officers didn’t lock up the hoodlums, they merely chased them off and warned them not to repeat their actions. Which, of course, Lin fully expected them to do. Lin retrieved his daughter’s wedding dress from the sand and shook it out. The rustling of the chiffon unleashed a faint scent of gardenia mixed with rum and sugar from the ceremonial cake. When her plate clattered to the floor, leaving a trail of cake and icing on her dress, Covey, like everyone else, must have been distracted by the bridegroom, who was on his feet, gagging and stumbling.
“She hated lilac,” Lin said out loud.
“Sorry, sir?” said the officer.
Lin shook his head and bundled up the dress again. Covey hated lilac and Pearl knew it, and yet Pearl had put lilac icing on the girl’s wedding cake. Lin looked back at the beach, now shrouded in twilight and storm clouds, and thought of where he’d seen Pearl earlier, standing just inland with a small group of onlookers near the pocked asphalt road that skirted the sand. They’d all been staring at the sea, leaning forward, as if willing it, like Lin, to send Covey back to them. But even Pearl had since abandoned her watch.