The Honeymoon Trap Read online

  The Honeymoon Trap

  Peter Swanson

  The Honeymoon Trap

  I am on my honeymoon.

  And as I stare at the shelves in the living room of our rental cottage on Blackfork Lake, I have a sudden sense of déjà vu. It is as though I’ve seen these very books in this very order before. They are all paperbacks, which make sense, this being a vacation house, but they aren’t the type of paperbacks you see these days, big trades almost as clunky as some hardcovers; no, these are classic pulp novels, stories about spies and gangsters and detectives meant to slide into your back pocket, or, at the very least, the inside pocket of a jacket. They are the types of books that I love, had always loved ever since I first raided my grandfather’s bookshelf when I was ten years old.

  There is one whole shelf here at the lake house that contains all twenty-one of the Travis McGee paperbacks, in order, too, from The Deep Blue Good-by all the way to The Lonely Silver Rain. The series doesn’t quite fill the shelf so there are a bunch of John D. MacDonald standalones there, as well. Condominium. Soft Touch. One Monday We Killed Them All.

  The next shelf down there are all the Gold Medal Matt Helm books by Donald Hamilton, and the next shelf down from there are a slew of Richard S. Prather’s Shell Scott series, also Gold Medal originals. There is also an entire shelf devoted to Nero Wolfe stories, the Bantam paperback editions, although I am pleased to see The Hand in the Glove, a non-Wolfe book by Stout, in one of those Dell editions with the map on the back.

  “That looks just like your bookshelf, Henry,” Alice says, and her voice, coming from right behind my shoulder, makes me jump. I’d thought she was in the bedroom unpacking.

  “It does,” I say. “I was just standing here with the worst case of déjà vu. I still have it, I guess. You coming up behind me is all part of it. I mean the déjà vu.”

  “You have déjà vu because this bookshelf looks as though you paid someone to transport your personal library from your apartment to here for the week without telling me.”

  “Maybe I did,” I say.

  She laughs. “I wouldn’t put it past you. Anyway, aren’t you glad you made the decision to not pack books for this week. I think it’s going to work out for you.”

  Alice had found the rental on one of those sites that advertised vacation homes. She’d looked at about a hundred, since she had a very specific type of place in mind for our honeymoon. “We live in Florida,” she’d said, “so the thought of going to some island actually hotter than our backyard does not appeal to me. And if we go to Europe, then we’ll spend the whole trip feeling guilty that we’re not sightseeing. How about an old-fashioned lake house, somewhere in New England?”

  “That sounds perfect to me,” I said, although I’d have agreed to anything she wanted. Maybe that was because we were in a so-called honeymoon phase, but I didn’t think so. I thought I’d agree to anything she wanted for the rest of our lives.

  I’d met Alice Stone at downtown Sarasota’s annual art festival. She was manning a booth that was selling these strange sculptures carved from vintage hardcovers to look like cats or anchors. They were for bookshelves, I guess.

  “Do you make these yourself?” I asked.

  “No, my friend Tommy does them. He’s at lunch break so I offered to watch his stall. He also makes these.” She showed me a bunch of books that had been hollowed out from the inside, their pages cut, to create a secret hiding place. In a couple of the books the cut-out section was shaped like a gun.

  “Not for you?” she said.

  “Oh, sorry. Was I frowning? No, I like them, but I guess, if I’m honest, I feel bad seeing books destroyed like this.”

  “Are you a writer?”

  “In a way,” I said. “I write book reviews for the Sarasota Busker but that’s more of a hobby. No, I’m just a reader, really, a fan. Particularly mysteries. And I’m a collector, an amateur one. Midcentury American crime fiction. Paperbacks.”

  The beautiful girl with the sun-streaked hair turned away from me and dug around in a beach bag. I thought she was going to pull out her phone to check it, effectively putting an end to our conversation, but she came out with a book, instead. A re-issue of Patricia Highsmith’s This Sweet Sickness. “Have you read her?” she asked, holding up the book.

  “I have, but not that particular book, but I’ve read the Ripley books, of course, and Strangers on a Train.”

  “I started with The Talented Mr. Ripley, because I’d fallen in love with Plein Soleil. Have you seen that movie? And the only reason I watched that film was because I’d fallen in love with Alain Delon, the actor. And now I’m reading all of Highsmith’s books. It’s like falling down a rabbit hole.” She was smiling while she told me all this, amused by her own words. Something about her, maybe the unfussy hair and the lack of makeup, made her seem like she came from another time and place. A prairie girl during the great migration, or a hippie girl from San Francisco before that whole time got seedy.

  I had taken the Highsmith book from her and was reading the back of it. “Borrow it,” she said. “Read the first chapter and you can bring it back to me here.”

  “How long will you be here? At this booth?”

  “Until you bring it back, I guess. Or better yet—are you going somewhere for lunch? Start the book there and I’ll come find you.”

  And that was what happened. I went to The Whiskey Institute, a fairly hipsterish restaurant two blocks north from the festival and waited there for Alice Stone. She’d given me her full name before we parted, so instead of reading the Highsmith book I’d quickly logged onto Instagram using Brenda Hartley’s username and password. Brenda was an old girlfriend (or so I liked to think) whom I hadn’t seen for over a year. But I’d known her passwords when we were together and she hadn’t changed them, so she still came in handy if I wanted to look something up on social media. I suppose I could have gotten my own accounts but the thought of that actually made me feel nauseous. I scoured Instagram, and then Facebook, for an Alice Stone that matched with the woman I’d just met, but found nothing. I was slightly disappointed, only because I wanted to learn more about her, but also relieved to find that another human had successfully resisted the siren song of these blights of our modern age.

  I sipped my whiskey sour and wondered if she’d show. If I wasn’t holding the Highsmith book, actual physical evidence of her, I’d wonder if I simply conjured her up, this ghost of Tuesday Weld who read Patricia Highsmith because of how much she loved the films of Alain Delon. I had met women like her a hundred times, but only ever in my fantasies. Was she even real?

  As I finished my drink she came into the restaurant, threading her way among the tables to reach me, a wide grin on her face. She was as beautiful as I’d remembered her, but she wasn’t perfect. Her teeth were slightly crooked, and there was a milky purple birthmark near her left collarbone. But those details made her more startling to me because they made her real. We talked about books and movies and what we liked and disliked about Florida. She was a cocktail waitress at one of the nicest hotels on Siesta Key. I could tell that she was somewhat confused by my employment status so I simply told her that I’d inherited my father’s successful auto repair business, and while I didn’t actively run it, the earnings provided me with more than enough to live on. It was mostly true. When my father and my mother died in one of the largest multi-car accidents in upstate New York, I had sold his shops rather than taking them on. They had been left to me, along with my parents’ two houses and my father’s vintage car collection, all of which I’d sold. It was that money, a few million dollars, that I was living off. I had no real job, besides my gig as a book reviewer,
but if I was careful, I would never have to work another day in my life.

  I don’t know why I lied to her about selling off the businesses. I guess I was a little self-conscious about the fact that I didn’t really work. They say that women these days don’t care about those things, but I wonder.

  We ate lunch then talked all afternoon, sipping palomas. She wasn’t from the prairie nor was she from California. Alice Stone had come to Sarasota from Charlotte, North Carolina, because of a boyfriend, a minor league switch hitter with aspirations to make it to the bigs. He developed a balky knee, followed by a devastating pill addiction, and when she’d finally disentangled herself from that relationship, she found she’d fallen in love with Florida’s gulf coast. He left and she stayed.

  At dusk we strolled through the cooling day and ended up at my favorite restaurant, where we ate again, and talked some more. Then she spent the night at my ocean-front condominium. Six months later we were married.

  I am not a fool—I know that my money played a part in our courtship. I am average looking at best with a physique sculpted by years of sitting in recliners and staring at books. Alice Stone is ten years younger than me, blond and lithe and sun-touched, and full of the hopefulness of her generation, the conviction that the world could one day be just.

  When she began to look for a lake house for our honeymoon her model was the hunting lodge in one of our favorite films, Leave Her to Heaven, starring Gene Tierney. It took a while but she finally found an impressive midcentury “cottage” on Blackfork Lake, in northernmost Maine. She’d shown me the pictures, pointing out the massive stone fireplace, the wall entirely composed of windows, and the vaulted ceilings. I’d been drawn to a wall of bookshelves, visible in one of the pictures of the sunken living room by the fireplace. I’d even zoomed in to try and see if I could make out the spines of the books on the shelves.

  “I can tell already that this is going to be a thrilling honeymoon,” Alice said, watching me squint at the computer screen. She was laughing, though, her chin tipped back, a hand on my arm to let me know that my feelings shouldn’t be hurt.

  “I think I won’t pack any books of my own,” I said. “That way when we get there, I’ll be forced to read something already in the cottage. I love that idea.”

  And that was what I did. And now that I am standing in front of the bookshelf I’d pondered with so much excitement I feel good about my decision. Yes, there are many books that I already own and have read, but there are several that I haven’t, even some by a few favorite authors. There are a number of Jim Thompson novels, his early paperbacks published by Lion, and while I have the exact same edition of The Killer Inside Me at home in Florida, I don’t have a copy of Savage Night, written shortly after, although I’ve heard good things. It is here on the shelf and I pull it out an inch in case I choose to come back to it.

  There are multiple 87th Precinct novels by Ed McBain that I haven’t read yet, or at least I don’t think I have. It is sometimes hard to remember. One of the titles, 80 Million Eyes, isn’t ringing a bell, and there is a book called The Empty Hours, three novellas, that I own but know I have never read. Next to the McBains are some Evan Hunters, which makes sense since they are the same author, Hunter and McBain. I pull a Penguin copy of Last Summer out an inch. Another book I’ve never read but have always meant to.

  On the very bottom shelf, I spot the first book by an author I don’t recognize. The Honeymoon Trap by Elvin Rhyne, bracketed on one side by a few of those awful Mickey Spillane books (don’t get me started on Mike Hammer) and on the other with some Elmore Leonard westerns. I pull it out. It’s another Fawcett Gold Medal, in nice condition, with a cover illustration that has to be by Robert McGinnis, not that he’d be credited on the book. It is one of those classic, curvy McGinnis beauties, her body curved like a quotation mark as she sits on what looks like a pier, long bare legs stretched out in front of her. She has dark hair and her head is tilted so that she is making eye contact with whomever might be holding this book. Behind her is a swath of tropical green and a distant house, or maybe it’s a hotel, going up in flames.

  I flip the book over and read the back copy.

  The first sentence, in the largest font, reads: two weeks of honeymoon bliss in the florida sun—but would the secrets she kept lead to murder? Below this is a slightly longer summary of the story, in smaller font but still in capital letters: nick dean didn’t think he had time for a wife until he met fay glidden on a cold winter day in new york city. one moment they were both hailing the same cab and the next they were honemooning at a ritzy resort in sweetgum, florida.

  but what did nick dean even know about fay glidden? he knew what she looked like in a white cashmere sweater, and he knew the honeysuckle smell of her hair. but she had a past she couldn’t escape, not even on her honeymoon, and the more nick learned the more he felt like a fox caught in a trap.

  I open the book to chapter one and read the first paragraph, a deft description of Nick Dean, Madison Avenue adman, leaving his office on a snowy winter evening in Manhattan. I decide to give it a shot.

  That night, in bed and with Alice dozing next to me, I turn my bedside lamp back on to read. I know it’s a cliché that all a man wants to do after he’s made love is to sleep, but that has never been the case with me. My body might relax but my mind keeps moving, and nothing helps me more than dipping into a good story.

  Alice shifts next to me, emitting a dainty snore. I begin to read, starting at the beginning, and reading the first two chapters; they set the scene in Manhattan as Nick Dean wrangles over a cab with Fay Glidden, and the two begin their whirlwind romance. The tension in these introductory chapters is that classic push and pull between the confirmed bachelor and the drop-dead gorgeous woman. If it was a screen comedy, it would be Rock Hudson and someone like Kim Novak playing the leads. But this was a thriller, so I pictured Humphrey Bogart and Veronica Lake. Nick Dean doesn’t want to give up his bachelor life in the city of Manhattan, but Fay Glidden is tired of being in the chorus line and living with three roommates in Greenwich Village. Fay, of course, overcomes Nick’s willfulness, and the two are married at City Hall. It’s Fay who suggests they go down to Florida for their honeymoon. She picks a resort hotel in the Gulf Coast town of Sweetgum.

  Chapter 3 begins with their plane landing in Tampa, and I slide my bookmark into The Honeymoon Trap to mark my place. It’s late and I don’t want to stay up all night reading on my honeymoon. I close my eyes and listen to the wind move the window around in its frame and think about how strange it is that the book I’ve picked is so similar to my current situation. Well, somewhat similar. I’m not a wide-shouldered ad man and Alice Jones is not a brunette chorus girl, but the swiftness of Nick and Fay’s courtship, and the fact that Fay, like Alice, picks their honeymoon spot both struck chords. I’m looking forward to getting back into it the next day.

  When I wake the bed is empty and it takes me a moment to remember where I am. Then my eyes adjust to the dark room and I can smell the aroma of coffee wafting in though the cracked bedroom door. I go to the kitchen and greet my wife.

  The day before, our arrival day, was overcast, sporadic bursts of rain moving through the area, but today is perfect. The sky is a wash of blue and a light cool breeze bristles the leaves on all the trees, a patch of early color here and there. The lake water matches the sky with its intensity, and after coffee and blueberry muffins, Alice talks me into joining her for a midmorning swim.

  “The key is not to hesitate,” she says as we walk out along the old wooden pier, gooseflesh already raising up along my arms. True to her word, when we reach the end of the pier, Alice plants her right foot at its edge and breaks into a graceful dive, barely causing a splash when she penetrates the lake’s placid surface. Not wanting to disappoint her I jump in myself, with about a tenth of her grace. The frigid water nearly takes all my breath away, but Alice talks me into swimming a little with her and
I begin to warm up. When our swim is over and we are both lying on our towels back on the pier, the high sun drying our skin, I feel as good as I’ve felt in years, maybe my entire life.

  After lunch I ask Alice what she wants to do with her afternoon. “Why don’t you read,” she says. “I have a few errands in town and then I’ll be back at cocktail hour.”

  “What kind of errands?” I say.

  “Never you mind.” She is smiling the smile I have come to know as her secret one. No teeth showing, her eyes bright.

  “Okay,” I say.

  She must sense some insecurity in my voice because she quickly says, “Don’t look worried. It’s possible I’m picking some things up. Trust me. You’ll be happy when I get back.”

  After she leaves, I grab my book, still on my bedside table, and bring it to the sunken living room, three soft upholstered couches surrounding a lacquered coffee table made from a single slice of what must have been an enormous, long-lived tree. I don’t know why it bothers me, her going off on her own on our honeymoon, but it somehow does. My own parents had done everything together, except for my father’s work, of course. They were inseparable, never spending a night apart. They were even inseparable in death. Still, I don’t mind having the time to read, and I crack my book open to chapter 3.

  There’s a lot of description of the swank resort in Sweetgum, and as Alice and I had, Nick and Fay start the first day of their honeymoon with a swim. Afterwards they relax poolside with a pitcher of pre-lunch martinis, and Nick wistfully stares at the “willing female flesh” bouncing around the pool. There’s a lot of anatomical description, calves clenching, breasts jutting, buttocks jiggling, then Nick reminds himself that his bachelor days are done before sweeping Fay back to their pool-side suite for some afternoon love. When he wakes up, he’s surprised to find that his wife is no longer in his room. A little confused, he pulls on his linen trousers and Sea Island shirt and goes out to find the concierge. “Mrs. Dean went out, Sir. Didn’t she tell you?”