The Honeymoon Trap Page 2

  “Well, she might have but it slipped my mind.”

  “Oh, she’ll be back soon. She told me she was just going to do a few errands.”

  Reading those words, a slight shiver goes over my skin and I feel instantly cold, despite the proximity of the fire. I’ve already thought that it’s strange how similar this particular story is to my current life, but I’d chalked it up to my picking up a book that was about a honeymoon. But now that the hero of this story is concerned about his wife going out for errands on the first day of their new life together, it all feels a little too close to home. I put the book down.

  The rest of that afternoon, as clouds build in the sky and the day darkens, I wander our rental house in a state of anxiety. I think about calling Alice on her cellphone but she’s only been gone half the day and we have both agreed that our honeymoon is going to be cellphone free. No screens except for the large television in the finished basement of the house, and we’ve decided that we’ll only use that screen to watch old movies. No news, no streaming services, no sports highlights.

  I mix myself a vodka tonic in the kitchen, even though it’s early for me, then find myself back in front of the bookshelf on the far side of the living room. As before I am amazed by the specificity of it, all these crime novels, all paperbacks, all American, none of them published before the mid-1970s. I look at the bottom shelf, where I found The Honeymoon Trap, and I’m surprised to see that there isn’t even enough space between the books for me to slide a finger between them. Maybe I’d taken the book from another shelf? Or maybe Alice had put another book in this one? Either way, I feel disoriented and confused and find the book on the sofa where I’d left it just to make sure I haven’t imagined the whole thing. And there it is, that startling illustrated cover, my Sarasota library bookmark poking up about a third of the way through.

  I am just about to settle down and read some more—it’s only a goddamn book, after all—when I hear the front door open and Alice comes in with a paper grocery bag held in both arms.

  “Oh, you started without me,” she says, looking at my drink.

  “You were gone longer than I thought you’d be.”

  “Was I?”

  I follow her into the kitchen where she deposits the bag before starting to remove items. “I think you’ll forgive me,” she says, “when you see what I’ve brought home.”

  On the quartz countertop she lays out two shrink-wrapped wagyu steaks, so marbled with fat that they are almost white, two tins of white sturgeon caviar, a Perigord truffle wrapped in wax paper, and a bottle of red wine that looks French and pricey.

  “Where did you get all that?”

  “I told you I have my sources up here.”

  I decide to not press her further, telling myself to relax. She is clearly enjoying her role as our honeymoon planner, and I have nothing to complain about. That night she makes deviled eggs topped with caviar as an appetizer, then we eat the grilled steaks with a side of truffled scalloped potatoes. It is the single best meal I’ve ever had.

  After clearing up we bring glasses of brandy to sit in front of the fireplace. “How’s your book?” she says, moving it out of the way so she can sit.

  “Strange,” I say. “I’m not sure I need to read it, since I’m living it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I tell her about the plot so far, how in some ways it’s mirroring our own honeymoon.

  “Only in reverse,” she says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We live in Florida and went north for our honeymoon while the two in your book are from New York City and go to Florida. Where is Sweetgum?”

  “Made up, I think.”

  “Do you want to know what I think?” Alice says, looking a little bit serious.

  “Sure,” I say.

  “I think you should put that book back on the shelf and get a new one. It seems to be making you a little paranoid.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Now I’m hooked. I need to find out what happens with Nick and Fay, and where she’s sneaking off to on their honeymoon.”

  “Okay. Just so long as you stop worrying about where I’m sneaking off to, okay?”

  I put down my glass of brandy, knowing that if I keep drinking my acid reflux will keep me up all night. “Sure,” I say.

  That night I don’t read my book. After Alice and I have disentangled our naked bodies, and she has rolled over to go to sleep, I lie there thinking about the fortunes of my life, allowing myself to gradually slip below the fragile surface of sleep.

  When I wake in the morning Alice is gone from the bed. I find her out on the pier in her one-piece white bathing suit, looking at her phone. “I thought we said no cellphones.”

  She is lying on her stomach, facing the water, and her whole body jerks with fright when I speak.

  “Jesus,” she says. “How do you walk so quietly?”

  “I thought we said no cellphones,” I repeat.

  “Just checking the weather,” she says, then adds, “Jeez,” as she puts her cellphone down on her towel so that its screen isn’t showing.

  “What did it say?”

  “What did what say?”

  “The weather.”

  “Oh.” Alice begins to peer up at the sky then stops herself. “Blue skies, warm days, cool nights. Like we’d ordered it especially,” she says.

  That afternoon, tired after a boozy lunch, I stretch out in the living room with a copy of my favorite Travis McGee novel, The Green Ripper. I’ve decided I don’t want to read anymore of The Honeymoon Trap, although I haven’t put it back on the shelf yet. It sits on the coffee table, the dark brown eyes of the female on the cover trying to lure me back into its story. I read the first chapter of the MacDonald book, instead, happy to be back with Trav and Meyer aboard the Busted Flush in Fort Lauderdale. The Travis McGee stories were the first adult books I ever read, given to me by my grandfather one summer when I was visiting him at his ranch house in Georgia. I think I read all twenty-one of the Travis books in about two weeks, and re-reading them throughout the years is like revisiting old friends. I might change but Trav doesn’t.

  After five chapters, I decide to shut my eyes for a while, surprised when I wake up an hour later, my neck sweaty, fragments from a disturbing dream quickly dissipating. I go to the kitchen and drink a glass of water, then call out for Alice. She doesn’t answer back so I go to the window with its expansive view of the lake. The pier is empty. Everything looks empty, actually. The lake is dull and gray and flat, and the sky is filmed in a thin layer of cloud. The sun is a yellow stain.

  I go to the front door and step outside. The car is gone from the gravel driveway. My heart is starting to thud in my chest now and I am making my way to the bedroom to get my cellphone when I see the scrawled words on the chalkboard that’s mounted next to the refrigerator. They read: More errands! Be back soon xo V. I drink another glass of water and return to the sofa. I felt a little better, telling myself that she’s gone out to purchase the ingredients for another gourmet meal, but I still wonder why she doesn’t tell me the details of where she’s going, or who she’s buying the ingredients from. All I know is that she isn’t getting Perigord truffles from the Hannaford Supermarket.

  Instead of returning to The Green Ripper I pick up The Honeymoon Trap, again, wanting to check in with Nick and his similar problems. Maybe he’ll figure out what’s going on with his own wife.

  I read three chapters. In the first Nick sits in the dark cocktail lounge waiting for Fay to return to the Sweetgum resort. The waitress who brings him his martini says, “Aren’t you the guy with that terrific-looking girl, the one with the long neck and those dark blue eyes.”

  “My wife, yes.” Nick says.

  “I only ask because she looks just like this girl who used to live here in Sweetgum, name of Celia Roche. She’s not the same girl, is she?”

  “Not unless she changed her name to Fay Glidden,” Nick says.

  “I didn’t think so. There’s just something familiar there, and since Celia went missing, and all.”

  This conversation is interrupted by the return of Fay, clicking her way across the terracotta floors of the lounge and sliding into the booth across from Nick.

  “Where you been?” Nick asks.

  “Can’t you tell? I got my hair styled and my nails done.” She holds out her hands, palm down, for him to see, and, Nick, in the gloom of the lounge thinks they look like blood-red talons.

  Over the next couple of chapters Nick becomes increasingly suspicious of his new wife, always disappearing to go somewhere. He asks her about the name Celia Roche and if it means anything to her, and she says it doesn’t mean a thing, although the inflection of her voice rises a little and he doesn’t believe her. One night, when Fay has gone missing again, Nick goes and finds the cocktail waitress, who agrees to meet him after her shift.

  Her name is Velma and Nick drives her out to a roadside bar where they get drinks. “Tell me about Celia Roche,” Nick asks.

  So Velma tells Nick about Celia, who grew up in Sweetgum but left when she was seventeen years old. She says how Celia was a trailer park girl who went from a skinny tomboy to full-blown ripe womanhood in one summer. She got swept up right away by a redneck named Boone Mitchum, and rumor has it that the two of them got their kicks by heading down to Miami on weekends, where Celia would rope in some fat businessman or conventioneer while Boone waited in the wings to roll him. Celia stopped going to school. Her mother, a diner waitress over in Palmetto, tried to control her but she couldn’t. And one day Celia and Boone just disappeared. Everyone figured that they’d gone to some other state, some big city where no one knew who they were, and the marks would be dumber and richer.

  “And you think my Fay might be Celia Roche?” Nick asked.

  “The thing is, I was two years younger than Celia at school. She scared me so I never really looked at her, but there’s a definite resemblance. Same height, same facial features, but everything else is different. Different hair, different clothes, different way of talking. If that’s Celia she’s changed a lot. Like maybe she even got a nose job or something. She definitely got her teeth fixed.”

  “Wouldn’t other people know her here?”

  “They do, and they’re talking about it, believe you me. But Celia’s mom is dead, and her best friend from school is living out in Hawaii now, and those are the only two people who could tell you for sure, I guess. As it is, everyone just has their suspicions.”

  The next two chapters has Nick confirming his suspicions that Fay Glidden really is this Celia Roche. He questions her, and she tells him she grew up in Florida, but all the way over on the west coast. One night, when the two of them drive to a restaurant for grouper sandwiches, Nick becomes convinced that they are being followed by a beast of a man wearing a cowboy shirt and a pair of boots. The man sits alone at the bar, but keeps casting his eye over toward them in their booth. Nick’s sure its Boone Mitchum and that he’s been set up.

  I stop reading, a little shaken by the name Celia, an anagram, of course, for Alice. Years of doing the crossword have left me alert to anagrams and palindromes and double meanings. And isn’t Roche basically French for stone? The lake house swims around me, like I’m watching it on television and everything has suddenly gone all pixelated. I decide to get another early drink when Alice, my Alice, comes through the front door, humming a tune I almost recognize.

  “More errands?” I say.

  “Yes and no. You were sleeping so I thought I’d go out for a ride. Didn’t pick up much, but I did find a farmstand with the most unbelievable looking corn.” She produces a plastic bag, laden down with four ears of corn, two large heirloom tomatoes, and a head of lettuce.

  “Maybe next time you head out on one of your jaunts you could invite me along,” I say, keeping my voice neutral.

  “I just didn’t want to wake you. You looked so contented with that book on your chest with the afternoon light coming in through the windows.”

  Eating dinner that night I ask her: “How well do you know this part of Maine?”

  She chews on her salad a little bit before saying, “Remember how I told you my dad moved us around all the time?”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Well, one year he decided that he wanted to be a lumberman, a good old-fashioned American job, so we came up here for a year. Not right here, at Blackfork Lake, but about forty minutes away, over in East Passanocket.”

  “You didn’t tell me that,” I say.

  “Sure I did, when we were talking about where to go on our honeymoon and I told you how much I loved the lakes up here in Maine.”

  “I thought you’d just visited. I didn’t know you actually lived here.”

  “Well, it felt more like a visit. Dad got bored, and we moved out before I’d even finished one year of school.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I turned sixteen the year I was up here. It was my sophomore year of high school.”

  “So you must know people from here still.”

  She smiles and there’s a little piece of corn trapped between two of her teeth. “Like I’ve told you, I have my connections up here.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Alice, if you say that one more time I’m gonna …”

  Alice’s face flushes with color and she pushes her chair back from the table. Stands up.

  A little spit has gotten on my chin from yelling at her and I wipe it off.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Alice says. “Jesus, if it bothers you so much I won’t leave your side the rest of the time here. Is that what you want?”

  “I think what I want is to know who it is that you are going to see.”

  “Since you care so much, I do have a friend up here. His name’s Bruce Lowe and I’ve kept in touch with him since high school. He’s a concierge over at this hunting lodge that hosts these high-roller events. He’s the one who told me about this rental house and, yes, he’s the one who hooked me up—hooked both of us up—with that amazing food we ate last night.”

  “Old boyfriend?” I say.

  She just shakes her head.

  Later, after we’ve done the dishes, I say, “This guy Bruce, what name does he know you by?”

  “What do you mean?” Alice says, and I do think she looks genuinely confused. She also looks alarmed, the color draining from her face.

  “Does he know you by Alice Stone or does he know you by Celia Roche, or maybe even Fay Glidden?”

  Alice, or whatever her name is, doesn’t say anything right away. She just calmly folds the towel in her hands and hangs out from its hook, then turns to me and says, “You’re scaring me, Henry.”

  I repeat my question and she shakes her head. “I don’t know those names. I think you’re confused.”

  She goes to bed early and I stay by the fireplace. I pick up The Honeymoon Trap and hold it on my lap, not sure if I want to continue reading. I know what I’m going to find out. Fay Glidden is a grifter who has lured Nick Dean down to Florida. I don’t know what the full scam is, but it has something to do with a redneck named Boone Mitchum. I am living the same story. Alice Stone (or whatever her name was) has brought me to this godforsaken lake because this is where her partner is. Is the plan to murder me, making sure that Alice has established some sort of alibi? Or is she simply sneaking off to fuck this other man, to celebrate the fact that she’s landed a fat fish like me? Is this just a sick game to her?

  Moving quietly, I put on my fleece coat and my hiking boots and slip out of the house. The night is cold and clear, the sky dense with starlight. I move along the edge of the treeline; there is light in our bedroom window, cast through the pulled curtains. I stare at it, imagining what my wife might be doing. She is probably on her phone, texting with her lover. Maybe one hand is between her legs. I put the image out of my mind and walk down the driveway to the dirt road that circles the lake. Then I jog the five hundred yards or so to the next house. It’s a cabin about half the size our lake house. We can see it from the pier and I’ve noticed a) that no one seems to currently be residing there, and b) there’s a jeep in its side driveway.

  I sneak up to the dark cabin, knocking on the door just in case. After thirty seconds of silence I try the door handle but it is locked. I work my way around to the part of the cabin that faces the lake. There is a porch, and another door, also locked. But one of the windows slides open and I step through it into an open living area that smells of cat food and mold. It takes a while, but using the flashlight pen I’ve brought with me, I find the keys to the wrangler in a kitchen drawer. I pocket them, plus a filleting knife I find in a tackle box on the kitchen counter.

  Re-entering the lake house, I am sure that Alice will be waiting for me, demanding to know where I’ve gone, but the house is exactly as I’d left it, our bedroom door still shut. I hide the keys and the knife in a dusty cookie jar on the top shelf in our own kitchen and return to the living room sofa. I need to get some sleep. But first I read some more of The Honeymoon Trap.

  I wake to the smell of sausage. And I wake to a teary wife, wanting to know what happened between us the night before. I apologize to her, telling her that I don’t know what came over me, that it’s the stupid book I’m reading, and will she ever forgive me. She apologizes, as well, telling me that she should never have been secretive about where she was going, that she won’t do it again.

  “No more secrets,” she says.

  Later that morning while I am idly casting from the pier Alice comes and tells me that she does have some errands to make and would I like to join her.

  “Where are you going?” I say.

  “There’s that farmstand I told you about, and I was planning on meeting Bruce over at the village market in East Passanocket. He says he has some very fresh striper fillets and that he’s put one of them aside for us. I thought we could grill it for our lunch.”