Table of Contents
Tropical Swap
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Part 2
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Part 3
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Part 4
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Epilogue
Praise for the novels of Laurence Shames:
About Laurence Shames
Works by Laurence Shames
Tropical Swap
by Laurence Shames
Tropical Swap
by Laurence Shames
First eBook Edition
Copyright © 2014 by Laurence Shames
eBook Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Dedication
For Marilyn, the mate that fate had me created for...
1.
For Meg and Peter Kaplan, the home exchange was going perfectly well, wonderfully really, until the coconut crashed through the window at three a.m.
They were sleeping upstairs when it happened. The window shattered by the coconut was downstairs. Muffled by distance and humidity, by tasteful rugs and fluffy pillows, the sounds of the splintering and the thud were abrupt and sharp but not terribly loud. Meg and Peter only half woke up and only for a groggy moment.
They’d gone to bed extremely tired, worn out from dragging luggage through airport security lines and from the shock of sudden searing sunshine in February. It had been seventeen degrees under a vacant sky when they left their Manhattan apartment that morning; by the time they’d landed in Key West, the thermometer stood at eighty-two and the yellow sun seemed so close and unshielded that they imagined they could see it spinning. The winter heat was thrilling but confusing to their bodies, which had opened toward the light like hungry plants but then had quickly wilted.
By next morning they barely remembered that anything untoward had happened in the night.
Warm as biscuits, they woke up in an unaccustomed bed to the lush and slightly raunchy smells of the near-tropics—the funk of wet fallen foliage, the narcotic fog of flowers just being born, the jungle tang of spray from the neighborhood cats—and moment by moment they recalled where they were: In yet another stranger’s house on yet another home swap.
Experienced exchangers, they had never yet grown numb to the fundamental oddness of the process, nor to the remarkable optimism on which it needed to be based. Home exchanging was all about trust—trust that one’s swap partner was not a total slob, scam artist, lunatic, or violent criminal. But how could people like the Kaplans know if they’d placed their trust wisely? They looked at some photos on a website and then there they were, not just in someone else’s house, but smack dab in the middle of a life that other people had made; surrounded not just by other people’s stuff, but by their choices, passions, personality. What did these or those people choose to display, to highlight? Family photos, gewgaws, bowling trophies? Were there books? Was there art? Deer heads on the walls? Were there ships in bottles or needlepoint pillows with homey sayings? Everything, even the refrigerator magnets, seemed to be a fragment of an entirely present though still elusive story.
Then there was the inevitable locked closet, which, in this case, seemed to be the husband’s half of a his-and-hers pair in the master bedroom, the wife’s half having been left open, with a good amount of space considerately cleared. In any case, every home they’d ever exchanged for had had a locked closet somewhere, and it invariably became a subject of mystery. The locked closet was like some repressed subconscious with hangers and drawers. What were people hiding in those musty and perhaps guilty chambers? Chances are, their contents were generally quite mundane: the better china, the aging Burgundies, the heirloom pony glasses from Alsace. No doubt the locked rooms also sometimes hid the sex toys, the stash of naughty videos, the home bondage starter kit in its cheesy vinyl case. Harmless though somewhat embarrassing stuff. But who could say with certainty that there might not on occasion be some truly insidious things shut away behind those closet doors? Firearms, explosives, blackmail-worthy photographs, records of embezzlements or frauds or even murder—who knew?
Short of breaking in to those locked closets, which of course was something that people like the Kaplans would never, ever do, they couldn’t fully know the sudden friends whose beds they were sleeping in, whose sinks and towels they were using, whose toothbrush holders were now cradling their own toothbrushes.
And who, in turn, were resident in their home, sizing them up by their possessions and their style, and wondering about them as well.
But about the coconut…
It wasn’t until after Meg and Peter had showered and dressed that they came downstairs and saw it. Still shrouded in its fibrous pale green husk, it looked enormous, bigger than any coconut they had ever seen. It was lying in the middle of the living room, the centerpiece in a bizarre mosaic of shattered glass. The glass had fractured mostly into narrow triangles, some of which glinted and some of which didn’t. Seeing the mess, the visitors finally remembered hearing the vague and dreamy crash. Meg said, “Was it really so windy last night?”
Peter said, “I didn’t think so.” He looked at what was left of the window. It was an ordinary window, which is to say, it was oriented vertically. Then he looked at the coconut, which appeared to be quite heavy, five pounds or so, he guessed, and he started to get worried. To worriers all things are worrying, and Peter was a first-class worrier. In airplanes he worried about the slightest change in the sound of the engines. In a car he worried about his tire pressure and whether the gas gauge was telling him the truth. On a bicycle he fretted about chain noise or pinging spokes that might fail and leave him stranded far from home. He worried about floods and droughts, recession and inflation, gaining weight and losing weight. Now he was worried about the trajectory of the coconut. He said, “I don’t think there’s any way that thing just blew through the window.”
His wife pursed her lips, glanced this way and that, and had to agree. “Maybe it fell and bounced off a frond. You know, a slingshot kind of thing. Or trampoline.”
She did not sound worried, and she wasn’t. She was blithe, she was cheery, she didn’t worry about anything. In this and in other things as well, she counterbalanced and completed her husband. Their marriage, a steady and generally happy one, was held together like, say, a loaf of bread, by their quite different personalities. Peter was like the flour and the water; without Meg he would have sat there in a passive, gooey lump. Meg was like the yeast and the salt; without Peter she would have gaily fizzed and frothed until she’d
wafted away into her own carefree but somewhat unmoored reality.
She now bent down and started picking up the shards of glass. Worried that she would cut herself, Peter went off in search of a dustpan and a broom.
When a path through the wreckage had been cleared, Peter gingerly stepped forward and picked up the coconut. He weighed it with his hands, then turned it over and blanched. “Oh my God,” he said.
“What?”
“There’s writing on it.”
He carried the coconut over to his wife. She looked at it quickly and saw some vague markings scrawled in waxy red. “They’re just squiggles,” she said.
“No, here,” he insisted, and slowly twirled the coconut to reveal a different facet of its husk. There did in fact seem to be some words there, though the letters were crudely rendered and seemed to have been partly smeared or scraped away when the projectile had crashed through the window. Still, among the crosshatched lines and drips, a short and discomfiting message could be made out: She dies. Then, after a space with some other illegible markings, two more words: You die.
Meg, unworried, said, “We die, you die, they die. Sounds like someone conjugating verbs.”
Peter’s throat had tightened down and he now held the coconut very carefully, far away from his body, as though it might explode. His voice pinched and rasping, he managed to say, “No one’s conjugating. It’s a death threat. Can’t you see that? It’s a death threat.”
“Death threat against who? We just got here. We don’t even know anyone.”
“Must be against the people whose house it is,” reasoned Peter.
“They aren’t here,” Meg pointed out.
“Probably no one knows they’re gone,” her husband said. “Probably they’d just left when we walked in. I thought I could still smell after-shave. I don’t like this whole business, Meg.”
“Come on, it’s just a coconut. A prank. A joke.”
“Right. A joke. Someone breaks your window and wants to kill you. Ha, ha, ha.”
“Honey, no one’s killing anyone. It’s all fine. We’re in Key West. Let’s have fun. Let’s relax.”
Peter did not relax. He gingerly placed the coconut on the kitchen counter and could not stifle a shudder as he let go of it. “These people we’re exchanging with,” he said. “What do we really know about them?”
2.
The house that Meg and Peter were borrowing was on Poorhouse Lane, a short and very narrow street near the west end of the cemetery. Back in the 1800s there had actually been a poorhouse there, a place where paupers were given soup and sermons and lectures about the presumptive virtues of hard work. Now the lane was one of those patchwork precincts so typical of Key West, with a sprinkling of million-dollar second homes among the peeling and off-plumb cottages occupied by deep locals who would never move or transients camped out in rental units whose landlords had long since ceased to give a damn about the properties. These funkier dwellings were ringed by wobbly chain-link fences enclosing yards where anarchic shrubbery grew in choking tangles. Here and there a clunky old air-conditioner bulged from a sagging window, dripping rusty water and looking like it might pull the whole building down.
By contrast, the home where Meg and Peter found themselves was one of the nicest on the block. It rose two stories tall, straight and proud behind a tidy, freshly-painted picket fence. Its ageless Dade County pine siding gleamed a faultless white that was tastefully set off by shutters of celadon green. The front of the house faced north and featured a deep and shady porch complete with a rocking chair and rope swing. The backyard had a swimming pool that was not quite big enough for actual swimming but was very beckoning nonetheless. In all it was a serene and luxurious accommodation, but Peter Kaplan, even at poolside, was not serene.
“Okay,” he said to his wife. “Let’s start at the beginning and try to figure out who we’re dealing with here. Take it step by step. You contacted these people—“
“No I didn’t,” Meg corrected. As usual, she had been the one who handled the arrangements, her husband being somewhat overwhelmed in wrapping up a trimester at the not very good New Jersey college where he taught literature. Meg, having neither craved nor stumbled into a conventional career, worked sometimes as a yoga teacher and occasionally in a health food store and now and then in a used book shop. Her schedule was flexible, and besides, it was she who had the travel bug, who was always lobbying to go somewhere while her husband would have just as soon stayed where he was. So it fell to her to put in the time at the computer, to browse the listings, filter the emails. “They contacted us,” she said.
“They contacted us?” said Peter. They were sitting at a glass-topped wicker table in the dappled shade of a fishtail palm. Meg was drinking coffee from a giant mug. Peter was sipping tea. He’d given up coffee some years before because it made him nervous. Now he drank tea in small doses but was nervous anyway. “Doesn’t that strike you as strange?”
“What?”
“That people with a great house in Key West would want to swap for a so-so apartment on West End Avenue.”
“It’s a nice apartment,” Meg protested. “And people love New York. Everybody wants to go there.”
“In February?”
“There’s so much to do. Theatre, opera, the symphony.”
“Old ladies disappearing into slush puddles,” said Peter. “Taxis slamming sideways into snowbanks. It’s a terrible time to be in New York.”
“To each his own,” Meg said mildly. “Maybe they had some event to go to. Some special reason to be there.”
“Like what?”
“How should I know? All he said in his email—“
“He?”
“Yeah, it was the husband I guess, this guy Benny. All he said was that it was a last minute kind of thing.”
“Aha!” said Peter, as though some major point had just been proven.
“Aha what?”
“Last minute kind of thing. Like maybe it wasn’t so much about going to New York at all. Maybe it was more about needing to get out of here.”
“Peter, please, slow down. The coconut, the broken window, okay, that’s a little weird, I admit it. But--”
“And what about the death threat?”
“Stop already with the death threat. You’re reading way too much into it.”
“Am I? I’m just reading what’s on the coconut. She dies you die. I don’t think it’s a big stretch to call that a death threat.”
“I still say it’s a prank. A random event. At worst maybe some petty vandalism. And have I pointed out that the only people it could possibly have been aimed at aren’t even here?”
“Exactly. And you know why they aren’t? Because we are. Unsuspecting suckers. Sitting ducks.”
Meg placidly sipped her coffee and dropped her voice to the lulling murmur she favored at the end of a yoga class. “Ducks,” she said. “Ducks sitting on a pond in sunshine. Isn’t that a peaceful image? Or look at the pool, the way the water looks so blue and still. Isn’t that beautiful?”
Her husband threw a quick look at the swimming pool, blinked once, and pulled his eyes away. “Or think about it this way. Say you were in trouble. Say someone was after you, you needed to get out of town. How would you do it? Go to a hotel? You go to a hotel, you need a reservation, you need to check in with a credit card. There’s a paper trail, people know you’re there. But with a home exchange—“
“Now you’re getting completely carried away.”
“With a home exchange nobody can find you. Perfect way to take it on the lam. Who else knows these people are hiding out on West End Avenue and 93rd Street?”
“Who says they’re hiding out?”
“No one knows but us, and I don’t like being the only ones who know.”
“Peter, breathe. Bring your attention to the center and breathe deeply into it.”
“What if somebody comes looking for them and ties us up with duct tape and won’t let us go until we tell him whe
re they are? I’d tell him in a minute, don’t get me wrong. The idea of being tied up in a chair makes me claustrophobic. But do I want that on my conscience?”
“Look, honey, slow down. It’s just a broken window. Happens every day. These are just normal people. Trusting, easygoing home exchangers, our kind of folks. I’ve spoken on the phone with the guy. He sounded just like a regular person.”
“Have you ever spoken on the phone with Charles Manson? Maybe he sounds like a regular person too. How long was the conversation?”
“Not long. Short. A minute. He said he had to go.”
“Had to go. See? Sounded jumpy?”
“He didn’t sound jumpy. He had another call.”
“I’m really not sure we should stay here, Meg.”
Meg ran her fingertips along the lip of her coffee mug and looked around the strangers’ property. In the half day they’d been there, she’d already fallen in love with many things about it—the banks of skyflower at the far end of the pool, the barely audible whoosh of breeze through palms, the glass block wall that let fractured light into the master suite shower. It all came pretty close to her fantasy of a perfect Key West house and she didn’t want to run away from it just because of a thrown coconut. “Listen,” she said, “I have a very simple idea. Let’s just call this fellow up, calmly tell him about the window, ask him who he uses for glass repairs. He’ll apologize for the inconvenience, he’ll be very reassuring and it’ll all be fine. How’s that sound?”
Peter put his teacup down, drummed fingers on the glass tabletop. Finally, with grudging and not more than tentative resignation, he nodded.
So Meg riffled through her contact list until she came to Benny Bufano. She hit the call button and was forwarded to voicemail but it turned out she couldn’t leave a message. The mailbox was full. This made Peter nervous.
“Full mailbox,” he said. “That’s never good. Guy’s not checking messages. Things are spinning out of control for him.”
Meg just sighed and sent Benny Bufano a text.
Peter, paranoid but in this instance also correct, guessed that it would go unanswered.
Tropical Swap (Key West Capers Book 10) Page 1
