Right Place, Wrong Time

“He said a bad word,” seven-year-old Alicia announced in a stage whisper.

“Hell isn’t a bad word,” Gina assured her. Alicia didn’t have to know how often her aunt uttered words a lot worse than hell. “It’s just the name of a place.”

“A bad place.”

“We can turn that bad word right back on him, okay?” Gina stared boldly at the man and said, “Who the hell are you?”

“I’m sorry,” he said. Gina wasn’t sure if he was apologizing for the invasion or only for his language. “There’s been a mistake.”

“Obviously.” If he could be diplomatic, so could she. “I don’t know how you got in here, but you’re in the wrong unit.”

“Six-fourteen,” he said, glancing at the open door, on which the number appeared. He turned back to Gina and lifted his hand so she could see the key. “This is how we got in here.”

There’s obviously been a mistake, she thought, her brain scrambling to figure out just how serious it was and how she was going to get these strangers out of the unit. “Okay—this is a time-share. We’ve got a key. You’ve got a key. My guess is someone’s here the wrong week.” You, she wanted to say. You’re here the wrong week.

“We’re here the week of July 19,” the man said calmly.

“Um, no.” Gina smiled. “That’s our week…. And we’re not leaving.”

Dear Reader,

One of the problems with being a writer is that no matter where you go, no matter what you do, a part of your mind is always thinking, “Can I use this in a book?”

A couple of years ago, my family took a trip to St. Thomas. It was supposed to be a family vacation, a special getaway to celebrate my older son’s impending high-school graduation and departure for college. On the jitney from the airport, I wound up next to a woman who was planning to spend the week at a time-share condo just up the road from our hotel. It was her cousin’s time-share, she told me, but her cousin wasn’t using it that week and had offered it to this woman and her husband, instead.

Goodbye vacation—hello book idea.

It took me a while to get around to writing Right Place, Wrong Time. I was under contract to write some other books first. But I saved all my research from the week we spent on St. Thomas, all the brochures and maps, all the notes I took—and at last I’ve been able to write this story.

(No, it’s not autobiographical. I didn’t buy a “happy diamonds” watch, although my husband bought me a beautiful bracelet in Charlotte Amalie, in honor of our twentieth wedding anniversary. I also bought a bottle of nail polish that changes color, just like Alicia’s in the book. And the snorkeling was as magnificent as anything Gina and Ethan experience.)

The habit of writers to turn every experience into a research trip can be problematic. But the positive side of that habit is that when a writer finally sits down and puts her research into a book, she gets to relive the experience. Writing Right Place, Wrong Time allowed me to enjoy St. Thomas all over again!

JudithArnold

Right Place, Wrong Time

Judith Arnold

To Ted and the boys

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

“DO YOU HAVE any idea what you’re doing?” Kim’s father asked.

Good question, Ethan muttered. No, he didn’t have any idea what he was doing. But he was doing it anyway. When in doubt, he usually just plowed ahead and hoped for the best.

“You’re driving on the wrong side of the road,” Kim’s father pointed out.

Ethan glanced at the man who might someday be his father-in-law. Ross Hamilton sat rigidly in the front passenger seat of the rented Oldsmobile, his jowls just beginning to go soft, his silver hair thick and precisely styled, his skin preternaturally tan and his eyes framed with the sort of creases that implied he squinted a lot, presumably at people he didn’t approve of. Ethan suspected he fell into that category.

“People drive on the left side of the road in St. Thomas,” Ethan explained.

“St. Thomas is part of the United States,” Ross argued. “Why don’t they drive on the right?”

“I don’t know.”

“This is an American car. The steering wheel is on the left.”

“Yes.” Ethan was having a hard enough time getting used to left-sided driving. He didn’t need Ross undermining his concentration by badgering him with questions.

“Perhaps you should have arranged for someone to pick us up at the airport,” Ross chided.

“My friend Paul told me the cabs on the island are overpriced. By renting the car for the week, we’ll save a lot of money.” Surely his thrift would win him a few points in his potential father-in-law’s view.

“In the meantime, we might wind up in a head-on collision.”

“I’m on the right side of the road. The left side,” Ethan corrected himself. Even with cool air blasting from the vents, he felt dampness gathering at his nape. Ross exuded not a single drop of perspiration, despite wearing a linen blazer over his polo shirt. July in St. Thomas—it was hot on the other side of the windshield. Ross Hamilton didn’t sweat, though. He was obviously a chilly man.

Ethan wished Kim hadn’t insisted on including her parents in this outing. He’d gotten access to Paul’s time-share because, as Paul put it, no one in his right mind would want to go to St. Thomas in July. Paul’s regularly scheduled week at the resort on Smith Bay was in January, but last January he’d had the chance to go skiing in Aspen with friends, and he’d chosen that over the tropics. So he’d traded his week with a woman who owned a week in July in the same unit, and then offered the July week to Ethan if he wanted it.

Ethan had thought a week in St. Thomas, even in the middle of the summer, would offer Kim and him a fun getaway. Kim had been elated. “I hear jewelry is dirt cheap and duty-free down there,” she’d said. “Maybe we could do a little shopping.” Hint, hint.

Okay, she wanted an engagement ring. Ethan was willing to concede that the time for an engagement ring might be drawing near—and if that time arrived, why not buy one that was dirt cheap and duty-free? In March, when Paul had first offered him the week at the condo, this had all seemed like a good idea.

Then Kim had heard that the unit had two bedrooms, and she’d come up with the clever idea of bringing her parents along. “It will give them a chance to get to know you better,” she’d argued. “I want them to love you as much as I do. We could have great fun, Ethan.”

Kim had been naked when she’d mentioned this, sliding her hand in provocative ways over his chest while simultaneously stroking his shin with her toes. She and Ethan had been having great fun at that moment, and he hadn’t been thinking clearly. So he’d said, “Sure.”

The van behind him was tailgating so closely Ethan could practically see the pores on the driver’s nose in his rearview mirror. Steep hills rose to one side of the road and a turquoise sea spread along the other side. He was in alien territory, surrounded by palm trees and brilliant crimson flowers, squat stucco houses and sprawling, cliff-hugging mansions. Cars, jitneys and small buses kept coming at him on the narrow, winding road—and they were on his right. The entire experience was disorienting.

Adding to his tension was a goat ambling along the asphalt no more than a hundred feet ahead.

“Oh, my God!” Kim shrieked from the back, where she and her mother had spent the entire time since they’d buckled their seat belts thumbing through guidebooks and plotting shopping expeditions. “It’s a goat!”

Ethan tapped on the brakes to slow down and prayed that the driver behind him wouldn’t rear-end them. A fender bender would not be an auspicious way to start this vacation.

“I’ve got to have a picture of the goat,” Kim declared. “Can you pull over, Ethan?”

“No.”

“Where’s the camera? Do you have it in front? I don’t have it back here.”

“It’s in the trunk,” he told her, slowing even more as he drew within a few yards of the animal.

“My first St. Thomas goat, and I don’t have a camera,” Kim wailed.

My first St. Thomas headache, and I don’t have an aspirin, Ethan thought. During a brief lull in the opposite lane’s traffic, he swerved around the goat, which glanced up from its grazing. Thin and brown, its jaw pumping and its black eyes piercing, it gave Ethan a contemptuous look, as if to say, This is paradise, pal. Mellow out.

Ethan wished he could. If only Ross Hamilton weren’t occupying the seat next to him and Delia Hamilton weren’t occupying the seat directly behind him, her unnaturally blond hair as flawlessly arranged as her husband’s, her skin as free of perspiration and her face lacking incipient jowls because Santa Claus had left some plastic surgery under the tree for her last winter. If only Kim Hamilton, the woman Ethan was contemplating marrying, weren’t squawking about her camera in the trunk…. Ethan would love to mellow out, but at the moment, the thought of leaping out of the car, slamming the door on the entire Hamilton family and joining the goat in a nice little snack of roadside grass held an odd appeal.

He promised himself he would mellow out as soon as they arrived at Palm Point, the beachfront complex where Paul’s time-share was located. Until they reached their destination, he was going to have to fight his natural inclination to steer onto the other side of the road, and he was going to grit his teeth at being cooped up inside a fat American sedan with Kim’s parents.

Vacations were for relaxing. He’d damn well better get to relax—and if everyone would just shut up, he might survive the half hour it took to drive to the place where relaxation would be possible.

If only he hadn’t agreed to let Kim’s parents come…. He and she could have escaped here by themselves for a week of exclusive togetherness. A week alone with her, when neither of them was distracted by the demands of their hectic lives, their careers and other obligations, would have given them the chance to make sure a lifetime commitment was right for them. He supposed having the chance to sample the Hamiltons as future in-laws would help him make up his mind, too. But he wouldn’t be marrying Ross and Delia Hamilton. If he and Kim got married, he wouldn’t have to see her parents more often than a few times a year, since the Hamiltons lived in Chevy Chase, Maryland, a good three hundred miles from Arlington, Connecticut.

He glanced at the screen of his PDA, into which he’d entered directions to the condo. Paul had provided a route that would allow Ethan to avoid Charlotte Amalie. He’d neglected to mention that avoiding the bustling capital city of St. Thomas required them to drive straight up the side of a mountain. If Ethan had thought the road leading away from the airport had been narrow, he’d been mistaken. The road up the mountain, a barely paved trail of twists and switchbacks and thirty-degree inclines, lacking shoulders, lacking railings but not lacking the occasional goat, would have been alarming if Ethan had been behind the wheel of his beloved Volvo—and driving on the right. In this alien environment, with lush, unfamiliar foliage—palms and ferns, shrubs with vivid puffball-shaped pink flowers and erotically red blossoms scattered across their branches, viny ground cover and ghostly moss dripping from branches—he felt totally out of his depth.

Ross Hamilton sat rigidly next to him, his scowl eloquently communicating that he, too, believed Ethan was out of his depth.

“Paul said there’s a golf course just up the road from Palm Point,” Ethan said, hoping this news might improve Ross’s opinion of him.

“I didn’t bring my clubs.”

“I’m sure they rent clubs.”

“Kimberly tells me you don’t golf.”

“I’ve never tried it,” Ethan said, “but there’s always a first time.” In truth, he thought golf sounded excruciating. Hit a ball, walk a little bit, hit a ball, walk a little bit more.

“Perhaps we’ll golf a round together,” Ross suggested, a dry smile whispering across his lips. “I could teach you a few pointers. Although God only knows what kind of equipment this golf course will be renting.”

Delia piped up. “Ross, it’ll be too hot to golf. You’ll have a heatstroke.”

“I will not,” he retorted, as if he and he alone determined whether he’d be afflicted.

“Where is Charlotte Emily?” Delia asked, peering out the window as the car strained up another precipitous incline.

“Charlotte Amalie,” Ethan gently corrected her.

“I just love that they named their city after a woman. Or is it two women?” Her smile reached Ethan via the rearview mirror. “Did we pass the city?”

“We’re circumventing it,” Ethan told her.

Her smile morphed into a delicate pout. “Well, if you boys want to golf and get sunstroke, that’s your business. Kim and I will be strolling the streets of Charlotte Emily. The guidebooks list all these wonderful shops….”

Ross shared a knowing grin with Ethan, who forced himself to grin back. “Something tells me your friend’s generous donation of his time-share is going to wind up being the most expensive gift you’ve ever received. Angels tremble when those two are set loose in a shopping center.”

“It’s not just shopping,” Delia informed her husband. “It’s duty-free shopping. Bottles of Absolut at prices you wouldn’t believe.”

Ross Hamilton glanced over his shoulder. “Really?” he asked, eagerness underlining his tone. “Absolut?”

“Absolut, Stolichnaya, all the big names, darling. You can restock the bar while we’re down here.”

“I can restock the bar at home.”

“Not at these prices.”

Ross gave Ethan another conspiratorial grin. “Women,” he muttered. “They think we can save a lot of money by spending a fortune on airfare to fly to some island with duty-free shops. We could have bought vodka at the duty-free shop at the airport and skipped the trip.”

Too bad you didn’t come up with that idea sooner, Ethan thought. A weary dog, part Lab and part a dozen other breeds, slouched across the road. Either Kim didn’t think dogs were as photogenic as goats, or she was too busy planning shopping excursions with her mother to have noticed the poor mongrel. Its tongue lolled to one side and its eyes looked sad. If Ethan weren’t in an air-conditioned car, his tongue might be hanging out of his mouth, too.

Around another hairpin turn, and they started down a decline. “Oh, my God!” Mrs. Hamilton shrieked. “There’s no railing! Slow down, Ethan!”

“I’m doing ten miles per hour,” he assured her. Yes, the road was steep, and no, there wasn’t a railing, but he wasn’t going to steer them over the edge. He’d had his driver’s license for thirteen years and had never been in an accident. Of course, he’d never driven on the left side of the road, either.

They’d get to Palm Point soon. According to Paul’s directions, it was only a couple of miles down Smith Bay Road, a scenic route skirting mountains that dropped sharply to the most tranquil, turquoise water Ethan had ever seen. Let Ross and Delia visit the duty-free shops in Charlotte Amalie by themselves, he thought. Let them stock up on enough liquor to keep them swilling martinis until they left this world for the next. While they were oohing and ahhing over the discounts on Stolichnaya and Absolut, Ethan and Kim would be lying on one of the pale, inviting beaches that fringed the sea. They’d be racing on the sand, and plunging into the water, and then sprinting back up to the condo for a quickie before her parents returned from their tour of duty-free liquor stores.

He would turn this vacation into something good, he resolved. He would not let Kim’s parents rattle him. He would not knock himself out to win their favor. He would not play golf against his wishes. He worked damn hard in Connecticut, but he was out of town for a week, out of the office, out of touch, and he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.

He cruised past the gated entry to a hotel, then another…and then he spotted the sign for Palm Point. He turned onto the drive, which was appropriately lined with towering royal palms, and maneuvered over the speed bumps. He passed a parking lot and a series of tennis courts surrounded by green chain-link fences, then followed the drive as it zigzagged down the hill toward the ocean. Beige stucco buildings dotted the road, their ocean-facing facades marked by vaguely Spanish-looking wrought-iron balconies. Ethan imagined sitting on a balcony with Kim, both of them flushed and sated after making love. They could be sipping drinks—beer for him, nothing with Absolut or Stolichnaya in it—and watching as the sun slid down toward that breathtakingly blue sea, and not sparing Kim’s parents a single thought. This was Ethan’s vacation. It was his fantasy.

“Here we go,” he announced, pulling into a parking lot beside a building identified by a small sign as number six. Paul’s unit was 614, on the second floor. Ethan’s mood brightened. He’d found the place without incident or accident. In ten minutes he’d be unpacked and in a swimsuit, ready to take a walk on the beach.

“It doesn’t look like much,” Mrs. Hamilton said with a sniff.

“Oh, Mom,” Kim scolded. “It looks lovely.”

It looked fine to Ethan. The stucco was freshly painted, the gardens surrounding the building well tended. When he opened the car door, the air that hit him was heavy with heat and thick with the scent of those red flowers.

“Hibiscus,” Kim answered his unasked question. She threw open her door, climbed out and circled the car to him. “I just love the smell of hibiscus. Isn’t this beautiful?” she gushed, as if to nullify her mother’s disparagement of the place.

“As soon as we unpack, let’s go to the beach,” said Ethan.

Kim gazed up at him, her hair golden and her eyes a blue paler than the sea but darker than the cloudless sky. She was beautiful. From the moment Ethan had seen her stepping out of the elevator into the lobby of the building where he’d worked, he’d been almost uncomfortably aware of her beauty. It was as overpowering as the fragrance of those red flowers.

“We’ll have to help Mom and Dad get settled in first,” she said.

“They’re adults. They can get settled in without our help.”

“I really appreciate your taking the convertible couch in the living room,” she added. “I know that wasn’t what you wanted.”

A ripple of resentment passed through him, impeding his evolution to mellowness. Sleeping on the living-room couch was definitely not what he wanted. Paul had told him one bedroom had a queen-size bed and the other had two twins. Ethan had thought he’d been demonstrating admirable selflessness by ceding the queen-size bed to Kim’s parents. He and Kim could snuggle together in one of the twins—and they could rumple the other bed’s blanket each morning so it would appear that they were sleeping separately.

But Kim had maintained that such an arrangement wouldn’t work. They couldn’t sleep in the same room, not with Mom and Dad right across the hall. If they were married—or even, perhaps, if they were just formally engaged—she might consider it. But without anything official declared between them, she just wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing a room with him when her parents were present.

Ethan had contemplated calling off the whole trip at that point. But that would have made him seem like a sex maniac. After all, he and Kim slept together often enough in Connecticut. It wasn’t as if he had to travel all the way to St. Thomas to get his rocks off. For Kim’s sake—for her parents’ sake—he could be a gentleman.

He didn’t have to like it, though.

Unlocking the trunk, he gazed at the array of luggage Kim and her parents had brought. A folding garment bag, a large pullman, a midsize pullman, a tennis tote containing racquets and fresh cans of balls, and two carry-ons—all in a matching tapestry pattern—belonged to Ross and Delia Hamilton. Given the option, Ross probably would have brought his golf clubs, too—and he probably kept them in a golf bag with the same quaint tapestry pattern. Kim had packed an enormous wheeled, leather-trimmed suitcase for herself, as well as an ergonomically designed shoulder tote she’d ordered from a catalog company specially for this trip.

Ethan had fit everything he needed into one modest duffel.

Nonetheless, he knew that as the young man of the party, he’d be the one hauling all the luggage inside.

He hoisted his duffel out of the trunk and slid the strap onto his shoulder. Then he pulled out Kim’s wheeled suitcase and the Hamiltons’ garment bag. “I’ll get the rest in the next round,” he promised the Hamiltons, who had finally emerged from the air-conditioned car into the broiling Caribbean afternoon.

“The condo is air-conditioned, isn’t it?” Delia Hamilton asked her daughter anxiously.

“Of course it is.” Kim grabbed her ergonomic shoulder bag, handed her mother one of the carry-ons and her father the other, then stepped aside so Ethan could close the trunk. Why she didn’t close it herself—she had two free hands, after all—he couldn’t guess, unless it was to prove to her parents that the man she intended to marry was properly chivalrous.

Feeling like a packhorse, he lugged the bags along the walk to the stairway and up to the second floor, the wheeled bag thumping as it hit each riser. Kim and her parents trailed him like baby ducklings following a mother duck. Sweat slicked his face and dampened his collar as he trudged along the open-air corridor to the door marked 614. He balanced the luggage on the concrete floor, then dug into the pockets of his khakis and pulled out the key Paul had given him. It slid easily into the lock. Smiling, he twisted the knob and pushed the door open.

He was greeted by a blast of cold air and an skull-splitting scream.

IN THE HOUR since they’d arrived at Carole’s unit at Palm Point, Alicia had changed into a swimsuit and run circles around Gina, investigating their vacation digs and announcing her discoveries: “They got a microwave, Aunt Gina! Can we make microwave popcorn?” and “This TV doesn’t get the Disney Channel!” and “There’s a balcony!”

That announcement had torn Gina from the dresser drawer into which she’d been dumping her underwear and sent her flying down the hallway, past the bathroom and through the living room to stop Alicia before she ventured onto the balcony. Alicia was seven, and in general she was smart enough not to fling herself over the balcony railing, but “in general” had nothing to do with this week. Alicia was wired. She’d just taken her very first airplane trip, and now she was in an ocean-view condo on a Caribbean island. Remembering to be careful on a balcony would not be high on Alicia’s to-do list.

But when Gina had joined Alicia on the terrace, gazing down the gentle slope toward the palm-studded beach and the vivid blue water beyond, she’d felt almost as wired as her niece. The air smelled tangy and sweet, so different from the usual sour scents of Manhattan in July that Gina could almost believe she was on a different planet, with its own separate atmosphere.

This was exactly what Alicia needed, she’d thought—a safe, happy planet for a week of carefree fun.

“Don’t lean over the railing,” Gina had warned, even though Alicia was too short to fall over accidentally.