Death by Misadventure

Hillary James

Description

World War II is over. Jobs have been found or reclaimed from women by American servicemen returning from Europe and the economy is booming. It is the 'buy now and pay later' 1950's. Young New Yorker, Rose Pinner, goes with old friends on a winter vacation - all expenses paid. The destination? It's a swish hotel in Palm Beach, Florida - calm, serene and relaxing or maybe not. She meets a grieving widow and her British nephew, struggling to recover lost property. Rose is a sensible young woman, keen to avoid danger, intrigue and fleeting short-term relationships. How well does she succeed?

Sujets

• Florida
• Historical romance
• Florida (homonymie)

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 16 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800467385
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Copyright © 2020 Hillary James

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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In memory of Ethel Purdy
Contents
Chapter 01
Chapter 02
Chapter 03
Chapter 04
Chapter 05
Chapter 06
Chapter 07
Chapter 08
Chapter 09
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 22
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 01
Penn Station was a madhouse. Where on earth could all these people be going, Rose wondered? After all, it was late morning; the commuter rush was surely finished and it was a winter weekday so why was the place heaving with humanity? She paused and drew in the scent of wet woolen overcoats, brewing coffee and burning coal perhaps or exhaust fumes from the streets outside. Somewhere close by there was the clank and rhythmic pound of a machine, which echoed in the vast hall when it paused.
Surely Penn Station was finished and what she was hearing came from outside. New York City was like a giant erector set, a grown-up version of the toy box of metal pieces that appeared every Christmas and was monopolized by the boys. There was building going on everywhere you went in New York: Scaffolding, steel beams, cranes, ladders, hard hats, cement mixers, all creating a cacophony of sounds as well as fumes of fuel, films of dust and great wreathes of smoke. The city was stretching itself ever upwards now that the war was over and there was no longer the need to make tanks and guns and planes.
Rose knew where she was going. Well, at least she knew where she was supposed to be meeting Albert and Edith Harding. They had agreed on underneath the huge ironwork clock on the main concourse. The coats swept around her – navy, black, tweed, checked, grey, brown, taupe, charcoal – the colors of a winter city, of coal, concrete, slate and asphalt. The wearers bobbed and swept and jostled among the marble pillars and steps of Penn Station. Beads of moisture hung on their hats and Rose lifted her hand to her own beret as a fur coat, smelling of cigarette smoke, brushed her arm.
Her suitcase was too heavy and she regretted borrowing it from her friend, Clare. The case had served Clare’s family well after having been passed on by another richer family probably before the war when wealthy people went to Europe on huge cruise liners with several pieces of matching luggage. This remnant of a glorious past was a little battered and its leather trim had been marked but it was still serviceable for those with a man nearby to manage it.
She needed two hands to lift it up steps and knew she couldn’t ask Edith or Albert to help her as Albert was in his mid-eighties, fit as a fiddle he told her frequently, but he would have his own case to manage and maybe Edith’s. Edith was fond of claiming that she was fifty eight. People believed her because she really did not look older but Rose understood there was some creative accounting in her insistence on fifty eight. She looked and acted like a younger woman but her back sometimes gave her trouble and carrying heavy cases would not help.
Of course Rose realized she should have thought about the logistics sooner – before she packed the case. The truth was that really she wasn’t an experienced traveler. She had gone from the children’s home in Yonkers to business college and from there into work of various sorts but there was never money for a mid-winter vacation in a Florida resort. Edith had insisted that she was owed some of the spoils which came from the sale of a valuable antiquarian book Rose had unearthed in the Hardings’ Ridge Road house so here she was – a real traveler for the first time in her life: Winter, 1951. Rose Pinner Goes on Vacation. Halleluiah.
She put her case down by a pillar and looked around. If she were a homeless person, God forbid, she would come to Penn Station to spend her days. Everywhere she looked, there were pillars and arches. It was like a vast cathedral, full of defused light from little rectangular pieces of glass in the roof - Mammon’s cathedral perhaps. It wasn’t her phrase, her description, she reminded herself. It had probably come from the Sunday papers, the book review section, which Mr Caroni saved for her every week in exchange for the occasional evening’s baby-sitting in the apartment above his shop. She was aware of the heels of smart shoes on the polished floors and a hum – indistinguishable voices echoing in the cavernous space.
She looked at her watch and sighed. She was at least half an hour early. The three of them had agreed to meet an hour before the train and here she was with too much time to spare. She could see the clock from where she stood and when she turned around, a rather smart looking coffee shop with smudged glass doors but clean glass windows. She could hump her case in and sit by the window, drinking coffee, but it seemed a frivolous thing to do and probably an expensive one as well. She didn’t like frittering money away unnecessarily.
Then she noted the vast hall’s seating. She could sit down and watch the people passing by. They all seemed full of purpose, many more men than women naturally but some of the women were dressed like mannequins from the pages of Vogue. Their luggage preceded them on a trolley maneuvered by men in uniforms. Redcaps, she thought they were called.
She picked up her case with one hand, trying not to betray how heavy it was, and set off towards the rows of seats. She wanted to appear nonchalant and pulled her chin to her chest as she had seen the stylish women doing. It seemed to her that they held their mouths so that their lips turned up very slightly at the corners and she tried to mimic them but found herself giggling instead.
“My darling!” a voice cried.
She looked around. Who was this ‘darling’ and where was she? It had been a man’s voice and it had been full of urgency and delight. Lucky woman, she thought. If only someone would call to her in the same way. The man was coming straight towards her and she put her case down in some confusion. The next thing she knew, he had swept her into his arms. He put his lips to her ear and whispered, “Please, please, just pretend you adore me. I’ll explain as soon as they’re out of sight.”
“My dearest,” he cried and then he kissed her ardently, passionately and lingeringly. She caught a whiff of wet wool mixed with coffee and soap and something else like sandalwood maybe and she was aware of freshly shaved skin. She closed her eyes to concentrate on the pulsing warmth of his lips, tasting of salt, and a sensation of melting. His? Hers? Theirs? She was shocked but she found herself responding to him in spite of common sense and propriety, in spite of her fear of strangers and knowledge of the harm that could come to young women in a big city like New York.
Then he drew back and surveyed what he could see of the train station. “Thank you,” he said. “You saved my life.”
“Surely that is something of an exaggeration,” Rose returned, feeling outraged by the eagerness with which she had responded to his kiss. She was aware that he was tall and bare headed and blue-eyed. “Are you in the habit of kissing strangers?”
He laughed. “Not usually. I do beg your pardon. It was the only thing I could think of on the spur of the moment to prevent the men I was following from turning around and seeing my face. They would have recognized me, you see.”
She didn’t see though she was distracted by his accent. He wasn’t an American. She thought, in fact, that he was British, an Englishman, if the films were anything to go by. She and Clare were film buffs, who had been known to travel all over Yonkers and Manhattan to see films their local movie theater couldn’t show. They had seen ‘The Red Shoes’ and Lawrence Olivier in ‘Henry V’, perhaps a little too erudite for their tastes, and ‘Brighton Rock,’ grittier than they had expected maybe but they had also seen and loved David Niven in ‘Matter of Life and Death’ quite recently when it had been shown in an art house retrospective of Niven films. Simon Knight most definitely did not sound like Lawrence Olivier or like any of the characters in ‘Brighton Rock’ but perhaps, Rose decided, he sounded a little bit like the dashing David Niven. He had no moustache though – not that it mattered of course since she would never see him again.
“I think you owe me a better explanation than that,” she said with a touch of asperity.
“I’m sorry but I mustn’t linger. I’ll lose them.” He gave a stiff little bow. “It was