Left Turn at Paradise Read online

  Left Turn at Paradise is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  An Alibi eBook Original

  Copyright © 2014 by Thomas Shawver

  Excerpt from Widow’s Son by Thomas Shawver copyright © 2014 by Thomas Shawver

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States of America by Alibi, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

  ALIBI is a registered trademark and the ALIBI colophon is a trademark of Random House LLC.

  eBook ISBN 9780804179287

  Cover art and design: Scott Biel

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming book Widow’s Son by Thomas Shawver. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

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  “I wish you to ensure that the style and contents might be unexceptionable to the nicest readers. My desire is that nothing indecent may appear in the whole book…”

  Captain James Cook to the Reverend

  John Douglas, editor of his shipboard

  narratives

  “Sneering in my face, the old procuress said, ‘What sort of man are you thus to refuse the embraces of so fine a young Woman,’ for the girl certainly did not want for beauty…”

  From the Journal of Captain Cook

  “It is impossible to believe that he (Cook) committed nothing at all to paper after his entry for Sunday, 17 January 1779.”

  Professor J. C. Beaglehole, writing in

  his Textual Introduction to the Hakluyt

  Society’s edition of Cook’s Journal

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  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 Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Excerpt from Widow’s Son

  Chapter One

  I still see him before drifting off to sleep.

  The corpse leaned against the crystallized limestone at the edge of the underground pool, upper body exposed, head tilted up, and eyes open as if admiring the light show. He had Asian features and the mottled skin had turned a dark cherry color. The gaping mouth, with the luminescent blue insects feeding inside it, shifted intermittently. I suspected he’d been dead a week.

  We didn’t stay long enough to determine what killed him. It didn’t seem to matter at the time; not with the sound of heavy footsteps echoing off the walls of the corridor outside our subterranean chamber. But if we had known, perhaps we would have scrambled to daylight sooner.

  * * *

  Mind you, nothing surprises me anymore; not after that last episode in which a psychotic millionaire tried to turn my daughter and her movie-star boyfriend into human dartboards. As luck and considerable help from Josie Majansik would have it, they survived, if not unscathed, then at least with their dignity intact.

  I’m not sure the same can be said for me.

  After years trying to make a mark in this world and continually seeing my efforts come to naught, my guiding philosophy had come down to two maxims:

  1. The best pint of Guinness is in the place where your friends are, and

  2. If the minimum wasn’t good enough, it wouldn’t be the minimum.

  It’s not that I was opposed to ambition. I simply seemed allergic to any success it brought.

  Case in point: At varying times between the ages of twenty-three and thirty I was Notes Editor for Iowa Law Review, served six years as a Marine officer, married a wonderful woman with whom I produced a beautiful (if headstrong) daughter, and started a law firm that while not exactly white-shoe—our major clients were payday-loan shysters and strip clubs—was highly lucrative.

  Such accomplishments may look good on a resume, but if you were to peep under the covers you would find that, given sufficient time and temptations, I’d managed to screw up nearly everything that came my way.

  I’ll not bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that eighteen years ago I spiraled downhill following the death of my wife in a car accident, packed my then six-year-old daughter off to London to be raised by her grandparents, and lost, along with my moral compass, the privilege to practice law.

  Redemption of sorts followed a decade later when, like a monk so enamored of the divine that he takes a vow of poverty, I opened a small used-book store in a leafy urban section of town called Brookside. I had few options after getting disbarred and there was simply nothing else, with the possible exception of rugby football and making love—both of which tend to be amateur sports—that I enjoyed more than books.

  I named the shop Riverrun. It’s the first word in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, a strange, painfully obscure allegory of the fall and resurrection of mankind. I never got past page four of the novel—other than Harold Bloom, who has?—but not only did I like its gentle alliteration, the name connoted just the right amount of literary gravitas I hoped would appeal to customers in an urban neighborhood with two universities.

  Brooksiders, thrilled to find a bookshop that looked and felt like something out of a Dickens novel, flooded in from day one. I took to the trade like a natural, discovering a knack for screening trade-ins, setting the right prices, and letting books of quality sell themselves. After five years of modest profits, however, dark clouds had gathered over the business.

  It was late afternoon in mid-January and Kansas City was experiencing one of those once-in-a-century snowstorms that seem to occur every other year these days. I was preparing to lock up the shop when the mail carrier—understandably, three hours late—showed up to make his delivery. After I told him I’d be sure to reward his efforts next Christmas, he muttered something about little green apples and I returned to my desk to sort through what he’d brought.

  Nothing looked particularly interesting until I saw the catalogue for the California International Book Fair.

  Alternating between Los Angeles and San Francisco each year, the fair is one of the most prestigious antiquarian gatherings in the world. Josie could watch the shop while I spent a weekend in the City by the Bay fondling old folios and adding quality to Riverrun’s inventory.

  To pay for the trip, I planned to sell several of my rarer books to ex
hibitors there. My first American edition of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse should reimburse the airfare. Charles M. Doughty’s Travels in Arabia Deserta would do for lodging and meals. I’d be taking Sir Richard Burton’s City of the Saints as well. But the main reason for bringing it and my British first of Ian Fleming’s Dr. No was to show prestigious dealers from around the world that my little Kansas City bookstore had more to offer than tired copies of books by the likes of Harold Bell Wright.

  I spent twenty minutes removing the listing of those books from the Internet and another half hour pricing recent trade-ins. It was nearly seven o’clock by the time I finished.

  Earlier I’d made a dinner reservation at Café Provence next door, but the blizzard made even the promise of steak au poivre avec moules marinières uninviting. So, after locking the shop, I scraped ice off the windshield of my Jeep and drove home, passing at least four car accidents on the short journey.

  Feklar, the demon cat, greeted me in my hallway. Careful to avoid the snow and ice dripping from my boots, he proudly dropped the head of a mouse in the puddle at my feet. I’d found him as a kitten trapped in a dumpster outside a Taco Bell and, despite five years of domestication, he’d never completely lost his feral instincts. I suppose that’s why we got along.

  I opened a can of tuna fish for him in the kitchen, then grabbed a Coors from the fridge and fixed a bologna sandwich. I ate it standing over the sink while pondering what to say to Josie when she returned from Wyoming.

  Nothing immediately came to mind, so I shifted gears to focus on the upcoming book fair. That’s when the thought occurred to me that I would need the large briefcase I’d used as a lawyer to carry my rare-book offerings to San Francisco. After finishing my beer, I went upstairs, let down the folding ladder, and climbed into the attic. Once I got the flickering twenty-watt lightbulb to work, I spent the next fifteen minutes crawling among tufts of fiberglass insulation looking for the battered carry-on.

  I finally found it. And something else as well—a yellowed cardboard box with markings made two decades earlier when my wife, Carol, and I were packing to move from Newport, Rhode Island, back to the Midwest.

  Lifting the lid, I saw old photographs, a crusty saltwater-stained packet, and other paraphernalia from when I served at the Naval Legal Service Office in that beautiful seaside town. The two years there had followed my harrowing tour of duty in Iraq and it was the happiest time of our lives, highlighted by the birth of our child.

  In hindsight, of course, I should have put the lid back on the box, picked up the briefcase, and gone straight to bed instead of letting the memories rush back to me. Like Pandora’s misdeed, however, there’s no way to put that stuff back once the top comes off.

  On the other hand, if you believe in fate, you might as well believe in it for your own good. If I hadn’t peered inside that old box, I would never have been attacked by Mongrel Dogs, sampled human flesh (surprisingly tasty when garnished with fennel, pulped apple, and chicory), nor played the Captain’s Mistress with the fertility god Lono.

  And then what would I have to brag about at rugby reunions?

  Chapter Two

  In Newport, Carol and I lived off base in a nineteenth-century whaling captain’s house that had been converted into three separate apartments. After putting our infant daughter to bed on our last evening there, we began to pack up photos and other items we’d stored in an old rolltop desk. Herndon Taylor, who lived across the hall, had given the desk to us shortly before his death.

  Herndon was a retired rear admiral who as a young officer had survived Pearl Harbor and the Battle of Leyte Gulf. During the last year of the war he worked in London as an American military attaché to the Court of Saint James’s. I suspect it was because my wife was English that he had cottoned to us.

  Or it could have been because an old photograph of his late wife showed a remarkable resemblance to Carol—the same slim figure, good-humored mouth, and lively eyes inviting you to play any game of your choosing: a mixture of tennis court and bedroom.

  Whatever the reason, Herndon liked us enough to invite us to his apartment one evening for a session of poker. With Annie nestled in a bassinet on the floor, we played Texas Hold’em on a table set in front of a bay window that looked out upon the old Touro Synagogue cemetery.

  It was a fine-looking room, the kind you’d expect of a cultivated man who had seen much of the world. In addition to personal items and what looked to be original satirical prints by Hogarth and Rowlandson, there were half a dozen framed antique maps on the walls. But the thing I remember best is the painting of a rugged naval officer wearing a dark blue jacket, a white waistcoat with gold buttons, and white breeches who cradled a folded chart of the Southern Hemisphere in his long fingers.

  The face, with its staring eyes posed to observe a distant point off to his left, exuded determination. The uniform and powdered wig may have defined this man as a British post-captain in the latter half of the eighteenth century, but the rugged demeanor and keen look of intelligence marked him as a man who could just as easily steer his ship among the stars centuries from now.

  “That’s Captain James Cook,” Herndon said, catching my gaze. “For an old salt like me, there is no better role model. He could read the sea like a blind man reads the face of a coin with his fingertips.”

  “At my primary school in Sussex,” Carol said, “our teachers considered him the second coming of Christ. The boys called him Cap’n Crook just to be cheeky. All I remember is that his men found the ladies of Tahiti so nice that a few of them tried to stay.”

  “That’s one way of looking at desertion,” Herndon muttered.

  I picked up the turn card. “Killed by the natives in Hawaii, wasn’t he?”

  The old sailor peered over his hand at me.

  “In one sense,” he said, dealing the river card. “To the British, however, he’s immortal.”

  I nodded politely, not realizing how true Herndon’s words would prove to be one day.

  * * *

  He received a diagnosis of pancreatic cancer a few months after that card game. Shortly before he moved to a hospice care facility, Herndon had four cadets from the Maritime Academy transfer the desk across the hall to our place. He died six weeks later.

  Rolltops were designed to be easily disassembled so you don’t have to lug the whole thing whenever you wish to move them. On our last night in Newport, Carol and I had lifted the top off the twin pedestals when she noticed something wedged against the lower back panel. It was a small, canvas-backed packet of water-stained pages.

  It now strikes me as ridiculous that I didn’t carefully examine the contents at the time. But with my sights set firmly on a law career, I had deluded myself into thinking any writing that didn’t contain the commercial code, a statute, or a ruling based on stare decisis wasn’t worth the effort of studying.

  I did, however, glance over Carol’s shoulder while she gingerly opened the canvas bindings. The words on the first leaf were in a crabbed style so small as to be nearly illegible. Together, we read aloud: “Sam’l Gibson, Pvt., R.M., 1768–71, En’dor.”

  The name and dates meant nothing to us. The pages that followed were as difficult to decipher as the first.

  “Put it in the box with the other stuff,” I said. “We’ve more important things to do than spend our last hours on Aquidneck Island trying to read the diary of a long-dead soldier of the sea.”

  “All right, but promise me we’ll have another look when there’s time.”

  Before placing the ugly little packet in the cardboard banker’s box, Carol pressed a cornflower she’d picked up that morning while pushing our baby in a stroller on Cliff Walk.

  “To remember how wonderful life can be,” she said.

  * * *

  Twenty years later, the dried flower still rested between the first and second pages. Carefully picking it up by the stem, I brought the petals to my lips. I don’t know what I expected. Perhaps I was trying to conjure the feel of
Carol’s touch, the sound of her voice, her refreshing optimism.

  Nothing came of it. For a long time after the car crash, I thought a lot of the good in me had died with her. Now, looking at where she had pressed the flower between the pages, I noticed that a ghostly palimpsest of the once-colorful petals remained.

  I squeezed the desiccated blossom in my hand and watched the fragments drift to the floor.

  Still, it took another five minutes before my bookman instincts took over, leading me to realize that an eighteenth-century journal, tattered as it was, might actually be of some historical value. I decided to take it to the shop in the morning to give it a more thorough look.

  After all, hadn’t I promised Carol I would when time allowed?

  Chapter Three

  The next day I shoveled a foot of snow off the sidewalk in front of Riverrun, hung my L.L. Bean barn jacket on a hook next to the counter, and, without bothering to put money in the cash register, set Samuel Gibson’s journal on my desk.

  The fact that the words had been penned nearly two and a half centuries ago wasn’t particularly significant. I’d handled several diaries and letters at least that old, but the “R.M.” after Gibson’s name meant that he was a Royal Marine. As a former leatherneck myself, I wondered what conditions had been like for a ship-bound British private prior to the American Revolution.

  On my second deployment to the Gulf I’d spent two weeks aboard a Navy troopship and never got used to the sardine-can sleeping quarters. To be trapped in tight spaces remains my greatest phobia. I couldn’t imagine what it would have been like to hammock in the stifling confines of an eighteenth-century bark for two years. Six feet long and strung just fourteen inches from the next, the webbed cocoon would have been the Marine’s sole refuge.