by Dana Dratch
I felt the same way every night. And I didn’t even work in a kitchen.
“Then it’s official,” I said, bending to pat Lucy’s downy flank, as she leaned in and licked my knees. “The Vlodnachek girls are going to Miami!”
CHAPTER 3
“Uh, I think you’re going in the wrong direction,” I said to the guy who was driving our ride-share. Or, more accurately, to the back of his head.
“No, ma’am, this is the right way to the address they gave me. Shortest route, too. Ain’t gonna carry you to the Washington Monument and back. Honest. And that’s not just because you’re a local.”
When he pulled into the entrance to a small private airport, I knew something wasn’t right.
“We’re supposed to be meeting my sister at a rental car counter at Reagan National,” I said, noticing that stress had sent my voice up half an octave. “She’s flying in and getting a car to drive us to Miami.”
No use explaining that we couldn’t use my car unless my supermodel sister wanted to be ferried around town in an ancient station wagon with a couple of nasty expletives carved into the paint, courtesy of a psycho-killer I helped catch. And once worked for.
Long story.
“Lady, this is the address they gave me. Really.”
“But it’s the wrong airport. She’s gonna be at the Hertz counter. And we’re, well, wherever this is.”
I looked past the driver out the windshield to see a sleek private jet behind an even sleeker blonde. And she was waving at us.
Annie!
The driver pulled up parallel to the jet as I rolled down the back window. Lucy, napping on the seat beside me, raised a drowsy head.
“Change of plans,” my sister said. “We’re hitching a ride.”
“You do realize that when most people say ‘hitching a ride,’ they mean standing on the side of a highway with their thumbs out?”
“And that’s exactly how we’ll tell the story to Mom,” Annie said, grinning, as she opened the back door. Lucy hopped over me and out onto the tarmac.
“Come on,” she said, grabbing the pup’s leash. “I want you to meet Esteban. This is his jet.”
I climbed out of the car and turned to reach for my duffel and Lucy’s two neat bags. Because, while she still may be a puppy according to my brother, the little dog doesn’t travel light.
“Don’t worry about that,” the driver called, opening the other back door. “I got these. All part of the service.”
“Thank you,” I said, digging through my purse for cash.
“That’s taken care of too,” he said softly. “Even the tip. And your friend’s a good tipper,” he added, nodding at Annie, who was chatting animatedly with a tall, good-looking guy, as Lucy sniffed his shoes.
“She’s my sister,” I said, both proud and dumbfounded.
“Wow, you sure don’t look alike.” If I had a dollar for every time I’d heard that, I could buy Esteban’s jet.
“Really?” I said. “Most people can’t tell us apart.”
CHAPTER 4
Turns out flying in a private jet is pretty much like flying commercial. Except instead of charging five dollars for a soda, a nice lady handed me a glass of champagne. For free. In a real glass.
And rather than my usual straightjacket-sized seat that smelled vaguely of air freshener and old socks, I had an entire cushy mini-sofa. No screaming babies, chair-kicking tweens or seatmates exercising their right to bare hairy toe knuckles.
So basically nothing like commercial.
Once we were in the air, Esteban busied himself on his laptop. If he’d had a phone on his shoulder, he would have looked right at home in any newsroom.
“New boyfriend?” I mouthed silently to Annie.
She shook her bouncy blond mane.
“So tell me about this condo thing,” I said, as she settled in next to me on the sofa. “What’s going on?”
“Super weird. We haven’t had a homeowners’ association for very long. Before that, the builder and their management company took care of everything. And they were wonderful. But then the residents started making a fuss about costs getting out of hand and how they wanted more control and that we needed a homeowners’ association. The next thing you know, we had one. And Leslie McQueen—she’s a star in the local real estate community—became the interim president. Between you and me, I think she was the one behind the push for an association in the first place. She really wanted the president’s job. Plus, I think the residents figured that since she works in real estate, she’d have the know-how.”
It was a familiar story. And HOAs could be a minefield, at least in some areas. You paid a set fee every month for the assurance that someone would step in if a neighbor painted their house bubblegum pink, let the grass get too high, or opened a neighborhood bar in their garage.
For my money, I figured the world had bigger problems.
“So who called the special election?” I asked, as Janet, our flight attendant, refilled our glasses.
Beside me, Lucy, worn out from sniffing every inch of the jet (and finding nary a french fry), was curled into a ball, dozing peacefully.
“She’s adorable,” Janet said, admiring our snoozing stowaway. “Let me know if she needs anything.”
“Thank you!” Annie and I said in unison.
We clinked glasses.
“No one knows,” Annie said, after Janet headed back to the galley. “Or if they do, they’re not telling. That’s what’s so weird.”
“So who’s running for election?” I asked.
“No one I’ve ever heard of. No one that anyone’s ever heard of, as far as I can tell. I have the list of names on the ballot, and I’ll show it to you when we get to the condo. But honestly, Leslie’s name was the only one I even recognized.”
“Could Leslie McQueen have done it? Called for the election, I mean?”
“Why would she want to? Leslie’s already president. She’d keep the position automatically until January if it wasn’t for the special election. And from what I’ve seen, she doesn’t want to give up that title anytime soon.”
“OK, it sounds like there’s a story here,” I said, taking a sip from my glass.
I looked out the little window and saw big, puffy clouds off in the distance. It seemed surreal that I was even here. By all rights, I should be at my own laptop in my dining-room-turned-home-office. Finishing stories, cultivating sources, and pitching editors for assignments. Instead, I was sipping bubbly on a private jet sailing through the clouds.
I wondered what my kitchen looked like right about now. I pictured a muscled goon-squad armed with sledgehammers—and took a longer swig from the glass.
Annie paused, thinking. “I don’t want to prejudice you one way or the other,” she said finally. “I need someone to look at this with unbiased eyes.”
“But?” I asked teasingly.
“The place hasn’t been the same since the HOA took over. And I think they’re cutting some corners. At least, that’s what I hear. They hired a management company for the day-to-day stuff. It’s not like Leslie’s calling carpenters and plumbers and locksmiths herself. But I get the feeling that she’s super involved.”
“Micromanaging?”
“It’s just the sense I got from a couple of the neighbors I talked with the last time I was there. And that was about a month ago.”
“What did they say exactly?”
“Well, Mrs. Plunkett downstairs? She needed her locks changed. She found a couple of things missing after the last time her pet sitter left. Two leftover bottles of prescription meds and some cash. It wasn’t much. I think she was more skeeved out than anything else. But after two weeks of phoning every other day, still nothing. And she was afraid to leave home for fear the guy would come back for more. So she finally called a locksmith herself. And paid for it herself. The next day, the HOA cited her for ‘unauthorized modifications.’ They fined that poor woman five hundred dollars and forced her to pay to change the lo
cks a second time with an approved vendor. When Mrs. Plunkett tried to appeal to the board, Leslie called her personally and threatened to hit her with more fines, take her to collections, and ruin her credit if she didn’t pay up immediately.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
“That’s Leslie McQueen. But it gets better. When a new resident, Josh Roundtree, wanted his big-screen TV mounted on the wall? The crew showed up in less than twenty-four hours. Didn’t charge him a penny.”
“Let me guess. Josh is friends with Leslie?”
“I think she’d like to be.” Lowering her voice to just above a whisper, she added, “Josh is a hunk-and-a-half. But Leslie’s also the agent who sold him his unit.”
“As president of the HOA, does Leslie get a salary?” I asked, probing the old “follow the money” angle.
“Not a cent,” Annie said, shaking her head for emphasis. “The position is strictly voluntary. And if you do it right, it’s at least a part-time job.”
“See, that’s the bit I don’t get. Who takes on a second job that doesn’t pay a dime?”
Says the girl who was working a first job that didn’t pay all that much either.
Annie giggled.
“What?” I asked.
“We chatted about that once,” my sister said. “When they were first forming the HOA, Leslie told me she didn’t want the position. But they simply needed someone with her organizational skills. And she just didn’t feel right saying no. She felt it was her civic duty.”
“And . . .”
“Well, it was a load of hogwash, obviously. I knew she was up to something. I just didn’t know what. I still don’t. And the election’s only a week away.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, poking her arm like I did when we were kids. “Between the two of us, we’ll nose around and figure out what’s really going on.”
CHAPTER 5
Standing in front of Annie’s condo building, with my beat-up duffel bag slung over one shoulder and Lucy’s leash in my other hand, I felt like a country rube visiting the big city. I couldn’t help looking up. The building, known simply as Oceanside, did not disappoint.
Built only a few years ago in the Art Deco style, the whitewashed tower stretched into the cerulean sky.
“See that?” I said to Lucy, pointing. “We’re going to live here this week. What do you think of that?”
She looked dubious. And I didn’t blame her.
As residents bustled in and out, sporting a variety of attire from Brooks Brothers to Tommy Bahama, I was beginning to feel like the brown shoe at a black-tie ball. Even the seventy-plus retiree who toddled in wearing white knee socks with even whiter knees looked like he’d dropped a mint on his electric-green Hawaiian shirt/Bermuda shorts/straw hat combo.
“Let’s get settled in; then we can regroup,” Annie said. “I’m thinking first the pool, then lunch. What do you say?”
“Sounds good to me,” I said.
“Oh, and here’s your key,” my sister said, handing me a black fob with a key card and a golden key dangling from the ring. “The key is for our place. The fob gets you into everything in the building—the pool, the workout room, the sun decks—you name it. And I have an account for resident services, like dry cleaning, laundry, the in-house cafés and the spa, so just swipe the card and they’ll put everything on my tab. The theme for this trip is ‘rest and recharge.’ ”
Did I say she was great, or what?
* * *
Right after I pulled on my swimsuit, my cell phone rang. Nick.
“How’s the little dog? She’s not getting car sick, is she?”
“I’m fine, thanks. How are you?”
“Sorry, it’s been one of those days. I don’t have long to talk. I’ve got a batch of custard tarts in the oven. And they go from totally liquid to crispy critters in no time flat.”
“Lucy’s fine. We’re already here. Some friend of Annie’s let us hitch a ride on his jet. So you’re gonna have to make a lot more tarts if you want to maintain the little dog’s current standard of living.”
I looked up and saw Lucy staring out the glass doors to the terrace. Head cocked to one side, she appeared perplexed.
Earlier, Annie had opened the doors, picked up her lead, and invited her gently out onto the balcony. But Lucy wasn’t having it. She had thrown back her head and howled until my sister finally gave up and closed the doors.
The penthouse was ten stories up, and I was beginning to suspect Lucy was not fond of heights.
“Damn, you girls are living large,” Nick said. “Oh, I don’t want to panic you or anything, but you might have an electrical problem.”
“What?!”
“The contractor found some kind of glitch when he came over to prep the site this morning. It looks like the wiring’s outdated, and he’s not sure it’s gonna be able to handle the load from the new appliances.”
“That’s not possible!” I screeched. I looked out the glass doors at the tranquil blue ocean and took a slow, deep breath.
“I had the wiring checked before I bought the house two years ago,” I continued, trying to channel my sister’s natural calm. “Trust me, it’s totally up-to-date. The couple who sold me the place had it professionally rewired. Plus we have the capacity to add more appliances. And I’ve got the stack of paperwork to prove it.”
I did, too. Faced with the prospect of making the biggest purchase of my life, I’d hired an inspector who’d literally crawled over every inch of the house. And I’d followed him through most of it, taking notes. The only bit I skipped: the roof.
Lucy’s not the only one in the family who gets queasy around heights.
“Well, I hope you’re right because the alternative sounds kinda pricy,” Nick said. “And messy. Anyway, we don’t have to worry about it yet. Right now, he’s only running some tests. Depending on what he finds, that could set us back a day or two. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.”
I heard a buzzer going off in the background.
“OK, that’s the oven timer. Got to go now. Time and tarts wait for no man.” And with that, he hung up.
CHAPTER 6
The funny thing about relaxing on vacation: It’s not as easy as it looks.
I’d done laps in the pool, drained a can of soda, and read the same two pages in my book three times.
I looked at my watch: We’d only been at the pool twenty minutes.
My mind kept wandering back to my comfortable—though possibly outdated and dangerous—kitchen. What if the place couldn’t be brought up to code? What if Nick’s new business crashed and burned because of me? Heck, what if my faulty wiring burned down the whole neighborhood?
I glanced over at Annie, reclining serenely in a lounge chair with a fashion magazine. Under her big fuchsia sun hat, her shiny hair spread out like a fan, she didn’t even appear to be sweating.
What they don’t tell you about south Florida: In July, the air feels like the inside of a blast furnace. That was one of the reasons we’d opted to leave Lucy in the cool comfort of the air-conditioned penthouse. And I’d only checked the locks on that patio door three times, thank you very much.
“I’m going to get another Coke,” I said to Annie, tugging on the oversized T-shirt I’d brought as a cover-up. “Do you want anything?”
“Ooh, I’ll take a Sprite,” she said, grinning. “And a bag of those barbecue potato chips. I know it’s a lame excuse, but in this heat, you have to replace salt. I’m thinking we can grab a light lunch here. Then, for dinner we can hit that seafood shack on the beach I told you about. Total hole-in-the-wall, but the best fried fish you’ve ever tasted. And I honestly have dreams about their hushpuppies.”
Oceanside’s upscale dining area was just off the pool. But over to one side, they also had a lounge-slash-snack bar. From sodas and umbrella drinks to snack food to more upscale fare, if you resided at Oceanside, it was yours for the asking.
If I lived here, I’d never use the kitchen again. Of cou
rse, given the news Nick had shared, I might not anyway.
As I walked toward the restaurant, I caught motion out of the corner of my eye. I turned just in time to see the back of a woman exiting the pool area. Billowing white pool cover-up, deep tan, and sky-high espadrilles.
She reminded me of someone. Odd.
“Could I have a Coke, a Sprite, and two bags of barbecue chips?” I asked the bartender.
Next to me at the bar, the guy with the electric-green shirt was swapping stories with a pal.
“I’m tellin’ ya, Ernie, it’s weird,” he said. “The stuff was moved. He even reported it to the cops. They took a statement and everything.”
My ears perked up. Another break-in?
“Nah, I think he just had a visit from his old buddy Jack Daniel’s,” his friend said, using the universal hand gesture for downing a shot. “Few of those, and I’m convinced my old lady is Ann-Margret.”
“Well, she does have some nice gams,” the first one admitted.
“Did you say there was a break-in?” I asked.
“Alleged break in,” Ernie announced. “I’m Ernie Doyle. This is Stan Cohen.”
“I’m Alex Vlodnachek. I’m here for the week with my sister, Annie.”
“Ooooh, the penthouse,” Stan said. “Very nice.”
“Have you seen the sister?” Ernie said. “She’s very nice, too.” He gave me an avuncular wink.
“Nothing to worry about—we’re not having a crime wave,” he continued, palming a handful of roasted peanuts from the bowl between them. “Just a neighbor of ours might have had a little too much of the old firewater, if you know what I mean.”
“Hey, Larry swears . . .” Stan started.
Ernie waved a plump paw dismissively and popped a peanut into his mouth. “The guy’s fresh off a divorce. And half the time I run into him, he smells like a distillery.”
“So what’s his story?” I said, pulling up a bar stool next to Stan.
“Guy’s name is Larry,” Stan said. “He lives on two.”