At least, plants didn’t treat you like dirt. He would go work in his garden.
Penny hummed to herself as she finished putting her clothes into the one small suitcase that Gary had allotted her for their trip. She was in the roomy, two-bedroom apartment Gary shared with a man named Steve. It sat on a small hill in Monterey Park. On a clear day you could see the long outline of Catalina Island from its balcony. At the moment, it was too smoggy to see much of anything.
A 1962 Volkswagen Beetle wasn’t very large, and they had camping equipment, so one suitcase was all she could take. She didn’t care, though. She would go without any clothes if necessary-and that’s the way Gary preferred her.
She grinned when she realized what song she was humming. “Dream,” made famous by the Everly Brothers a few years ago. That had been “our song,” the song she had shared with her boyfriend in school. Actually, with her boyfriends-and there had been many of them. With the same song for all, at least she never forgot what it was.
She didn’t play games like that with Gary. He was different. Different than the four men who had proposed to her in the two years she’d been in California. One had expected her to accept the virginity of Mary, the mother of Jesus. She had laughed at him. Another said he pictured her wearing white gloves. She’d been forced to wear white gloves in her college dining hall, but this was the real world. She told him what he could do with his white gloves.
Penny knelt on the suitcase with her full weight to force it shut and then latched it. The only piece of clothing she hadn’t put into it was her wedding dress. She would hang that up inside the car to keep it from getting wrinkled. When she’d been home for her summer visit, she’d spent a day with her brother and his wife. At some point, when talking about Gary, she’d casually mentioned that they might be getting married.
“Do you have a wedding dress?” Barbara asked.
“I have a new blue dress that Gary hasn’t seen.”
Tim and Barbara hit the roof at the idea of a blue wedding dress. They rushed her out to a department store. Penny found a white, knee-length dress that fit her perfectly. Tim plunked a white hat on her head. So she returned to Los Angeles with a wedding dress in tow. In spite of that, she hadn’t quite believed she was going to get married, but apparently she was.
Penny had finished vacating her apartment yesterday. She had brought the last of her stuff here, and now it lay scattered around the spacious living room. She reached into a box containing some letters and lifted out a brown envelope. She hesitated, wondering whether she should throw it in the trash, but then she fished two wrinkled pieces of note paper out of it.
She placed them flat on the coffee table and smoothed them as much as she could. Both pieces had the name and address of a Las Vegas motel at the top. Not one of the big hotels. Just a rinky-dink motel Penny had never heard of. The messages on them were written in pencil. The handwriting was large and messy, as if a right- handed person had written them with his left hand or vice versa.
The notes had been slid under the door to her apartment, one in late July and one just two weeks ago, in August. The first message read, “Don’t stick to one boyfriend. Play the field.” Penny had thought it was a prank note from one of the other tenants. She had shown it to her landlord and several other people, but she hadn’t been very concerned about it. She hadn’t shown it to Gary.
The second note had scared her. It read, “I told you to play the field. You are walking on quicksand.” She asked her landlord if he’d seen anybody unusual on the day the note was delivered. He hadn’t. She no longer thought it had been written by one of the other tenants. The ones she knew were friendly and harmless. She asked several of them about a suspicious person on the premises. Nobody had seen anything.
She’d considered going to the police, but what could they do? She still hadn’t shown the notes to Gary. Why? Because she was afraid he would get cold feet? No, he wasn’t the type to scare easily. But what if he thought the notes reflected a shady past that she hadn’t divulged. She’d been open with him about her past, but their relationship was new enough so that she still had visions of a revelation of some long-forgotten sin ruining it.
Hopefully, she had escaped the writer of the notes. She put them back into the brown envelope. She couldn’t quite bring herself to throw them away. One reason the notes bothered her more than they probably should was a memory that haunted her from a year ago.
Penny had just finished her first year of living and teaching in California. She flew home to Fenwick, Connecticut to spend the summer of 1963. This was not an ordinary summer. Emily, her best friend since nursery school and a fellow cheerleader, was getting married. Penny was to be her maid of honor.
June, the wedding month, was busting out all over. Penny was excited for Emily, who had the looks and grace that Penny felt she herself lacked. A perfect nose, as opposed to Penny’s large one. And a good attitude toward marriage and children, which Penny had never had.
The wedding preparations were exciting. Dress fittings, gossip sessions, a shower. And then, just two days before the big event, Emily’s body was found behind Fenwick High School by Darren Filbert, the school janitor. She had been strangled.
That sent shock waves through the town of Fenwick. It was arguably the biggest news event since Lieutenant Gibbons scared off a Dutch sloop with a couple of cannon shots and claimed the area at the mouth of the Connecticut River for Viscount Saye amp; Sele and Lord Brooke in 1635.
At the funeral, Emily still looked beautiful. Penny had the eerie sensation that she would awake and end Penny’s nightmare. But, she didn’t open her eyes. The lid of the coffin closed over her quiet form, forever, and she was lowered into the ground.
Three weeks later, Darren Filbert was arrested for Emily’s murder. A bracelet belonging to her was found in his small apartment on Main Street. He claimed that he had discovered Emily’s body after she was dead. He could never satisfactorily explain why he took the bracelet, which was not worth much. In fact, he claimed he hadn’t taken it. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison.
For Penny, that was a shock second only to Emily’s death. Penny had known Darren quite well. He was a big teddy bear of a man with not too much upstairs, but he seemed like a gentle soul, who trusted other people so much that he never locked his apartment. Penny and Emily were friendly toward him, partly because that was their nature and partly because Darren helped them.
For example, he let Penny into the school one Saturday morning when she needed to get some megaphones for a football game. As head cheerleader, Penny was always needing favors, and people like Darren could be very useful to her.
She didn’t have any qualms about going into the dark and empty school alone with Darren. Now she shuddered when she thought about it. Had she been naive about this man or perhaps about men in general?
Penny had another thought that had gnawed at her previously. She wondered whether, if Emily, who had been born to be married, couldn’t make it to the altar, how could she, Penny, accomplish it? Was there something or somebody out there who would stop her?
“Please deposit one hundred dollars for the first three minutes.”
It wasn’t $100, of course, but to somebody as parsimonious as Alfred, the operator’s request sounded like a small fortune. He carefully counted out the correct change from the coins in his hand and placed them in the appropriate slots of the pay phone. Someday when he was rich, he would live in a big house with two telephones, not a dingy apartment without any.
The coins chimed as they dropped, and the operator, satisfied, put through the call. After three rings, a female voice said hello.
“Hello, Mrs. Singleton?” Alfred used his most persuasive voice. “This is Alfred. Alfred Ward. I went to high school with Penny. I just arrived in California, and I thought I’d look her up. I was wondering if you could tell me her address.”
“Alfred? Your name sounds familiar. Were you on the basketball team?”
“No ma’am. Listen, I’m on a pay phone-”
