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.