Honeymoon for Three (2 page)

The tricky part was climbing it and
balancing on the top without falling into the thorns of a rosebush.
He wasn’t the most agile person in the world, but if he were very
careful, he could do it. With the flashlight in his pocket he was
able to lift one foot high enough to place it on top of the
palette. Then he had to push hard off the ground with his other
foot and simultaneously use the strength of his upper leg to lift
his body until he could grasp the sill of Penny’s window.

He did this now, teetering precariously on
the top edge of the palette for a few seconds until he had both
feet planted firmly on it. His body was pressed against the stucco.
When he had stabilized himself, he reached into his pocket and
pulled out the flashlight. He shone it through the window. The
first thing he saw was Penny’s bed. Something about it looked
strange. It was covered with a bedspread, but the spread was flat.
There was no pillow underneath it. A minor thing, perhaps, but….
Alfred tensed.

The room looked different than it had the
first time he looked through her window from the top of the
palette. He had been watching that window from his car on and off
for months. He knew it was a bedroom window because occasionally
she would come to the window in a nightgown and look out. Alfred
lived for those moments. Apparently she thought no one could see in
because she never closed the drapes.

One night he hadn’t seen her car and thought
she was out. He had an impulse to look into her room at close
range. That was when he had found the palette set out on the street
with the trash from one of the buildings. He had carried it to the
window, climbed onto it, and was investigating the room with his
flashlight when he heard a noise inside. He just had time to douse
the flashlight when the bedroom light came on and Penny walked into
the room—naked.

In spite of his fear of being discovered, he
couldn’t take his eyes off her. The first thing he saw was her flat
stomach and her beautiful innie bellybutton. The rest of her was
just as spectacular. Then he ducked his head below the level of the
window. He didn’t dare jump to the ground because the window was
open, and she might hear him.

He balanced there for an eternity of
seconds, his bent legs starting to shake from holding his body in a
cramped position. Finally, not hearing any sounds from her room and
afraid he would collapse, he took a chance and dropped to the
ground. He froze there, listening. Silence surrounded him, except
for the distant hum of automobiles, ubiquitous in Los Angeles. He
hid the palette, being careful not to make any noise, and returned
to his car.

Now, Alfred shone the flashlight around the
room. It flashed across the top of the dresser, which was bare. In
a panic, he moved the beam to the open closet door. The closet was
empty. Penny’s clothes were gone. Penny was gone.

CHAPTER 2

Alfred came back to Penny’s apartment
building about nine o’clock on Thursday morning. Not too early to
arouse suspicion. His instinct that had told him something was
about to happen had been right. It was a good thing he had quit his
job, so that he could devote full time to this. He had saved some
money. He never spent a dime, except for gas, rent, and food. His
instinct had failed him in one respect. He hadn’t guessed that the
bird would fly the coop.

He would prove to Penny that he was up to
the challenge. He would prove that he was worthy of her. Alfred
knocked on the door of the apartment manager. The door was opened
by a small man with a small head, topped by thinning gray hair. He
squinted up at Alfred, inquiringly, through his wire-rim glasses,
with his head cocked. Alfred had been very careful about his
prowling and was sure the man had never seen him before.

“Hi.” Alfred remembered what he had
rehearsed. “I’m a cousin of Penny Singleton. I just arrived here
from Connecticut and wanted to say hello to her. This is the only
address I have for her. Can you give me her forwarding
address?”

The man looked at Alfred, his eyes darting
from Alfred’s baseball cap to his dark glasses to his potbelly. The
small head moved too, with the jerky motions reminiscent of a bird.
He said, in a high-pitched voice, “Hasn’t she given you her
forwarding address?”

“I’ve been on the road.” Alfred forced a
chuckle. “It would have been hard for her to get hold of me. And
she doesn’t know my address in Los Angeles because, as I said, I
just arrived here.”

“You say you’re from Connecticut? You could
contact Penny’s folks and find it that way.”

Alfred was getting irritated, but he tried
to hide it. “I’d like to get in touch with Penny right away. I
don’t have a lot of money to waste on long distance phone
calls.”

“Have you rented a place yet?”

“Yes, I have.” The man was trying to rent
him Penny’s apartment. What could he do to convince this sparrow to
give him Penny’s address? “The thing is, my mother’s sick. She and
Penny’s mother are sisters, but they don’t talk to each other. Some
kind of long-standing feud. I felt that Penny would want to know
about her aunt.”

“Sorry. I can’t help you.”

He closed the door. Right in Alfred’s
face.

***

Gil couldn’t help the man with the beard who
claimed to be Penny’s cousin, because Penny hadn’t told him where
she was going. Even if she had, he might not have passed on the
information. Something was fishy about the guy. Starting with the
fact that Penny had just vacated the apartment yesterday afternoon.
How did he know that Penny had moved out? Even if he’d knocked on
her door, the fact of her not being there would certainly not be
evidence of that.

Gil was actually somewhat miffed that Penny
hadn’t told him where she was going. Presumably off with her
boyfriend, but Gil didn’t know where he lived. He suspected she had
left a forwarding address with the post office, but she could have
left one with him, too. After all, he had been friendly to her. He
liked renting to good-looking girls. He tried to be nice to them
and respond to their requests about maintenance quickly. Pretty
girls were used to being catered to. He was sure Penny had already
forgotten him.

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 & 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 naïve 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.