Room 18
“Who gave you this?”
The old clerk’s hand shot across the counter and snatched the brass key right out of my fingers.
I stared at him.
“You did,” I said. “Five minutes ago.”
He looked at the wooden tag dangling from the key. Then at me. Then up at the little security monitor mounted on the wall behind him.
His face had gone the color of skim milk.
“That’s impossible,” he whispered.
I need to tell you how we got there. Because none of it would have happened if my husband had just stopped driving when I asked him to.
We were driving from Denver to St. Louis.
Eight hundred and fifty miles. Thirteen hours, if you don’t stop much. Mark had promised me that morning, standing in our driveway at six a.m. with his coffee thermos and his old Rockies cap, that we’d stop whenever I got tired.
“We’ll take it easy, Viv,” he said. “No rush. We’ll stop in Kansas somewhere. Find a nice little place. Get a good night’s sleep.”
I believed him.
I’ve been married to Mark Holloway for twenty-six years. You’d think I’d know better.
He pushed through the morning. Through the flat brown stretch of eastern Colorado where there’s nothing but wheat and sky and the occasional grain elevator standing up out of the prairie like a lighthouse.
He pushed through lunch. We ate gas station sandwiches in the car outside Burlington.
He pushed through the afternoon. Across the Kansas line. Past Goodland and Colby and Oakley. Past signs for the world’s largest prairie dog and a museum of barbed wire.
“Mark,” I said around four o’clock. “I’m getting tired.”
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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