Honeymoon for Three

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