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.
