I looked at her.

“How do you know that?”

“Because my sister Rosalind burned a man’s clothes in a driveway in 1986,” Wendy said, “and it cost her the house.”

There was no clerk problem.

There is never a clerk problem at a place like that; nobody at the desk of a motel that rents by the hour is going to fight you over a room number, and I didn’t need one anyway, because it was printed at the top of the receipt in my pocket.

Room 207 is on the upper level, third door from the stairs, facing the lot.