The money Sherri had borrowed against the building in East Troy went right up their noses. Sherri and Mitch lived large in Los Angeles, and they spent a fair amount of time partying in Palm Springs, a town that felt refreshingly small, like East Troy. Mitch had a friend who managed the Riviera. The low-slung hotel, like the Playboy resort, had a history, but their history ran deeper. The hotel now also billed itself as a family resort, and the hallways were filled with framed photos of celebrities like Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Elvis Presley, and Sonny and Cher. The pool was designed like a spoke wheel, and had been the site of psychedelic bashes in the sixties. She felt at home there, like she could pick up where she’d left off, only now she didn’t have to work. She could walk into a guest room, wake up late, and lounge by the pool while someone else served her. The freedom and lack of rules went to her head. Because she could do anything, she did.

Palm Springs was where Sherri went hiking in the mountains in her bikini and flip-flops, and it was where she discovered the joys of the desert, even in the middle of summer. She liked the flat, dry landscape because it bore so little resemblance to what she’d known in East Troy that she might as well have been on another planet.

She and Mitch made a striking couple, and they were always up for a party or a late-night hike in the nude. They hopped the fence of Elvis and Priscilla Presley’s former house and took a dip in the pool, and after all the bars closed, they’d hang out at the airport because it stayed open all night long.

Mitch, a mere mortal now, was on a level playing field with Sherri. When she told him about what had happened with Arthur, he gave her space to indulge her frequent bouts of melancholy, and he’d hold her when she woke from nightmares screaming Arthur’s name. He’d had his own trouble. His mother ran off with another man when he was a kid, and his father had been a car wrangler for the movie studios, finding automobiles for various films, or for the movie stars to drive around in, looking like swells. But he’d wanted to live the same high-profile lifestyle as the people who drove the cars, and began staging crashes in order to collect insurance. Mitch’s world had crumbled when his father ended up serving a prison sentence for manslaughter and insurance fraud.