He takes a breath and then slowly lets it out. “I was a distance away, but like I said, I can see just fine with my glasses. I saw Mrs. Warner struggling with a man. It was fast. I saw her and looked down to step over some rocks to get there, and when I looked up again, both of them were gone.”

“His height? What was he wearing?”

The old man thinks carefully, his eyes closed for a moment. “Average,” he finally says. “Might have had a baseball cap on. Orange jacket. That I’m sure about. Although it might have been a red. Orange, I’d say.”

“I don’t believe you mentioned that jacket to my partner,” I tell him.

He gestures with open hands. “Didn’t ask me.”

“Okay,” I go on. “This is good. This is helping. What about Mrs. Warner? Can you recall any details about her? What she was wearing?”

He thinks a minute. “A straw hat—that I remember very clearly. And a white dress,” he says, though with a little less certainty. “Maybe light blue? She was definitely wearing a dress. You know the kind of light, filmy thing those gals wear now over their bathing suits. I’ve even seen them at the IGA dressed like that. Practically see-through. Not that I’m really complaining.”

I smile. It’s a creepy remark, but this isn’t a creepy old man.

“A cover-up,” I say.

“If that’s what you call it.”

“Anything else?”

“No,” he says. “She vanished. Poof. I looked back up, and she and whoever was attacking her were gone. I called 911. The husband was almost to shore when I got done.”

“What was his demeanor like?”

“Like I said, the man was frantic. Didn’t know which end was up. His little girl was crying, and he told me to call 911. Said his phone didn’t have service or something. Probably T-Mobile. Pretty bad out here.”

He goes on to say Adam left Aubrey with the vacation renter in the cabin next door while he ran up the trail behind the cabin looking for his wife. They waited for the police to come.

“And while you were waiting, what happened?” I ask. “How was Mr. Warner?”

“Why are you asking about him so much?”

“It’s routine.”

“He was out on the boat when it happened. I can verify that. That’s the God’s truth.”

“I know,” I say. “But we need to ask. So tell me: What was his behavior like?”

Winston moves back to the floor to work on his flea.

“He was a mess,” he says. “His wife just got snatched. How do you think a man is going to behave?”

Fair enough, I think.

We talk a little more about what he saw, how his vision was decent—though he was overdue for a new prescription for his glasses.

“Damn Medicare,” he says. “So much red tape.”

While the state of his vision is of some concern, he’s so sure about what he saw that I relax a little. He shows me around his place. I see a silver-framed photo of him and his wife, a wedding portrait.