“But is it out of the question that he and Violet might have gotten together? Two black sheep?”

“Well, it’s always possible, though it doesn’t seem likely. Violet was in her twenties and married to boot, so she hardly registered with us. We lived in a world of our own. You know how it is; the big event for us was two classmates who got killed in a car accident. Violet was a grownup. Nobody cared about her. Liza was the one I felt sorry for.”

“I don’t wonder,” I said. “I talked to her yesterday and she said she was crushed when Ty left town. What was that about?”

“ The story I heard was Ty’s aunt got a phone call from someone who told her he was fooling around with another underage girl, namely Liza. That was Friday night. The aunt turned around and called his mother, who’d flown to Chicago for a wedding. She got back to Bakersfield late Saturday night and picked him up first thing Sunday morning.”

“You’d think he could have gotten word to Liza. She was dumped without so much as a by-your-leave.”

“I guess good manners weren’t his thing.”

“What happened after that? I asked, but she wasn’t happy about the question so I left it alone.”

“ Things went from bad to worse. Her parents had divorced when she was eight. She’d been living with her mom-essentially without supervision, since her mother drank. When her dad got wind of her relationship with Ty, he flew out from Colorado, packed her up, and took her back to live with him. Of course that went nowhere. The two didn’t get along; she hated his new family and she was back the next year. No big surprise. You take a kid like her, used to freedom, and she’s not going to react kindly to parental control.”

“How’d he hear about Ty if he was in Colorado?”

“He still had contacts in town.”

“So she ended up living with her mom again?”

“Not for long. Sally Mellincamp died in a house fire the next year and a local family took Liza in. Charlie Clements was a good guy and didn’t want to see her sucked into the foster care system. He owned the auto-repair shop in Serena Station that I bought when he retired in 1962. Liza married his son.”

“So everything connects.”

“One way or another; it sure looks that way.”