“Amazing.” I could feel the shift in my perception of Tannie Ottweiler. I’d pictured her barely making ends meet on a bartender’s salary, never guessing she was a land baroness. “I take it she’s thinking about moving up here.”

“That’s her hope. She’s been driving up Thursdays and Fridays, so if she’s here again this week maybe the three of us could have lunch.”

“Sounds great.”

There was a silence that lasted fifteen miles. Daisy was communicative in small doses, but she seemed to feel no obligation to chatter full-time, which suited me fine.

“So what’s your story?” she asked, finally.

“Mine?”

“You’ve been asking questions about me. Fair is fair.”

I didn’t like this part, where I was forced to pony up. As usual, I reduced my past to its basic elements. I didn’t want sympathy and I didn’t want additional questions. In any version I told, the ending was the same and I was bored with the recitation. “My parents were killed in a car wreck when I was five. I was raised by a maiden aunt, who didn’t parent all that well.”

She waited to see if I’d go on. “Are you married?”

“Not now, but I was. Twice, which seems like plenty.”

“I’ve got four divorces to your two so I guess I’m more optimistic.”

“Or maybe slower to learn.”

That netted me a smile, but not much of one.

When we got back to Daisy’s house, I picked up my car and drove the hour back to Santa Teresa, returning to my office, where I worked for the balance of the afternoon. I took care of the phone messages that had accumulated in my absence and then sat down and read the newspaper accounts about Violet in the weeks following her vanishing act. The initial item about the missing woman didn’t appear until the eighth of July, Wednesday of the following week. The article was brief, indicating that the public’s help was being sought in the disappearance of Violet Sullivan, last seen on Saturday, July 4, when she’d left to join her husband at a park in Silas, California, nine miles from her home in Serena Station. She was believed to have been driving a violet-gray two-door Chevrolet Bel Air coupe, with the dealer’s sticker displayed on the windshield. Anyone with information was encouraged to contact Sergeant Tim Schaefer at the Santa Teresa County Sheriff’s Department. The telephone number for the north county substation was listed.