“Six twenty-five, round about then. The fellow at the pump cleaned her windshield and checked her tires, which he needn’t have done. The car was brand new and he was interested in hearing how she handled. They spent a few minutes talking about that. I asked him if he noticed anything unusual because I was curious about her mood. If she was leaving her little girl for good, you’d think she’d be down in the mouth, but he said she seemed happy. ‘Giddy’ was his word. Of course, he’d never laid eyes on her before, so as far as he knew, she was always that way. I was hoping she’d said something about her destination, but no such luck. Her dog was barking up a storm, jumping from the front seat to the back. She finally let it out to do its business in the grass. After she put the dog back in the car, she went in the office, paid the clerk for her gas, and bought a Coca-Cola from the cooler. Then she got in the car and off she went, driving toward Freeman.”

I opened my shoulder bag and took out a pen and my map of Santa Maria. “Can you show me the location of the service station? I’d like to take a look.”

He adjusted his bifocals and studied the map, opening it to the full and then refolding it. “That’d be here,” he said, making a mark on the page. “Place is still there, though the pump jockey and clerk have both left the area. From that point, she could have gone anyplace. Down one of these side roads and out to the 101-south to Los Angeles, north to San Francisco. She could have circled back and gone home. We calculated how far she could get on a tank of gas and checked with every station within that radius-no easy task. No one remembered seeing her, which struck me as odd. That car was a beauty and so was she. You’d think someone would have noticed if she’d stopped for anything-meal, restroom, to walk the dog. I don’t know how she could have vanished like that, literally, without a trace.”

“The papers said Foley wasn’t considered a suspect.”

“Of course he was. Still is. We put that out, hoping to coax him into telling what he knew, but he was a wily one. He went straight out and hired an attorney, and after that, he wouldn’t say a word. We never did come up with anything to hang him on.”

“He gave no explanation at all?”