“I’ll tell you what I think. He did it out of guilt. That was his pattern. He’d get mad, beat the hell out of her, and then do something nice to make up for it. Maybe he realized she was on the verge of taking him to court so he tried to buy her off. She was nuts about that car.”

“From what I heard, Foley was stuck making all the payments even though he never had a thing to show for it. That seems strange.”

“Depending on his agreement with the dealer,” he said. “The fellow you want to talk to on that subject is Chet Cramer of Chet Cramer Chevrolet in Cromwell. I’ll give you his address.”

“Thanks. Daisy mentioned him. I’m surprised he’s still in business after all these years.”

“Oh, sure. He’ll never retire. He’s got his hands on the reins and he’ll be happy to drop dead before he ever lets go.”

Mentally I went back and skimmed the newspaper accounts I’d read. “One of the papers reported Violet going into a Santa Teresa bank that week and getting into her safe deposit box. Any idea what was in it?”

“Nope. I’d assume valuables of some kind. Like you, I’ve heard she had a sizeable sum of cash, but you’d have to take that on faith. We got a court order and had the box drilled when it was clear she was gone. It was empty.”

“What about since then? I know how Stacey feels about a case like this. An open-ended situation bugs the hell out of him.”

“You’re right about that. Once in a while someone goes back to take a look, but there’s not much to go on. We never got a break on this one and we haven’t had the manpower to devote to a second full-on investigation. Detectives down in S.T. have enough on their plates. Some rookie might noodle around with it from time to time, but that’s about it.”

“What about the theory she was having an affair?”

“That’s what Foley maintains, but I have my doubts. Ask around and you’ll find out most people who heard the rumor heard it from him. Violet screwed around-no question about that-but if she ran off with someone, how come no one else was gone?”

7

The service station where Violet was last seen was near Tullis, a dot-sized town you could probably miss if you weren’t paying strict attention. Several hamlets, like stars in a constellation, were clustered in a patch with small two-lane roads forming the irregular grid that connected them. Tullis was to the east on a straight line that led to Freeman and from there to the 101.