“Can you describe this man, the one who bought the coffee?”
“Not real good.”
“White or black?”
“White. Seems like he was dark. Black hair, maybe brown. Maybe in his late twenties, early thirties.”
“Tall, short, fat, thin?”
Ellen stared off toward the back of the store. “Medium height, maybe. Sort of well built but not big, I think.”
“Beard or mustache?”
“Don’t think so . . . Wait a minute.”
Her face lit up. “His hair was short. Yeah! In fact, I remember it passed through my mind he looked military. You know, there’s a lot of military types around here, come in all the time on their way to Tidewater.”
“What else made you think he might be military?”
Abby asked.
“I don’t know. But maybe it was just his way. It’s hard to explain, but when you’ve seen enough military guys, it gets to where you can pick ’em out. There’s just something about ’em. Like tattoos, for example. A lot of ’em have tattoos.”
“Did this man have a tattoo?”
Her frown turned to disappointment. “I didn’t notice.”
“How about the way he was dressed?”
“Uhhhh . . .”
“A suit and tie?”
Abby asked.
“Well, he wasn’t in a suit and tie. Nothing fancy. Maybe jeans or dark pants. He might’ve been wearing a zip-up jacket . . .. Gee, I really can’t be sure.”
“Do you, by chance, remember what he was driving?”
“No,” she said with certainty. “I never saw his car. He must’ve parked off to the side.”
“Did you tell the police all this when they came to talk to you, Ellen?”
“Yeah.”
She was eyeing the parking lot out front. A van had just pulled up. “I told ’em pretty much the same things I told you. Except for some of the stuff I couldn’t remember then.”
When two teenage boys sauntered in and headed straight for the video games, Ellen returned her attention to us. I could tell she had nothing more to say and was beginning to entertain doubts about having said too much.
Apparently, Abby was getting the same message. “Thank you, Ellen,” she said, backing away from the counter. “The story will run on Saturday or Sunday. Be sure you watch for it.”
Then we were out the door.
“Time to get the hell out of here before she starts screaming that everything was off the record.”
“I doubt she’d even know what the term meant,” I replied.
“What surprises me,” Abby said, “is that the cops didn’t tell her to keep her mouth shut.”
“Maybe they did but she couldn’t resist the possibility of seeing her name in print.”
The I-64 East rest stop where the clerk had directed Deborah and Fred was completely deserted when we pulled in.
Abby parked in front, near a cluster of newspaper vending machines, and for several minutes we sat in silence. A small holly tree directly in front of us was silver in the car’s headlights, and lamps were smudges of white in the fog. I couldn’t imagine getting out to use the rest room were I alone.
“Creepy,” Abby muttered under her breath. “God. I wonder if it’s always this deserted on a Tuesday night, or if the news releases have scared people away.”
“Possibly both,” I replied. “But you can be sure it wasn’t deserted the Friday night Deborah and Fred pulled in.”
“They may have been parked right about where we are,” she mused. “Probably people all over the place, since it was the beginning of the Labor Day weekend. If this is where they encountered someone bad, then he must be a brash son of a bitch.”
“If there were people all over the place,” I said, “then there would have been cars all over the place.”
“Meaning?”
She lit a cigarette.
“Assuming this is where Deborah and Fred encountered someone, and assuming that for some reason they let him in the Jeep, then what about his car? Did he arrive here on foot?”
“Not likely,” she replied.
“If he drove in,” I went on, “and left his car parked out here, that wasn’t going to work very well unless there was a lot of traffic.”