The waitress walks Darcy and Hensel to a table in the new edition. The room is empty except for a heavyset man with a stack of blueberry pancakes in front of him.
“Here are your menus,” Margaret says, anxiously glancing at Hensel. “I’ll be right back with waters.”
When Margaret is out of earshot, Darcy gives Hensel a conspiratorial smile.
“So this is official FBI business?”
“Just greasing the wheels,” Hensel says, reading the back of an artificial sweetener packet. “This stuff will kill you.”
Each chooses a slice of blackberry pie. By the time they finish eating, Margaret’s shift ends. When she returns to their table, she’s wearing a pair of blue jeans which appear painted on. A black T-shirt shows off the arms of a woman who is no stranger to the gym. A colorful tattoo, something floral, curls from her shoulder to her elbow. Margaret stands back with her hands clasped until the waitress who took over her shift drops the bill in front of Hensel.
“Please,” Darcy says, motioning for Margaret to sit beside her.
The waitress doesn’t know what to do with her hands, which she shifts from the table to her lap and back again.
“The trucker who claims he saw the missing girl,” Darcy says, removing the folded picture of Nina. “Do you know his name?”
Margaret shakes her head.
“We get truckers from all over Georgia. He wasn’t someone I recognized, but Donna, she ran tables in the main room with me that morning, said his truck had Florida plates.”
“What about this girl he bought breakfast for?” Hensel asks. “Did you see her?”
Margaret nods her head slowly.
“The trucker came in alone and ordered eggs and toast. I stopped by to make sure he had everything he needed, and then there was this girl sitting across from him. Straight, brownish hair down to about here.” Margaret touches her neck just below the ear. “Pretty little thing, late teens or early twenties. I figured it was his daughter. Sometimes the long-haul truckers bring a family member along for the ride.”
Darcy slides the picture in front of Margaret.
“Did she speak to you?”
“Well, I took her order. All she wanted was a bowl of plain oatmeal, no fruit or maple sugar or nothing. She was here ten or fifteen minutes, just long enough to eat.”
“So she just walked out?”
“I guess. I didn’t see her go, but when the man came back from the restroom, he kept asking people where she went. I got worried because I still thought she was his daughter and the girl had wandered off. But he was supposed to give her a ride out of town, so I figured she found somebody else to drive her, or maybe she got cold feet about hitching.”
Hensel leans back and squints his eyes in thought.
“But the girl appeared to be around twenty. It’s not like a toddler went missing.”
Margaret’s eyes dart around the room like bats in a cave.
“To me, she seemed like a little girl. She wasn’t slow or nothing, more like she didn’t know what to say or how to act. Like it was her first time in public. I had to kneel beside the girl to coax her into ordering.”
Darcy taps her finger on the picture.
“Margaret, is this the girl you saw?”
A tear trickles out of Margaret’s eye. She lifts the picture and stares for a long time. After she sets it down, she sniffles and dabs her nose with a tissue.
“I don’t know. I mean it could have been her. It’s so dark in that room, and she always had her head down like she didn’t want nobody to look at her. Oh, God. What if it was Nina? She sat right in front of me, and I let her get away.”
Margaret breaks down and cries into her hands. Darcy meets Hensel’s eye, and he runs to the restroom for tissues. Lowering her voice, Darcy touches Margaret’s shoulder.
“Besides the resemblance, is there anything the girl said or did that makes you think she could have been Nina?”
Margaret hitches and drops her hand to the table.
“I didn’t see her come in, but the trucker said she stood in the doorway and stared at a poster, except there are a few dozen on the wall. No way any of us knew it was the missing person poster. It wasn’t until the girl disappeared that the guy looked at the picture and noticed the resemblance. But why would a kidnapped girl walk into Maury’s ten years later and ask for a ride out of town? That’s what makes me think it wasn’t her. A normal person would have wanted the sheriff or asked for a ride home.”
Darcy thumbs through her wallet and removes a business card. On the back of the card, she scrawls her phone number.
“This is my mobile number,” Darcy says, handing her the card. “If you see the girl or the trucker in town, call me.”
Margaret inspects the card, turning it over between her fingers and biting her lower lip.
Darcy loses herself in her thoughts during the ride back to Laurie’s. Scarlet River is a walking, breathing dichotomy. Small southern town values manifest themselves in the well-dressed families filing out of the Baptist church and the long line at the community bake sale to support the elementary school. Mothers with children crowd the park in the edge of town, the merry-go-round, slide, and swing set overflowing with laughing children. And yet a darkness pervades the town. It curls sleeping in the shadows and slithers out when no one is paying attention.
“It’s hard to believe someone in this town would follow a degenerate like Michael Rivers,” Hensel says, nodding at the park. “Could be the painting was a prank like Tipton theorized.”
Christmas garland and lights splash holiday colors through neighborhoods. Darcy lowers the window a crack. Someone is playing a Bing Crosby song.
“You don’t believe that, and neither do I.”
“Let’s assume the same guy who kidnapped those girls ten years ago sought Michael Rivers. The abductions stopped. Where has this guy been?”
“Prison? If he did time in Buffalo, that would explain how he met Rivers.”
“Sure, but what about the girl? Nina.”
“If the trucker met Nina, the kidnapper couldn’t have gone to prison. He kept her all this time.”
“Then one day he let her go?” Hensel cocks an eyebrow.
Darcy doesn’t have a good explanation. When she glances off to the side, she taps Hensel’s arm and points.
“That’s the guy that harassed us at the supermarket.”
The predator stands outside a bar on the corner of Main and Church Street, hands buried in his pockets.
“The big guy?”
“Don’t slow down. I don’t want him to see us.”
Hensel pulls into an open parking place in front of a drug store. The man’s eyes swerve to the truck. Not good. He recognizes her through the windshield and marches across the sidewalk. It isn’t until he spots Hensel in the driver seat that he pulls up short of the curb and stares bullets into the cab. His hands pop out of his pockets and curl into big meaty fists that would pummel both of them on a desolate roadway and bury their bodies in the forest. But this is downtown, not a lonely stretch of country road, and Hensel is armed and knows what he’s doing. The predator stands and considers his options, one arm leaning against the lamp post as flies feasting inside a garbage can swarm out at his presence.
Hensel wears an amused grin, not acknowledging the threat. Perhaps because he wasn’t at the grocery store parking lot to witness the encounter. This man has no boundaries. It’s evident in the wild set of his eyes, the toothy grin. His gaze moves across the car to Darcy. He runs his tongue across his lips.
Hensel pulls the FBI badge from his pocket.
“Should I say something to him?”
“No, just drive.”