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present?”
    “Us, the minister, and two witnesses we dragged off the street.”
    “Very romantic.”
    It was romantic. That was how he’d seen it at the time. He’d fallen in love in a tropical location with a woman from anothercountry. And it hadn’t been some meaningless holiday romance. Their bond had been strong enough for their relationship to blossom. They’d met up in other foreign countries every few months when they could get the time off from their careers. Their passports were full of immigration stamps proving their commitment to each other. And when their relationship needed to be elevated to a new level, they married. But to Holman—applying cold logic to the situation—Terry’s actions were ridiculous. To Holman, Terry was no more a romantic than one of those idiots at a casino who drops a million dollars on red and then watches it come up black. He was a fool.
    “Sheriff Holman, what’s your point?”
    Holman straightened in his chair and leaned across his desk. “My point is, you don’t seem to know squat about your wife.”

CHAPTER FOUR
    T erry walked out of the sheriff’s office. He chewed on Holman’s remarks and tried to convince himself that the sheriff’s doubts were unwarranted, but he failed. True, he didn’t know much about Sarah, but their marriage would change that. Whatever Holman thought about the relationship, the sheriff was still obliged to do his job. He had a duty to follow up on Terry’s report.
    He wandered along Solano Dam Road, Edenville’s main street. Sporadic traffic whistled along on the main thoroughfare on its way out of town. Although the look and feel wasn’t the same, he was reminded of many villages in England. Edenville felt self-contained. It had its own supermarket, restaurants, a couple of bars, a few stores, a gas station with a mechanic, two banks, and a farmers’ market on Saturdays. There was a little bit of everything for everyone. But Edenville, like every English village, would never become a boomtown. Although quaint in a rough-and-ready way, it was never going to be a destination town. Thanks to Solano Dam Road, it was easy to pass through Edenville without a second thought.
    Taxis were fine, but Terry needed wheels, so he rented a car from Edenville’s only rental center. It took some finagling since he didn’t have a California driver’s license, but he played thetourist card to swing it his way. He left the center in a Ford Focus. He took to driving on the wrong side of the road pretty well, thanks to Edenville’s simple network of roads.
    With the car, he had mobility. Wherever Sarah went, he could follow. He bought a map at a supermarket and opened it out across the hood of the car. He put himself in Sarah’s shoes. If she’d skipped town, it wasn’t like she had a large number of options. The US might be a big country compared to Britain, but for its size, it didn’t have a particularly complex or involved road system. Only a couple of roads led in and out of town and a limited number of freeways took you any distance. He could follow, but he stood little chance of catching Sarah. She had almost a week’s head start. Besides, Holman had the resources to cast a net far and wide. But who was to say she’d gone that far? She could be in the local area. The surrounding area got pretty rural, pretty quick. Terry could see her crashing in a hundred places within a twenty-mile radius of Edenville. Crashing brought up another possibility. What if she’d had an accident and hadn’t been found? He could check out the local area. He had to do this. He couldn’t let any possibility go unchecked.
    He worked on a twenty-mile radius as a search area, then broke that area into quadrants based on the direction of roads entering and leaving Edenville. He stopped to check every park, campsite, abandoned trailer, unused vacation home, and set of skid marks that left the road—with no success. When the dashboard light came on to tell him to