“I understand,” Caleb said patiently.
Sparks shrugged, looking abashed. “Sorry. Sure. Either of us would do anything to help find the woman, it’s just that…there’s nothing else to say or do. She came in the courtesy shuttle, she rented a car—and she disappeared. The cops kept coming back because once she left here, everything’s a dead end. We’re all they’ve got. Her picture ran in all the papers, and no one came forward to say they’d seen her anywhere, not a gas station, a restaurant, or a hotel, bowling alley, movie theater or bar. It’s almost as if aliens came down and swept her up. But I’ll call Mina into the office, and you two can chat.”
“Thank you,” Caleb said. He knew that the police had been here; he knew that the manager and the poor clerk had been through it all before. And he didn’t think he was going to learn anything new, but that was half the job, doggedly repeating what had been done, always searching for whatever little bit of information might have seemed insignificant at the time but now just might become a clue.
Mina Grigsby was one of those thin, nervous-by-nature people, but she didn’t seem to have a problem talking to him. She nodded when her manager explained that Caleb was a private investigator, and she quickly perched on the edge of her boss’s desk, looking expectantly at Caleb as Harold Sparks excused himself.
Caleb smiled reassuringly. “I’m sorry,” he began. “I know you’ve been asked about Jennie Lawson before.”
“Oh, it’s okay. Really. I’m glad to hear that someone is still looking in to what happened to her. She was very pretty and very sweet. And polite. I think that’s why I remember her so clearly. We didn’t have the exact car she had requested, but she wasn’t nasty about it, the way some people are. I mean, the rental forms say ‘a certain vehicle or its equivalent.’”
Caleb agreed. “I’ve rented plenty of cars, and you’re certainly right about that, Miss Grigsby. Mina. I know that she came in, got the keys and left, and that her agreement for was two weeks. And I know that you two just met to transact business, but I was hoping she might have said something, given you an idea whether she was meeting up with friends or what her plans might be. Something that might have come back to you in the time since she went missing. If I had anywhere to go from here, it would be very helpful.”
“Well, let me think…I mean, she didn’t say where she was staying. She did say that she wasn’t leaving the state with the car.”
“Did she say anything about her plans? Anything at all?”
Mina was thoughtful for a moment; then she smiled. “Well, to be perfectly honest, people don’t always get too excited about Jacksonville. They’re all heading somewhere else—down to the beaches, or St. Augustine, or Daytona, the space center…even the theme parks. But Jacksonville is a great city, with a really nice river walk and lots of history. It’s old, too, you know.”
“Of course. Was she planning on visiting Jacksonville?”
“Yes—but on her way back. She was anxious to see St. Augustine. She said that she’d be heading straight there. I told her where there were some very good restaurants…but she wasn’t planning on eating for a while. She had a bottle of soda in her purse, and some Power-Bars. She wanted to get started seeing things right away.”
“Did she say what things?”
Mina shook her head slowly again. “No, not exactly.”
“Not exactly? Think, please, Mina. What exactly did she say?”
“Well, she said that she was going to take a ghost tour—but that wouldn’t have been until that night.”
“Did she say anything about a hotel reservation? Or maybe a B and B?”
“No. She was going to head into Old Town and find a place that appealed to her—I do remember her saying that.”
Caleb waited, because she appeared to be thinking with intensity. She let out a sigh after a moment, and he decided he had gotten all he could from her, and that it wasn’t terribly helpful. He could—and of course would—speak to the ghost tour operators, guides and ticket vendors, but since Jennie Lawson’s picture had been up all over the city and no one had come forward, he didn’t think that avenue would take him far, either. Still, he had to follow where the trail led.
“There was one more thing,” Mina said, surprising him.
“Oh?”
“I’d forgotten all about this. She told me she was going to get a reading. You know, a palm reading or the cards or something. She wore a pentagram around her neck, and I asked her if she was a witch. She said no, she just liked it. There was a ruby set in one of the points of the star. She said she wasn’t a believer, but she liked the stories. I guess that’s why she was going to take that ghost tour.” She fell silent, then sighed again, shaking her head as she looked at him. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t think of anything else.”