Sarah glanced at her watch and realized that an hour wasn’t nearly enough to finish her digging. It was time to return to work.
She left the library—a historic building itself—and headed back to the museum. On her way, she saw that flyers had been posted everywhere.
Have you seen this woman?
The picture was of the missing local girl, Winona Hart. She was smiling and bright-eyed in her photo, a beautiful young blonde whose innocence and zest for life had been captured by the photographer’s lens.
Sarah felt a tightening in her heart, and she wished there was something she could do to help find the girl, but she doubted that a master’s in history qualified her to be of much help in a missing persons case.
But…
Caleb Anderson was here to search for another woman. Could the two disappearances be related? She wished she knew more about the psychology of crime. Would a serial killer hang around a city like St. Augustine so he could kidnap and most likely kill two women a year apart?
She realized that she was still staring at the picture. It was one thing to read about the girl in the paper, see a grainy photo and impersonally hope for the best. Now, looking at such a lifelike image, she felt as if she had somehow become involved. Those big bright eyes seemed to stare at her. Winona was so young, so pretty, and so full of life and laughter.
She was surprised when she reached out to touch the picture, as if she were actually reaching out to touch Winona Hart’s face.
And she was even more surprised by the electric sizzle that streaked along her arm when she made contact with the paper.
“I’m so sorry,” she caught herself saying aloud. “I’m so sorry, but I don’t know how I can possibly help you.”
Then, feeling like a fool, she looked around and hurried down the street, walking quickly now, since her lunch hour was definitely over.
A year ago, the usual had all been done. Jennie Lawson had made a cell phone call to her mother when she had landed. That was the last call she had made, though her cell records and voice mail showed a long list of calls coming in, from her mother—growing more frantic with each message—and various friends who had hoped to make it to St. Augustine to meet up with her. The friends all had alibis; none of them had ever even come to St. Augustine, because they had never been able to contact her.
She had last used her credit card at the car rental agency, and no one had accessed her bank account since her disappearance, so presumably she hadn’t been killed in the course of a robbery for financial gain.
She had left with her rental car and, as Harold Sparks had suggested, disappeared as thoroughly as if she had been beamed up by an alien spaceship.
But that hadn’t happened. Which meant that someone, somewhere, had to know something.
Caleb stopped at a few gas stations on his way back down to St. Augustine, but she had left the rental agency with a full tank of gas, so it was unlikely she would have stopped at any of them. Still, despite what she’d told Mina Grigsby, she might have stopped for a soda or a cup of coffee, even something to munch on or a more detailed map of the area than the rental agency had provided.
A tedious and time-consuming canvas of local businesses was likely to get him nowhere. Still, it had to be done.
If he were visiting St. Augustine for the first time and was anxious to find out the best things to do, the local tourist agencies would be a logical place to start. There were several, not to mention the booking offices for all the hearse tours, carriage tours, tram tours, walking tours and train tours.
He pounded the pavement with Jennie’s picture in hand, and at each stop he was told that no, they hadn’t seen Winona. Each time he explained patiently that this was a girl who had disappeared a year ago.
Finally, toward the end of a long and frustrating day, he entered a booking office offering a variety of tours and went through the usual spiel.
“This isn’t the girl who just disappeared. This girl’s name is Jennie Lawson. She came down a year ago on vacation and disappeared. We think she might have been looking to take a ghost tour,” he explained for what felt like the thousandth time.
The young guy manning the place frowned, taking the picture again. He looked at Caleb, then studied the photograph again.
“Wow. They really could be the same girl, except—” He broke off, his face wrinkled in concentration.
“I can’t tell you how many tourists come through here,” he said apologetically.
“It’s okay, I know that. I appreciate you trying,” Caleb said.
“I’m thinking about what she might have looked like with her hair up, and I’m thinking I just might remember her. Because she was asking about the scariest, spookiest thing it was possible to do. Naturally I told her all our tours are great, it just depended on what she was looking for.”