Sunset Beach(91)
“There’s no stress for you, because you’re a guy. You don’t have to think about what to wear, or what to do with your hair.”
His voice softened. “Wear it down, okay, Drue? You have really pretty hair. And if you don’t mind my saying so, you look great in jeans.”
“I don’t mind your saying that at all,” Drue said, surprised. “It’s actually lovely, hearing a compliment from a man.”
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow morning, then. Right?”
“Right.”
* * *
Once in bed, she fell asleep immediately but awoke after only two hours.
Her dreams were stranger than usual. She dreamed of Jazmin Mayes, staring up from a basket of soiled sheets; of her own mother, Sherri, plucking at the edge of the blanket the hospice worker had tucked around her pale, emaciated body, her eyes clouded by the effects of the drugs in her IV drip. And she dreamed of Colleen Boardman Hicks, and a pile of blood-spattered but neatly folded clothing placed on the bucket seat of an orange Camaro.
Her mind kept drifting back to that binder on the kitchen table, and the mystery of Colleen. Corey was right. She really did need to find herself a hobby.
But in the meantime, she had questions. So many questions.
Exasperated, she sat up in bed and reached for her cell phone, returning to the Google search she’d done earlier in the evening.
She yawned as she skimmed through the first half-dozen articles the search generated, impatient that none of them yielded anything new. But she paused when she came to a 2016 Tampa Bay Times article headlined COLLEEN HICKS WITNESS DELVES INTO 40-YEAR-OLD MYSTERY.
Vera Rennick still remembers the last words Colleen Boardman Hicks, her friend and coworker, said to her on that otherwise unremarkable afternoon on August 20, 1976.
“We’d left work early to do a little shopping. Maas Brothers was having a big summer clearance sale, and afterwards we had dinner at the Suncoast Room. I needed to get home and see about my mother, so Colleen insisted on picking up the check. She stood up and gave me a hug. She told me to make sure to tell my mother hello from her,” Mrs. Rennick said. “And then she said, ‘See you tomorrow.’”
But tomorrow never came. The disappearance of the attractive 26-year-old dental hygienist triggered one of the most intense police investigations in St. Petersburg history. Investigators widened their search to a five-state area, consulted psychics, dragged local ponds and questioned dozens of known sex offenders, but to no avail. The mystery remains unsolved.
Forty years later, Vera Rennick’s pale blue eyes still fill with tears at that memory. “And that was the last time anybody ever saw Colleen. Ever. It still haunts me. I wake up so many nights, wondering, Where are you, Colleen? What happened to you? That’s why I decided to start my own blog. It’s my way of trying to find answers to my questions.”
Mrs. Rennick titled her blog Have You Seen Colleen? In it, she shares tidbits of information she has personally gleaned over her years of following the case, and invites readers to contribute their own knowledge and theories.
“The police don’t care anymore,” Mrs. Rennick said. “The fact that it’s unsolved is a black eye. They won’t even answer my phone calls.”
Cassandra Banks, a spokesman for the St. Petersburg Police Department, denied that authorities have given up their investigation. “We welcome any and all information from the public concerning this case, as we would for any still-open investigation.”
“People are still fascinated with the case,” Vera Rennick said. “And I’ve received valuable tips. It all happened so long ago that people who might have stayed quiet at the time of Colleen’s disappearance have been willing to come forward and share information with me.”
She pointed out that Colleen Hicks’s husband Allen passed away in 2009, and that the missing woman’s parents, Burton and Edith Boardman, died, separately, within four years of their daughter’s disappearance.
“I’m the keeper of the flame,” Mrs. Rennick said. “And I intend to keep asking questions until I find out the truth, or die trying.”
* * *
“Screw it,” Drue whispered aloud, after tossing and turning for another half hour. She found Vera Rennick’s blog online, and spent the next hour or so trying to slog through three years’ worth of Have You Seen Colleen?
The blog was comically amateur, replete with typos, misspellings, blurry photos and stream-of-consciousness posts in which the author posed, then debunked, wildly improbable theories.
One post would examine the possibility that Colleen Hicks was living in a hippie commune in upstate New York, while another would have the missing woman joining a cloistered religious order.
Various “experts” opined that Colleen Hicks had been murdered by a Manson family–inspired cult, by a jilted former boyfriend, even by a disgruntled patient from the dental clinic where Colleen was working at the time of her disappearance.
It was all mildly entertaining, Drue decided, but what she really needed to do was talk to Vera Rennick in person. Just before dropping off to sleep, Drue sent a deliberately vague private message to the blogger.
Hi, Vera. I recently moved home to St. Pete from the east coast, and found a trove of newspaper clippings about the Colleen Hicks case in my late mother’s belongings. I’m intrigued and wonder if you’d be willing to talk to me about the case in person? Thanks, Drue Campbell.