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.