“I want to round up everyone in town and ask them if they’ve seen Claudia, or if they know Trina Greene.”

“Hmm.” Jesse still wasn’t sold on the idea that I’d found the right woman. “How ’bout after that?”

“I don’t know. Maybe we should go to Idylhaven and make sure Claudia isn’t there under a fake name.”

“They know what she looks like, Lil. She’s been there twice before.”

We’d been on a mad tear to get to the Berkshires, and now that we’d arrived, we were stymied. “I guess we could go to the car rental place and check if it was really Claudia who rented the car to drive back to New York.”

That wasn’t as smart an idea as it sounded. The rental shop was miles away from the town of Lenox. It had perfectly fine records, but all it really showed me was that they had a photocopy of Claudia’s license and a form with a squiggle for a signature. “It could be Claudia’s, I guess,” I said, squinting at it.

“Great detective work,” said Jesse, his elbows on the Formica countertop and his head resting in his hands. “You’re a real Miss Marple, you.”

“Do you remember anything about the woman who rented the car?” I asked the ruddy-cheeked man behind the counter.

“That was three months ago, miss,” he shrugged, his long white hair flopping into his eyes.

“Could it have been this woman?” I held up the photograph of Trina Greene.

“That’s funny,” the man said after examining it for a minute. “It doesn’t look like her—her hair was black, not blond—but I remember thinking boy, that girl gained some weight after she got her license photo. It looked good on her. Not fat, you know, just nice and curvy. Hey, we all put on weight over the years.” He patted his own beer belly.

“How did she pay?”

“Cash,” he said, pointing to a notation in the file. “The rental fee plus the special deposit for paying in cash.”

“Do you know a woman named Trina Greene?”

“Haven’t heard the name,” he said. “You know if she was local?”

That was the problem. I knew so little, I wasn’t even sure what questions to ask.

Back in the car, Jesse turned off the radio. “How come you never told me you were coverin’ Claudia’s rent check every month?”

I glanced at him warily. His eyes were on the road and he had one hand on the wheel. “I wanted to make sure she had a place to live. She couldn’t live with me. When I tried it, it just about killed me. But I could give her a place to live so that she wouldn’t be homeless.”

“You couldn’t stay, but you felt guilty about goin’ away,” he said in a mild voice that had no judgment in it.