“Should I call Grandma Hinkle and tell her?” Jared asked.
“No, not yet,” I told him, “not until we know for sure. I’m sorry about this, Jared, so very sorry.”
“But you said the remains are from 2008? If Chris has been missing all this time, how come we never knew a thing about it?”
“Because he fell through the cracks,” I replied. “According to Chris’s girlfriend at the time, he’d been saving up money for a trip back to Ohio, primarily because he wanted to talk to you. According to her, he was finally starting to realize that the versions of events told by your two sets of grandparents couldn’t both be correct and that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. I also think he was coming to understand that he’d been wrong in believing that had you boys been in the house at the time of the incident, you might have been able to prevent your mother’s murder. Danitza said Chris specifically wanted to apologize to you about blaming you for what happened.”
I heard a slight sputter on the phone that sounded suspiciously like a partially suppressed sob. That was followed by another long pause. “Chris had a girlfriend?” Jared asked in a hoarse voice that was little more than a whisper.
“He did,” I answered. “Her name is Danitza Adams Miller. She goes by Nitz. Earlier, on the day Chris disappeared, Nitz and her parents had both learned that she was pregnant.” For the next few minutes I filled Jared in on everything I had learned about the case since my arrival in Anchorage.
“Did Danitza ever have the baby?” Jared asked when I finished.
“It turns out that baby is now a twelve-year-old boy,” I answered. “His name is Christopher James. Nitz calls him Jimmy, and he looks a lot like you.”
There was another choked sob. “Sorry, Beau,” Jared said quickly. “I need to go. Send me the number for the lady at the crime lab.”
“Will do,” I said into the phone, but Jared had already hung up by then, and I couldn’t help but be grateful for that. I hate hearing grown men cry.
Chapter 13
When I finally emerged from Harriet Raines’s basement lab, I was in for a surprise. It had still been a strange kind of pinkish twilight when I first walked into the anthropology building, but when I stepped outside almost three hours later, I was astonished by the blinding sunlight glinting off my snow-covered surroundings.
Belatedly I understood why Twink had advised me to bring along sunglasses. It took a moment to fumble them out of my pocket and onto my face. I was about to use my phone to call her when I spotted the Travelall sitting with its hood up in a lot that, under normal circumstances, was probably reserved as faculty parking off to the side of the building. As I walked in that direction, Twink Winkleman appeared from under the hood. She had shed her jacket in favor of a pair of grease-stained gray coveralls.
As I walked toward her, Twink gave a monkey wrench a quick polish on her pant leg before dropping it into a battered toolbox. After that she carefully closed the Travelall’s hood, giving that a bit of a polish, too, in the process. By the time I reached her, Twink was wiping her hands on a thick blue paper towel.
“Car trouble?” I asked.
“Nope,” she said, “I just finished installing that new heater core. My daughter-in-law, Cindy—my ex-daughter-in-law, actually—” she corrected, “knew when I left the house this morning that I’d been waiting for it. When the UPS driver dropped it off, she called to see if I’d like her to bring it to me. God knows she’s a hell of a lot more dependable about things like that than my son ever was. She stayed on with me after my son walked out on her, and I’m happy to have her. She looks after the house and does most of the cooking. What could be better than that?”
When I didn’t comment, Twink continued. “Once Cindy brought me the heater core, I figured what the hell. I could either continue sitting there freezing my ass off or I could get off my heinie, go to work, and install the damned thing. With a cheechako riding around with me for the rest of the day, I figured the sooner I got the heater fixed, the better.”
Remembering the Tlingit words Harriet had used to refer to white men, I wasn’t at all sure what I’d just been called, but I suspected it wasn’t exactly complimentary.
“With a what?” I asked.
“A cheechako,” she repeated. “That’s a newcomer to Alaska—someone from Outside who just arrived and doesn’t know up from down about life around here.”
Presumably in Alaska the word “Outside” stands for anyplace else, but the part about my being a new arrival was absolutely true. I had visited Alaska only once before, and that had been on a cruise ship. Being in Anchorage in the depths of winter wasn’t at all the same thing.
“Sounds about right,” I admitted.
Twink hefted the toolbox up off the ground. Lifting loaded toolboxes is no mean feat, but she did so effortlessly, shoving it over the Travelall’s rooftop luggage rack and into what was clearly its designated space. Before she could tug the blue tarp back into place, I caught a glimpse of some of the other items stowed up there—a spare tire and a pair of ten-gallon gas cans along with several sturdy wooden crates.
“What’s in all the boxes?” I asked.
“Spare parts mostly,” Twink replied, manhandling the tarp back into position. “With the exception of replacement heater cores, I keep an inventory of anything and everything I might need with me at all times—alternators, generators, spark plugs, sun visors. You name it, I’ve got it. And thanks to my old man, if I break down out on a lonely road somewhere between hither and yon, all I have to do is haul out my handy-dandy toolbox and fix whatever’s broken.
“Last week I had some smart-ass kid throw a rock through the rearview mirror on the passenger side. After I cleaned the kid’s clock, I grabbed the spare mirror out of the crate and fixed the problem on the spot. You wreck one of them newfangled SUVs with all those fancy-schmancy cameras built into ’em and you’ve got yourself a five-thousand-dollar repair bill and a minimum three-week wait for parts.”
Once Twink finished tying down the tarp, she turned to me and said, “Where to next?”
I had been wondering that very thing. “Let me check,” I said.