I climbed into the passenger seat, fastened my belt, and consulted Todd’s incoming e-mails. The two unaffiliated boys from Homer High School who lived in Anchorage were John Borman and Bill Farmdale. John was a bartender at a place called the Anchor Bar and Grill, so depending on his shift he could be either working or at home sleeping. According to Todd, Farmdale was a social-studies teacher at East Anchorage High. Since this was a snow day, there was a good chance he might be at home.
When Twink got into the driver’s seat, she had stripped off and stowed the coveralls. Having shed her jacket as well, she was down to nothing more than her faded flannel shirt. Whatever the outside temperature might have been right then, it was clearly not an issue for her, while I was still zipped back into my parka. I guessed I was seeing an example of one of the differences between people who actually live in Alaska and a chucka-something—whatever it was she’d called me earlier.
Twink settled into the seat, punched the lighter, and lit her next cigarette. “Well?” she prodded, still waiting for me to decide where we were going.
“How far is South Salem Loop?” I asked.
“Not far,” she said, reaching for the key. “Not far at all.”
I gave her Bill Farmdale’s address. She didn’t need to enter the address into a GPS before putting the Travelall in gear.
As she drove, I thought about Danitza’s place on Wiley Loop Road and wondered aloud, “Why are there so many loops around here? Seattle has streets, avenues, courts, roads, and lanes, but I don't know of a single loop.”
“Beats me,” Twink said with a shrug. “Nobody bothered consulting me when it came to naming streets, but did you find out what you needed to know from the bone lady?”
“Pretty much,” I replied.
“Good news or bad news?”
During my years as a cop, I was taught not to discuss ongoing investigations with outsiders. Just now, however, not engaging in polite conversation with the woman who was driving me around seemed downright rude.
“Probably bad,” I said.
“So the guy you’re looking for is dead instead of missing?”
She had correctly assumed that my missing person was male, and I let it go at that. “Most likely,” I replied, “although that has yet to be confirmed.”
“By DNA?” she asked.
I nodded.
“I like those true-crime shows on TV,” she added. “Seems to me that DNA must make you guys’ jobs easier.”
“Seems like,” I agreed.
What I really wanted just then was for Twink Winkleman to be quiet so I could think, but that didn’t seem to be in the cards.
“Where’s he from?”
I was trying to decide how I would approach Bill Farmdale. Eventually I figured out Twink was asking about Chris. It turned out, however, that the answer in both Farmdale’s case and Chris’s was the same.
“Homer,” I replied.
“My dad grew up there,” Twink said. “Only way out for him was to join the military, so he came to Anchorage via a long stint in Korea. Never wanted to move back to Homer. I’ve been there on occasion for work. Homer’s not really my cup of tea.”
Must not have been Bill Farmdale’s either, I thought.
Thinking about our next stop, I changed the subject. “What kind of place is the Anchor Bar and Grill?” I asked.
“It’s mostly a dive,” she answered. “Not exactly high on our list of tourist attractions and probably doesn’t have any of them Michelin stars.”
“I’m not a tourist,” I grumbled aloud. “I’m working.”
The new heater core might have been humming along like a champ, but the atmosphere inside the Travelall turned suddenly frosty. “Well, pardon me all to hell,” Twink responded huffily. Obviously I had offended her, although I wasn’t quite sure how.
A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of a raised ranch on a well-plowed street. I was glad to see that the walkway and front steps leading up to the house had been cleared of snow.
“How long are you gonna be this time?” Twink wanted to know. “According to the terms of my contract, I believe I’m due for a lunch break pretty soon.”
“We’ll have lunch after this interview,” I assured her, hoping to get back on her good side. “You choose the spot. I’ll buy.”
After leaving the Travelall, I made my way to the front porch and rang the doorbell. The hefty guy who answered the door was in his late twenties and was wearing a pair of East Anchorage High School sweats. Behind him I heard the voices of some young kids squabbling.
“Mr. Farmdale?” I said, offering my hand.
He peered over my shoulder and took in the Travelall before giving me a wary look. “Who’s asking?” he wanted to know.
“My name’s J. P. Beaumont,” I explained, pulling a business card out of my pocket and offering that in place of the handshake. “I’m a private investigator from Seattle, and I’m looking into the 2006 disappearance of a young man named Christopher Danielson. I was wondering if there was a chance he might be a friend of yours.”
Bill Farmdale’s eyes widened. “You’re looking for Chris?”
I nodded.
The wariness he had exhibited before vanished. “It’s about damned time someone did!” he exclaimed. “Come on in.”
The kids I had heard were two boys, maybe ten or eleven, duking it out in some bang-bang-shoot-’em-up video game on a big-screen TV hung over a gas-log fireplace. Bill Farmdale invited me to take a seat on a somewhat saggy sectional with more than a few crumbs and bits of popcorn showing here and there. Meanwhile he spent the next five minutes booting the kids out of the living room. They weren’t happy about having their video warfare uprooted, and it took a promised bribe of snacks in the kitchen to finally dislodge them. I hoped Mr. Farmdale, the teacher, had better disciplinary skills with his students at school than Bill Farmdale, the father, did with his kids at home.
The house had been built long enough ago that “open concept” had yet to be an architectural requirement. When Farmdale returned to the living room and shut the kitchen door behind him, the two kids were in an entirely separate space and completely out of earshot.
“So you knew Chris Danielson?” I confirmed as he flopped down onto the sofa beside me.
“I did,” he said.
“And you were friends?”
Bill nodded.
“Close friends?” I asked.
“I guess,” Bill admitted, “as close as anyone ever got. Chris was kind of a loner who didn’t have many friends. He had a pretty rough life, you know.”
“You mean because of losing his parents?”
“He didn’t just lose them,” Bill said. “Chris’s father murdered his mother and then committed suicide. After his folks died, Chris and his older brother were farmed out to live with their grandparents. One set of grandparents blamed Chris’s father for what happened. The other grandparents blamed his mother. Made Chris feel like he was in the middle of a tug-of-war.”
Of course I knew all the details of that far too well, but I was gratified to have found not just one of Chris’s friends but a good one at that, and I was eager to learn more.