“Who is it, Pen?” asked a male voice from somewhere deep in the house. I assumed the person asking the question had to be Nitz’s Uncle Wally.
“It’s Mr. Beaumont, that detective Nitza spoke to yesterday,” Penny said, calling over her shoulder, “the guy who’s looking for Chris.”
I made a mental note of that. Danitza Miller might be Nitz everywhere else, but in this household and as far as her Aunt Penny and Uncle Wally were concerned, she was Nitza.
“Well, have him come inside so you can shut the damned door,” the man ordered irritably. “It’s freezing, and we don’t need to pay to heat the great outdoors.”
“Won’t you come in?” Penny Olmstead invited. Once inside, she pointed toward a collection of shoes sitting just beyond the door. “If you don’t mind,” she said.
I was standing on a welcome mat–style rug in a small entryway, but the flooring in the next room was a highly polished hardwood. Clearly Aunt Penny didn’t want anyone tracking snow or melted salt water inside. There was a small bench there, and so I complied with her wishes by sitting down and slipping off my boots. I was grateful for the bench. My fake knees are a miracle for most things, but standing upright while removing boots isn’t one of them.
“You and your niece look a lot alike,” I observed.
Penny Olmstead gave me a tentative smile. “Yes, we do,” she agreed. “We always have.”
When the boots were off, I looked down at my stockinged feet, grateful that I wasn’t wearing socks with holes in them.
From the small entryway, Penny led me into the wood-paneled interior of the house, where it felt as though the temperature had to be somewhere in the eighties. Obviously the baseboard heaters were working overtime. We walked past a compact dining area complete with an old-fashioned table and six matching chairs. The polished tabletop was decorated with a gorgeous Christmas centerpiece made of freshly cut evergreen branches studded with white and red candles.
Beyond the dining room was a cozy seating area. Much of the far wall was taken up by a large brick fireplace with a wood fire crackling inside. The large flat-screen TV, perched on the mantel, was tuned to the Golf Channel. On-screen some guy whose name I didn’t recognize was teeing off at a green, palm-tree-lined golf course far away from wintertime Alaska. In the corner next to the fireplace sat a petite but fully decorated Christmas tree. It was pretty enough, but unlike the wreath on the table it wasn’t real.
The walls on either side of the fireplace contained a gallery of framed photos, almost all of them featuring Christopher James Danielson. Taken together they showed a chronology of the boy's young life. There were photos of birthday celebrations, complete with cakes and candles. One school head shot after another showed his gradual facial changes from year to year. Several showcased him in a Cub Scout uniform while others had him dressed in a Little League outfit, glove and all. Those kinds of over-the-top photo displays are usually limited to the walls of doting grandparents. In this case the doting was being done by a loving great-aunt and -uncle.
Seating arrangements in the space consisted of two leather recliners directly in front of the TV set with a narrow end table standing between them. Off to one side sat an upholstered love seat. A rolling walker was stationed within easy reach of a graying fifty-something man seated in one of the recliners.
“I’m Walter Olmstead,” he said, holding out his hand in greeting. “Have a seat. I hope you’ll forgive me for not standing. Football injury,” he added in explanation, patting one hip, “a new one rather than an old one. I’m the coach, you see. The first game of the season was a doozy. In the middle of a crucial play, I saw two players charging straight for me. Unfortunately, I dodged to the right when I should have dodged to the left. Broke my hip and had to be stretchered off the field. The doctors tried screwing it back together, but they finally gave up and did a hip replacement. With any kind of luck, I’ll be back at school after Christmas break.”
“Ouch,” I said, settling onto the love seat while Penny sat down on the other recliner.
“Them’s the breaks,” Walter said with an offhand shrug accompanied by an engaging grin. “But the Wolverines went on to win state without me, so you can see how much my coaching is worth. What can we do for you, Mr. Beaumont?”
“As your wife said, I met with Danitza yesterday—with her and James both. He looks like a great kid,” I added, gesturing toward the collection of photos.
“He is a great kid,” Walter declared proudly, “no question about it. His mom has done a terrific job of raising him.”
“But not without a good deal of assistance from the two of you.”
“We do our best,” Penny agreed with a modest smile.
“But what can we do for you today?” Walter insisted. “Why this sudden interest in finding Chris now? Why not twelve years ago?”
“Because twelve years ago it wasn’t clear he was missing,” I answered. “Since Chris was estranged from both sets of grandparents at the time he disappeared, no one ever got around to reporting him as missing. Now, though, his only remaining grandmother, Annie Hinkle, is likely on her deathbed back in Ohio. She asked Chris’s brother, Jared, to try to find him in hopes of having a last-minute reconciliation. Jared’s the one who brought me into the picture.”
“I don’t see how we can be of much help,” Penny said. “Wally and I never actually met Chris. All we know about him is what Nitza has told us over the years.”
“From what I’ve heard, you two were part of a very limited group of people who knew much of anything about what was really going on at the time Chris went missing.”
“You mean about her being pregnant?” Penny asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “I guess Nitza’s parents weren’t too thrilled with the news. What can you tell me?”
“Saying they weren’t thrilled doesn’t come close!” Penny objected. “Roger Adams was downright furious, and when Roger is angry, he’s a force to be reckoned with. As for my sister, when it came to choosing between her husband or her daughter, Eileen always went along with whatever Roger said. That’s one of the reasons I tried to stay close to Nitza over the years, even when she was little. I wanted her to feel like she had someone on her side.”
“You must have succeeded,” I remarked, “because that night when the chips were down, she trusted you enough to come straight here.”
“And we’re both glad she did,” Walter declared, sending a smile in his wife’s direction. “I was always troubled by the way Roger and Eileen treated their daughter, but when Roger refused to let Nitza attend her own mother’s funeral? That was the last straw in my book.”
“Did you go?” I asked Penny.
“To the funeral, you mean?” she wanted to know.
I nodded.
“I tried,” Penny said. “Nitza and I wouldn’t even have known it was happening if one of Shelley’s friends hadn’t called and told me about it.”