Nothing to Lose, page 13
Todd had sent me a photocopy of John Borman’s driver’s license, so even though the bartender was at the far end of the bar, I knew he was the guy I wanted to see. Bartenders need to be reasonably gregarious, but they’re generally not wild about talking to detectives of any kind—sworn officers and private investigators alike. It’s usually considered bad for business. They do, however, engage in conversations with paying customers, so when the barkeep came my way, I ordered a ginger ale.
“Not a drinker?” he asked as he delivered my alcohol-free beverage.
“Turns out it was bad for my health,” I replied. “You’re John Borman, right?”
“Depends on who’s asking,” he said. “Who are you?”
I slid one of my cards across the bar. He picked it up and studied it for a moment.
“A private detective?” he asked with a frown. “What’s this all about?”
“I’m looking into the disappearance of Christopher Danielson.”
The frown deepened into a scowl. “From Homer, you mean? That’s yesterday’s news,” he said. “Chris disappeared years ago, while we were all still in high school. You thinking maybe I had something to do with it?”
“I’m just trying to talk to people who possibly knew him back in the day and might have an idea about what became of him.”
That was a giveaway. Had Chris and Borman been close, he would have been aware that Chris had already dropped out of school before he disappeared.
“I’m not going to be of much use to you,” Borman said, confirming my initial assumption. “I mean, I knew who he was, but I didn’t really know him. We weren’t friends or anything. We were maybe in a couple of classes together, but that’s it. He was sort of a sad sack. I think something bad happened in his family when he was little, but I don’t know much about it.”
I nodded. “Domestic violence. His dad killed his mother and then committed suicide.” Sometimes you have to give a little information in order to get some.
“I never knew that part,” Borman conceded.
“What did you know?”
“Just that Chris was mostly an odd duck, a perpetual outsider, so it surprised the hell out of me when I heard he was hanging around with one of the most popular girls at Homer High. How does that happen? Then, a while after that, he was just gone. Word was that his girlfriend was pregnant and they ran off to get married. That’s the last thing I remember hearing.”
A customer down the bar caught Borman's eye and summoned him with a wave of his finger. As he walked away, I could tell that although my “unaffiliated boy” theory had come up winners with Bill Farmdale, it was a dud here. Chris had regarded Bill as a friend—someone Chris had turned to in his time of need. John Borman had been Chris’s sometime classmate, but that was it.
When the bartender returned, I dropped a ten-dollar bill on the counter. “Thanks for the help,” I told him. “Keep the change.”
Setting foot outside the bar, I noticed that the sky was once again that weird shade of pink that made it look like late afternoon. Inside the smoke-filled Travelall, Twink assured me that that pinkish glow was what passed for afternoon daylight in wintertime Anchorage.
“Where to now?” Twink wanted to know as she punched the button on the cigarette lighter.
The truth is, I had no idea. Danitza Miller, Bill Farmdale, and John Borman had been the only three names on my Anchorage to-do list. Two of the three had produced worthwhile information. I had already told Jared Danielson that his brother was most likely dead, but I’d had to do that in order to rush the DNA comparison. The next time I spoke to Nitz, I wanted to have a clear answer one way or the other—either the human remains in Harriet Raines’s lab belonged to Chris Danielson or they did not. Until I knew for sure, there was no reason to see her again.
Bill Farmdale had told me about the mysterious woman whose tire had needed changing the night Chris disappeared. She was certainly a likely suspect in my opinion, but would a random stranger show up at his work, lure him away, and then murder him just for the hell of it? No, I was sure someone with motive must have been behind it. The most promising suspect there was an irate father who’d just discovered that his unwed daughter was pregnant. I needed someone who wasn’t Danitza herself to shed some light on her dear old dad. Suddenly it occurred to me there might be another person in Anchorage who could do just that.
I had evidently been sitting there thinking for far too long. “Well?” Twink demanded impatiently.
“Hang on,” I told her. “Let me give someone a call.”
I pulled out my cell phone and punched in Todd Hatcher’s number. “What do you need now?” he asked. I got the distinct feeling he was growing weary of my constantly badgering him for information.
“I’d like the address for a Penny and Wally Olmstead. Maybe it’s Walter instead of Wally. I understand they live here in Anchorage, but I have no idea where.”
In a matter of seconds of rapid-fire keyboarding, I heard an incoming text arrive on my phone. “Sent,” Todd said.
“And received,” I told him. “Thanks.”
I read the address aloud to Twink Winkleman. “Peck Avenue is due east of here,” she said, turning the key in the ignition. “Maude and I will have us there in a jiffy.”
Exactly one and a half cigarettes later, we pulled up in front of a small frame residence in the 8000 block of Peck Avenue. It was a modest one-story tract house that looked as though it had been built in the sixties. There were lights on inside, which led me to believe someone was home. Twink pulled in to the cleared driveway and parked.
“Don’t worry,” she told me. “I’ll wait.”
Chapter 15
Once outside the vehicle, I followed a narrow cleared path from the driveway to the front door. Clearly people in Alaska are serious about shoveling their walks.
After ringing the bell, I waited the better part of a minute before a woman finally came to the door. When she opened it, an enticing aroma of cooking food wafted through the air. All day long my beleaguered nostrils had been assailed by secondhand smoke, both from Twink’s chain-smoked cigarettes and Harriet Raines’s cigar. Whatever garlicky delight Penny Olmstead was cooking up in her kitchen—beef stew maybe?—served as a welcome antidote.
The woman standing in the doorway was tiny, with short blond hair. I guessed her to be somewhere in her late thirties or early forties. If I had encountered Penny and Danitza Miller walking down a street together, I probably would have assumed the two of them to be sisters rather than auntie and niece.
“Yes?” she inquired, staring up at me.
“Penny Olmstead?” I asked.
She nodded. “Who are you?”
I handed her one of my cards, and she studied it for a moment before saying, “You must be that private detective from Seattle. Nitza was telling me about you.”
“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.”
“One of Shelley’s friends?” I asked. “You mean Roger himself didn’t let you or Nitza know that Eileen had passed away?”
Penny shook her head. “He never said a word! One of Shelley’s good friends, Betsy Norman, was working in the hospital in Homer when Eileen was undergoing chemo. Back when we were kids, Bets and I knew each other from youth group at church. When she got to high school and started running with Shelley and the rest of the cheerleader crowd, the two of us drifted apart. Still, if she hadn’t called to express her condolences about my losing Eileen, Nitza and I wouldn’t have known her mother was gone.”
That struck me as odd. Using my iPad, I made a quick note of Betsy Norman’s name.“No one else called to notify you?”
“Bets was the only one.” There was more than a hint of bitterness in Aunt Penny’s reply, and I didn’t blame her. It was as though once Aunt Penny had taken Danitza’s side in the quarrel between her and her parents, the whole town of Homer had closed ranks against the two of them, with the sole exception being this Betsy person, who happened to be pals with Roger’s longtime mistress and soon-to-be bride.
“Anyway,” Penny continued, “Nitza and I found out when the funeral was scheduled to happen, and we drove over to Homer together, taking Jimmy with us. Except when we got to the church, there was an Alaska State Trooper stationed outside on the front steps. He wouldn’t let Nitza and Jimmy inside, so I didn’t go in either, but Shelley was there in all her glory. She came waltzing up the steps, big as you please, just as we were turning to leave. She was dolled up in head-to-toe black, looking like your basic mourner-in-chief. Knowing what I knew, just seeing her there acting like a full-fledged member of the family made me sick to my stomach. I wanted to grab that woman and strangle her on the spot. How dare she!”
“When you mentioned knowing what you knew, I’m assuming you mean that you were aware your brother-in-law and Shelley were having an affair long before your sister died.”
Penny nodded.
“How long had you known?”
“A year or so before Nitza came to live with us, I was at a restaurant here in downtown Anchorage for a friend’s baby shower when I spotted the two of them together. I recognized Shelley right off. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. They were too busy acting like a pair of love-starved teenagers who couldn’t keep their hands off each other.”
“Did you tell your sister?” I asked.
Penny shook her head. “I suppose I should have, but I didn’t. For one thing, Eileen was totally besotted with Roger, and knowing he was cheating on her would have broken her heart. Besides, I kept thinking the fling would run its course and go away, but with Shelley Hollander Loveday in the picture, I should have known better.”
“Wait, are you saying Roger’s other woman was someone you already knew?”
“Oh, I knew Shelley, all right,” Penny sniffed. “I was in school with her, too. I was a junior when she was a freshman. She was the kind of girl who always went for older guys. Even as a freshman, she only dated upperclassmen. She likes her men to be older and well-to-do.”
“Maybe when it comes to liking older men,” Walter observed with a grin, “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.”
Penny returned his grin with a fond smile, as though this older-man/younger-woman issue was a long-standing joke between them. “I dated lots of guys my age before I ended up with you,” she teased.
“So Roger Adams isn’t Shelley’s first husband?” I interjected, trying to steer the interview back on course.
“By no means. Shelley was always a bit of a wild thing. When everybody else was talking about going off to college, she was dead set on becoming a bush pilot, and that’s exactly what she did. As soon as she graduated, she signed up for flight school. Jack Loveday not only owned the school, he was also Shelley’s flight instructor. He might have been twenty years older than Shelley and married at the time, but that didn’t keep her from putting the moves on him. She got what she wanted. Jack and his first wife, Lois, divorced. Lois went away, and Shelley became the second Mrs. Jack Loveday. Jack gave Shelley her very own Piper Cherokee as a wedding present.”
