“Do we have an exact date for that disappearance?”
“No,” I replied. “We don’t.”
“Date of birth?” Todd asked.
“September eighteenth, 1988.”
“Social Security number?”
“No idea,” I replied, “but I’m sure you’ll find one. Given the nature of the boys’ parents’ deaths, the two sets of grandparents weren’t exactly on the best of terms, and that kind of information wasn’t passed along to the folks in Ohio.”
“Was a missing-persons report filed at the time?”
“Maybe, maybe not. We’re not sure.”
“We?” Todd asked.
“Jared and I,” I answered. “Jared, Chris’s older brother, is a newly ordained priest now—Father Danielson. He’s looked as far as he’s been able to but hasn’t found anything. Unfortunately, he isn’t blessed with your kind of Internet search skills. Neither am I, for that matter.”
As Todd and I talked, I was thumbing through the copy of The Log that Jared had left behind. That particular yearbook’s original owner, a girl whose name was Edwina Moran, had been a sophomore the year Chris was a senior. As I glanced at all the very young faces pictured there, I wondered which of the guys in Chris’s class might have been pals with him. Were any of those people still living in Homer? Did any of them remember him? Had they wondered and worried about Chris’s sudden disappearance from their midst? And if so, why hadn’t there been more of a reaction to his absence? Although, since Chris’s grandmother hadn’t seen fit to file a missing-persons report, I could see why none of his friends might have done so on their own. After all, since they were just a bunch of kids, who was going to pay any attention to them?
“All right,” Todd said finally. “This gives me a starting place. I’ll see what I can do, and I’ll send you whatever turns up.”
“Thanks,” I said. “You know where to send the bill.”
“Didn’t you say that the boy’s mother was your partner?” Todd asked.
“Yes,” I said quietly. “Yes, she was.”
“In that case there won’t be a bill.”
That blue line may be thin, but it’s very strong, and there was a lump in my throat when I answered. “Appreciate it, Todd,” I said, “more than you know.”
After the call ended, I studied the senior section of The Log once more, thumbing through it a page at a time, studying the earnest faces pictured there as well as the captions underneath each photo. Somewhere along the way, I remembered something about my mother and me. During eighth grade I fell in with some of the tough kids at school—a gang of five boys, all of them seemingly determined to go in the wrong direction. Somehow my mother got wind of it, probably through the principal. That summer she kept me on very short boundaries. When I asked her why, she told me, “Birds of a feather flock together, and I don’t want you hanging out with those guys.”
When it came time for my freshman year at Ballard High School, she told me, “Okay, there’s football, basketball, or track—pick one.” I was tall and scrawny, so naturally I chose basketball. Eventually I became reasonably proficient at it and moved on to the varsity squad during my sophomore year. As a result I ended up in a completely different social milieu from that gang of young toughs.
As for my eighth-grade pals? Two of them never graduated from high school and went to work on family fishing boats in Seattle. One of the boats sank, and my former friend’s name along with those of his father, two brothers, and a cousin are all engraved on the memorial at Seattle’s Fishermen’s Terminal. As for the other one? He took his fishing money and opened a small used-car dealership that eventually morphed into two large new-car dealerships.
Of the three of us who did graduate, one got drafted right out of high school. His name is engraved in black granite at the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. The second one went to prison in his early twenties on a vehicular-manslaughter charge after killing two people, an elderly couple, while he was driving drunk. I have no idea what became of him after that. As for number three? That would be yours truly, who ended up in law enforcement as a homicide cop. I may not be a police officer anymore, not officially, but that’s how I still think of myself—as a cop.
Suddenly all those innocent-looking young faces in the yearbook took on a whole new meaning. I flipped back through the pages again, studying the captions more carefully this time, looking for the kids who might have been shoved aside, bullied, or dissed. I ignored the people who were student-body or class officers. I ignored the valedictorian and salutatorian. Ditto for the guys who played varsity sports or were in the National Honor Society. Instead I went searching for guys like Chris who had nothing at all in their captions—no honors, sports, or club affiliations whatsoever. If Chris Danielson had been a nobody—an outsider—chances are his best friends would have been cut from the same cloth.