“Greg and I became friends first. He was great with James. Took him fishing. Taught him how to ski—did all those boy things with him. We ended up falling in love. Greg was ready to get married a lot sooner than I was, but in time he won me over. He had bought this place on his own before we got married. It was way more expensive than I could ever afford, but he told me not to worry. He said that when he bought the house, he signed up for mortgage insurance. He had to pay a higher premium because of his job, but he told me that if anything ever happened to him, the house would be paid in full, and it was—five years later he went down with the Snow-Queen.”
Ballard, the area where I grew up, is still ground zero for Seattle’s fishing fleet, and the world of commercial fishermen is a tight-knit community. If a boat goes down somewhere, people from Ballard pay attention, because there’s a good chance someone they know might have been on board. So I remembered the Snow-Queen incident. The vessel had lost power, iced up, and capsized during a raging storm in the Bering Sea. Crew members abandoned ship, but they had all succumbed to the cold long before the coast guard was able to reach them. No one survived.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Nitz nodded. “Thank you. I still miss them both,” she added, “Chris because he was my first love and Greg because he was such an incredibly good man. As far as love is concerned, I consider myself a two-time loser—except for James, of course.”
As if on cue, the front door slammed open. “Hey, Mom,” a young voice called. “I’m home. What’s for dinner?”
Christopher James Danielson had announced his arrival before he ever closed the door. As soon as he did so, he saw his mother and me sitting in the living room. “Oh, sorry,” he said quickly. “I didn’t know we had company.”
“This is Mr. Beaumont,” Danitza said. “He was a friend of your birth father’s back when he and his brother were living in Seattle.”
James was a long-legged and good-looking preteen whose striking resemblance to his uncle, Father Jared Danielson, was downright spooky.
I held out my hand. Slipping off his backpack, James walked over and returned the gesture with a surprisingly firm grip and a ready grin. “Glad to meet you, sir,” he murmured respectfully. “Did you really know my father?”
I nodded. “Your dad was several years younger than you are now, but yes, I knew him and his older brother, Jared, too.”
“What was he like?”
In all of James’s twelve years, I suspect I was possibly the only person alive, other than his mother, who had actually known Chris Danielson in the flesh.
“He was a good boy,” I answered truthfully. “He and his brother both were, and neither of them deserved to lose their parents the way they did.” I wanted to add the words “and neither did you” to that statement, but I didn’t. And it turns out I didn’t have to. Looking me in the eye, James favored me with a tiny nod that told me he got it. As someone who had already lost two parents—both his birth father and his stepfather—he understood all too well.
“How are you fixed for homework?” Danitza asked, interrupting our conversation and precluding any further discussion.
“I’ve got some math and a lot of social studies,” he answered.
“Go upstairs and work on that while I finish with Mr. Beaumont here,” she said. “Once you’re done with schoolwork, we’ll order a pizza.”
James’s face brightened. “Sounds good,” he said. With that he gathered his backpack and disappeared up the stairs.
For a moment I couldn’t speak past another catch in my throat. Christopher James Danielson was clearly a terrific, well-brought-up young man. It broke my heart to think that his grandmother never got to meet him. Sue Danielson would have been so very proud.
Chapter 9
It had been overcast and getting dark when I parked in front of Danitza Miller’s home an hour or so earlier. When I left a little after five, I came outside to discover it was pitch dark and had started to snow. So far it didn’t amount to much—mostly light flurries. In Seattle it would’ve been enough to have people crowding grocery stores’ aisles to do “panic” shopping. Once some of the white stuff stuck, drivers on Seattle’s roadways would have gone nuts and started slamming into one another. In Anchorage it was business as usual.
Back at the hotel, I sat in my room for a while and perused the notes I’d made during my long conversation with Danitza Miller. With each detail I began putting together a timeline on Chris’s disappearance. The last Sunday in March of that year would have been the twenty-sixth. Nitz had spent the previous night at Chris’s place, and then he’d taken her home the next morning because she wasn’t feeling well. The big fight with her parents that had resulted in her leaving home had happened the following day, on Monday evening.