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.