“He told me so,” Jared replied, “time and again.”
Passing blame around made it sound to me as though maybe Christopher Danielson was a chip off his father’s old block. “So tell me about Chris,” I said. “What’s his deal?”
Jared sighed again before he answered. Whoever wrote that line “He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother” never met Jared Danielson’s little bro.
“With both our parents gone, our mom’s folks—our grandparents, Annie and Frank Hinkle—took us back home to Monroe, Ohio, to live with them. It was a good place to grow up, or at least it was for me if not for Chris. I graduated from high school and won a scholarship to Ohio State. By the time Chris was in eighth grade, he was already smoking, drinking, ditching school, and sneaking out of the house at night. Gramps was an Eagle Scout kind of guy. Whenever he tried to get Chris to straighten up and fly right, Chris backtalked like crazy. He barely made it through eighth grade, but right after graduation he snuck into their bedroom one night, stole money out of both Grandma’s purse and Grandpa’s wallet, and then took off.
“Naturally they were worried sick about it and reported him missing. The cops looked for him but couldn’t find him anywhere. Three months later our dad’s mother, Linda Danielson, wrote to Grandma Hinkle saying that Chris had turned up on their doorstep in Homer, Alaska, asking to stay. She said he claimed he’d run away because Grandpa Hinkle had beaten him with his belt, something I can tell you for sure never happened. Gramps wasn’t that way. She said that since Chris wanted to live with her and Grandpa Danielson, she needed his school transcripts and shot records so she could get him enrolled in high school there.”
“Your other grandparents went along with that?”
Jared shrugged. “What else could they do? They had done their best by both of us, and they decided there wasn’t much sense in trying to force him to come back. They figured he’d just take off again, so why bother?”
“What happened then?”
“I’m not sure. He stayed on with the Danielsons for a while—I don’t know for how long. He ended up dropping out of high school without graduating and took off again.”
“Did you try contacting your grandmother over the years?”
Jared shook his head. “I didn’t really know that side of the family. We weren’t ever close, not even before Mom died to say nothing of after. Maybe you remember that none of them bothered to come to Mom’s memorial service, and if they had one for our father, Chris and I never heard about it.”
“You weren’t even invited?”
Jared shook his head again. “So other than that one letter requesting Chris’s school information, we—meaning my grandparents and I—never heard another word from my father’s side of the family. It was like they had disappeared off the face of the earth.”
I’d seen situations like this countless times before. When domestic violence results in a homicide, the lingering aftereffects can continue to tear a family apart for generations.
“Obviously all this happened years ago,” I observed, “so why are you on a mission to find Chris now, and why come to me?”
“Gram Hinkle isn’t well,” Jared told me. “She’s in assisted living and wants to make things right with Chris before she passes on. I think she wants to see him one last time, and I took a leave of absence to try to help her get that sorted.”
“This sounds as if your grandmother took the parable about the prodigal son to heart,” I suggested. “The kid who goes AWOL gets the brass-band treatment when he comes home. As for the son who never ran off in the first place? He’s more or less taken for granted and brushed aside.”
Jared favored me with another nod accompanied by a rueful grin. “Right, he’s the guy who gets sent out searching for the one who isn’t there—if he still exists, that is.”
“You think Chris might be dead?”
“Maybe or maybe not,” Jared replied. “I have no idea. No one on our side of the family has heard from him directly since he left Ohio at age thirteen.”
“Have you filed a missing-persons report?”
“Chris may be missing from our lives, but that doesn’t mean he’s missing as far as other people are concerned, so no. We haven’t filed a missing-persons report.”
“Have you tried contacting your other grandmother?”
He nodded. “She died two years ago.”