Back in my hotel room, I turned once more to The Log. This time, rather than focus on the junior-class head-shot photos, I scrolled through the various groupings of kids involved in extracurricular activities, scanning through the captions on the bottom, and found Danitza Adams’s name listed again and again. She was a member of the varsity cheerleading squad. She was in both the National Honor Society and the Quill and Scroll, an organization that recognizes high-school kids involved in journalism of one sort or another. Sure enough, Danitza was pictured as part of the yearbook crew. She had also played Juliet in that year’s school presentation of Romeo and Juliet.
That set me to thinking. Her family and Chris’s weren’t exactly the Montagues and the Capulets, but still, how could a bright young girl who had all the potential of being voted Most Likely to Succeed have ended up with an apparent loser of a kid like Chris, someone who seemed hell-bent on turning himself into a deadbeat? How had the two of them become a couple? I suspected that neither family would have been any too thrilled by the prospect.
As a consequence I wasn’t just Johnny-on-the-spot at Danitza’s place for our scheduled three-thirty appointment—I actually arrived fifteen minutes early, bringing with me, I confess, a preconceived notion about what I’d find there.
Danitza Miller was a single mom. Having been raised in a two-bedroom apartment by an unwed mother, I knew something about that reality. Growing up, I’d always envied kids who were able to live in actual houses. We never did, and my mom was a renter until the day she died. Since Danitza and her son were also a one-income family, I expected to find them living in somewhat humble surroundings. Instead when I pulled up outside the address on Wiley Loop Road, I found myself parked in front of a respectable-looking two-story house in what appeared to be a prosperous suburban neighborhood. The tall wooden fence surrounding the yard was strung with an array of multicolored lights, and a fully decorated Christmas tree glowed in the front window. Given that this was Alaska in the winter, I suspected Christmas lights stayed on around the clock. In fact, although it was barely midafternoon on my watch, the pinkish glow of the sky overhead said it was close to sunset.
When Danitza drove up in a late-model Honda, I noticed that she pulled in to a two-car garage with an SUV of some kind parked in the other bay. Hers might have been a one-income, one-driver family, but she had a two-car garage with two cars parked inside. My first thought was that maybe her folks had been helping her out financially, but of course I turned out to be dead wrong on that score. I was about to discover that the Adams family, not unlike my mother’s, never lifted a finger to help either their single-mother daughter or their fatherless grandson.
A shoveled walk led to the front porch, but Danitza motioned me over to the driveway and into the garage. Being ushered into her house like that, through the back door and into a small but tidy kitchen, made me feel as though I were being treated as a longtime acquaintance or friend rather than a complete stranger. In the mudroom she encouraged me to strip off the parka (warmer than I actually needed) and my boots before she led me on into the living room, turning on more lights as she went.
I paused at the fireplace and looked at a framed photo of a young man sitting in a place of honor among the Christmas decorations on the mantel. At first glance I thought it was Christopher, but closer examination revealed that wasn’t the case. The haircut and clothing didn’t work. This had to be a recent school portrait of Christopher James Danielson rather than one of his absent father.
“Your son’s a good-looking kid,” I commented, sensing that Danitza had walked up behind me and was gazing past my shoulder toward the photo.
“He is that,” she allowed. “Jimmy looks a lot like his dad. He’s also a straight-A student, plays in the jazz band, and helps out around the house. He’s the one who put up all the Christmas decorations.”
Having just accomplished that complex task on my own for the first time ever, I was suitably impressed.
“Won’t you take a seat?” she invited. “Can I get you something?”
“No, I’m fine, thank you,” I said sinking down onto a nearby sofa.
Danitza took a place in an easy chair across from me, laid my card on the intervening glass-topped coffee table, and then looked me in the face. “You’re a private detective, Mr. Beaumont?” she asked.
I nodded. “Most people call me Beau.”
“And most people call me Nitz,” she told me. “You said Jared Danielson hired you to look for Chris?” I nodded. “All right, then,” she continued resignedly. “What do you want to know?”
I decided this was no time for playing games or pulling punches. “Your initial response this morning surprised me,” I said.
“How so?”
“Once I said Chris has never returned to Ohio, you immediately concluded he had to be dead. Why?”
“When he left Homer without saying a word to me, that’s what I assumed—that he’d gone back home to Ohio. A couple of months earlier, he had gotten into a big fight with his grandmother in Homer, left her house, and dropped out of school. He was renting a room at a friend’s house and waiting tables at a local hamburger joint, Zig’s Place, trying to save up enough money to pay for a trip back to Ohio later that spring. He said he owed his brother an apology, and he wanted to deliver it in person. When he came back to Alaska, he told me he planned on getting a job on one of the fishing boats. You don’t have to have a high-school diploma to do that.”
“Wait,” I said. “What’s this about an apology?”
“As soon as I saw your card this morning, I recognized your name.” Nitz paused and gave me a piercing look. “You’re the detective who urged Jared to grab Chris and leave the house the night their parents died, right?”
I nodded. “Guilty as charged.”
“Chris and I talked a lot about that night,” Danitza said. “He was still a little kid when it happened, and that terrible event haunted him. He was angry that his parents were dead, and why wouldn’t he be? When he was shipped off to Ohio to live with his maternal grandparents, things got worse. He was rebellious and acting out. By the time I met him, he was starting to feel guilty about how much trouble he’d given his grandmother before he finally ran away and came to live with his other grandparents in Homer.
“While he was living in Ohio, his mother’s parents only told him their daughter’s side of the story. Once he got to Homer, his father’s family did the opposite. They filled him full of his father’s point of view. The Danielsons claimed that Richie was the real victim—that he’d been driven to do what he did because Sue was such a poor excuse for a wife and mother.”
“So one set of grandparents said one thing and the other ones said something else?” I asked.
Danitza nodded. “Which meant Chris ended up not knowing who or what to believe. Not only that. To begin with I believe Chris was under the impression that if he and Jared hadn’t left the house that night—if they had still been there—they could somehow have prevented what happened.”