Nothing to Lose (J.P. Beaumont #25)(36)

Must not have been Bill Farmdale’s either, I thought.

Thinking about our next stop, I changed the subject. “What kind of place is the Anchor Bar and Grill?” I asked.

“It’s mostly a dive,” she answered. “Not exactly high on our list of tourist attractions and probably doesn’t have any of them Michelin stars.”

“I’m not a tourist,” I grumbled aloud. “I’m working.”

The new heater core might have been humming along like a champ, but the atmosphere inside the Travelall turned suddenly frosty. “Well, pardon me all to hell,” Twink responded huffily. Obviously I had offended her, although I wasn’t quite sure how.

A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of a raised ranch on a well-plowed street. I was glad to see that the walkway and front steps leading up to the house had been cleared of snow.

“How long are you gonna be this time?” Twink wanted to know. “According to the terms of my contract, I believe I’m due for a lunch break pretty soon.”

“We’ll have lunch after this interview,” I assured her, hoping to get back on her good side. “You choose the spot. I’ll buy.”

After leaving the Travelall, I made my way to the front porch and rang the doorbell. The hefty guy who answered the door was in his late twenties and was wearing a pair of East Anchorage High School sweats. Behind him I heard the voices of some young kids squabbling.

“Mr. Farmdale?” I said, offering my hand.

He peered over my shoulder and took in the Travelall before giving me a wary look. “Who’s asking?” he wanted to know.

“My name’s J. P. Beaumont,” I explained, pulling a business card out of my pocket and offering that in place of the handshake. “I’m a private investigator from Seattle, and I’m looking into the 2006 disappearance of a young man named Christopher Danielson. I was wondering if there was a chance he might be a friend of yours.”

Bill Farmdale’s eyes widened. “You’re looking for Chris?”

I nodded.

The wariness he had exhibited before vanished. “It’s about damned time someone did!” he exclaimed. “Come on in.”

The kids I had heard were two boys, maybe ten or eleven, duking it out in some bang-bang-shoot-’em-up video game on a big-screen TV hung over a gas-log fireplace. Bill Farmdale invited me to take a seat on a somewhat saggy sectional with more than a few crumbs and bits of popcorn showing here and there. Meanwhile he spent the next five minutes booting the kids out of the living room. They weren’t happy about having their video warfare uprooted, and it took a promised bribe of snacks in the kitchen to finally dislodge them. I hoped Mr. Farmdale, the teacher, had better disciplinary skills with his students at school than Bill Farmdale, the father, did with his kids at home.

The house had been built long enough ago that “open concept” had yet to be an architectural requirement. When Farmdale returned to the living room and shut the kitchen door behind him, the two kids were in an entirely separate space and completely out of earshot.

“So you knew Chris Danielson?” I confirmed as he flopped down onto the sofa beside me.

“I did,” he said.

“And you were friends?”

Bill nodded.

“Close friends?” I asked.

“I guess,” Bill admitted, “as close as anyone ever got. Chris was kind of a loner who didn’t have many friends. He had a pretty rough life, you know.”

“You mean because of losing his parents?”

“He didn’t just lose them,” Bill said. “Chris’s father murdered his mother and then committed suicide. After his folks died, Chris and his older brother were farmed out to live with their grandparents. One set of grandparents blamed Chris’s father for what happened. The other grandparents blamed his mother. Made Chris feel like he was in the middle of a tug-of-war.”

Of course I knew all the details of that far too well, but I was gratified to have found not just one of Chris’s friends but a good one at that, and I was eager to learn more.

“I understand Chris was living with his paternal grandmother in Homer and moved out after some kind of disagreement with her. Do you know anything about that?” I asked.

“Chris didn’t just move out,” Bill corrected. “His grandmother booted him out. He came home from school one day in the dead of winter and found all his stuff left in a heap on the front porch. She had also changed the locks on the doors. He didn’t have a car or anyplace to stay. I came over in my folks’ car and loaded all his crap into that. Some guys I knew were sharing a house. They’d just lost a roommate and had an extra room to rent, so he moved in with them.”

“I was under the impression he’d stolen money from his grandmother and that’s why he moved out.”

“That’s what she claimed, but it wasn’t true,” Bill said with a firm shake of his head. “That woman was a witch and mean as a snake. Once Chris’s granddad died, his grandmother couldn’t wait to get rid of him. She made his life miserable in hopes of getting Chris to leave on his own. When he didn’t, she was the one who made it happen.”

“Is that when he dropped out of school?”

Bill nodded. “His grades weren’t all that good even before then, and he was already in danger of not being able to graduate, so he just quit. He hoped to hire on with one of the fishing boats eventually. In the meantime he wanted to earn enough money to go back to Ohio to visit the rest of his family—his brother and his other grandmother. That’s when I helped him get a job washing dishes in my uncle’s restaurant.”