"Here we are," Betty Cutler announced nervously as she entered the well-kept, modestly decorated living room, putting the large tray down on the cleared off coffee table. "What would you like in your coffees?" There was a nervous edge to her voice as she reached for the milk jug.

With a warm smile, Mike slid himself to the edge of the large blue velvet sofa and leaned over the coffee table. "Oh, that's alright, Mrs. Cutler, we can help ourselves, can't we, Steve?" He included his young partner with a slight turn of his head; the inspector nodded his concurrence, punctuated with a genial smile and nod. "Please, sit down," Mike continued, gesturing at the overstuffed armchair nearby.

Wiping her hands on her apron, the thin older woman with the wispy grey hair nodded hesitantly and sat. As the two detectives set about preparing their coffees, Mike said softly, "So, like I said before, Mrs. Cutler, we'd just like to ask you a few questions about your son Danny, if that's all right."

Mrs. Cutler swallowed heavily and nodded. "I don't know what I can tell you, Lieutenant. Danny wasn't living here when he disappeared… he'd moved out about ten months before and he didn't come around a lot…" She looked down at her clasped hands on her lap and bit her lower lip then raised her eyes again and smiled sadly. "He and his daddy didn't get along too good. After the mill closed, Jack, my husband… well, he didn't take it so good. He'd been a foreman at the mill for over ten years. He worked his way up from a sawdust sweeper when he was just a boy; he was good at what he did. And when the mill closed down, all of a sudden he was just a middle-aged man without a job."

Steve, who had Danny Cutler's meager file open on his lap and his notebook balanced on his knee, was staring at her faraway expression, his pen frozen in mid-air. Mike had stopped stirring his coffee and was watching her expressionlessly.

Mrs. Cutler blinked several times and covered her unease with a soft, mirthless chuckle. "He, ah, he took his anger and his resentment out on Danny, I'm afraid. And Danny, bless his heart, he took it for awhile, he really did. He loved his daddy and he tried to understand, but Jack… well, Jack couldn't see that. All he could see was a son who wanted to go to a big university in the city somewhere and get away from Colville."

"Did Jack hit him?" Mike asked softly.

She blinked quickly several times before she met his soft and understanding eyes. She nodded. "Danny didn't fight back at first… he couldn't… it was his Daddy… But after awhile it became too much and he had to protect himself." She dropped her head and sighed then took a deep breath and looked up again. "The day Danny fought back, the day he dropped his father to the ground… that was the day Danny disappeared…" Tears began to roll silently down her cheeks. "Jack died six months ago… his car went off the road and into a tree… The police told me it was an accident… he'd been drinking… but I don't think it was an accident…"

Steve felt his throat tighten; he heard Mike inhale deeply beside him.

"I don't even know if Danny knows about his father…" Her voice was barely above a whisper; a heavy silence settled over them.

"Mrs. Cutler," the older detective began slowly and gently, "do you have any idea where your son could be?" She shook her head sadly. "Have you heard from him at all since he disappeared? A postcard? A letter? A phone call?" She continued to shake her head, not at all embarrassed at the tears that continued to course down her weather-beaten cheeks.

Mike looked down, took a deep breath and met her worried eyes once again. "We're gonna try to find out what happened to Danny, I promise you." He glanced at the file in his partner's lap then reached out to pick up the small colour photo that was paperclipped to the top of the folder. "This is the only picture we have of your son. Do you have one that's more recent and maybe a little less blurry?" he asked with a warm smile.

Mrs. Cutler's wet eyes travelled slowly to the small, creased print in the lieutenant's hand and she nodded. "Oh yes… yes, I do." She got to her feet and crossed to a bookshelf on the far side of the room.

Mike handed the photo back to Steve, their eyes meeting briefly. Mike's slight smile was sad but encouraging. As Mrs. Cutler rummaged through a stack of papers and envelopes on one of the congested shelves, Steve clipped the photo back onto the file and glanced at the list of questions he had written in the notebook. He looked up. "Ah, Mrs. Cutler," he began, then hesitated a beat, "do you have any idea if Danny was… was involved in –"

"If Danny was involved with anyone?"

He felt Mike's hand lightly on his arm and the older man's voice, a little louder than normal, overrode his own. He stopped talking and turned to his partner, who was staring at their hostess.

"Like did he have a girlfriend, do you know? Or some close friends from school that he was still in touch with?" After giving Steve's arm a quick squeeze, Mike picked up his cup and took a sip of the rapidly cooling coffee, keeping his eyes on Mrs. Cutler, who was returning to the armchair with a large brown envelope.

She managed to find a melancholic smile as she sat and opened the envelope, tipping it to allow a jumbled stack of photographic prints to slide out onto her lap. "Oh, Danny didn't have a girlfriend, Lieutenant, at least not that I knew of… but, well, I guess he could have. But he had a lot of friends… he was a very popular young man…" She smiled proudly, the tears starting to fall again. She brushed them away with the back of her hand as she started to sort through the pile of black-and-white and colour photographs on her lap.

Mike looked at his partner, briefly closing his eyes and nodding gently. Steve inhaled deeply and turned back to the grieving woman. "Mrs. Cutler, would you be able to give us a list of Danny's friends?"

She looked up from the photos, her brow furrowed, and stared at the young detective as if not understanding what he had requested. Then she smiled. "Yes, of course… I can do that." Her haunted eyes returned slowly to the photo she held in her right hand. She leaned towards Mike and held the print out. "Here, Lieutenant. This is a good picture of my son."

With a warm, encouraging smile and a nod, Mike took the photo and held it so Steve could see it as well. "That's a great shot, Mrs. Cutler. It's exactly what we need. I'll have Sheriff Manley make some copies and we'll return it to you as soon as we can. Is that alright?"

"Of course."

Both detectives stared at the colour snapshot of the handsome, sandy-haired young man with the deep dimples and sparking blue eyes. "He's a good-looking boy," Mike said quietly, trying to keep the emotion out of his words.

"Yes, he is, isn't he?"

Steve's eyes traveled from his partner's profile to the beaming face of the distressed yet hopeful woman whose eyes remained riveted on the photo in Mike's hand.

# # # # #

Mike slammed the car door and sagged back against the seat, staring dourly out the front window. Steve tossed the file on the seat between them as he fished the key out of his jacket pocket and stuck it in the ignition.

"That was tough," he said quietly.

"Yeah," the older man agreed, continuing to stare through the windshield. "I really hope we don't have to come back here and tell her her son is dead."

"Yeah," Steve replied with a sad shake of his head as he turned the key and the engine roared to life. He shifted into Drive and began to back the tan Galaxie out of the gravel driveway. "Which direction am I supposed to go?"

There was a long moment of silence. Steve knew the older man was thinking about his daughter, about how he'd be coping if Jeannie just disappeared one day.

"Oh, ah," Mike said abruptly, sitting up a little straighter and looking across the seat with an apologetic half-smile, "sorry…" He picked up the map that Manley had highlighted and ran his finger across it till he located their present location. "Ah, go left, back the way we came. I want to drop the list of Danny's friends off at the station so Carole can track down their home addresses for us. And we can ask to have copies of that new picture of Danny made too. Then we'll head over to the Sullivans."

"Sounds good," Steve agreed, swinging the sedan onto the eroding pavement.

They drove in silence for a couple of minutes before Steve shot a quick look across the front seat at his quiet partner. "Hey, uh, I'm sorry about almost blowing it back there. I realize now it was the wrong thing to ask –"

Mike had turned towards him and now he put a hand up and smiled. "Don't worry about it. The question still needs to be asked but I, ah, I don't think she'd know if Danny was taking drugs or not and I didn't want to put that thought in her mind. We'll learn more about that kinda thing from his friends instead of his mom."

"Yeah, you're right, of course." Steve let the silence settle over them again then smiled and raised his voice slightly. "Hey, ah, I was thinking, when we finish up today, why don't we head into Crocker tonight, check out that bar John told us about. I don't know about you, but I think I'll be needing a nice cold beer about then, and he said the food was good and they've got a couple of pool tables." He glanced across the front seat again; Mike was once more staring pensively through the windshield. "What do you say?"

Very slowly an appreciative smile creased the older man's features. "I'd say that sounds like a great idea, buddy boy."

# # # # #

"Thank you," Mike smiled warmly as he accepted the cup and saucer from Mrs. Sullivan, taking a sip of the steaming hot coffee and nodding his appreciation before setting it down on the newspaper-covered table in front of him.

The tall, heavy-set woman with the thinning but still vibrantly stunning red hair nodded at both her guests before sitting back down on the tattered brown faux leather armchair. She glanced nervously at the large but frail-looking older man in the wheelchair beside her.

With a quick glance at his partner, Steve, who had set his own cup and saucer down, his pen poised above the notebook on his knee, cleared his throat quickly and smiled. "Mrs. Sullivan, you were saying that Stuart was out with friends the night he disappeared?"

"Yes… yes, he said he was going out with Johnny and Derek – they went to school together, all the way from kindergarten to high school," she grinned affectionately. "They were like brothers."

"Do you know where they went?"

"Well…" Mrs. Sullivan hesitated, looking down then, with a quick, almost guilty, look at her husband, continued softly, "well, they were underage, the boys, and they were forbidden to go drinking… but I think that's what they did anyway. Eric thinks they had fake I.D.'s." She looked at her husband with a loving smile and he curled his lips and nodded as best he could; it was obvious to the two detectives that Mr. Sullivan had recently suffered a stroke.

Mike cocked his head, smiling with commiseration. "Typical boys, right?" he chuckled and she smiled and nodded at him, grateful for the empathy. "But, I didn't think there was anyplace to go for a drink in Colville anymore. There's just the diner and it's not licensed, am I right?"

Mrs. Sullivan nodded vigorously; her husband's head bobbed up and down slightly as well. "They go into Crocker, or sometimes Burns Falls, but I think they spent more time in Crocker. There's two or three bars there, I think."

Making a note on the pad, Steve's eyes slipped towards his partner; the blue eyes flashed his way briefly. It was the first 'coincidence', and they both knew it.