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“Was it worth it to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Was saving Luke worth getting beat up?”
Hell, no. If I’d known what life had in store for Luke, I wouldn’t have bothered. If I hadn’t interfered in his life, maybe he wouldn’t have been where he was that day. And maybe I would have… “Well…yeah, I guess.” Was it a lie? I’d wanted to protect him at the time. Everything else was hindsight.
“You said he wasn’t a great friend of yours or anything, not the kind of kid you wanted to hang out with.”
I squeezed the arms of the chair. “It was just the right thing to do. That’s all.”
“And who taught you that standing up for the little guy was the right thing to do?”
“My dad, I guess. My grandpa. I don’t know if they ever told me in so many words, but I knew right from wrong, and what those bullies were doing to Luke wasn’t right.”
Dr. Carmichael nodded. “So you said Luke disappeared.”
“Yeah, right around the time…” My skin tightened, and blood pushed through my veins.
“Take a few brief deep breaths, Talon.”
I obeyed, breathing in…out…in.
“Deep breathing has a therapeutic value.” she said. “Just two or three deep breaths will calm you down.”
It would take more than two or three deep breaths to calm me down, but the breathing did help take the edge off a little. I loosened my grip on the armchair.
“Joe was with his best friend, Bryce Simpson. Like I said, Bryce was Luke’s cousin—their moms were sisters—and he lived in town with his parents and older sister. One time, Bryce and Joe were out at Luke’s ranch. They were throwing a football around when Luke’s mom came out and asked them to round up Luke for dinner. They couldn’t find him.”
“When was the last time they had seen him?”
Apprehension oozed through me. I hesitated for a moment. Then, “I don’t know. Joe said he had been at lunch, but then he and Bryce had run off to do their own thing. They never saw him again after that.”
“So then what happened?”
“Bryce and Joe told Mr. and Mrs. Walker they couldn’t find Luke. No one was worried yet. They went ahead and ate their dinner, but then when Luke still didn’t show up, the Walkers called the police.”
“And what happened after that?”
“The police came out and questioned the Walkers and Bryce and Joe. I remember my dad had to go over because Joe was a minor and the police couldn’t talk to him without a parent present. They came home later that night, and Dad told us that Luke was missing.”
“And what did you think?”
I swallowed the knot lodged at the base of my larynx. “I thought the bullies had gotten him.” And indeed the bullies had. Only not the bullies I thought at the time.
“Did you tell the police that?”
I gulped again. “Yeah. I felt really terrible for not being there to protect Luke, and then I got in real trouble with the bullies for implicating them, let me tell you. As it turned out though, all the bullies had ironclad alibis, so they were exonerated right away. After that, no one really knew where to look. The police stalked around the ranch for days, looking for clues, but they didn’t find anything—at least not anything that helped.”
“What do you mean ‘not anything that helped?’ Did they find something unusual?”
Nausea rose in my throat, putrid and acidic. “Yeah.” I exhaled. “They found a black ski mask.”
Dr. Carmichael cleared her throat. “That doesn’t seem so unusual here in Colorado. Lots of people ski.”
“The Walkers didn’t, apparently.”
“What about other people who hung out at the ranch? Your brother and Bryce, for example.”
