“Do the Walkers still live here?” I asked.

Ryan shook his head. “They’ve been gone for a while. A couple months after Luke went missing, they sold the property here and moved to Ohio, where Mrs. Walker was from. I don’t know what happened to them after that.”

“Do you remember their names, Ryan?” I asked.

“I was seven, Jade. To me they were Mr. and Mrs. Walker.”

“It’s right here in the article,” Marj said. “Luke Walker, son of Chase and Victoria Walker of Snow Creek. They owned a small ranch north of town.” She bit her lip. “North of town. I think that’s part of the Carlton Dairy land now.”

“Yeah, it is. The dairy bought it about a year later. Before the Walkers left, Talon and I used to—” Ryan stopped abruptly, his face going white.

“What?” Marj asked. “What did you and Talon do?”

“I don’t want to talk any more about this.” Ryan walked briskly toward the bed and gathered the articles in a sloppy pile. “This isn’t any of your business. I’m taking these back to Joe’s.”

He walked out without another word.

“What was that about?” I asked.

Marj let out a heavy sigh. “Damned if I know. There’s something that he’s not telling us. And now we don’t even have the articles. How are we going to figure out what they mean?”

I smiled. “We don’t need the articles. Your best friend just happens to be a city attorney and has access to all archives in the state. I can pull up copies of those articles tomorrow at work.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Talon

“When I was about ten years old,” I began, “a kid I knew from school disappeared.”

“Was this kid a friend of yours?” Dr. Carmichael asked.

“Sort of. Not a forever friend or anything. He was a scrawny little kid whose parents ran a ranch north of Snow Creek. A real small-time operation, nothing like what we run. He was small for his age, and he had buckteeth. So of course he was ripe for the bullies at school.”

“Did you bully him?”

I shook my head. “Hell, no. I hate bullies.”

“Then what did you do?”

“I… I didn’t really take him under my wing. He wasn’t the kind of kid I wanted to hang out with. But more than once I kept the bullies from bothering him. Got my ass kicked a couple times for the trouble.”

“So you bullied the bullies.” Dr. Carmichael smiled.

I let out a chuckle. “I guess so. Sort of.”

“So you said he disappeared. What happened?”

“Well, that’s just the thing. Nobody knows. He was never found.”

What a damned lie. I knew exactly what had happened Luke Walker. And the five other kids who went missing during that decade—that horrible decade.

“What do you think made you want to protect Luke? If he wasn’t a friend, why bother?”

I cleared my throat. “It was the right thing to do.”

“I know that, and you know that now. But you were a ten-year-old kid, Talon. Kids don’t see things the way we adults do. So go back to your ten-year-old mind and tell me. What made you want to protect Luke from the bullies?”

I closed my eyes, trying to conjure Luke Walker in my mind. He’d been such a scrawny little thing, kind of reminded me of a scarecrow. His hair was even the color of straw. And those two front teeth stuck out. I figured he’d probably grow into them or get braces at some point.

But braces weren’t in Luke Walker’s future. Luke Walker was denied a future.

“I just hated the bullies. I hated seeing what their actions did to him. The kid walked around like he was scared all the time. No one should have to walk around like that.”

No one indeed.

“So what did you end up doing? How were able you protect Luke?”

“Sometimes I’d wait for his bus with him. Which meant I usually missed my own bus. But Joe and Ryan would get home on the bus and tell my mom that she needed to come get me.”

“And she did?”

“Yeah, she did. My mom was great.”

I wished I hadn’t said that. Now she was going to want to talk about my mom. Shrinks loved to talk about guys and their moms, right? But to my surprise, she continued with the line of questioning about Luke.

“So what happened to you when you protected him? Did the bullies go after you then?”

“Sometimes. But only when Jonah wasn’t around. He was nearly thirteen at the time, and puberty had already started. All three of us were early bloomers. So he’d had quite a growth spurt and was heading toward six feet already, and his voice was in that middle area between high and low. He was strong from working on the ranch. We all were, for that matter. If he was around, and if his best friend was around—his best friend was Luke’s cousin—no one got near Luke.”

“But when Jonah wasn’t around?”

“They ganged up on me a couple times. Ryan was only seven and would try to get in on it, but I’d tell him to stay the hell away and run toward home. Usually he did.”

“But they obviously never did any real damage to you, right?”

“One of them broke my nose. That’s where this little crook comes from.” I touched my nose. “Other than that, they pretty much just knocked the wind out of me, blackened my eyes a couple times. Nothing I couldn’t take.”

“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.”