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.”

“The Steels have never been big skiers, believe it or not. I don’t know about Bryce. But obviously the black ski mask didn’t lead to anything.”

I gripped the chair again in the devil’s clench. Tried the deep breathing again. I had to maintain… Had to move forward…

“That’s good, Talon,” Dr. Carmichael said, standing. “Breathe in, breathe out. Excuse me for a moment. I want to get you some water.”

“No!”

Dr. Carmichael stilled, her face unreadable.

“I… No.”

“All right. A soda?”

I nodded. “That would be great. Soda. Please.”

“Regular or diet?”

“Regular.”

She came back with a cola. I opened it and took a deep drink, letting the cold liquid soothe my throat.

“Ready to talk again?”

I nodded.

“So what happened next?”

“A couple of days went by, and we didn’t hear anything about Luke. My dad would call every day for an update, but the police didn’t have any leads, and nothing had been found other than the black ski mask. Joe and I both took this kind of hard, because his best friend was Luke’s cousin, and I had always kind of protected Luke, even though we weren’t great friends. So one day, Joe, Ryan, and I decided to go into town and talk to the police. We rode our bikes. It’s a couple hours. But we made it and walked right in there. I think it was a Saturday.”

“Why didn’t you ask your father to take you?”

“We did. He said no, that we had work to do around the ranch, and that he had been calling every night and there wasn’t any new news.”

“Did you think the police were holding something back? Is that why you went?”

I shook my head. “We were kids, Doc. Someone we knew was missing. Someone who meant something to us. We were impatient. We just wanted to know what was going on.”

She nodded. “I understand. So what happened when you got to the police station?”

“Joe walked right in there and demanded to see the chief of police.” I chuckled, remembering. “He thought he was such a big shot. But it was Saturday, so the police chief wasn’t even in. Just a couple of uniformed officers. Of course they told us no, that we couldn’t talk to anyone without our parents, and to please leave. Joe started to make a stink about it, and we were ushered out.”

“And then?”

“We got an ice-cream cone and rode our bikes home. Dad was steaming mad that we had gone off and didn’t know where we were. There were no cell phones in those days.”

“I would guess he was quite upset,” Dr. Carmichael said. “After all, a kid had just gone missing. He was probably afraid the same thing might happen to his children.”

Wow. I’d never thought of that. Dad had been pretty over the top that day. Normally he didn’t care if we ran off and had some fun, especially on the weekends. I didn’t voice this, though.

“So you couldn’t get help from the police. What next?”

“The next week we went back to school. It seemed strange without Luke there.”

“But you and Luke weren’t really good friends, right?”

“No.”

“Then why was it strange?”

“I… I just had a weird feeling. I can’t really put it into better words than that. The black ski mask…”

God, the black ski mask.