“That’s good. Let’s start at the beginning, okay? Ricky left your house that Friday at six to go home.”

She nodded. “The next morning I went out to feed the chickens and collect eggs, that’s one of my chores. I saw Ricky’s bike behind the chicken hutch. I got mad thinking he came over to talk to Joe and not me, we were all supposed to go see the puppies together. Then I heard something but didn’t see him. I went up to the tree house and he was there. He’d slept there all night and he’d been crying.” She paused and bit her lip.

“Ginny, it’s very important that you tell us everything,” Nate said. “You’re not going to get in trouble from us, I promise you that. We want to find Ricky. We know that he’s called his grandparents on Christmas every year for the last three years. He didn’t say anything, but a private investigator traced the call to a specific region in Mexico. Since we know his parents are dead, we think he made the call.”

Ginny said, “Ricky went home that night and no one was there. He waited, played games, and then four men came into the house. They had the keys. His dad’s keys. He hid in a closet downstairs and heard them talking about his mom. He didn’t tell me everything they said, but he heard them say his whole family was dead and one of the men was a policeman. He didn’t know what to do, and he didn’t want to go to the police. I said we could talk to my dad, and Ricky was really scared that what happened to his family would happen to my family. And I got scared, because I couldn’t even think about how I would feel if my mom and dad and Joe were … were … were dead. So I didn’t say anything.”

She paused, bit her lip. “I’m really sorry.”

Lucy said, “You were scared, we all understand how that feels. Why did Ricky go to Mexico?”