“We decided to get a bus ticket to Austin because we thought that was far away enough and he could trust the police there. One of our friends moved there, and we went to his birthday party the summer before, so it just, I don’t know, it just felt right. And it’s a whole different police department. But getting to the bus station would be hard, it would take hours on his bike, and I knew my uncle Javi—he’s not a real uncle, he’s my mom’s cousin, but we call him Uncle—he was coming to visit the next week. I said maybe Ricky could hide in his truck, then get out when he got to town. He could take a bus to Austin, or go to the police in San Antonio or another town that Javi stopped in.

“So Ricky slept in the tree house at night, and during the day he stayed in the woods. He kept out of sight. I brought him food. And he said maybe he should talk to my dad. So we were going to, on Tuesday, when Dad got home from work. But then the two detectives came and Ricky got scared again. Because one of them was the man in his house.” Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “You can’t tell them this. You really can’t. Ricky wasn’t lying about the men in the house. He said they shredded all his mom’s papers and two of the men went upstairs and got suitcases to make it look like everyone just left. Ricky said they’d kill us all if he said anything and he didn’t have anything anymore because his family was dead and he didn’t want my family to be dead, too.”

Now Ginny was crying, and so was Jill, who sat down next to her and put her arm around her daughter. “Honey, no one is going to hurt us.”

“But they killed them, Mom! They did, and … and it just made sense that they would h-hurt us if they knew that Ricky was here. They told us that Ricky’s mom took a lot of money and disappeared with her family to Mexico, and I know they didn’t, and Ricky knew they didn’t, and so did the police! They lied to us, and so when Uncle Javi left, Ricky said he was going all the way to Mexico with him and just disappear. I thought maybe when Javi found out Ricky was in the truck that he would come back, but he didn’t. And— Well, I got this a couple months later.”

She pulled a worn, tightly folded piece of notebook paper from her pocket and slid it over to Nate. Lucy read over his shoulder: