“What the hell are you two doing out here?”
Both boys exhaled loudly with relief. One of them grabbed his chest. “Riley! It’s you! Thank God. We thought...we thought...”
“We thought you were him,” the other boy finished the sentence. “We were afraid he’d come back.”
“You know them?” Derek looked at the woman.
“Remember when I told you I had family who used to live around here? These are the grandsons to my uncle’s former neighbor.” She tilted her head behind her. “Their house is back that way, on the other side of the trees. This is Ronald.” She pointed to the older one. “That’s his younger brother, Jeff.”
By now, the others had joined them. When Eric glanced at York, she shrugged. “I still visit their grandmother. She was always nice to me when I was younger, and my dad would bring me here to stay with my aunt and uncle. I check in on her from time to time.”
Not giving a shit about York’s family history, Derek asked the young men, “Who did you think we were?”
At first, they sat frozen, looking up at him as if he were the devil himself. When it was clear he was losing his patience, the older of the two spoke up.
“The man. The one with the woman.”
At that, Derek took a step closer. “What man? Was the woman okay? What did she look like?”
He was firing his questions so quickly, both boys shrunk back against the tree. York put her hand on Derek’s shoulder to try to calm him.
“It’s okay, Ronald.” She looked at the taller of the two. “Just tell me what you saw.”
The boy took a deep breath, but his voice was still shaky when he spoke.
“Jeff and I were just out here walking around. Exploring, you know? We were bored, so we hopped the fence and started looking around.”
He brought his eyes to Derek’s, as he went on to explain.
“We’re both in scouts and wanted to practice being able to identify animal tracks. We thought we’d have a better chance in the woods than the field, so we came here. This is public land, right?” His head turned back to York’s. “I mean, you’re not going to arrest us for trespassing are you? Because if this land belongs to someone else, we didn’t know. I swear it! We thought we would just—”
“Ronald!” Derek barked the boy’s name to put a stop to his rambling.
Both kids jumped, making him feel like an ass. Derek was on the verge of losing his shit but knew he needed to dial it back if he was ever going to get any information from them.
“We don’t give a damn about trespassing,” he assured them. “We just want to know what you saw.”
Ronald looked up at York as if he needed her permission to talk to him. When she nodded her head and gave him a kind smile, the boy continued.
“We were in the woods looking for tracks when we heard a car coming. So, we hid.”
“Why did you hide?” Derek asked as calmly as he could.
“We weren’t exactlysurethis was public land, and we didn’t want to get into trouble.”
Fair enough. “Go on.”
“We heard the car coming and hid behind a couple of trees closer to the road. We were going to wait until it passed and then keep doing what we were doing, but then she jumped, and then the guy came after her, and we—”
“Whoa. Back up,” Derek ordered. “The woman jumped?”
Jeff finally spoke up. “It was crazy. She just opened the car door and jumped.”
“So they’d pulled over to the side of the road?” Derek asked, trying to paint a better picture.
“No!” Both boys shook their heads, practically shouting in unison.
“That’s the thing,” Ronald went on. “The car had slowed down for the curve, but it was still probably going forty, fifty miles an hour when she jumped out.”
