He was Walking Alone

by P. D. Workman

  “Uh-huh.” She still didn’t sound convinced of anything. Zachary stared at her, trying to figure out a way to impress on her just how bad he had been.

  “Zach… those kids that you met at Summit…?”

  Zachary blinked and nodded. “Yeah?”

  “Those kids were trouble, right?”

  “Well… no. They did put some kids in there just for behavioral issues, but mostly it was kids with autism. You know that.”

  “So they’re still pretty bad, right? I mean, they won’t follow instructions, they hurt people and cause property damage, they’re too disobedient to be able to stay with their parents anymore.”

  “No. Their brains don’t work the same way as other kids’ brains do. They learn differently. They express themselves differently. The world can seem very threatening to them. They’re just reacting in the only way they know how.”

  “That’s why they need to be zapped. Because they’re like animals. They are children who are so wild that they need to be trained like dogs to do what they’re told.”

  Zachary knew she was intentionally pushing his buttons, but he couldn’t stop the outrage and anger that welled up in him at her words.

  “No!”

  “If you can understand that they are wired differently and can’t be held responsible like a normal child or an adult, then why are you still blaming yourself and repeating the lies that your mother told you?”

  If Zachary hadn’t already been sitting, he would have fallen into his seat. As it was, his head spun with blinding speed and he couldn’t slow it down enough to allow for logical thought.

  “What?”

  “Tell me what you know about your own diagnoses.”

  Zachary cleared his throat. “I don’t see…”

  “Don’t you? Humor me.”

  “ADHD.”

  “Impulsivity, difficulty maintaining focus, hyperactivity. Right?”

  Zachary nodded.

  “That’s not something you can just change by deciding to, is it?”

  “No.”

  “You have learning disabilities to go along with that?”

  “Dyslexia. Dysgraphia. But that’s not—”

  “And PTSD, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Before or after the fire?”

  Zachary swallowed. His mouth was like cotton. He looked around for a drink. “They think… before.”

  “Why?”

  “My parents’ fighting… and… abuse…”

  “If I took one of those kids from Summit and told you that he had ADHD, learning disabilities, PTSD, and a history of abuse, and that he’d knocked over a candle and burned the house down, injuring himself in the process, would you say he was just a bad kid? That he had to be institutionalized because he was irredeemable?”

  “No. I’d feel bad for him. But I didn’t knock a candle over—”

  “No, you just lit them.”

  “I shouldn’t have. I wasn’t supposed to be out of bed or to use the matches.”

  “You were trying to do something nice for your family. Trying to make it so they could all have a nice Christmas Day.”

  “But I was breaking the rules. My mother said I was incorrigible. I would never follow the rules.”

  “So any child who can’t follow the rules is incorrigible?”

  Zachary pressed his lips closed. He didn’t need to be told that his feelings were illogical any more than he needed to be told he was broken. Too broken to ever be fixed.

  Kenzie’s color rose when he refused to engage any further in the debate. Then she covered her eyes and blew out her breath, relaxing her body. She dropped her hands from her face and looked at him.

  “I’m not trying to prove you wrong, Zachary. I’m just trying to show you… that you wouldn’t blame yourself for what happened to your family if it was any other child but you. You are a compassionate person. You try to help people. You get inside and try to understand them. You wouldn’t blame yourself, and I don’t think your brother would either.” She gestured to the letter. “I don’t think he’d write to you if he just wanted to blame you for the bad stuff that happened in his life. I don’t think he’d reach out just to lash out at you when you answered.”

  “But you don’t know that.”

  “Of course I don’t know that, but you don’t know that he will either. Is that the kind of person he was? A mean, angry kid?”

  Zachary remembered the sweet, concerned, helpful boy Tyrrell had been. So earnest.

  “No. But things can change. I met a lot of kids in foster care and institutions who had turned bad. Bullies and sadists of the worst kind. If he ended up in a bad home… or a few of them… even the sweetest kid can turn into a monster.”

  “Obviously I’m not going to talk you into anything. You’re going to have to work through this yourself. But don’t shut him out just because you’re scared. Being reunited could be the best thing that could ever happen for both of you. It could be a wonderful experience. You could have family back in your life, and the two of you could help each other and share memories.”

  Zachary swallowed and nodded. “Yeah. It could be really good.”

  “So don’t block him out. Take a chance.”

  He looked down at the handwritten note. “I will,” he agreed, “just not yet.”

  “Does that mean not today or not this year?”

  Zachary cleared his throat. “Maybe after the holidays. When everything is back to normal.”

  “Do you think it’s a coincidence that he sent that before Christmas? He wants to be with family. Christmas is probably a difficult time for him too, and he’s trying to reconnect.”

  “I just can’t deal with it right now.”

  She opened her mouth to argue.

  “I just can’t, Kenzie.”

  She gave a frustrated sigh. “Fine. I’ll stop pushing you. You know what’s best for you.”

  Chapter Nine

  H

  aving so far run into dead ends identifying the cyberstalker, Zachary decided to change tack and run background on Harding. Sometimes, profiling the victim could provide an investigation with a new direction to go. He wasn’t getting anywhere on Rusty Donaldson or the stalker, so he needed a fresh avenue to investigate. Ashley had said Harding didn’t have any family, but that didn’t mean it was true.

  A lot of the background he could run online from the comfort of his own apartment, but the police check required actually going to the police station to fill out request forms. Zachary was pretty sure they would come up clear, since the police would undoubtedly have checked to see if their victim had any prior history, but he wasn’t going to assume anything. He would run everything, as if he were just starting the investigation and the police had had no involvement.

  Bowen was at the information desk and gave Zachary a big grin, as if Zachary had gone there just to see him.

  “Zach, my man! How is the investigation going?”

  “Not going very far in any direction,” Zachary admitted. “What little I’ve found hasn’t gone anywhere. I thought I’d run police record checks on Harding.”

  Bowen rolled his eyes. “He was clean.”

  “Did you do the police checks?”

  “I don’t remember. Probably. You don’t think Campbell and his boys would have forgotten something like that, do you?”

  “Not everyone runs background on the victim.”

  Bowman passed Zachary the requisite forms, still rolling his eyes and griping over the duplication of effort. But he was the one who had suggested that Ashley hire Zachary in the first place, and he knew that meant Zachary going over the same ground as the police had already done.

  “How are you and Ashley Morton getting along?” Bowman asked, after he had worn out the topic.

  “Alright.” Zachary shrugged. “I’ve certainly had worse clients.”

  “She’s quite the looker, don’t you think?”

  Zachary focused on filling the search forms out neatly
, his printing painfully slow. If Bowman was the one who had done the search, Zachary didn’t particularly have to worry about it being legible, as Bowman knew all of the details himself. But if it went to someone else to do the search, they might toss it in the garbage if it was too hard to read. Or misspell Richard’s name on the search, even though both names were pretty standard. It was best to get it right the first time.

  “Ashley. She’s a pretty lady,” Bowman persisted, not getting the response he wanted from Zachary.

  Zachary looked up from his form, distracted. “What?”

  “Where are you, Zach? I was talking about the girlfriend. The client. She seemed like a nice girl.”

  His words started to filter into Zachary’s brain. He frowned. “Her boyfriend just died. You think she’s going to want to go on a date with you?”

  “With me?” Bowman guffawed. “No, not with me. I thought maybe you and she…”

  “Me?” Zachary was getting even more confused. In the past, Bowman had encouraged him to pursue Kenzie, saying that she was interested in him and all he had to do was declare his intentions more clearly. His ears got hot. “But Kenzie and I…”

  Bowman raised his brows. “You and Kenzie have been lukewarm for a year. She’s a girl who likes to go out and have some fun. I think you’re stuck in the friend zone with her, and good luck ever getting out of it.”

  “Oh.” The thought had never occurred to Zachary. They were friends, and he thought that if he just allowed the relationship to unfold naturally, if he and Kenzie were meant to be together, things would work out.

  “I told you before you needed to be proactive,” Bowman said. “A girl likes to know where she stands.”

  Zachary looked back at the form that he had come there to complete. “Okay. Good to know.” He struggled to focus on filling in the lines on the form. “Is she seeing someone else, then? She hasn’t mentioned anyone…”

  If he were “just a friend,” then she would tell him if she started dating someone, wouldn’t she? But she hadn’t said so, and when they talked and she was busy and couldn’t get together, it was usually because she had friends to meet up with, or work, or she had something to get done. Had those just been excuses? Was she just trying to let him down easy?

  “I don’t know,” Bowman admitted. “No one from here, I don’t think. But you have to understand, if you’re not meeting her needs…”

  “Uh… yeah. Okay. Thanks.” Zachary handed Bowman the forms back. “Thanks for that.”

  Bowman shook his head and pushed the papers back at Zachary. “You didn’t sign them.”

  Embarrassed, Zachary scribbled his signature at the bottom of each page and slid them across to Bowman again. “Just let me know when the results are in.”

  “Zachary…”

  Zachary walked away without another word.

  Zachary sat in his car, waiting for his heart to stop pounding and his head to stop spinning. He’d never been good at relationships, but he had thought that he and Kenzie were doing well. They were connecting, they enjoyed doing things together, and they each called the other regularly. It seemed, for the most part, to be a balanced, two-way relationship, with both of them getting something out of it. Even though Bowman had told him he should push harder for a more intimate relationship, it had never felt right to Zachary and he had resisted. Did that mean he’d lost out?

  He turned the key in the ignition to warm up the cold car. There was an icy bite in the air. Winter was starting to assert itself. He turned the radio on. It was still on the station Rhys had tuned it to and the heavy beat shook the car. Zachary couldn’t help smiling a little as he turned it down. Rhys was a good kid, and Zachary hoped he’d be able to grow and mature and not be kept down by the traumas he had suffered through so young.

  Zachary pulled his phone out of his pocket to check for messages. There were no urgent messages. He tapped on the email icon to make sure there wasn’t anything in his inbox that he needed to act on. There were a couple more emails from the stalker, which he trashed, and nothing else of importance in the inbox. Everything else could wait until he was at his computer later.

  He slid his phone back into his pocket and put the car into reverse to back out of the parking space. He was backed most of the way out when he was hit by a lightning bolt.

  Emails from the stalker? In his own inbox?

  Stomping on the brake, he pulled his phone back out and quickly navigated to the trash. He opened the first one.

  What you did was criminal.

  They should have locked you up and thrown away the key.

  You should have just died in that fire.

  Zachary stared at the words in horror. Of course it wasn’t Harding’s cyberstalker, in spite of the similarities between the poisonous messages. Harding’s stalker would have no idea of Zachary’s past and no reason to start harassing him.

  But someone connected to Zachary’s past had tried to make contact with him recently. If Tyrrell was able to find Zachary’s old address from when he and Bridget were living together, then it followed that he’d be able to find Zachary’s email address. Zachary ran a business, he didn’t exactly keep it a secret. When Zachary had failed to answer the letter, Tyrrell had gone looking for another way to get ahold of him, and had vented his anger through email.

  Zachary closed the first email and opened the second. They were in reverse chronological order with the most recent at the top, so the second email had actually arrived first. Zachary stared at the contents of the email, gobsmacked.

  Someone laid on the horn behind him and Zachary realized that he was still sitting in his car in the police visitor parking lot, his car at an angle from pulling out, blocking the aisle completely. He threw the phone on the passenger seat beside him and shifted into drive. Without looking at the car behind him, he drove out of the parking lot and all the way home without picking up his phone again. The radio blasted out music he didn’t even hear and he couldn’t remember any of the drive home once he found himself sitting in the parking lot of his apartment building.

  He picked up his phone, woke it up again, and looked at the screen.

  Chapter Ten

  I

  t was Pat who answered the door. He stared at Zachary in surprise.

  “Zachary! I didn’t know you were coming by. Lorne isn’t home. Did he know…?”

  Zachary had driven for several hours to get to the home of Mr. Peterson, an old foster father, fully believing that he would be there when Zachary arrived. It seemed inconceivable that Mr. Peterson would not be there when Zachary needed him.

  “No,” he admitted. “I didn’t… I just came. Is he coming back? He didn’t move, did he?” Already mired in the past, Zachary couldn’t help but remember the day he had arrived on the Petersons’ doorstep expecting to be able to develop pictures with Mr. Peterson, only to be told by his wife that he had moved out. That had been when Mr. Peterson’s relationship with Pat had come to light, predictably ending the marriage.

  “Of course he’s coming back,” Pat assured Zachary. “Come in.” He took Zachary by the arm and tugged him inside. “You’re white as a sheet, Zachary, what’s wrong?”

  Zachary leaned on Pat for support. Though a good ten years older than Zachary, Pat was taller and his muscular chest almost twice as broad. With his help, Zachary managed to get to the couch and sit down. He buried his face in his hands, elbows braced on his knees. “He’s coming back?”

  “I promise, he’s coming back. He just went out to pick up some groceries.”

  Pat didn’t tell Zachary that he should have called ahead to arrange something. Mrs. Peterson had always criticized Zachary for showing up unannounced, when he had been told repeatedly that he needed to call and set up appointments ahead of time. In contrast, Pat and Mr. Peterson had always told him that Zachary was welcome anytime, so he hadn’t hesitated to go there when everything in his world had suddenly gone sideways.

  “Let me give him a call,” Pat said. “I’ll le
t him know you’re here, see how long he’s going to be.”

  He walked out to the kitchen to make the call out of Zachary’s hearing. Zachary couldn’t make out his words, but did recognize the low tones of concern. Pat looked back over his shoulder at Zachary once as he talked, then looked back away. After he hung up, he turned back around and stood in the doorway between the living room and the dining room.

  “He’s on his way. Ten, fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay.” Zachary nodded, his movements feeling awkward and wooden. “Thanks.”

  “Just relax and make yourself at home. I’ll bring you a drink in a minute.”

  Zachary turned his head to look out the living room window, watching for Mr. Peterson’s return. He could hear Pat moving around in the kitchen, but the sounds didn’t really enter his conscious thoughts. He was in limbo, drowning in memories, waiting for someone he could share them with to try to get them out of his head.

  Pat walked in and placed something on the glass-topped coffee table.

  “Zachary.”

  He tried to travel the long span of time back to the present, but it took a couple more prompts from Pat before Zachary could get there. He turned his head and focused on the older man. Still handsome and fit, looking fashionable even in a t-shirt. Pat motioned to the coffee table.

  “Have some tea,” he urged. “It will help.”

  Zachary leaned forward and, with a shaking hand, picked up the white mug with a cat picture on the side and forced himself to drink a few tiny sips of the hot tea. It was an herbal blend Zachary wasn’t familiar with, but it was pleasant enough. It had been sweetened with a generous amount of honey. Good for shock.

  “Thanks.”

  He put the mug back down. It rattled against the coaster as he set it down.

  Pat sat down in one of the upholstered chairs. “It’s good to see you. You know Lorne would love to see more of you. Any time you want to make the trip, we’d love to have you. Take a week off and have a real vacation.”

  Zachary nodded wordlessly. Just a reflex reaction, keeping the flow of the conversation.