The Lake [Part 4]

He and Dean sat outside in the warm night and drank a box of Woodstock. Sometime about midnight, he couldn’t remember for sure, Dean headed to bed and Pete stretched out on the couch and went to sleep.

They were each the others alibi. Nothing ever linked them there to the lake. Still, many in town believed it was them. Others said there was no sense in the brothers killing him over a few thousand dollars, after all, now they were never getting their money. They said Kyle pissed plenty of people off, and maybe he mouthed off to the wrong person as he made his way home.

The police came to our house the day after he was found to speak to my father. They sat in the lounge as the fan stirred air overhead and I passed them cans of lemonade from the fridge.

Dad told them about Kyle asking him for money, coming over while we were working out there on the car, and he nodded his head toward it, the freshly painted Ford.

Then one of the cops shook his head and laughed. Looked at my father. “You can’t have been too pleased to have your daughter shacked up with him,” he said.

“I sure wasn’t,” my dad replied.

I wished he’d lie then, for his own sake. Not admit he’d hated his daughter’s murdered boyfriend. But Dad always said, your word is all you have. Be someone people can trust. There’s no one on this earth I trust more than him.

It was a story now, a decade later, the haunted lake. Kids who swam out there claimed they felt something grab at their legs under the water. He was always trying to be someone big in town, Kyle Lewis, and eventually he was.

Every time I visited, Dad and I would've drift out to the garage after dinner. Just like we used to when I was a kid still living at home. There was something soothing about being out there with him, the petrol scented concrete and the glow of the florescent light, the way we understood one another without having to speak. My childhood was something unending there.

Dad took two beers from the fridge in the garage and passed me one and we stood drinking, looking toward the road. It was quiet out here at night. I wondered if he felt the pull of the lake like I did.

“Do people still think it was the Ryan’s who killed Kyle?” I asked, not looking at him. We never spoke of that.

“Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “People don't talk much about it now.”

I remembered the day Kyle was pulled from the lake, the convoy of police cars driving past as we stood there in the garage. The solemnness of their cars with sirens and lights off, and the scraping sound of Dad scrubbing sandpaper over the car. The stark look of the metal underneath the old paint.

***Download NovelToon to enjoy a better reading experience!***