Read Still Lake for Free Online Page A

was buried with her family in Minnesota, but he couldn’t remember where he’d ended up laying the old man to rest. That bothered him.
    His father had died in Kansas or Nebraska. One of those big, flat states, in a small town, and Griffin had just managed to beg, borrow and steal the money for the funeral expenses. He never could afford a stone, but it didn’t matter. He was never going back.
    He hated returning to places, especially this particular one. There’d been one point when he was fool enough to think he could spend the rest of his life in Colby. He’d been young, with just a trace of innocence left. The Vermont legal system had knocked that out of him, fast.
    Of course, that was before he and Lorelei had gotten involved. Back then he’d never had much sense when it came to women. Lorelei was trouble from the word go. She was thin, lithe and sexually voracious. So voracious, in fact, that one man hadn’t been enough for her, and probably not two, either. He’d known he was sharing her, and he’d told himself he didn’t mind. He would have liked to know where she went on the nights she didn’t creep intothe decrepit cottage down by the lake, but she wouldn’t tell him and he stopped asking. He didn’t want to care enough to feel jealous, but he’d been a kid, and sooner or later it had all boiled over.
    He remembered that much. Remembered the screaming fight they’d had, which too many people had overheard. But he couldn’t remember anything else. If she told him who else she was seeing. If she’d said anything that would lead him to the truth.
    And he couldn’t remember if, in his adolescent outrage, he’d put his hands on her and killed her.
    That’s what a jury had believed, no matter what he’d said. That he’d killed her, and his so-called blackout was only a convenient ploy to get off the hook. But no one knew he’d been in the old wing that night. Hell, even he hadn’t remembered until five years later, and by then all he wanted to do was forget.
    Now he was ready to remember, ready for the truth. No matter how ugly.
    He’d had no reason to kill the other two girls. He’d barely known them, just managed to flirt with them at the Wednesday night square dances. Well, there had been a one-night stand with Valette, but that hadn’t amounted to anything, and most people didn’t even know about it. Valette had certainly managed to forget it in short order.
    In the end the police hadn’t even bothered trying to pin the other two murders on him, satisfied thatthey could tie him to Lorelei and put him away for the rest of his life. They’d been found far enough away—Valette in a cornfield and Alice by the side of the road. The police never bothered to wonder how unlikely it would be to have two killers in a town the size of Colby. Two who preyed on pretty teenage girls. They’d been happy enough to railroad Thomas Ingram Griffin. It was just a good thing the death penalty was outlawed in Vermont. And there hadn’t been enough energy for a lynch mob.
    He’d worried someone would recognize him once he came back, but he decided they probably wouldn’t. It had been easy enough to track down the twenty-year-old newspapers, to look at the grainy photograph of the boy he once was. Hair past his shoulders, a beard covering half his face, a James Dean kind of squint that obscured the fact that he needed glasses. The picture they’d regularly run was a doozy—taken when they’d slapped handcuffs on him at the edge of the lake. He was wearing cutoffs, and you could see his tattoo quite clearly if you bothered to look. He was going to have to remember to keep his shirt on. The snake coiling over one hip would be a dead giveaway.
    Without that, no one would be likely to connect the reclusive, bespectacled Mr. Smith with the murdering teenage vagrant. He wore khakis and cotton now,