Her arms struggling more than fighting, the silver water was violent; her pale face stretched in screams, bobbed and glowed in the moonlight. Ricky was standing near the “No Swimming” sign just a few yards away, transfixed and quiet.

Winded, Sweed shook him: “Hey!”

Ricky blinked slowly at him. Sweed heard the gurgling sound. He saw the girl’s head rise above the water once with her arm straight out at them. But then she went down. Everything was still.

Sweed clinched Ricky’s arm. Both were breathing hard and ragged. He looked at Ricky who just stared where the water had closed over. Sweed shook him again.  “Ricky? Hey, man.”

Ricky blinked at him again.

“What’s wrong wit’chu, man? Aw, aw.” He let go of Ricky and backed away, head in his hand. Aiming his words toward the lake: “We gotta call somebody.” He was going for the car.

Ricky grabbed him from behind. “Don’t leave me. Don’t leave.” He started crying.

Sweed saw the blood soaked cut on Ricky’s shirt and on his hand. “What the hell happened?”

“I can still see it!”

“What’s the matter wit’chu? You tripping?”

“I just wanna go home,” Ricky said, choking on the word home. Tears streaked his face.

This nigger was high and a white girl was dead, for sure. Sweed looked around, trying to pierce the darkness. They’d made so much noise. Had anybody heard? Two niggers and a dead white girl. What could they say to the cops? What story would any of them believe? What difference could it make now, anyway? She was gone. Besides, it wasn’t anybody’s fault, he told himself, looking around again and grabbing Ricky’s arm. “Let’s get the hell outta here.”

***

Sweed took Ricky to his place that night because he didn’t think Ricky was in any shape to be seen by his folks.

He had not bothered to tell Ricky that after he’d fallen asleep, he went back out to his car. Sweed had parked near the slanted back stairs of his building. He looked around the empty alley and up to the rear apartment windows. He opened the back passenger door slowly. There they were: a tangled knot of girl pants and panties on the car floor. They had gotten buried in the mix of rags he used when fixing on his car, his own sweat shirt jackets, discarded food wrappers, old papers of all kinds. He picked up the girl’s things and peeled them apart. There was blood on the panties. Her big crochet bag was there, too. He pulled from it a tattered brown leather wallet. Inside was a student I.D.: Alison Tucker, Gerald T. Holland High School, six dollars, a bus pass, and what he assumed to be a house key. His palms went damp and his heart raced when he fished out the photos they’d taken with Mr. Chiles’ instant camera: he held the one of Alison and Ricky wrapped in a grinning hug. He quickly swept the alley again and went to the dumpster. He threw away the girl’s underwear and her purse, but paused as he considered the Polaroid; it was date-stamped July 19, 1969. He stuffed it into his back pocket. Back in his room, while Ricky snored through his drug and alcohol induced sleep, Sweed pulled out the tin lockbox from underneath his bed, the secret place usually reserved solely for his weed. He buried the picture of Ricky and Alison there.

***

Days passed. At first Mr. and Mrs. Tucker of Loveless, Indiana thought their daughter had run off again on account of the fight they had. She was always running off after the fights, but would usually show up in a day or so, at night, round about the time when she knew her daddy would be passed out drunk and wouldn’t start in on her again. But this time, something didn’t feel right, her mama with her nervous fingers splitting the window blinds for her only wild weed to return. She never showed.

It was Mrs. Tucker who started phoning around first. No one had seen the girl. So Mr. Tucker put on a shirt with a collar, and he and his wife drove their truck down to the sheriff’s office. Their daughter had been missing for three days by then. The cops told them they’d investigate. Word about it traveled lickety-split.

But it wasn’t until Mr. McNeal saw the story on the TV news about the missing girl did it click for him what he’d seen. Now was it two…no, four days ago…when that girl came in and bought all sorts of junk at his store: potato chips, Twinkies, liquorish sticks and Bazooka Joe bubble gum. Crazy kid, he remembered thinking. And now he recalled watching that dark car parked outside his store when the girl was there. A colored boy driving, but it had been too dark to make him out, even though Mr. McNeal knew the boy was staring back at him. And he was pretty sure he saw somebody in the back seat, too. It was unsettling, the car idling with that boy casing his place. Moments before, he had not seen the girl when she’d gotten out of the car, so when she turned to leave, he called out to stop her. “Hey!” And louder still, “Hey!” But she’d already gone through the jingling door.

Mr. McNeal had pushed himself from behind the counter. He tried to hobble after the girl who had gotten into the backseat of the dangerous car with that boy. But the driver was too fast. This was the first break for the cops.

The mention of the black boys changed the trajectory of the investigation. The cops started knocking on every door where black folks lived in and around Loveless. They were asking the whereabouts of every black man. If they owned a car, it was searched, even if it didn’t fit the description the old store clerk had given. Some black men were pulled over in the streets. The cops had also started checking the vacation properties owned by black folks. There was a small cluster of cabins up near the northern part of the lake, and then a few more sprinkled along the west bank. Most of these folks came in from Gary, and farther north still, Michigan and Chicago.