Champy

Part Seven

After countless hours of searching, the team had found our row-boat overturned, and scratched up underneath, nested at the shore some twenty miles from where we had docked it earlier. My mother and I were directed to go home to try to get some sleep, and that the search would continue at daybreak. Since there was still no sign of Freddy, sleep was not an option for my mother. I tried to squeeze in an hour or two, but I was having trouble with it as well. After our father had passed away from lung cancer, my mother had a tough time with the thought of another one of her family members missing. We shared her bed that night, and had done so for the next couple of weeks.

The searching had ceased after the first week, and by the time a month had passed and Freddy's body wasn't found, it had become time for my mother and I to accept that he was gone. Although after the first 48 hours, investigators figured he had drowned and that he wasn't coming back, my mother was holding onto a fragment of hope. She had come up with a few explanations for how he could still be alive. One of them involved the row-boat being pushed out onto the lake by currents or wind, and that he was never on it in the first place. She thought maybe he ran away and would eventually decide that he missed us and would come back. She thought that if he were in the row boat, that when it tipped over, he found his way to shore and couldn't find his way back home yet, and that the investigators hadn't found him yet. She had thought up a millions scenarios in which Freddy was still living, even after the ceremonies. After a year had passed, she gave up.

I knew, however, that it was Champy. The fact that we had seen him the day before while out on the lake, and the scratches on the bottom of the row-boat, all led me to believe that Champy is the one who knocked our row boat over, and then dragged my brother to the bottom of the lake. It would make sense as to why his body was never found, as well. Nobody would believe me, though. To them, it didn't sound believable that a lake monster was responsible for my brother's death, and there wasn't enough incriminating evidence to legally make that claim. So everyone shrugged my theory off and implausible. But I know that it was Champy that did it. Of that, I am sure.