The Pride Trilogy: Kyle Callahan 1-3 by Mark McNease Read Free Book Online Page A

to him the previous year when he needed to talk to someone about his problems.
    “You take a lot of pictures, Kyle,” Teddy had said, one afternoon when they were alone in the Lodge’s great room.
    “I don’t know why,” Kyle replied. “I think I see the world in images. Even videos, which I don’t much care for, are just thousands of single images flashing in front of you.”
    “Do you ever talk to them?”
    “Pardon?”
    “The people you take pictures of. I’ve seen you. Very sly, the way you do that.”
    Kyle had blushed, having never been caught red handed before—or in this case red faced.
    “Well, no, I don’t talk to them,” Kyle said, waving Teddy over to the large couch in front of the bay window. Teddy came over and sat down, putting his coffee cup on a coaster on the side stand.
    “The point of taking pictures of people when they don’t know it, is that they don’t know it,” Kyle said.
    “Yeah, but I bet if you asked them they’d say yes anyway. And then you could have a conversation, get to know them a little. The way you do it, you only ever know what you imagine.”
    Kyle saw Teddy in a different light after that. Not that he had ever assumed Teddy wasn’t a man of substance, only that he hadn’t considered him the potential friend he became. They were never especially close; that’s hard to do when Kyle and Danny lived in Manhattan and Teddy lived at Pride Lodge. They only saw each other the few times a year when the couple stayed there, but they emailed and sometimes they spoke on the phone, as they had just two nights before when Teddy told him he would be leaving the Lodge soon but didn’t want to discuss it on the phone.
    Kyle walked over to the two women who had moved away from the pool’s edge. The one busy thumbing the news of a dead body in a pool to her hundreds of Twitter followers didn’t look up. She was squat, with a distinctly wide bottom in stone-washed jeans a dark green hoody. Her hair was short, red and curly, and she wore a pair of pink cat-eye glasses, the most striking thing about her. The taller woman had a more evolved sense of style, with navy slacks, a turquoise blouse and a gray p-coat. She stood tall, her posture impeccable, and Kyle pegged her as a professional woman, someone aware of her appearance at all but the least guarded moments. She did not wear glasses, as so many of the Lodge guests did (it went with the demographic), and her hair was just going gray, most of it raven’s black and tied loosely back. She nodded at Kyle and extended her hand.
    “Eileen,” she said, shaking hands. “That’s Maggie. Don’t mind her, she thinks she’s a citizen journalist. Or sixteen, I’m never sure.”
    Maggie seemed unaware that her companion was talking to anyone, or that Kyle had come into their presence.
    “What happened?” Kyle said. “I didn’t hear an ambulance.”
    “There wasn’t a life to save, that’s my guess,” said Eileen. “I mean, he’s dead, you can tell that.”
    Kyle looked down into the pool and just then noticed a woman—a detective, he presumed—kneeling by the body as one paramedic climbed down the pool ladder while a second eased a gurney along from the shallow end.
    “It’s horrible,” Dylan said, coming over to them.
    “You saw it?” Kyle asked.
    “Nobody saw it! Sid was making his morning rounds and found him. I’m guessing he was drinking and slipped. I kept telling him to stop, you have to stop, Teddy, I just had a feeling it would end badly for him.”
    “Death by Appletini,” said Eileen.
    “I like that!” blurted Maggie, momentarily aware of her surroundings, then tweeting what she’d just heard.
    Dylan looked at him and discreetly shook his head: this was not something to discuss further in front of Lodge guests. The death alone might mean a change in plans. He had to think, he had to talk to Sid and see what they should do.
    Kyle watched as the detective stepped away from the body and allowed the