Deputy Wes Carmody read the text from May first three times, and then he did the thing I will always be grateful for. He closed the door of his office. “Mrs. Hughes,” he said quietly, “I need you to listen very carefully. The deputy who found your husband that morning was Danny Rusk, and he is the cousin of Brandon. I have no reason to believe the sheriff office is anything but honest. But I cannot take this to the people in this building until I know who else is involved.” He looked at the little black phone. “May I make a call to somebody I trust?”
I said yes. He dialed a number from memory, and in a low voice he spoke to a woman named Agent Pruitt of the state water patrol and the federal drug task force. She drove to Camdenton that afternoon in an unmarked pickup. She was a small, calm woman with short gray hair and an easy smile, and she wore a fishing vest. She sat down on the other side of the desk, picked up the black phone with a gloved hand, and scrolled through every message without a word. At the end she said, “Mrs. Hughes, your husband was a smart man. He left you everything you need.”
Then she told me what she wanted me to do. For four months, her agents had watched the coves of the Lake of the Ozarks, waiting for a boat to make the same drop twice. They had a name, but no proof. They had a pattern, but no witness. “You are the witness,” she said. “And that boat is the proof. I would like you to go home and act as though you are still thinking about signing. I would like you to invite your son in law to the dock on Sunday. And I would like you to let us bring the boat out one last time.”
A man who saves a secret for the woman he loves is still looking after her long after he is gone.
I have never been a brave woman. For thirty two years I handled certified mail and kept my opinions to myself. But on Saturday night I sat at my kitchen table and called my daughter. Kristy answered on the first ring, as though she had been waiting. “Mama,” she whispered, “did you find it?” I said I had. She started to cry. She told me that Jerry had come to her in May, gray in the face, and said that he had found something in the boat that he could not explain. He told her to give it to me if he did not come home.
“I was so afraid,” she said. “I have been living in that house with him for ten years. I thought he would hurt the children.” I told her to take the grandbabies to her friend in Osage Beach that night, to pack a bag and leave the porch light on. She did. By midnight, my daughter and my two grandchildren were in a safe place with a deputy on the street, and I sat on the dock in the dark with a thermos of coffee and a jacket of Jerry around my shoulders, listening to the frogs.
On Sunday morning, at dawn, I called Brandon. I told him I had slept on it. I said Jerry would have wanted the boat to stay in the family, that I was ready to sign. He was at my dock in forty minutes with the folder and a smile like a new dollar. I made him coffee. I let him go out to the garage and climb up on the trailer of the boat. I stood at the door with my hands folded. From the cove across the water I could see the glint of binoculars, and the flat gray shape of a patrol boat sliding out of the reeds.
They took him in the garage with the bill of sale in his hand. Six agents, four of them in vests, came through the side door and the back. Brandon dropped the pen. He did not fight. He looked at me, and I saw the whole of the man at once, the charm falling off his face like paint. “Mom,” he said. “Mom, wait.” I said, “I am not your mother, Brandon.” Then they led him out into the sunshine, past the grill where Jerry cooked his Saturday burgers, and put him in the back of a gray car.
The rest unrolled quickly. The cousin who found Jerry was arrested the next morning. The coroner reopened the file and changed the cause of death from accident to homicide, and a state pathologist found a mark on the back of the skull that matched the corner of a boat hook. Brandon and the deputy were both charged with murder and with conspiracy to traffic. Four other men on the lake, two of whom I had known for twenty years, were arrested in the weeks afterward. The ring had been running for three summers.
At the trial in January, I wore my good blue dress and the pearl brooch Jerry gave me for our fortieth anniversary. Kristy sat on one side of me, and the district attorney on the other. When it was my turn to speak, I told the jury about a man who taught shop for thirty six years, who took a boat out every morning at dawn and never in his life locked his garage, because he believed the best of everyone. I told them that this was the only fault he had. Brandon got life. The cousin got thirty years.
Kristy and the children moved into my spare room that spring. We did not talk about it much. We planted tomatoes. We took long walks down to the dock in the evening, and she told me stories about her father I had not heard, Jerry at the pool hall, Jerry singing in the car, Jerry fixing the bike of a neighbor boy in the rain. I realized that grief was not a single hole. It was a hundred small rooms, and we were opening them one by one, with a flashlight.
On the first Saturday in June, we took the boat out at dawn. The agents had released her in May, scrubbed and clean, with the compartment under the seat empty. I stood at the wheel in the gray light, and Kristy sat beside me with a child on each knee. The lake was perfectly flat. Mist came off the water in long curls. I eased the throttle forward, and Darlin Darlene slid out of the cove like a swan. My grandson looked up at me and asked, “Grandma, is Grandpa watching?” I said, “Every morning, honey. Every morning.”