“That is the skiff of Curt, Sharon,” Glen answered, in the easy tone he used to give the weather. “My brother in law ties up there when he works late at the marina. He is probably asleep on the dock. You know how he is.” I crouched beside the locker with the photograph in my hand and watched the black water slap at the pilings. The engine under our feet gave one last tick. A man who was asleep did not leave his motor warm. “Glen,” I said, “I did not know Curt kept a boat at this dock.” There was a long silence on the line. “Well,” he said slowly, “now you do.”
Nate turned off the flashlight. We stood very still in the dark, and I heard something that I would remember for the rest of my life, a small, careful scrape of wood on wood, down in the shadow beneath the planks. Someone was climbing the ladder. My son took my wrist and pulled me behind the big wooden locker, and we crouched between it and the rail, shoulder to shoulder, breathing through our mouths. A shape rose over the edge of the dock. It was a big man in an oilskin coat, carrying a coil of line, and he stopped within six feet of us.
I recognized the voice before the face. “Glen said they would be here,” Curt Vander Ploeg muttered, to nobody, and he walked to the locker and lifted the lid. “Said the widow would come hunting. Said the boy would be with her.” He rummaged inside, grunted, and swore. The vests were scattered on the planks where I had thrown them. The plastic food container was gone. He turned toward the water and raised his voice, flat and bored. “Glen, they took it. They have the photograph.” Over the phone in my hand, I heard the harbor master sigh. “Then they cannot go far,” he said.
A thermos can carry a captain last cold warning home when the lake would not.
Nate moved before I could stop him. My son, who had never in his life struck another person, stepped out from behind the locker and swung the heavy steel flashlight against the elbow of Curt, and the man yelped and dropped the line. I grabbed the long boat hook from its bracket on the rail and pushed. Curt, who weighed two hundred and sixty pounds and had expected no fight from a widow, went backward off the dock into the black water of the harbor with a roar and a tremendous splash. Nate pulled me down the planks toward the shore, and we ran.
We ran to the car, and I fumbled the key and got the engine going, and Nate was already on his phone with the Coast Guard station at Charlevoix. He gave our location in four words. He said there was a man in the water and a second man on the phone, and that both were involved in the death of Captain Paul Dykstra. I have never heard my son voice so steady. When he hung up, he looked at me with the eyes of Paul. “They said stay put. A cutter is already at the dock. Mom, they have been waiting for someone to say his name.”
The Coast Guard arrived in six minutes, with a floodlight and two small boats. They pulled Curt out of the harbor coughing, and the second boat swept the old dock and found the crates. Six of them, hidden in the pilings, under a tarp. They contained counterfeit prescription pills, forty thousand of them, pressed to look like painkillers, along with sealed cartons of untaxed cigarettes from a factory in Kentucky. A federal agent in a black windbreaker opened one with a pocketknife and shook his head. “This has been coming across the lake for six years,” he said. “We never knew the route.”
They found Glen at the harbor master office, sitting at his desk in the dark with his hands folded. He made no attempt to leave. When the agent asked him if he had anything to say, he looked at me through the glass, and I saw that he was weeping, the old broad shoulders shaking. “Sharon,” he said, as the door opened, “I never meant for it to end that way. Paul found the crates, and he said he was going to report it. I only asked Curt to talk to him on the stern deck.” He put his face in his hands. “He did not go overboard on his own.”
The body of Paul was never recovered, but the testimony was enough. Glen pleaded guilty to second degree murder, to conspiracy to distribute a controlled substance, and to smuggling, and received thirty years. Curt received life. The ferry line was sold to the county, and a federal task force dismantled a ring that had passed through eleven small harbors. In July, on a bright afternoon, we held a second service at the end of the new terminal pier, with the whole island watching from their porches. I did not bury an empty casket this time. I scattered a handful of rose petals on the water.
Nate finished his license that winter. He is the youngest captain in the history of the line, twenty four years old, and he wears his father steel thermos on a hook by the wheel. The first morning he stood at the helm, I rode with him, in a life jacket, because he insisted. We crossed the strait in a gray dawn, with the gulls wheeling and the island rising out of the mist. He did not speak for twenty minutes. Then he cleared his throat and said, quietly, “Mom, he would have loved this crossing.”
I keep a small card in my coat. It is the photograph of Paul in the cargo hold, the one with the five words on the back, trimmed and laminated by Nate. None of this is listed. Last week, at the end of the run, I turned it over in my hand and noticed that my son had added a sixth line beneath, in his careful block letters: Now it is. I held it against the rail of the boat, and the cold wind off the lake blew the tears across my face like rain, and I let it.