“I am sitting in my boat, honey, about a hundred yards from your dock,” Pastor Glenn replied, as warm and unhurried as a Sunday sermon. “I saw a light on the water and I worried you had fallen. A woman alone at night near the lake, with all that has happened.” I stood on the boards of the dock with the jelly jar clutched against my chest and stared across the black water. A pair of headlights had gone out on the far shore, and now I heard, far off, the low cough of an outboard motor. “Glenn,” I whispered, “I did not hear a boat when I came out.” He chuckled. “That is because I turned off the engine, Martha.”
The motor started again, and I watched a small shape cut across the lake, a pale wake behind it. I did the only thing I could think of. I pushed the jar deep into the pocket of my coat, kept the flashlight pointed at the water, and called the one man in Indiana I trusted completely: my son in law, Deputy Cole Brandt of the Kosciusko County Sheriff. He picked up on the second ring. I told him in six sentences who I was with, where I was, and what I held. He answered with four words. Keep him talking, Martha.
So I kept him talking. The boat slid up alongside our dock, and Glenn climbed out with a flashlight of his own, in his good gray overcoat, with his white hair combed. He held out a hand to help me up. I did not take it. “Glenn,” I answered, “I found a deed in the buoy of Walt.” For the first time in the two years I had known him as a friend, I watched the kindness slide from his face like paint off a boat. “Martha,” he replied quietly, “I wish you had left that where it was.”
A man who hides a warning in a green buoy trusts the lake to deliver it when he cannot.
He did not threaten me. That is the strange part. He sat down on the bench at the end of the dock and folded his hands, and he spoke with the sorrow of a man describing a funeral that was not his fault. A developer named Lyle Voss had offered the church building fund two million dollars to secure the shoreline. All it needed was a right of way across the land of Walt, and Walt had refused. “He told me the lake belonged to the minnows,” Glenn replied. “He would not listen. He was going to expose the deal to the county, and the church would have been ruined.”
“Did you push him?” I asked. My voice did not shake. I do not know where it came from. Glenn studied his hands. “I was in the boat beside him that morning,” he replied. “We argued. I told him to think of the congregation. He stood up to walk away from me on the deck, and I reached for his arm, and the boat rocked.” He raised his eyes. “He hit his head on the gunwale. I swear, Martha, I did not mean it. And then he went into the water, and I could not make myself pull him out.”
Behind him, out on the lake, I saw blue lights come on, silent and swift, a boat of the marine patrol skimming toward us with Cole at the bow. Glenn turned and saw it, and his shoulders dropped. He did not run. He rose from the bench like an old man, and he whispered, “I have prayed for two years that someone would find it.” Cole stepped onto the dock and read him his rights. I stood beside my son in law with the jelly jar in both hands and my knees shaking at last, and I felt Walt standing in the dark behind me.
The small key from the jar opened a locker at the marina in Syracuse. Inside was a cassette recorder, the kind Walt used to tape fishing reports. On it, in a voice that cracked with age and temper, Pastor Glenn argued with my husband in the boat that morning, and the last minute of the tape was the sound of a man falling into water. The prosecutor in Warsaw played it for the jury twice. Glenn pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter and fraud, and Lyle Voss received eleven years for conspiracy. The church sold its land to pay the damages.
I took back the bait shop. The young couple from the church, who had been as deceived as I was, sold it to me for one dollar and a handshake. I painted the sign myself, in blue, with a fish and a lantern: Walt Bait and Tackle, Since 1984. Ellie works the register on Saturdays. She is fifteen now and sharp as a hook, and she gives the customers a stern lecture on knots. On the wall behind the counter, I hung the green tackle box, open, with a single line of pencil on the lid.
The lot at the end of our shore is not for sale to anyone. I signed it into a conservancy last spring, in front of a notary and a table of neighbors. It will remain forest and cattails and fishing pier for as long as the lake exists. A small stone stands on the point with the name of Walt carved in it, and the words he wrote in pencil, on the bottom of a note, in the last hour of his life. The lake belongs to everybody. I read it every morning before I open the shop.
On the second anniversary of his death, Ellie and I rowed out to the spot by the old pier, just after dawn, with a thermos of cocoa and two poles. The water was flat as a table. She baited her own hook, and she cast it badly, and she laughed. I felt the line tug in my hands, and I thought I heard a voice, low and amused, right beside me in the mist, telling me to be patient, Marty, the good ones always bite when you stop trying so hard.