The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

My daughter was the one who found the phone, not me. I want to start there because for six years I had convinced myself I was the one still looking, still asking, still refusing to let the lake keep its secret. But it was Emily, twenty two years old, standing in the doorway of the garage with a shoebox in her hands, who finally cracked the thing open. I was folding towels at the kitchen table when she said my name in a voice I had not heard since she was small and scared of a thunderstorm.

“Mom.”

That is where this really starts, but I need you to understand what came before it, because none of what happened at the lake makes any sense until you know what my husband’s family was like, and what his brother was like, and how long I let a man stand in my kitchen and tell me to stop grieving the way I needed to grieve.

My name is Anne. I am forty seven years old. I have lived in Loon Lake, Missouri my whole life, in the kind of town where everybody’s mailbox is a little bit crooked and everybody knows whose truck is whose from two hundred yards off. I married Mark Delaney when I was twenty three. He was quiet, steady, the kind of man who checked the oil in his truck every Sunday whether it needed it or not, and who never once in twenty four years of marriage raised his voice at me. We had four children. Emily first, and then three boys close together, Josh, Ben, and Luke, eleven months apart from oldest to youngest at one point, which meant our house was never, ever quiet.

Mark’s family had run Delaney Feed and Farm Supply on Route 9 since before Mark was born. His father built it out of a tin shed and a used grain truck, and by the time Mark and his younger brother Jerry took it over together, it was the only feed store for thirty miles that farmers actually trusted, because Mark weighed every bag himself and never once shorted a customer a pound. Jerry ran the books. That should have been the first thing that worried me, looking back, but Jerry was likable in the way certain men are likable, quick with a joke, quick with a beer at the Fourth of July cookout, always first to hug you a little too long at a funeral. People in Loon Lake loved Jerry. I loved Jerry, for a long time, the way you love a brother in law you never had a reason not to trust.