The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

None of that alone proved Jerry meant for anyone to die. He would tell people, later, that he only meant to strand them, to buy himself time before the audit came due, to make the trip end early with an engine problem instead of a drowning. I do not know if I believe that. I do not know if it matters, when four people went into that water and only the boat came back.

What I needed, Sheriff Dawson told me plainly, was a witness. A recording of a heated conversation the night before is powerful, but a defense attorney can call it an argument between brothers, nothing more, and Jerry had six years to build himself into the grieving, devoted uncle who mowed my lawn every Saturday. I needed somebody who saw something that morning, and the only person who had been at that marina at dawn, filling gas cans before the sun came up, was a dockhand named Walt Sherrow, who had worked that ramp for thirty years and who, when Sheriff Dawson first knocked on his door, said he did not remember anything unusual about that morning at all.

I did not push Walt. I did not have it in me to push anybody else that year. Instead, the whole thing came open somewhere I never would have predicted, at the town’s sixth annual candlelight vigil at the Comfort Lake boat ramp, an evening the Loon Lake Volunteer Fire Department had started holding every summer for every family the lake had ever taken, ours included.

Two hundred people stood along that shoreline that evening holding candles in paper cups, and Jerry stood near the front with his wife and his son Russ, who was eight years old and had never once in his short life met the uncle and the cousins he was named half after. Jerry had a way, at those vigils, of positioning himself close enough to the front that people saw him grieving, close enough to me that people saw us standing together, one broken family united by tragedy, and every year I let him do it because I did not have the strength left over to stand somewhere else.

That night, though, little Russ tugged on his mother’s sleeve in the quiet, in the exact hush between the fire chaplain’s prayer and the reading of the four names, and asked, in the clear, carrying voice that only a child who does not yet understand a room can produce, “Mommy, is this the lake where Daddy said Uncle Mark wasn’t going to make it back before they even left.”

Two hundred candles do not make noise, but I have never in my life heard a silence that loud.