The Fishing Trip They Never Came Home From

Jerry’s wife went white. Jerry reached for his son’s shoulder too fast, too hard, and Russ flinched away from him in front of the whole crowd, which is its own kind of answer even before anyone says a word.

And it was Walt Sherrow, thirty feet back in that crowd with his own candle shaking in his hand, who broke first. I found out later he had carried it for six years, the sight of Jerry crouched at that motor housing before sunrise with a screwdriver and a look on his face Walt told himself for six years he must have imagined, because the alternative was too ugly to hold. He had said nothing to protect his own conscience more than to protect Jerry, he told the sheriff later, because saying nothing let him keep believing it had been an accident, same as the rest of us wanted to. But an eight year old boy repeating his own father’s words out loud, in front of two hundred candles and the mothers of three dead boys, was more than Walt Sherrow’s conscience could survive one more night.

He walked to the front of that crowd, right past me, right up to Sheriff Dawson, and he said, loud enough for the whole shoreline to hear him, “I saw him. That morning. I saw Jerry Delaney at that boat before sunrise, and I have hated myself every day since for keeping my mouth shut about it.”

Sheriff Dawson arrested Jerry right there on the boat ramp, in front of the fire chaplain, in front of Jerry’s own son, in front of two hundred candles that did not go out.

I would like to tell you the trial was quick. It was not. It took the better part of a year, and I sat in that courtroom in Springfield for every single day of it, in the same row every morning, with Emily’s hand in mine and Sheriff Dawson two rows behind us. The county’s forensic accountant walked the jury through eighteen months of falsified invoices to a supplier that turned out to be a post office box Jerry rented under his wife’s maiden name, sixty one thousand dollars in total once the final number came in, most of it spent on a house payoff, a boat of his own that he kept at a marina forty minutes away where nobody from Loon Lake would recognize it, and a four wheeler for a six year old boy.