Wyatt wanted to turn it off. Cody held his shoulder and would not let him. We watched the whole of it, the three of us, with the kitchen light off and the laptop glowing on the table like a small cold window. When the clip ended, I sat for a long time. Then I opened the envelope, and the handwriting of Ron, which had been a joke in our household for forty years, made me laugh for one second and weep for the next.
Linda, he had written, if you are reading this, I did not get the chance to tell you. I have known since February that Dwayne was stealing from the marina. He has been moving money to a company in Kansas City for three years. A man from the state banking office, Mr. Perry, came to see me in March, asking about the loan papers. I never signed any loan. I told him so. Two days later he vanished. I think I know why. Do not trust the sheriff. Take the drive to the Highway Patrol in Jefferson City.
That is exactly what I did. I drove the next morning to Jefferson City with both boys, in my Sunday dress, with the flash drive in my purse and the black notebook on my knee. A captain of the Highway Patrol listened for an hour in a small gray office. He did not say much. When I finished, he picked up the telephone and said to someone, “I need a dive team at the Lake of the Ozarks tomorrow morning, and I need it quiet.”
A patient man who hides a small proof in a tackle box has trusted his grandsons with the whole lake.
The divers went into the cove behind the house of Dwayne at dawn on a gray Thursday. I stood on the public dock across the water with Cody and Wyatt, and with a cup of coffee I never drank. The sun came up. At twenty past nine, a boat crane lifted something large and dripping into the light, and a murmur went along the shore where fifty of our neighbors had gathered. It was a silver sedan. It had been under twenty feet of water for ten months.
Mr. Perry was inside. I will say only that his family could finally lay him to rest. His wife stood across the cove in a black coat, with a young daughter, and I saw the child take her hand. A trooper came and asked whether I wanted to leave. I said no. I said I wanted to see the man who had done it brought to the shore, and the trooper, who had a mustache like Ron, looked at me and said, “I think you will.”
They arrested Dwayne Pruett in the dining room of the marina restaurant at lunchtime, in front of eighty customers, with a bowl of chowder in front of him. The man from Kansas City, whose name was Vincent Rizzo, was picked up at the airport with a ticket to Mexico. He talked within the hour. By Friday, agents of the state and the FBI were carrying boxes out of the office of Dwayne, and the news had reached every town on the lake.
The little black notebook did the rest. Ron had kept it for three years in pencil, in his chicken scratch: every deposit, every transfer, every date on which his partner had signed his name to a paper that Ron never saw. A forensic accountant from St. Louis spent nine days with it. She said it was the best piece of private bookkeeping she had ever been handed, and that if the man were not dead she would have offered him a job.
The loan was declared a forgery. The marina, the house, and the boat were returned to me by order of a circuit judge, who looked at the stack of evidence and said, with a tired smile, that for once the law and the truth had arrived at the courthouse on the same day. Dwayne was charged with murder, forgery, and fraud. The jury convicted him in nine hours, and when the foreman read the word guilty, I felt Wyatt press his shoulder against mine, small and warm, the way Ron used to lean against me at the end of a long day. They did not even stop for lunch. He is serving a life sentence in Jefferson City.
Cody and Wyatt asked to testify, and the judge allowed Cody, who was fifteen, to read from the notebook. He did it in a steady voice, with the old cap of his grandfather in his lap. When he finished, he looked at the jury and said that his grandfather had taught him to read the lake, and that the lake always showed the truth if you waited long enough. A woman in the second row wiped her eyes with a tissue. So did the judge.
We reopened the bait shop in the spring. Wyatt works the register now, and Cody runs the dock, and the two of them bicker over the radio like their grandfather and me. The big green tackle box sits on the counter with the lid propped open. Every morning, anglers come in for minnows and coffee, and they ask about the box, and the boys tell the whole story, with all the proper pauses, and then they sell them a lure from the bottom tray.
