“Jo?” Clay said again, his voice tight in my ear. “Why are you at the marina?” I looked at the white pickup at the end of the boat ramp with its door hanging open and its engine running, and my stomach went cold. But I had been married to a tournament fisherman for thirty nine years, and I knew what to do when a fish was close and the line was thin. “Minnows,” I said. “I came for minnows for Kelsey. She wants to go out on the lake Saturday.” I drew a slow breath. “Where are you, honey? I thought you were in Chattanooga.”
“Turn around,” said Clay. I turned. He was standing at the corner of the bait shop thirty feet away, his phone still at his ear, his hat low over his eyes. He lowered the phone and began to walk toward me across the gravel in his work boots, smiling the smile that had sat at my breakfast table for a year. “Sorry, Jo,” he said. “I got off early. A friend at the marina called. He said he saw you out back with a screwdriver.” He glanced at the bait freezer. “What on earth are you doing on the ground?”
I stood up, brushing my knees. I held the photo of Wayne face down in my hand, and I looked at the man I had trusted. “Looking for something Wayne left,” I said. “A photograph. Of a scale.” Clay stopped. All the color left his face. Somewhere out on the lake a boat horn sounded. “Jo,” he said, “you do not understand what you are holding.” “I understand,” I said. “I understand that my husband wore his life jacket every second of his life, and that he wrote me a note the night before the tournament. I understand you rigged the scale.”
A photograph hidden under a bait freezer brought a widow face to face with the man who had been sitting at her breakfast table.
Clay took his hat off. He turned it in his hands, and for the first time in two years I saw the real man under the friendly one. “He saw it at the weigh in,” he said. “The magnet. He was not supposed to be near the scale. I told him I would fix it, that I would return the money. He would not let it go. He said he would take it to the association Monday.” His voice dropped. “We went out on the lake after midnight to talk, on my boat. We argued. He took off his life jacket, because he was hot, because he was angry. He leaned over the side. And I let go.”
“You let go,” I repeated. “Of what?” “Of his arm.” He was crying now. “He was reaching for the rail and slipped. I was holding him. I let go, Jo. I could have held on. I did not. I stood there and watched him in the water for ten seconds, and I thought, if he is gone, it all goes away.” He wiped his face. “I have not slept a night since.” In my back pocket my phone was warm against my leg. The little red dot of the recording app had been blinking since the moment I knelt behind the freezer. I let him say every word.
“I should tell you,” I said, “that I have been recording this.” Clay stared at me. And then, from the road above the marina, I heard the first thin whine of a siren. Then another. A county cruiser came skidding down the gravel with its lights flashing, and behind it a small blue car, and out of the blue car jumped my daughter, in her work clothes, with her face as white as a plate. “Mama!” Kelsey cried. “I called Deputy Hammond when you did not answer. I followed him.” Clay did not run. He looked at Kelsey, and his shoulders folded.
“I loved your father,” he said to her. “I swear I did.” “Then you should not have lied to us at the funeral,” Kelsey said, in a voice I had never heard. Deputy Hammond put his hand on the arm of Clay. He read him his rights in the plain, courteous way a deputy does when he has known a man for twenty years. Clay did not argue. He looked once at the water, and then he got into the back seat of the cruiser and sat there with his head down while the lake went on shining behind him.
The little key with the red tag opened a locker at the marina office, and inside it were the weigh in logs for eleven years, a rigged scale, and a notebook of payouts in the handwriting of Clay. The tournament association opened an inquiry the following week and found nine winners whose prizes had been taken wrongly. In March, Clay pleaded guilty to fraud and to the death of Wayne, and the judge gave him fourteen years. I sat in the second row. Kelsey held my hand. I did not hate him, exactly. Hate takes too much strength. I simply felt very sad.
The association did one thing I will always be grateful for. They reviewed the weigh in of the night Wayne died, found the nine pound largemouth to be honest and measured, and declared it the winning fish of the Guntersville Classic. Wayne had won. The trophy came to my door in a box, with a letter. I put it back on the wall of the hallway, in the frame, with a new brass plate: Wayne Price, Champion. Kelsey and I finished painting the hallway that same afternoon. We used the yellow he liked.
In June we went out on the lake together, Kelsey and I, in a borrowed boat at five in the morning, when the mist lay on the water like cotton. We both wore life jackets. We fished until the sun was high and caught nothing, and laughed about it. At noon I took a flat stone from my pocket, the one from under the bait freezer, and dropped it over the side near the Goose Pond bridge. It sank slowly, turning, into the green. Kelsey put her arm around me. “Dad would have said we were using the wrong lure,” she said. “He would have been right,” I said.
