Mike keyed his radio from the floor of the boathouse, and I heard the rustle of paper in the background before he spoke. “Karen, the envelope has three things,” he said. “A typed list of twelve hundred lures, with the maker and the year. A letter. And a deed, notarized, with a seal.” I wrote every word on my pad. “The deed gives the entire collection to the Heritage Fishing Museum in Muskegon, effective upon the passing of Mr. Pellerin.” I put down my pen. “That means the lures were never hers, Karen. They were never his grandson either. They have belonged to the museum since 2022.”
He read me the letter, a line at a time, in the crisp voice of a man who had grown up fishing that lake. “Gertrude, if you are reading this, Cody has gone for the lures,” Henri had written, in old blue ink. “I could not bear that they be sold to a collector and lost in a basement. I have given them to the museum, where children will see them. You may keep them on loan for your lifetime. If he tries to sell, this is his stop sign. Do not blame him too hard. A boy can lose his way.” In the background, I heard Mrs. Pellerin begin quietly to weep.
The ambulance crew wrapped her in a blanket and carried her up the path from the water on a stretcher, while Mike walked behind with the tackle box held to his chest. The lake was iron gray, with a skin of ice at the edges. At the top of the lawn, she asked them to stop. She looked at the dark cottage, the empty cardboard boxes in the bed of the pickup, and the open door of the study. “He has been taking them since Sunday,” she said. “Nine boxes. Almost three hundred lures.” At that moment, headlights swung into the drive, and an engine came crunching up the gravel. It was Cody.
A tackle box with a hidden bottom tray gave one dispatcher the evening to bring a grandmother and a lifetime of lures safely home on Diamond Lake.
Mike gave his terms in the headlights, with his hand resting lightly on his belt. Cody would turn off the engine. He would step out of the truck. And he would explain, to a deputy of Cass County, where the nine boxes had gone. Cody got out slowly, a lanky man of thirty four in a leather jacket, with his eyes darting. “Deputy, this is a family matter,” he said. “My grandmother is confused. She locked herself in there. I was going to find her in the morning.” Mike held up the deed, in the light. “Mr. Pellerin, these lures belong to a museum,” he said. “Who did you sell them to?”
Mrs. Pellerin raised herself on one elbow on the stretcher. Even in the cold, in the blanket, she had the dignity of a woman who had run a household for sixty years. “Cody Pellerin, look at me,” she said. He did. “I have loved you since you were in diapers. I would have given you the cottage. I would have given you anything you asked, if you had only asked.” Her voice cracked, and steadied. “You did not need to put me in a boathouse.” The big man in the leather jacket stood very still. For the first time he seemed to see her, small and gray, with the army blanket slipping off her shoulder. His mouth began to shake.
He did not stay to finish. He wheeled, flung himself back into the cab, and slammed the truck into reverse, to back down the drive and out into the road before anyone could reach him. But the paramedics had parked their ambulance across the foot of the lane, its red lights spinning. He saw it too late. The truck backed into the side of the ambulance with a crash and a shriek of metal, and the horn blared on and on. The younger paramedic opened the door of the cab. He shut off the engine, and removed the keys, and said, “Sir, I think you are going to want to stay put.”
I went to see Mrs. Pellerin on Saturday at the hospital in Dowagiac, after my shift, with a paper bag of hard butterscotch candies. She was sitting up in bed, with color in her cheeks, and her hair brushed. I had never seen her face, only heard her voice through a headset. She took my hand. “So you are the one,” she said. “Karen, I knew when I picked up that radio that somebody would answer.” I told her it was all I had done. “That is all anyone ever does,” she said. “And it is everything.” She asked about Cody. I told her he was in the county jail. She nodded for a long time.
The money consequences followed in the weeks after. Cody had texted the buyer in Chicago the amounts and the shipping times, and the detectives traced the man within two days. He returned all nine boxes, and cooperated, and was not charged. The museum accepted the donation with great ceremony. Cody was charged with elder abuse, larceny and unlawful imprisonment, and he pleaded guilty in January, with two years in prison and a program for his pills. Mrs. Pellerin signed a statement asking the judge for leniency, and then she asked that the cottage be repaired, and a ramp built to the boathouse.
In the name of my mother, Wilma Vanderhoef, who passed in 2016 and who answered the telephone for the township for thirty years, I started the Lake Radio Fund. It pays for emergency radios, wellness checks and counseling for older lake residents in Cass, Berrien and Van Buren counties who live alone through the winter. In the first year, we placed seventy radios in cottages and boathouses. A widower of eighty four, in a wool cap, took one from my hands and said, “My son has the phone.” I told him how to key the mic, and that I would always answer.
In June, the Heritage Fishing Museum opened the Pellerin Collection in a long hall with wide windows over the water. Twelve hundred lures, in glass cases, from the 1890s to the 1940s, hand painted, glittering like jewels. Mrs. Pellerin came in a new wheelchair, in a navy dress, with a corsage. Mike stood beside her in his dress uniform. She asked me to come forward, and she placed a small wooden minnow, painted red and gold, in the palm of my hand. “Henri would have liked you,” she said. I closed my fingers around it, and I could not say a word.
