The engine of the red truck was still warm when I laid my palm on the hood. I stood at the public landing in the gray light with my trailer half backed down the ramp and my first client still thirty minutes away, looking at Florida plates, an empty seat, and a coffee cup in the holder with the lid still steaming. Duane was here. Duane, who had gone missing from a house on a canal in Fort Myers, with every dollar Norbert and Sharon had put into it, was somewhere on my lake.
I did not call the deputy right away. I know that was foolish, and I would not advise it to a client. But I had guided this water for six summers and fished it for sixty years, and I knew that a man who parks at the landing before dawn is not going to walk. He is going to take a boat. I looked down the shoreline, and I noticed what I was looking for. A small aluminum boat was missing from the rack behind the bait shop, and a ripple was spreading across the channel in the mist.
Dad taught me to read a lake the way a doctor reads a face. He used to say a frightened fish goes to the deepest, ugliest spot it can find, and a frightened man does the same. I pushed off in my boat and ran the north shore, past the weed beds and the sunken log where I caught my first muskie at nine years old, and there in the shadow of the old Halvorsen cabin dock, just as I figured, sat a heavyset man in a camouflage jacket with a rod in his hand and a duffel bag between his boots.
He did not run, which I will say for him. When he heard my motor throttle down he only looked up, and the color went out of his face. He was seventy years old, with a day of stubble and eyes like a hound dog that has been caught in the henhouse. “Marcella,” he said. “I had a feeling it would be you.” I tied my boat to his dock without being asked and sat down on a cooler, the way I used to sit when I was counseling a freshman who had skipped third period.
A man who steals from his friends usually does not run away. He only goes looking for the one person who will listen.
He told me all of it. The house in Fort Myers was real, but it was never paid for. Duane had borrowed against it three times, and when the bank called the loan, he took what was left of the money Norbert wired him and disappeared. He drove north in a week because he could not think of anywhere else to go. The cabin on this lake had belonged to his father. He had spent every childhood summer on this dock. “I just wanted to sit here one more time before they came for me,” he said. He started to cry.
In the duffel bag was eleven thousand dollars and something wrapped in an old flannel shirt. Duane unwrapped it with shaking fingers and held it out to me, and I knew what it was before I touched it. A casting piece with a cork handle, worn smooth. I turned it over in my hands, and there on the side plate, scratched with a nail by my father in 1968, was a tiny M. “I took it from the tackle box of Norbert, years ago, when we were drunk at the lodge,” Duane whispered. “I always wanted it. I left him a copy. I have been sick about it ever since.”
I called the deputy from the middle of the lake. Duane did not argue. He climbed into my boat with his duffel bag and sat in the bow like a child on a school bus, and we motored back to the landing together in the morning light. Norbert was standing on the dock when we came in, his face the color of old newspaper. The two men looked at each other for a long time. Neither said a word. Then Duane lifted the bag and handed it up to his friend.
The deputy took Duane away in the back of the squad car. It was gentle, as these things go. Sharon cried in the parking lot and held on to my arm, and I told her I would help her find a lawyer in Rhinelander who would not take her last dime. Norbert stood by himself at the edge of the ramp with the bag at his feet, looking out at the water. Then he turned and said, very quietly, “Marcella, I was a fool.” It was the closest thing to an apology I had heard from him in forty four years.
He did not ask to come home that day. He knew better. Instead he asked if he could ride along on my morning trip. I said no, there was a client already booked. He said he would sit in the back of the boat and keep his mouth shut. I considered that for about as long as it takes a muskie to strike. Then I handed him a life jacket. We took out a retired nurse from Milwaukee, who caught a forty one inch fish, and Norbert held the net.
It took the rest of the fall. Norbert sold his half of the Florida house at a loss, moved into a rented room in town, and came by every Saturday with a bag of donuts and a repaired lawn chair. He asked nothing. He listened when I talked. In November, over a pot of coffee on the dock, I told him that I had decided something. I would take him back as a friend, and maybe, one day, as more than that, but he would have to earn his seat in the boat the same way anyone does. By showing up.
The cork handled casting rig is back in its glass case now, with the little M facing out. I am sixty seven years old, with a captain license, a business card that says Ladies Welcome, and a husband who finally knows how to bait a hook without complaining. Some mornings, at the landing, I find a fresh thermos on the dock with a note tucked under the lid. It says, Fish well. I always do.
