At twenty-five minutes past nine I picked a spot several hundred yards from the nearest fisherman’s fight, cut the motor and let the boat drift. There was a slight inshore current, but I figured I would maintain the same relative position to the other boats because I assumed they would take advantage of the current for drift trolling instead of anchoring and doing still fishing.
At nine twenty-nine by my watch I began studying the shoreline, concentrating on the point I judged Crestwood Beach would be. Minutes passed and nothing happened.
With my eyes straining at the shoreline, dotted here and there by cottage lights and silhouetted by the lights of moving traffic on the highway beyond it, I sat motionless for minutes more. Finally I risked lowering my gaze long enough to glance at the time, and was shocked to see it was twenty minutes to ten. By then Helena should have flashed her lights three times.
Just as I raised my eyes again, a pair of headlights blinked twice off to my right, a good quarter mile from where I had been searching for them. I only caught them from the corner of my eye, and they blinked on and off too fast for me to take a fix. There was nothing to do but wait another five minutes with my gaze centered in that direction.
Eventually they blinked twice again.
Starting the motor, I headed at full throttle toward the point where I had seen the lights. But running a boat in the dark is confusing. I was fifty yards offshore, had turned out my Coleman lantern and was heading confidently toward a narrow dock I could see protruding out over the water when the lights blinked again a hundred yards to my left.
Changing course, I cut the throttle way down and slowly chugged up to the small dock Helena and I had stood on the night before. As I tied up I could make out the dim shadow of the convertible next to the dark and boarded-up cottage.
Helena greeted me with a calm, “Hello, Barney.”
“Any trouble?” I asked.
“Not since I got here. I missed the turn and was a few minutes late. But no one from the other cottages has come out to ask why I was blinking my lights.”
Looking in both directions, I could see no one. The cottages both sides of us were still dark. Going behind the car, I lifted the trunk lid and took the dead body of Lawrence Powers in my arms.
As I lurched past the front seat with my burden, I said, “Bring the gunny sacks.”
I’m a fairly strong man, but it’s quite a chore even for a strong man to carry an inanimate hundred and forty pounds over uneven ground in the dark. Once I stumbled and nearly dropped the body, and as I started to lower it into the boat, it slipped from my grip and nearly tumbled into the water before bouncing off the gunwale and settling just where I wanted it on the bottom of the boat.
Again I found myself drenched with sweat.
When I finished wiping my face with a handkerchief, I found Helena standing on the dock beside me, the three burlap bags in her hands. Carefully I covered her husband’s body with them.
Then I returned to the car for the two anchors and the sash cord.
When I was finally reseated in the boat and ready to start, Helena still stood on the dock.
“Can’t I go along and help?” she asked.
“I’d never find this place again in the dark,” I told her. I looked at my watch, noting it was five of ten. “Pick me up at the boat livery at ten thirty.”
When she didn’t say anything, I glanced up at her. Maybe it was only an effect of the moonlight, but I imagined there was a look of disappointment on her usually expressionless face, as though I had refused her some pleasure she particularly wanted to enjoy.
“Ten thirty,” I repeated.
She merely nodded, and I started the motor and pulled away.
I headed straight out from shore at quarter speed for about fifty yards, then stopped long enough to light my lantern. I didn’t care to have the Naval Reserve pick me up for running without lights.
When I started up again, I opened to full throttle and held it until I was even with the farthest boats from shore, approximately two miles out. I didn’t want to risk calling attention to myself by going out beyond them.
There weren’t many boats out that far, perhaps a half dozen spaced several hundred yards apart. I cut my motor halfway between two.
There was no risk working under the bright glare of the Coleman lantern, for since I could see nothing of the other boats except their lights, I knew it was impossible for them to see what was going on in mine. Working rapidly, I uncovered the body, cut a length of sash cord and tied one of the anchors around Lawrence Powers’s neck. The other I tied firmly to his feet after lashing his ankles together.
I was standing up in the boat and just getting ready to heave him over the side when a voice said almost in my ear, “Any luck?”
Starting violently, I lost my balance, made a wild grab for the side of the boat and sat down with a thump on the body. I took one wild look over my shoulder, expecting to see someone within feet of me, then drew a deep sigh of relief. There was a boat light slowly coming toward me, but it was still a good twenty yards away. I realized it was only the acoustic effect of sound traveling across water which had made the voice seem so near.
Since the two figures in the other boat were only faceless shapes to me, I realized they couldn’t see into my boat any clearer than I could see into theirs. Quickly I pulled the burlap sacks over the body and pushed myself up onto the rear seat next to the motor.
Only then did it occur to me I hadn’t even answered the other boat’s hail. Belatedly I called back in as calm a voice as I could muster. “Couple of small perch is all.”
The boat was now within ten yards, and I could make out the two men in it. The one in front was in his early twenties and the man operating the motor was middle-aged. The motor was barely turning over, which was the reason I hadn’t heard their approach. But they hadn’t been trying to sneak up on me, I realized when I saw a line stretching back from either side of the boat. They were moving at that slow speed because they were trolling.
They passed within three yards of me. As they went by, the middle-aged man said, “We ain’t having any luck either. We’re about ready to go in.”
Then they were past. Neither had glanced at the burlap-covered mound in the bottom of my boat.
I waited until I could see nothing of them but their light, then uncovered the body again, lifted it in my arms and heaved it into the water. It landed on its back, the sightless eyes peering straight up at me for a final second before it disappeared in a gurgle of bubbles.
I tossed the burlap bags overboard after it. Then, with shaking fingers, I lit a cigarette and drew a deep and relieved drag.
15
I was halfway back to shore before it occurred to me the old man at the boat livery might think it odd if he noticed my line wasn’t wet. Cutting the motor, I tied a yellow and red flatfish to my line and made a long cast out over the water. I knew the chance of getting a strike on an artificial lure at night was remote, but all I was interested in was getting the line wet.
My usual fisherman’s luck held. If I had been fishing seriously, I could have sat there all night without a single strike. But because the last thing in the world I wanted at that moment was a fish, I nailed a northern pike which must have weighed close to five pounds. It took me nearly ten minutes to land it.
Then I had another thought. I didn’t have an Illinois fishing license. And it would be just my luck to step out of the boat into the arms of a game warden.
So I unhooked one of the nicest northerns I ever boated and tossed it back in the water.
When I pulled in at the boat livery dock, the old man asked me, “Any luck?”