Riverwatcher Page 22

  “He was a writer.”

  “So?”

  “He wrote novels as well as outdoor articles.”

  “So?”

  “Novelists tell plausible lies. Proffit was good at it. Maybe seeing poachers on the South Branch gave him the idea for the letter, or maybe he invented it from whole cloth. Remember that on the cassette—Stroud’s recording—Proffit said that in the letter Charlie disclosed he camped all summer at Rainbow Run and fished at night, which was how he knew about the poaching? Proffit couldn’t have actually known such things until he drove out to Michigan and started shadowing Charlie. And—”

  “And,” Mercy said, “Charlie would never have written anything so personal in a letter. He just wouldn’t. Not to a total stranger. Why didn’t we catch that on the recording?”

  “Like I said—Proffit was good at telling a story. He had us believing Charlie wrote him about poachers.”

  “But at least one thing never rang true. It wasn’t like Charlie to go over somebody’s head. He’d complain about poachers to me, not to my superiors. And certainly not to a magazine writer. I said that all along.”

  “You did.”

  “So Proffit wasn’t all that terrific at inventing things.”

  “I don’t know,” Fitzgerald said. “He published his novels. Six of the things.”

  *  *  *

  “WE CAME HERE because of Charlie,” Mercy said after they gathered the remains of lunch into the sack from Glen’s, “not Proffit. This was Charlie’s place. I’ll always remember him more here than in the campground.” Then she looked over at Fitzgerald and said, “You’ll get the reward, you know. Stroud will have to give it to you.”

  “I’ll give it back.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “Give it away, then. Maybe to the library in Charlie’s name.”

  “I’ve got another idea. For some of the money, anyway. Let’s get a big stone, have it hauled in here, this clearing or maybe more toward the old stairs. Let’s put a plaque on it—brass with Charlie’s name, his dates. Something else about his life up here—angler, camper, riverwatcher, something like that. Maybe a quotation at the bottom. Is there anything from Thoreau?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You could work on it. What should be on the plaque.”

  “All I’m able to write, you mean? No plausible lies?”

  “What I mean,” Mercy said, “is it’s something you could do for Charlie’s memory.”

  “I know,” Fitzgerald said. “I’d like to.”

  “So let’s do it. We’ll have a dedication ceremony for the monument. All Charlie’s old friends from around the river. They’re the only ones who ever come this way, who really care for this place.”

  “You’d invite Charlie’s wife?”

  Mercy grimaced. “I don’t think so.”

  Fitzgerald said, “How’s this? ‘I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life . . .’ ”

  “That fits Charlie.”

  “I’ll keep working on it,” Fitzgerald said.

  #

  Note to the Reader

  The outdoor writer Frank Forester is not an invention but, as the story notes, a pen name of Henry William Herbert, a popular writer of the 1840s and 1850s who was an early champion of a code of ethics for anglers and hunters. His book The Warwick Woodlands, or, Things as They Were There, Ten Years Ago was published in Philadelphia in 1845. Herbert took his own life in 1858.