SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1)
Read SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) Online
Authors: Edward A. Stabler
Tags: #mystery, #possession, #curse, #gold, #flood, #moonshine, #1920s, #gravesite, #chesapeake and ohio canal, #mule, #whiskey, #heroin, #great falls, #silver, #potomac river
SWAINS LOCK
Edward A. Stabler
Smashwords Edition
Copyright 2013 Edward A. Stabler. All Rights
Reserved.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment
only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.
If you would like to share this book with another person, please
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own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this
author.
SWAINS LOCK is a work of fiction and its characters
are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of these
characters to actual persons living or dead is unintended and
coincidental.
*****
For Martha, who made this book possible, and for
those
who have walked the towpath or put their feet in the river.
*****
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE
PART ONE
PART TWO
Chapter 21 – Unwinding by Starlight
PART THREE
Chapter 30 – Emmerts Lockhouse
Prologue
Blood Pendant
Tuesday, May 3, 1831
The two men sat on sloping rocks shaded by a
Bear Island hackberry tree. Sweat trickled down their backs and
foreheads and their reddened hands were streaked with dirt. Five
hours of work on a spring morning had raised a thigh-high stone
wall that bisected a swampy drainage. The feeder was operating now,
watering the C&O Canal down from Seneca, and the sixty-foot
depth of Widewater across the towpath was slowly filling. When
their half-built wall was finished, it would prevent this grafted
vein of the canal from draining out across the island toward the
Potomac River.
Glancing through slender trees toward the
towpath, the man with curly hair noticed the girl when she was
still forty paces away. He caught the other man’s attention with a
low whistle. Screened by sunlit trunks, they could watch her
approach without being seen. She wore a tan skirt that might have
been buckskin and a long-sleeved blouse. Her hands and dark hair
swung a gentle rhythm as she glided forward with feline grace. A
grin widened on the face of the man with curly hair as he watched
the girl.
“She moves like an animal, eh Richard?” He
gathered a clot of saliva in his mouth and spat it out tersely
between his feet. “Bet she fucks like one too.”
“Just one way to find out,” Richard said,
stroking his red-gold mustache. He rocked forward to crouch in the
shade on the balls of his feet.
“No sign of poppa today,” the man with curly
hair whispered, grinning again.
“Probably sleeping off his whiskey back at
the quarry,” Richard whispered back. “It’s lonely out here on the
island today, Johnny.”
Johnny pushed himself away from the rock and
crouched alongside Richard. The girl was only twenty feet away now
and they could hear her singing softly to herself, the tune rising
and falling as she passed. Richard stepped quietly to the towpath
and Johnny followed. Their eyes met and they loped toward the girl.
When she turned toward the crunch of footsteps, Richard’s arm
encircled her neck. His hand clamped her mouth as Johnny lifted her
legs to his waist. The girl shook her head and tried to scream but
her voice and teeth were overpowered by Richard’s calloused
hand.
Richard lowered her to horizontal, hand
still across her mouth, and the gesture jerked open her top button,
displacing the silk cord of a pendant necklace that lay against her
dust-colored skin. She writhed and twisted as the men carried her
back into the Bear Island woods. Past their half-built stone wall,
a fish-shaped pond occupied the lap of the drainage. They carried
the girl along a slope of brown grass toward the tail of the
pond.
“I think we’re beyond earshot,” Richard said
over his shoulder.
“Aye. We ain’t seen no one pass in hours
anyway.”
Together the men dropped their arms to the
ground. The girl tried to roll onto her stomach, screaming as her
mouth came free, but Richard quickly muzzled her with one hand and
pinned her arm with the other. He knelt facing Johnny, who pressed
her ankles to the earth.
“Well now, Johnny,” he said with a smile.
“You seem to have ended up in the favored position. I guess that
means you get the first taste.” He looked down at the girl. Her
gleaming hair was speckled now with dried grass and her dark eyes
oscillated wildly under an emerging skin of tears. “You just relax
and enjoy this now honey. Might be the only chance you get with two
full-blooded white men.” She bit at the fingers of his hand, but
they were tough and thick and he waggled them to avoid her teeth.
When he looked up again, Johnny had already dropped his trousers
and was yanking down his grimy undershorts, still pinning her thigh
with one hand as she frantically tried to twist away. Johnny
cradled his craning member and shuffled toward her on his
knees.
“Here I come, darlin’,” he said, pawing at
her underwear and smiling, “like a big old barge sliding into a
tight little lock.” With his hands still pressed to the girl's
mouth and elbow, Richard glanced down and saw that her eyes had
dried. She was reaching inside the neck of her blouse and pulling
something with her free hand.
“Hey, Johnny,” he said, looking up again. “I
think she likes the look of your boat. Seems she fixin’ to open the
gates for…” Before he could finish he saw a moving shape and a
flash of white light, then felt a stabbing pain. His left eye
closed reflexively as warmth flowed down his face and trickled onto
his lips. Turning back toward the girl, with one eye he saw his own
blood raining onto her face and neck. His occluded left eye was
buried behind a red, throbbing field.
“God damn it!” he roared. “Fucking
half-breed whore!” Johnny jerked back onto his knees in surprise.
The girl stopped struggling momentarily and Richard saw a thin
smile form on her lips. Her free hand was clenched around a reddish
stone shaped like an elm leaf and stained a deeper red with his
blood.
In one motion he grabbed a fistful of hair
and stood up, yanking her to her feet. He pressed his wrapped fist
to her scalp and dipped to sweep her legs off the ground. When she
tried to scream, he pulled her hair until the tears resurfaced and
her voice trailed off. The pond was a half-dozen paces away and he
strode quickly toward it. Johnny had hoisted his suspenders and was
shambling to catch up.
“I told you she was an animal,” he said.
“Fucking injun blood.”
“Well she better ask her medicine man to
turn her into a fish,” Richard said as they reached the water.
Johnny gestured toward the stop-gate near the tail end of the
pond.
“Let’s go behind it. Too open here.”
Past the stop-gate, Richard thrust her down
at the water’s edge, then bent her right arm behind her back and
forced her to her knees. “Time to join your ancestors, you pagan
bitch!” he said as the blood slowed and grew viscous on his face.
The girl inhaled sharply as he thrust her head into placid water
discolored by decaying leaves. Her body was quiet for a moment,
then lunged violently upward. Johnny placed his hand on top of
Richard’s and together they held her head below the surface. Still
clutching its weapon, her left hand flailed for another target.
The girl’s resistance subsided and her body
grew quiet. Her dark hair fanned out across the water, like an aura
surrounding the oppressive hands. She pulled her free arm into the
pond and groped for leverage in the muck at the bottom. Then her
legs and arms erupted in another spasm as she fought to push upward
and back. The reddened hands and arms held fast. She tried to dive
forward but was tethered by Richard’s grip on her bent arm. Her
third and final lunge was a fading echo of its predecessors, and
after that the girl was still.
Johnny pried the object from her fingers and
laughed. “Some kind of stone leaf. Maybe a necklace…with an idiot
symbol. She’s a fucking native, like we thought.” He tossed the
sandstone pendant onto the bank. Richard pushed her head under the
surface in disgust, then brought his hand gingerly to his face to
gauge the damage while Johnny knelt back from the water and
watched.
“I don’t think she caught you square in the
eye.”
The girl’s head bobbed to the surface and
her hair undulated on the water like sea moss.
“Maybe not,” Richard said, “but that whore
got a piece of me. My eye’s too swelled up to open.” He gently
washed drying blood from his face with wet fingers. “Let’s get rid
of her,” he said, spitting savagely at the dirt.
The men stood up and Johnny pulled her limp
body from the water and laid it on the bank. Her dark eyes were
fixed at infinity and a stream of water trickled from the side of
her mouth. Johnny bent to grab her ankles. One of her heels had
twisted out of its shoe, and the shoe hung from her toes. Richard
gripped her wrists and turned toward the thin tail of the pond.
