SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (14 page)

“Here!” he tried to yell, but the shell of
his snow coffin reflected the sound and he wasn’t sure he could be
heard. He struggled to twist his upper body, then pushed a hand up
into the snow above him. Powder tumbled against his face.

“Nicky!” he yelled, punching into the
ceiling of snow again. His arm went a few inches further. “Nicky,
here!” He felt his voice fading and a prickly sensation encircled
his forehead and temples, as if a vine had been looped around his
head and was being tightened. It grew darker and he saw a row of
diffuse orange spots. He punched once more into the snow overhead
and felt his hand break through to the weightless air.

“Vin!” he heard Nicky scream again.

“Here!” he answered, but it was barely a
rasp. He withdrew his hand into the snow, saw light reach the
channel he had opened, and felt a taste of sharper, dryer air. He
hyperventilated toward the air channel, then thrust his hand as far
as he could back toward the surface.

This time he felt contact, and Nicky’s
gloved hand grasped his own. He rotated his arm and Nicky pushed
his hand into a widening spiral. Loose snow fell onto his face, and
he blinked and shook his head as the widening hole filled his snow
coffin with air and light. Nicky dug snow away from his upper body
with both hands. The weight on his torso and neck diminished and he
was able to twist onto his back and reach both arms toward her. She
yanked him sideways and he managed to bend a foot beneath him, push
his snowshoe down, find leverage at last. He dragged his other foot
into the pit, then kicked and thrust until he managed to stand.

Panting and too tired to speak, he turned
toward Nicky. She was breathless too, her face red with exertion
and her arms, hat, and hair covered with snow. He leaned in to hug
her, bracing his knees and waist against snow. He felt her choke
through silent sobs that resolved into fast and shallow
breaths.

“God, Vin! That was horrible!” She pulled
away to see him through tearing eyes. “What happened?”

Vin felt his own eyes water. He wiped his
face with his sleeve, freed the snow around his ears. “I don’t
know,” he said between breaths. “I stepped right through the
bridge.” He took off his hat and shook the snow loose. “Are you
OK?”

Nicky nodded as he crawled out of the pit.
They helped each other stand and their snowshoes prevented them
from sinking deeper than their knees. Nicky collected her poles and
they plowed to the far side of the gulley, where Vin helped her
climb out to the trail beyond the bridge. As he started to follow
her, he realized his shoulders were unencumbered.

“My pack,” he said. “It came loose when I
fell. Hang on.” He waded back toward the bridge. Passing the snow
pit he’d created, he tried to envision the trajectory of his fall.
He saw Nicky’s tracks entering the gulley and a second crater in
the snow. That must have been where she was digging at first, he
thought. How could she have missed the right spot by six feet? His
daypack had created its own hole in the snow. He fished it out,
then leaned in to examine the underside of the bridge.

In the middle section the four right-most
planks were missing, and the joists beneath the missing planks
looked new. They’d been covered by a sheet of building-wrap that
had been strong enough to support the snow but incapable of holding
his additional weight. Swearing to himself, he reached under the
bridge to pull the building-wrap loose. As it shed its snow
blanket, he noticed a flash of orange beneath the bridge. He draped
the wrap back onto the bridge, looked underneath again, and saw a
flat, orange diamond splattered with fallen snow. It was a sign,
and his head throbbed lightly as he read the words on its front.
“Bridge Out. Trail Ahead Closed.” He jammed the sign into the snow
with its words facing the trail behind them, then followed his
tracks to the edge of the gulley and climbed out. Nicky leaned back
and extended her poles for him to use as handholds.

They walked the remainder of the trail in
silence and without incident, with Vin leading. The last stretch
veered away from the river, up a gentle grade through thinning
woods. The flat white towpath and the open space over the canal
emerged through the trees. Approaching the trailhead, Vin saw that
it was blocked by posts nailed together with cross-boards, and that
another sign was affixed to these boards. They sidestepped around
to the towpath, then stopped to read it. Vin already knew what it
would say. “Trail Closed. Use Alternate Trailhead.”

While hiking in silence he had aligned the
pieces in his mind, and though they didn’t quite connect, he was
unable to abandon the framework. Whoever had etched the words on
the railings must have seen Lee Fisher’s note. If it was Kelsey,
that would mean she had quoted it twice. And that she had tried to
lead him here.

And the question, “why are you here?” Did
that mean Carderock? The Billy Goat Trail? Potomac? The D.C. area?
Or did the question refer to his search itself? He thought about it
in the context of the note. When he’d read the question on the
railing, he had been standing between the tree of the killers and
the tree of the dead. Was that what “here” meant? And what about
the half-covered tracks leading from Carderock toward the
footbridge? And the displaced “Bridge Out” sign, that obviously
should have been attached to the naked wooden posts flanking the
entrance to the bridge?

“I don’t think we’ll have to worry about
broken bridges or missing signs from here on,” he said, still
staring at the sign. Nicky laughed and sniffled. He turned to see
her wiping her nose on her sleeve, and noticed now that she’d been
crying. “What’s the matter, honey?” He put his gloved hands on her
shoulders and lowered his head toward hers. She squinted through
teary eyes and sniffled again.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t find
you and was afraid I was going to lose you when you fell. And I
felt like it was my fault. Like I was trying to help you but I was
doing the wrong things.” She exhaled deeply. “I don’t know…” she
repeated, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s happening to
me.”

Chapter 10
High-Water Marks

Sunday, January 21, 1996

Driving the downslope toward the American
Legion Bridge over the Potomac, Kelsey saw the river emerge through
the trees to her right. The silt-stained current rolled and twisted
through bare trees that normally stood a hundred feet from the
water’s edge. Looking upstream from the bridge, she saw a writhing
brown body below the orange sun; it seemed as if the river had
risen halfway toward the level of her eyes. And in rising, like a
cobra, it had grown half again as wide.

The highway ascended into Virginia and she
turned onto a serpentine road that ran through woods and pastures,
tracking the river upstream. After a few miles she reached the
entrance road to Great Falls Virginia National Park. A police car
was parked across the road, its lights flashing. Kelsey slowed to
turn and the officer waved her onward, instructing her to bypass
the park. She reversed course in a driveway and drove back past the
entrance, then retraced another half-mile to the dirt lot for the
Difficult Run trailhead. Since it was 5:10 pm on a winter Sunday,
she wasn’t surprised to see the lot almost empty. Difficult Run was
a Potomac tributary that drained a local watershed and formed the
southeast border of sprawling Great Falls Park. A muddy path from
the parking area followed the stream toward its confluence with the
Potomac, then joined trails leading west, back into the heart of
the park.

She parked in the lot and got out, and with
daylight fading climbed directly into the woods beside the road. A
shallow draw led up the hillside and she found a deer path within
it. She followed the path to the crest of the drainage where it met
a legitimate trail, then turned west through the trees and jogged
along the top of the ridge.

The thaw had begun on Thursday with heavy
rain and temperatures in the low 60s. The last three days had been
unseasonably warm and all that was left of the Blizzard of ’96 were
dirty pyramids of snow in the corners of parking lots and patches
of melting snow in the woods. The residual snow along the ridge-top
reflected twilight and made the trail easy to follow. When it
dead-ended at the entrance road to the park, she stood in the
shadows and looked up the road to her left. The police car she’d
seen earlier was two hundred yards away, still guarding the
entrance, lights flashing. To her right the road descended through
dark woods toward the guard kiosk, just under a mile away. She
turned downhill and set off at a light run.

The air was still warm, so she shed her
fleece pullover and wrapped it around her waist. The shuttered
guard kiosk appeared through the gloaming; she passed it and cut
onto the grassy picnic area between the road and the cliffs. She
continued toward one of the viewing platforms that sat astride the
rocks, overlooking the river below and the Falls a quarter-mile
upstream.

But through the ebbing light she could see
that the cliffs were gone. Instead the edge of the river undulated
over the cement floor of the platform and encroached a few feet
further into the park. Where it was compressed into the gorge below
Great Falls, the river had risen seventy feet. She proceeded toward
the water’s edge, passing a wooden post that denoted the high-water
marks of past floods. At the level of her knees, a small sign read
“1985.” At chest-height another read “1937.” Nearly six feet up the
post, “1972.” Ten feet up, “1942.” The highest sign read “1936.” No
earlier floods were chronicled.

Right now the water was lapping at the path
just ahead, but the picnic areas behind her were swampy and studded
with pools of standing water. She knew that the crest of the flood
had passed Great Falls before noon, and that the river must have
left flood stains on the post once more.

She peered out at the river. The nearest
fifty feet of water lay within a lazy eddy defined by a submerged
promontory of the cliffs upstream. Little ripples flowing in from
the main current traversed the eddy and collided with their mirror
images reflecting from the shore. Out beyond the eddy line, the
current was a traveling, caramel-colored vortex laced with deep
ephemeral folds and whirlpools. And at its center the river raged
as a series of exploding brown waves and haystacks, spewing
whitewater twenty feet in the air.

Kelsey saw that the Falls were gone, buried
entirely beneath the surface of the river. A severed tree trunk
shot out where the base of the Falls had been, then collapsed into
the water and vanished. A half-minute later its torn roots emerged
to spin inside a transient whirlpool, a long swim downriver from
where it had disappeared. The bright and steady background roar of
the Falls at normal water levels was missing too, and she found its
absence unnerving. In its place the flood had brought a deep
rumbling sound, punctuated by erratic booming and popping noises
emanating from the center of the river.

A small snapped tree flowed past and she
realized that it might have been swept from the distant western
edge of the watershed. The sudden thaw throughout the mid-Atlantic
had funneled blizzard runoff from four states into the torrent she
confronted now. Or maybe the tree was a local casualty, she
thought, and had only been in the river a day, drifting down from
somewhere like Whites Ferry. She turned toward the high-water post
and sought out the sign at its midpoint. 1972. She absently traced
the faded scar on her temple with her fingers.

Des, where are you? Did you drift this far
from Whites Ferry in the days they searched for you before the
flood? Are you here now? Staring at the post, she felt a chill
breeze caress her shoulders. Final colors were draining from the
sky. Shivering, she untied the pullover from her waist and put it
on. When her eyes opened, they found the knee-level sign that read
“1985”. Early November, she thought, crossing her arms and
squeezing her sides for warmth. I was here then too, and saw
nothing, learned nothing. But something seems different this time.
Why? she asked herself, turning back toward the wild and kicking
flow.

This time I feel your presence. Maybe your
bones have been here all along, in an ageless chamber under the
Falls. Or maybe you’re still with us. Do you miss your boyfriend,
Des? Poor Miles who never had a chance… never saw the Stones. And
something else is different. I’ve seen your sign, the mason’s mark.
Twice now. And I met the person who found the second one. Vincent
Emory Illick, born October 22, 1960. I know that much, Des. And
this: he also found an old photo, and a note that may bring me what
I’ve been looking for. I need your help to resolve it. What to make
of Vin Illick? And what to make of his fiancée?

She unzipped her pocket and pulled out an
empty plastic bottle, tilting it skyward so the label caught light.
“Gentamicin. Dr. Nicky Hayes, DVM.” Twisting off the cap, she knelt
down at the water’s edge. Ripples broke against the gravel of the
path and tiny counter-waves reflected back across the eddy. She
held the bottle’s mouth underwater long enough to fill it halfway
before screwing the cap back on. She stood up, set herself, and
threw the bottle hard toward the current. It landed just inside the
eddy line, drifted slowly out and downstream, then caught an eddy
current and bobbed back upstream and shoreward. She waited while it
flirted with the threshold. Which way is this going, Des? A
harmless reflecting wave pushed the bottle past the eddy line and
it vanished in the maw of the flood.

Chapter 11
White Mules

Monday, March 11, 1996

Kelsey excused herself from a conversation
with a customer who was reviewing the hanging photos in her studio.
She retreated through the archway to the office area, where she
cleared papers from the circular table and deposited them on her
desk. Vin Illick and Nicky Hayes were due to visit at 11:00 and it
was 10:45 now. She pulled two thick albums from a bookshelf and
placed them on the table.