SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (31 page)

He rounded a bend in the towpath and saw the
lockhouse at Swains in the distance. Alongside the towpath was a
small blue shape, which he soon recognized as the hayhouse wall of
the Emory’s scow. That was odd. As a light boat, the scow should be
steering a path closer to the berm. And he noticed it didn’t seem
to be moving relative to the lockhouse. Then he saw the mules
grazing on the fringe of grass between the towpath and the canal.
He sighed and shook his head in disapproval. Once again, his
cousins had chosen an inappropriate place to tie up. It showed a
lack of respect for the unwritten rules of the canal.

Passing the mules, he didn’t see either of
his cousins nearby. He ducked under the mooring line and called out
as he neared the scow’s cabin, but no one answered. Great, he
thought, they’re off causing trouble somewhere. Then he remembered
their reference to Katie when he’d seen them last Monday. She might
be alone at Swains right now. Apprehension pulsed through him and
he broke into a run for the short remaining distance to the
lock.

The scow should have recently locked
through, so he expected to see the upstream gates open and the lock
filled with water. Instead the upstream gates were closed. And no
one seemed to be around the lock. But the lockhouse door was open,
so he angled off the towpath toward the crossing planks. As his
foot hit the walkway, a figure passed through the door. He looked
up and saw Cy Elgin.

Cy saw Lee at the same instant and stopped
in his tracks. He stared Lee down for a few seconds without
speaking, and Lee noticed the hacksaw in his hand. The silence grew
strained, so he looked down while searching for the words to
inquire after Katie. He saw two shapes floating in the drained
lock, one tan and one gray, with flossy strands splayed out on the
surface, and the shock of recognition hit him at the moment that he
heard Cy’s voice.

“Don’t jump to no conclusions,” Cy said with
an edge of menace.

“Jesus!” Lee yelled, his heart racing,
“they’re drownded!” He sidestepped across the plank and gazed into
the lock in disbelief. As his thoughts gained traction, he realized
that he hadn’t seen the dead men’s faces. He looked at Cy and tried
to steady his voice.

“That Kevin and Tom Emory?”

Cy nodded warily. “I think so. Haven’t
gotten close enough to see for sure. Just found ‘em here myself a
minute ago.”

“So you ain’t tried to help ‘em yet?”, Lee
asked with a note of incredulity. “Gonna cut ‘em up with that saw
instead? Maybe they’re not dead yet!” He glanced around for
something he could use to help and saw the rope ladder rolled up on
the ground. He paced across the walkway and leapt down onto the
lock wall.

“They’re dead,” Cy said tersely. “They was
at the bottom, under their boat. I found ‘em when I pulled the boat
out and drained the lock.” Lee listened while reaching for the
ladder. When he understood what Cy had said, his frantic energy
dissolved into resignation. Cy retrieved the pole he’d left near
the lockhouse door. “Looks like they had some help,” he said.

Lee finished untangling the ladder, then set
its hooks against the stone edge of the lock wall and unfurled it.
He looked up as Cy carried his pole to the wall – the same kind of
pole Lee had spent hours drilling for Charlie Pennyfield. Cy
extended its hooked end deep into the water and maneuvered it
toward one of the bodies. He twisted it until its hook caught
something, then raised the hook toward the surface. Lee saw a leg
and a blocky object rise from the shadows. When the hook reached
the surface he saw it held a chain, the near end terminating at the
dead man’s ankle in a wet gray cuff that gleamed in the light. Lee
felt the air leave his lungs as if he’d been kicked in the chest by
a mule. He bent forward and put his hands on his knees, head
swimming as he tried to understand what had happened and what it
meant.

“Their legs are shackled,” Cy said. “To each
other and a toolbox. Might as well have been chained to an
anchor.”

Lee took shallow breaths and tried to regain
his equilibrium. Shackles. His leg-irons. He’d given them to Katie
to lock the bicycle, but he still had the key. How had they become
unlocked? Maybe Cy had intercepted her and taken the leg-irons
away. His cousins were dead! Had Cy killed them? A darker feeling
settled over him when he considered the possibility that Katie
might be an accomplice, but he cast the thought aside. He couldn’t
imagine that she was involved. The toolbox… was that the motive? He
knew that the Emorys used it as a safe, and Katie had told him that
Cy was always on the edge financially. Where was Katie now? Maybe
Cy had sent her away so he could rob the Emorys when they arrived
at Swains… and then use the leg-irons and the plundered toolbox to
drown them? It seemed unbelievable. But those were his cousins
lying face down in the water! He slid his hand into his coat pocket
as if he were inserting it into a hornet’s nest and took out the
key.

“Those cuffs,” he said, swallowing hard and
holding up the key. “I think they’re mine.” He put the key in the
pocket of his pants, stripped off his coat, and started down the
rope ladder. From the lowest rung he jumped backward into the lock,
and the press of cold water against his chest made him breathe
faster. He hopped through the water toward the nearest body, placed
his hand under a floating shoulder, and lifted it several inches.
The head flopped forward as it came out of the water, but Lee could
see that the dead man was Tom Emory. He recoiled at the sight of
his cousin’s colorless face, then paused briefly with his head
bowed in silence.

Kevin’s body floated within reach but Lee
saw no reason to confirm its identity. He pivoted Tom’s body until
he was alongside the chained leg, then reached down with both hands
to raise it. He could feel the chain tug the toolbox at the bottom
of the lock. He pulled Tom’s shin upward until his hands broke the
surface. The leg-irons caught the light and Lee saw the small
keyhole near the hinge of the closed cuff.

He carefully extracted the key from his
pocket, guided it into the keyhole, then twisted it and felt the
C-arms fell apart. He let Tom’s leg drift away and slid the key
back into his submerged pocket. Still gripping the opened cuff, he
lowered his hand into the water and looked up at Cy. “I don’t know
how those leg-irons got here,” he said. He started to say that he
had given them to Katie last night, but his instincts intervened
and he left the thought unspoken.

Cy met his gaze with a stern look. “The law
says you can’t pull a body out of the canal,” he said. “Got to call
the police and let them do it.”

Lee nodded, acknowledging the protocol.

“But I don’t think either one of us is going
to want to explain this,” Cy continued. “Seeing as they was
drownded with your shackles at my lock.”

Lee’s jaw clenched as he considered the
situation. Cy was right. Lee’s only explanation – that someone had
used his leg-irons without his knowledge to drown his cousins –
would sound far-fetched, especially if it turned out the Emorys had
not been robbed. And the weight of the toolbox gave him the
impression that it wasn’t empty. And what if Cy claimed that he had
found Lee at the lock with the dead men? It might look like Lee
still intended to rob them and just hadn’t finished the job yet.
Maybe he killed his cousins for some family reason. They might have
trusted him enough to let down their guard. Or it might look like
Cy and Lee were in league against the Emorys. To the police, the
various ways Lee might have been implicated in the death of his
cousins would inevitably sound more plausible than the truth. And
the truth made no sense even to Lee, since he still couldn’t
believe that Katie was involved.

“We got to get them bodies out,” Cy
said.

With his reasoning at a dead end, Lee nodded
his assent.

“I’ll fetch a canoe and paddle in,” Cy said.
He pointed to the berm beyond the lock. “We can take ‘em out and
unload ‘em near the flume, then get ‘em into the house. Better get
moving before anybody else happens along.”

“OK,” Lee said. “I’ll stay here to help lift
‘em into the canoe.”

Cy opened the berm-side gate and limped up
past the driveway toward the green canoe Pete had been using to
launch his stick armada. He untied it and dragged it onto the berm,
across the grass, and down the embankment to the lower level of the
canal.

While Lee grew cold standing in the lock, he
lifted the open cuff back out of the water. The toolbox and Kevin
Emory’s ankle rose toward the surface. He saw something wrapped
around the toolbox handle and pulled it closer. An arrow stabbed
his heart as he recognized Katie’s sandstone pendant. He released
the cuff and untied the cord from the handle. The pendant came
free, shedding water into the lock as tears formed in the corners
of his eyes. What had happened to Katie? How could she have been
involved? He thrust the pendant into his pocket and turned blindly
away from his cousin’s body, dropping his hand and the toolbox to
his side. Untethered from its anchor, Kevin Emory’s corpse floated
freely on the surface.

Lee turned to see Cy paddle into the lock,
sitting in the bow seat of a green canoe. He glided over to Tom
Emory’s body, and Lee waded awkwardly alongside him. “Better get
this loaded first,” Lee said. He hoisted the toolbox up to Cy, who
set it between the thwarts. Lee tried to hold the birchbark canoe
steady while they worked Tom’s body over the rail. Lock water
poured from the corpse’s clothes as it slumped onto the floor of
the canoe. Cy knotted his brow, staring at a small hole in the
starboard side that was now only an inch or so above the waterline.
“I reckon we’ll take on water after we load the other one, but it
don’t matter,” he said. He took a stroke to draw the boat toward
Kevin’s body, and together they lifted the corpse on board. The
hole in the starboard side was below the waterline now and a steady
stream flowed through it. “Better get back to the berm before she
sinks,” Cy said. Lee pushed the bow toward the open gate as Cy
stroked. Only a few inches of freeboard remained, but that was
enough to reach the bank near the flume. Shivering freely, Lee
waded to the rope ladder and climbed the lock wall.

It was early afternoon now and the air above
the lock felt much warmer than the water. He stripped off his
shirt, shoes, and socks and laid them out on the swing-beam to dry,
then strode barefoot to the mouth of the flume to help Cy pull the
canoe onto the bank.

They carried the bodies into the lockhouse
as quickly as they could and laid them face up on the kitchen
floor. While Cy looked for something to cover them, Lee rifled
through Kevin Emory’s pockets and retrieved a key-ring with a
wooden fob and a few keys attached. From the other corpse he took
Tom’s sheathed Bowie knife, which he held before him as Cy
returned. “I was thinking it should stay in the family,” he said,
forcing a smile. Cy only glared as Lee slid the knife into his
pocket and offered to retrieve the toolbox. Cy grunted to suggest
indifference, but his bloodshot stare betrayed his interest.

Lee jogged back out to the lock wall and
scouted the towpath – no one in sight. Even though the canal’s
official opening was still three days away, they had been lucky to
remove the bodies without being seen. Remove the bodies – how
easily that phrase traversed his thoughts! On one level, the
thought of what he’d just experienced, and of what he and Cy were
doing now, was still unfathomable. He knew his cousins were
unattractive characters – scofflaws at best, criminals at worst –
but even though he’d felt little affinity for the Emorys, he had a
hard time believing they deserved to die. And someone had drowned
them, or killed them first and thrown them in the lock, leaving
Katie’s pendant tied to the instrument of their death. The fear
that she was somehow responsible was pierced by a sharper fear;
maybe she’d fallen victim to the same killer! Maybe he had stripped
off her necklace and used it as a macabre signal or warning. Or had
killed her and was trying to frame her for the Emorys’ deaths!

Lee knew his apprehensions were scaling
beyond usefulness, so he tried to refocus on the situation at hand.
He and Cy needed to deal with the bodies and come to terms with
each other. He loped down to the canoe and grabbed the toolbox;
water trickled from the crack between the lid and the base. He
carried it back to the kitchen where Cy was waiting in a chair
beside the table. An old sheet covered the dead men’s faces and
chests.

Cy gestured for Lee to put the toolbox on
the table. “I think we need to examine the evidence,” he said, “so
we can figure out what happened.” He rose from his chair and knelt
alongside Kevin’s body, prepared to search for the toolbox key. Lee
pulled the key-ring from his own pocket and jangled the keys.

“Already got ‘em,” he said. Cy mumbled and
limped back to his chair. Lee settled on the smallest key, holding
it up so Cy could see it but keeping it beyond arm’s reach. In the
sallow skin under Cy’s greenish eyes and the sand-colored hair
streaked with gray, Lee saw little family resemblance to Katie. It
might have been stronger once, he thought. Before Cy drifted into
gambling and – his cousins had hinted – drugs. Lee inserted the key
into the lock plate and turned it; the lock clicked and the box
seemed to exhale. He opened the latches and lifted the lid.

The first thing he saw was silver coins,
dripping wet and reflecting the kitchen’s indirect light. It looked
like seventy or eighty dollars worth stacked in the rows of a coin
rack that occupied the hanging tray. They shared the tray with six
drenched sleeves of wrapped coins, silver peeking from their ragged
ends. As Lee pocketed the key-ring, Cy laid the coin tray on the
table and drained the box’s main compartment in the sink. Back at
the table they studied its contents. A small leather-bound ledger
with lists of names and numbers. Cy flipped through a few pages,
but they were too water-logged and ink-stained to read at a glance.
Lee showed no interest, so Cy set it next to the box. Then he
placed a money clip holding sodden bills on the table. Next he
pulled out a drawstring pouch that made a solid metallic sound when
laid down. He dumped its contents on the table and the gleam of wet
gold seemed to illuminate the room.