SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (32 page)

Cy drew a sharp breath and Lee saw that his
eyes were riveted on the gold coins. Cy picked up a coin to examine
it, turning it over to read both sides. “Twenty-dollar piece,” he
said softly. “Mint. And there must be over twenty of ‘em.”

“Twenty-four,” Lee said after counting them
with his eyes.

Cy picked up one of the silver dollars,
studied its faces, and put it back in the rack. “Your cousins liked
their money hard,” he said. “Looks like someone made ‘em pay for
that. Though whoever drownded ‘em didn’t seem to have an appetite
for money themselves.”

And that’s why I don’t think you killed my
cousins, Lee told himself. Cy had done business with the Emorys
before and would have known that they used the toolbox as a safe.
Anyone who had picked it up and felt its weight – as the killer
must have – or heard the rattle of its contents might have guessed
there was something valuable inside. So while Lee could imagine Cy
using the toolbox and shackles to drown his cousins, he could only
see it happening after Cy had opened the box and stolen its
contents. Maybe thrown in a few bricks or rocks instead. And just
now, hadn’t his interest in the toolbox been obvious?

“Here’s how I see it,” Cy said, fingering
one of the gold coins again. “Your cousins are bootleggers. That’s
not a judgment, that’s a fact. They might of had a disagreement
with a customer… maybe an ex-customer. Maybe they sold someone out
and got paid back with interest. We don’t know and we’re not likely
to figure it out.” He put the coin back in the pile and looked up
at Lee from his chair.

“What we do know is that nobody but us and
the killer knows they’re dead. Since they was on a bootlegging run,
no one’s going to miss ‘em for a few more days. Maybe even a week.
But sooner or later someone’s going to come looking for them. Maybe
some other cousins of yours, maybe some business partners, maybe
the police. When that happens, we can’t have any evidence around
here that points to us. ‘Cause we got nobody else we can point to
instead.”

Staring at the coins on the table, Lee said
he agreed. Cy was right that members of the Emory clan would come
looking. And they would probably find someone at Great Falls who
had seen the scow heading upstream and someone above Swains who
hadn’t. Bootlegging was a family business, so the clan would wonder
what had happened to their money. Anyone flashing silver and gold
coins would get looked at funny, since that was how Kevin Emory
carried his profit. Lee met Cy’s gaze. “What do you reckon we
should do?”

Cy seemed to be measuring Lee with his eyes.
“The bodies,” he said. “Bury ‘em somewhere safe. It’s the only
thing. Otherwise, we’re the easy suspects, and maybe we spend our
lives in jail. If we bury ‘em, only the killer knows they’re dead.
Maybe it looks like your cousins just took the money and ran
off.”

Lee felt something harden inside him. Maybe
it was his skin hardening and forming a new layer or shell. One
that was scarred and compromised by time and events in a way it
never had been before, but would be irredeemably calloused from now
on. “So you must have an idea for the money as well,” he said.

“The coins are too hot to handle,” Cy said.
“Whoever comes looking for your cousins will want the gold and
silver, too. We got no safe place to put it. I say we put it back
in the box and bury it for a while. Until things blow over.” Cy
reached for the wad of soggy bills, which he pulled from the clip,
unfolded, and laid on the table. “But I got no problem with the
paper money. We can split that even right now.”

“How much is it?” Lee caught himself
thinking that a few extra dollars would be useful. He’d lost his
ride upstream to Harper’s Ferry, so now he might need to buy a
train ticket. His lips cracked into a cynical grin at the thought.
The new, calloused Lee was a practical man.

Cy leafed through the bills and counted.
“Eighty-eight dollars. Plenty of singles.” He separated the bills
into two piles and handed one of them to Lee, who stuffed them into
the pocket of his wet pants. He touched Katie’s pendant in the
process and felt a pang.

“What about the scow and the mules?”

“I can take care of the mules,” Cy said.
“Find ‘em a nice home before I set out on Tuesday. But the boat is
like an arrow that points right at us. Too big for you and me to
drag it out of the canal. I think we should scuttle it.”

“Can’t scuttle it in the canal, unless you
turn it into sawdust first. The canal’s too shallow.”

“Not here. Widewater. Below Six Locks and
Great Falls. Parts of it are sixty feet deep.”

Lee thought about it for a second. Widewater
was the old channel of the river between Bear Island and the
Maryland shore that had been incorporated into the canal. “It’s
deep enough. But you got more people coming and going down
there.”

“We’d have to do it at night,” Cy said.
“Late tonight. Pull the scow down there and chop a few holes in the
hull. Maybe bring some stones on board. She’s heavy enough to go
down.”

“Maybe. Can’t think of anyplace else it
would work. What about the bodies?”

“I don’t like sending ‘em down with the
scow. If they’re in the canal, they might pop back up. Sooner or
later, they’ll get found.”

“I know a safe place we can bury ‘em…along
with the money.” Lee gestured with his thumb toward the kitchen
window, which looked out toward the apron between the towpath and
the river. “Out there on an island,” he said. “We’ll need a
canoe.”

“We got a canoe, but it leaks. Can’t hold
four men.”

“A second canoe.”

“Jess Swain got a whole rack of canoes, but
they’re locked up.”

“I can bring one down from Pennyfield,” Lee
said. “Might take me a couple of hours to get up and back.” He
thought for a second. “Unless you seen a stray bicycle lying
around.”

Cy looked at him with a furrowed brow and
shook his head. “Ain’t no rush,” he said. “We got to wait until
after dark to move the bodies anyway.” He rose from the table and
gestured toward the corpses. “But we can’t leave ‘em here. Katie
and Pete could walk in any minute. Let’s get ‘em down to the
basement.” Lee knelt down alongside Kevin Emory’s left ankle, which
was still cuffed by the leg-irons. He reached into his pocket for
the key.

“Leave it on,” Cy said abruptly. “Since the
bodies are staying here while you’re gone. Got to have something
pointing to you as well. Keeps us both honest.” Lee looked up and
squinted but left the cuff attached. He held his cousin’s ankles
while Cy gripped the body by the armpits. They carried the bodies
downstairs and laid them in a dark corner of the basement.

Back in the kitchen, Lee put the ledger in
the box along with the pouch of coins and the refilled coin tray.
He closed the cover and set the latches, then pulled out the key
ring and locked the toolbox. “That was a good idea you had,” he
said. “About keeping us honest. Made me think I should leave the
box with you until tonight. I’ll take the key with me. That way we
trust each other. And we don’t have to worry about someone else
bumping into it.”

Cy put the box on top of a cabinet, where it
was unlikely to be noticed right away. They walked out toward the
lock, where Lee retrieved his damp clothes from the swing-beam.

“Let’s lock the scow down,” Cy said. “Get it
out of the way and set us up for later.” They reset the lock,
brought the scow through, and moored it to a post near the mouth of
the flume. Lee led the mules across the lock and tied them up near
the water. Cy peered out at the uninhabited islands in the center
of the river. “Show me again where you’re thinking,” he said.

Lee pointed at the island. “There’s a huge
sycamore we can use as a landmark. And flat ground next to it for
digging.” They agreed that Lee would bring a second canoe down from
Pennyfield at seven and Cy would find a reason to send Katie and
Pete to Great Falls before he arrived.

“One more thing,” Cy said as Lee set out.
“If you got one, bring a shovel.”

Chapter 24
Pennyfield Pages

Saturday, March 29, 1924

During Lee’s walk back to Pennyfield, his
thoughts spiraled from the central question: who had killed his
cousins? His fingers reached past the wet bills in his pocket to
absently finger Katie’s sandstone pendant. He resisted reason,
which told him that she must have been involved. Maybe against her
will. He had given her the leg-irons and no one else at Swains had
ever seen them. But if she’d used them to lock the bicycle, they
never could have been used to drown the Emorys, because he hadn’t
given her the key. So she must have chosen not to lock it. That was
troubling – a breach of faith, however small. There must be another
explanation, he thought, as his fingers closed around the pendant.
If she was coerced into helping the killer, he prayed she hadn’t
been hurt in turn. Maybe she would return to Swains and tell Cy she
had left the leg-irons unlocked by mistake. Someone else must have
found and used them.

Cy. Lee still sensed that he might have had
a hand in the killings. He knew that Cy owed his cousins money. And
he knew that Cy’s vices – gambling and drugs – meant he might not
have been able to pay. So Cy had a motive, both to steal and to
cancel a debt. But the gold and silver was still in the toolbox and
that didn’t make sense. Maybe Cy had come across a payback killing
and scared the killer away. And then he was preparing to saw the
toolbox free of the leg-irons when Lee arrived at Swains. No matter
how Lee tried to construct a logical thread, it fell apart when he
thought it through.

But instinct told him that Cy was dangerous.
Whether or not he was involved in the murders, Cy would regard Lee
as a witness who might incriminate him. Or he might worry that Lee
would exhume the Emorys’ money for himself. As he assessed this
possibility, Lee realized that he was the one at risk. By disposing
of Lee, Cy could silence him and keep all the gold and silver. But
Lee was younger, faster, strong; if he kept his guard up, he
thought he could defend himself.

What if Cy returned to the burial spot by
himself in the days ahead? If the money was missing when he and Cy
went back for it, Lee could tell the Emory clan that Cy had been
seen passing gold and silver coins. And that would mean he would
have to spend the next seven months wondering when a bullet would
find him from the woods along the canal. So it was in Cy’s interest
to live up to his agreement with Lee. Each of them would get almost
four hundred dollars of the Emorys’ money. Even for Cy, that had to
be enough.

But Lee still felt anxious. Striding fast on
the approach to Pennyfield, he lightly tapped Tom Emory’s knife in
his pocket. It would come with him tonight. And he needed more…
some other form of insurance. Not for his safety, since that was up
to him alone. But in case things went wrong. What if Cy managed to
betray and bury him along with the bodies of his cousins? He
shuddered at his next thought. What if Katie really was involved in
the murders and was collaborating with Cy? What if everything he
felt about Katie, about the two of them together, was an illusion?
He shook his head and willed the doubt away. That couldn’t be, and
he would return from tonight’s loathsome tasks to be with her
again. She would be innocent. He held the pendant lightly in his
pocket. And if he was wrong, if he was killed tonight, he would
make sure he left a thread for others to follow.

By the time he reached Pennyfield, this
thread was forming in his mind. He entered the lockhouse and went
straight to the dining room. On top of a bureau he found the
locktender’s log-book, which he carried to the table. He hung his
coat on the back of a chair and tore out a blank page from the
back.

As he considered how to word his message, he
struggled with the many purposes it had to serve. If he was killed
by Cy tonight, he wanted someone to find his body. The only person
he could trust right now was Charlie Pennyfield. This was Charlie’s
lock, and he had trusted Lee to watch over it the last ten days.
And Charlie wouldn’t be conflicted, since he was outside the circle
of Emorys and Elgins. He was due to return on Sunday or Monday. So
the message had to tell Charlie where to look. And it had to warn
him that the killer or killers were still at large. He could leave
an additional clue at the burial site that would implicate Cy for
his own killing and the murder of his cousins. And Katie? He
ardently believed she was innocent, but if she was part of it, then
something should point to her as well.

If he survived and made it back to
Pennyfield, he could recover the note before Charlie found it. But
what if someone else intercepted it first? His blood chilled as he
considered another possibility: maybe Katie was the killer, and
maybe she would find it. If that happened, she and Cy would go free
and his body would never be found. He needed to leave the message
in a place only Charlie would see it… somewhere no one else would
care to look. Maybe the shed. And just in case, he needed to guide
Charlie to the burial site using terms that wouldn’t help an
unwanted reader. He tapped his pen in rhythm against the table as
he thought.

He still hoped that his cousins had been
killed by enemies from their bootlegging world. If so, their deaths
were a sad fate of their own making. And if Cy lived up to his
word, he and Lee would split the Emorys’ silver and gold. A few
hundred dollars would be a stake he could build on. He could start
saving for a house. Something small in Seneca, with a view of the
meadows. Would Katie like it there? Keep your focus, he scolded
himself. These are the only words you can speak from your
grave.

What day was it? The 29th. Tapping the pen,
he visualized the intended burial spot again. A name and an image
crystallized and he began to write. When he was finished, he
changed a few words and rearranged the sentences. Then he tore
another page and wrote the message as legibly as he could.