SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (40 page)

Trying to visualize the woman on the bridge
again, he almost missed the exit for Route 40. A glance confirmed
that there was still no gray sedan behind him as he swung west on
the Old National Road. The woman watching from the bridge on Sunday
and then the parked car on Monday and Tuesday – by themselves those
sightings were hardly worth notice or reflection. But now he felt
compelled to reconsider them in the context of Wednesday
afternoon.

Yesterday afternoon he and Randy had run
down the wooded hillside and out into the meadow next to the old
Pennyfield House, then crossed over the lock and turned upstream,
as they usually did. A quarter-mile past Pennyfield, the towpath
bisected the Dierssen Waterfowl Sanctuary. To their right a
backwater eddy extended into the flat, swampy woods of the berm. On
the left a string of shallow ponds choked with marsh plants
stretched for half a mile, occupying most of the terrain between
the towpath and the river. Dierssen offered stilted boxes for wood
ducks and also attracted herons, songbirds, beavers, and foxes. On
its downstream side, a dirt trail used by birdwatchers branched off
toward the river and circled the ponds.

Randy was lagging as Vin approached the
branching trail. His sniffing completed, Randy sprinted to catch
up. Vin saw the dog’s ears flex as it passed him. Randy skidded to
a stop, stood alert for a moment, and then bolted along the trail
toward the river. Vin jogged in place and waited. Randy couldn’t
resist pursuing a deer or fox, or even a goose or heron, but Vin
knew the animals could escape by taking to the air or water, or by
outrunning or outwitting his dog. Randy’s chases were brief and
typically ended with his return to the towpath winded and
muddy.

Wednesday’s pursuit lasted only a few
minutes. Randy was panting when he trotted back, but he hardly
seemed tired and wasn’t muddy at all. Whatever creature he’d heard
or scented must have escaped before luring the dog far off the
trail. As he usually did after bolting without permission, Randy
stood directly in front of Vin, wagging his tail. Vin was never
sure whether the dog’s motive was to ingratiate himself or to tell
Vin about his encounter with the one that got away. While noting
the surprising lack of burrs or mud on Randy’s legs, he saw that a
piece of paper, rolled into a tube about the size of a cigar, had
been slipped under his collar and pinned against the back of his
neck.

He pulled the paper out – the collar seemed
tighter than usual. Twisting it, he saw the exposed black line on
the nylon band; someone had tightened it a notch, probably to keep
the paper tube in place. A current of anger shot through him as he
envisioned a stranger handling his dog in the woods. Whoever it
was, Randy must have judged the person approachable. He grudgingly
conceded that letting Randy run free put the dog, the stranger, and
himself at risk. After resetting the collar, he unrolled the paper
cylinder, wondering what message awaited. Maybe it was a miniature
menu for Chinese take-out or a pizza delivery service.

There was only one word on the paper,
written vertically inside the post of a cross. “SOON.” Or since the
Os flanked the cross arm, maybe it meant “SO ON.” The cross
mimicked one he had found planted in the mossy dirt atop the Bear
Island stop-lock last March.

“Fucking bullshit,” he mumbled in
irritation, blood-pressure rising. He stashed the paper in his
pocket and launched back into his run, too irritated to bother
leashing his dog. Randy instantly passed him. “Soon,” he muttered,
back into the rhythm of running. “Screw that.”

***

He continued west on Route 40 through fields
of tall corn and undulating meadows that rose to tree-covered
hilltops. The old road climbed the green slope of South Mountain to
Fox Gap, and then wound down the west side of the hill into
Washington County. In the town of Boonsboro, he waited at the Main
Street light to turn southwest toward Sharpsburg. He checked the
rear-view mirror once more – by now it was a reflex. No gray
sedan.

The rolled-up paper with the cross was a
link between his current suspicions and his mishaps at Carderock
and Bear Island earlier in the year. What reminded him today about
the events of the winter and spring was the rekindling of an
intuition that he was being guided or stalked. And the threads he
was able to connect all pointed to Kelsey Ainge.

The road ran through rolling fields and the
village of Keedysville before crossing Antietam Creek on a stone
bridge and then climbing a steady grade toward Sharpsburg,
following the trail traveled by thousands of Union Army soldiers on
the bloodiest day of the Civil War. A line of iron plaques along
the road, painted black, commemorated the movements of various
divisions on September 17, 1862. Beyond the plaques, green fields
rose and fell on both sides, stretching into the distance like
ocean swells. The interlaced rails of graying snake-fence segments
scarred the fields with zigzagging lines of stitches – maybe one
rail for each of 23,000 casualties here, he thought. The road
leveled off as it entered Sharpsburg.

Houses with painted clapboard siding and
double-hung windows pressed against the sidewalks of Main Street.
Between the first and second stories, narrow portico roofs reached
toward the street, supported by painted columns and shading shallow
front porches. Downtown Sharpsburg was only four blocks square and
Betsy Reed lived near its center, on Chapline Street.

Vin coasted down Main Street, reading the
intersection signs. He was early so he turned onto Snyder’s Landing
Road, which sliced through cornfields and wound down through woods
to the Potomac River. Just before the road's terminus at a boat
ramp, a wooden bridge spanned a broad ditch thick with undergrowth
and trees. A sign confirmed what he already knew – this drained and
abandoned artery was the C&O Canal, on the five-mile level of
Sharpsburg above Lock 39. He drove a dirt-and-gravel spur alongside
the canal until he noticed a cloud of dust in his wake, then
reversed course and headed back to town.

At 117 Chapline, Betsy was knitting on her
porch swing when he parked and crossed the street on foot, carrying
a folding notepad. The clapboard house was painted a warm tan color
that had been softened and dulled by the sun. He rapped his
knuckles against a column to get her attention and smiled when she
looked up from her knitting.

“Mrs. Reed?” She peered at him over her
glasses and smiled back. “I’m Vin Illick. We spoke on the phone
about…”

“Yes, of course,” she said, putting her
knitting aside. “Hello.” She stood up and brushed the wrinkles from
her slacks and patterned blouse, then pushed the octagonal frames
back against her face to see him better. Her hair was swept away
from her forehead and curled neatly behind her ears, its color
somewhere between sand and gray. She looks closer to seventy than
sixty, Vin thought, noticing the sagging skin on her cheeks and
neck. But still petite, with a firm grip to her weathered hand.
Aside from a hint of garnet on her lips, she didn’t seem to be
wearing makeup.

“Please call me Betsy,” she said in the
warm, fragile voice he’d heard on the phone. “Let’s go inside where
we can sit. I’m afraid there’s not much room out here.”

He held the screen door open and followed
her through. The entryway opened directly into the unlit living
room, where a couch with faded upholstery sat against the far wall,
framed by end tables and windows with blinds angled to let the
sunlight in. Two colorless stuffed armchairs with draped lace
doilies faced the couch across a central coffee table. The still
air smelled like rarely-used furniture.

Betsy switched on the end-table lamps and
offered Vin an armchair. As he eyed two stacks of leather-bound
albums at the center of the coffee table, she retreated to the
kitchen to pour lemonade, then returned with filled glasses and
took the chair beside him. “I told my daughter you were visiting
this afternoon,” she said. “And that you were writing an article
about the canal days, so you wanted to know about Grandpa Em.
Alison helped me get Dan’s albums out and we looked through them
with the girls before they left.

“Of course, most of the photos are of Dan
and me when we were younger, and of Alison, Tom, and Linda growing
up.” She sat back and turned toward Vin with a half-smile. “It’s
always funny to see children who can’t sit still for five seconds
spend an hour looking at old pictures of their parents.”

Vin smiled back. “I enjoyed doing that as a
kid.”

She pointed to the stack of three albums to
his right, which looked newer than the others. “Those are mostly
snapshots of our children. Alison was born in ’57, so that’s about
as far back as those books go.”

Vin shifted in his chair. “I think it’s
great that you and your husband found time to collect all your
photos in albums. No one in my family was ever organized enough to
do that. Most of ours are stuffed inside envelopes and buried in
drawers.”

“Well, that was something Dan liked to do.”
She pointed to the other albums, a black one on top of a brown one,
both discolored and scratched. “Those two are older. Most of those
photos came from Dan’s father, Jake. So there are pictures of Dan
and Sarah as children, back in the thirties, and then some that
came later. After Jake gave Dan and Sarah their first cameras, he
didn’t take many pictures anymore. I guess that was his way of
passing the torch.”

Vin listened with his eyes on Betsy while
trying to unobtrusively settle his notebook in his lap and open the
cover. She seemed to be relaxing into her chair and warming to the
conversation. There was something about her, a straightforwardness
that he first noticed when they spoke on the phone. He found it
refreshing and didn’t recognize it right away. Sincerity – and an
utter lack of pretense. Was that something that came with age, or
was it something she carried forward from a different era?

“I think you told me that Emmert Reed was
Jake’s father?”

“That’s right,” Betsy said. “Grandpa Em was
Jake’s father and Dan’s grandfather.” She gestured to the albums
again. “There’s a picture of Em and his family in that bottom
album, back in 1909. The girls and I were surprised to find that
there. It must have come from a box of Jake’s things that Ida gave
Dan. We could only find a few pictures of him.”

“Ida was Jake’s wife?”

“That’s right. Ida lived to be eighty-seven.
She died just three years before Dan.”

Vin sipped his lemonade and extracted his
pen from the notebook. He sketched a rough family tree, with
“Emmert + ” at the top and “Jake + Ida” on the next rung. On the
rung below their names he wrote “Dan + Betsy.”

“What was Emmert’s wife’s name?”

“Helen.” He wrote “Helen” to the right of
Emmert’s name.

“And you mentioned that your husband used to
visit his grandfather when he was young, and Emmert would tell him
stories about the canal days?”

Betsy nodded. “Mostly about how hard it was
to run a canal boat. But how it was rewarding, too, since you were
your own boss. You could run all night if you had the motivation.
And there was always something to see or do along the canal.” She
paused to look at Vin, who nodded reassuringly. “Dan used to pass
that sermon along to our children. He wanted them to see the value
of hard work. Of course, I suspect old Emmert maybe wasn’t quite
the role model Dan made him out to be.”

“Do you mean after he gave up boating?”

“Probably both before and after,” she said.
“Dan’s father used to say that Grandpa Em knew how to entertain
himself in Georgetown. So some people called him M-Street. And then
when he started tending lock down near Leesburg – was that at
Edwards Ferry? I’m not sure – he had a good business selling
barbecue. And maybe he sold a little whiskey as well. But that was
Prohibition times, so lots of people were shaving the edges off the
law.”

Vin thought about how to phrase his next
question. “I know – from my research – that Emmert was quite
familiar with Georgetown, and really with the whole canal, from
captaining a boat. And then after 1913, he lived at Lock 25 at
Edwards Ferry for about ten years during boating seasons. Is there
any other location along the canal that you associate with him?
Some other place he liked to spend time?”

Betsy stared at her folded hands before
shaking her head. “No,” she said tentatively, looking up at Vin. “I
don’t think so. Grandpa Em lived here in Sharpsburg when he retired
from the canal. He had a house a couple miles from here on Harpers
Ferry Road where they raised their children. Jake used to take Dan
and Sarah over there for barbecue back in the thirties, though
times were hard and sometimes they couldn’t afford meat. Emmert and
Helen lived there until Emmert died. A few years later Jake and
Howard helped her fix it up and sell it, and then Helen moved in
with Alice until she died.”

“Alice?”

“Alice was Dan’s aunt. Jake’s younger
sister. And Jake had an older brother Howard.”

Vin wrote the names down on his tree to the
left of Jake’s. “And Emmert’s old house on Harper’s Ferry
Road…that’s not near the river, is it?”

Betsy shook her head. “Well, the river bends
around a lot here. I suppose the house was two or three miles away.
The man who bought it knocked it down and built two new
houses.”

She fell silent again, her gaze fixed on a
point beyond the window. Maybe she was visualizing Grandpa Em’s old
house. Vin glanced at the crow’s feet around her eye and tapped his
pen on the paper but wrote nothing. He felt as if there was
something he should be able to learn about Emmert Reed from Betsy,
but the insight danced out of reach. She was Emmert’s grandson’s
widow, and she couldn’t help him solve the puzzle by identifying
the place that was well known by Emmert’s albino mule. Her memories
could only offer a basic sketch of Grandpa Em. He glanced back at
the albums on the table. Maybe seeing the photos again would
trigger something more. “Would it be alright for me to see the
pictures of Emmert?”