SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (41 page)

“That would be fine,” Betsy said, pulling
out of her reverie. She centered the brown album between them on
the table, then turned the cover and flipped to the first page of
photos. Vin saw black-and-white shots of a young woman with a boy
and a girl sitting at a picnic table eating a meal. In the
background were the thick trunks of tall trees. Betsy pointed to
the boy.

“That’s Dan, with his Mom and Sarah. On a
trip they took to Yosemite, around 1940.” She flipped the page and
then leafed through several more. “This was Jake’s album, so these
are all his pictures. Dan left them in the order Jake had them.
Then at the end of the book he added some of the other photos that
Jake kept loose in a box.”

She flipped to the end of the book and
turned pages backward, stopping on a left-hand page with a single
photo. She laid the album flat and pulled back her hands so Vin
could see it. The image showed a man sitting on a straight-backed
wooden chair in front of a whitewashed stone wall. He wore a
grayish Stetson and an unbuttoned vest over a white shirt and held
a pipe in one hand while resting his ankle on his knee. The corners
of his closed mouth were turned up and his dark eyes sparkled. His
thick gray mustache and trim beard reminded Vin of a popular photo
of Ernest Hemingway. Written in black ink in a loose hand below the
photo was the caption, “Grandpa Em, 1921.”

“That’s Emmert. I think that was taken down
at his lockhouse.”

Vin stared at the image. There was something
mesmerizing about Emmert’s playful eyes and elusive smile. What
secret are you holding from me, he wondered. What does your mule
know that I don’t? He became aware that Betsy was looking at him,
waiting for a signal to turn the page. He raised his eyes from the
image.

“There are a few earlier pictures,” she
said. Vin nodded and she flipped the page backward, then pointed to
the left-hand photos. “Those are from Jake’s fiftieth birthday
party. After that, he left the picture-taking to Dan and
Sarah.”

She swung her finger to the opposite page.
“These are the other pictures of Emmert. Well, except the one on
the bottom, which Emmert took of the boys.” The uppermost photo
showed a man wearing a flat cap and a light-colored shirt
unbuttoned at the neck. His mustache was dark and luxuriant as he
leaned against the transom of a broad boat with his hand on the
long wooden tiller. Vin recognized the impish eyes of a younger
Emmert Reed. The caption below the photo read, “Cpt Emmert Reed,
Boat 32, 1905.”

“That’s Emmert on his boat. And that next
photo is a family portrait.”

Vin turned to the second picture. Emmert and
a young woman in a jacket, skirt, and wide-brimmed straw hat were
seated at opposite ends of a short bench out on a lawn. Between
them were two boys about seven or eight years old, dressed neatly
in white shirts and dark shorts, and a younger girl in a simple
dress leaning against her mother. The caption read, “Emmert,
Howard, Jake, Alice, Helen” and “July 4, 1909.”

“That’s the whole family,” Betsy said.
“Howard ended up going off to war and moved to Baltimore when he
came back.”

Vin studied the image. No one was smiling,
because you didn’t smile when you had your portrait made in that
era. But Emmert still seemed to be radiating a rakish
self-confidence. Maybe it was the mustache.

He proceeded to the third photo and his
heart leapt into his throat. Emmert Reed wasn’t in it, just two
boys, each perched bareback atop a horse. But the large ears were a
giveaway that the boys were riding mules, not horses, and the mule
on the left was entirely white. Emmert Reed’s albino mule! He
devoured the caption: “Howard and Gladys, Jake and Annie,
1913.”

“That’s Jake on the right. Howard was a year
older, so he usually got to ride Gladys. I think she was a bit of a
celebrity, being albino. Jake said she was kind of spoiled.”

Vin tried to sound dispassionate. “Did he
say anything else about Gladys?”

She regarded him quizzically. “Not that I
recall. I know she was part of Grandpa Em’s team for a few years,
but I don’t remember hearing anything else that was special about
her. Apart from her color.”

He sighed and looked back down at the album,
reviewing the photos from the bottom up. Howard and Jake astride
their father’s mules. Emmert in his prime, posing with Helen and
the kids for a family portrait. And Emmert as a young man, during
one of his first seasons captaining a canal boat. It was
frustrating to come this close – but no closer – to the man who
could explain part of Lee Fisher’s message to Charlie Pennyfield.
He had been able to construct the framework of an answer but was
missing a plank that he needed to tie it all together.

After turning back for another look at
Emmert as an older man, he tried not to let his disappointment show
as he tied up the obvious loose ends with Betsy. Jake’s siblings
Howard and Alice had been dead for years. Dan’s older sister Sarah
was still alive but suffering from Alzheimer’s at a nursing home.
Betsy knew of other families – the Moses, Colberts, Snyders – that
had lived in Sharpsburg for three or more generations, but she
couldn’t say for sure which of them had been involved with the
canal in the twenties.

He took a few notes as a gesture of good
faith and closed his notebook, telling Betsy he had to leave for an
appointment back in Washington. He said he appreciated her
willingness to help his research by sharing her recollections and
family photographs.

“You’re quite welcome,” she said. She led
him to the door and they said their goodbyes. As he turned to
leave, she added a wish. “I hope you find what you’re looking for.”
He thanked her again, then turned to wave from the far side of
Chapline Street, but she was already closing the door.

Feeling thwarted and hollow, he approached
his car, noticing that the back tailgate and windshield were
covered with dust. He remembered the cloud he had stirred up on his
brief spin alongside the C&O at Snyder’s Landing. It was time
to wash it anyway. As he passed the rear windshield, he saw that
someone had drawn a symbol in the dust and he felt as if his core
sinews had been plucked like guitar strings. It was Kelsey Ainge’s
mason’s mark. He swiveled to pan his surroundings but saw no person
or gray sedan. The street was so quiet he could almost hear his own
heart thumping. He stood still while a grassfire burned at his
hairline and pinpricks of sweat formed on his forehead. He swept
his hair back with his hand and opened the car door.

On the drive home he took the longer, faster
route. When he swung east onto Route 70 near Hagerstown, he turned
on the radio and hit the scan button, tapping it to hold the
channel when he heard a weather report.

Fran remains a category 3 hurricane with winds of
115 to 125 miles per hour. The storm is tracking northward at 15
miles per hour and is now centered about 75 miles south of Cape
Fear, North Carolina. The National Hurricane Center is predicting
that Fran will come ashore sometime this evening, and has issued a
hurricane warning for the coastlines of South and North
Carolina.

Sounds like most of the storm will miss us
to the west, he thought. I wonder whether we’ll even get any rain.
The worst of it will hit the Appalachians and then start washing
down toward us. He tapped the scan button again and the plaintive
whine of a bluegrass fiddle filled the air. The feeling of having
been here before flooded his senses, and for a few disorienting
seconds the green hills of Washington County felt like home.

Chapter 35
Pas de Deux

Friday, September 6, 1996

Late Friday afternoon Vin pulled his hands
from the keyboard and lifted tired eyes toward the ceiling. The
first incarnation of his user interface for the ratings feature was
finished. There was still the server-side code to write, but he
felt as if today’s work had almost compensated for the time lost on
yesterday’s fruitless trip to Sharpsburg.

Behind him on a portable TV perched on a
filing cabinet, a CNN commentator was saying something inaudible
about financial markets. Vin tapped the buttons for the Weather
Channel and eased the volume up. They’re probably still showing
full-time hurricane coverage, he thought. I wonder how Fran is
doing.

The station showed a reporter in Roanoke
wearing crimson rain gear and standing in an empty, rainswept
street. After coming ashore at Cape Fear last night, Fran had
tracked north by northwest, through North Carolina and into central
Virginia as it was downgraded first to a tropical storm and then to
a depression. Fran’s unraveling remains were now centered just
south of the West Virginia panhandle, on course for Morgantown and
Pittsburgh. The only menace Fran had left to offer was rain, but
rain was enough. Flash floods were already responsible for almost
two dozen missing or dead.

When the storm’s projected path was
superimposed over a map of the mid-Atlantic states, Vin swiveled
toward the screen. From central Virginia through southern
Pennsylvania, Fran would be scouring the broad western reaches of
the Potomac watershed, dropping torrential rains on the Appalachian
and Blue Ridge mountains. He glanced out the glass doors at the
backyard. The storm’s relentless wind and slashing rain had receded
during the last few hours, leaving in their wake an intermittent
drizzle and the gray light of an overcast afternoon.

Those floodwaters will all be heading our
way, he thought. From the Shenandoah and both upper branches of the
Potomac. They’ve already started. We might even get something like
last January’s flood, which was triggered by an extended thaw on
the heels of what was already known as “the Blizzard of ’96.”
Apparently Great Falls had been completely buried in the raging
waters. The Park Service had closed viewpoints on both sides of the
river, so Vin hadn’t been able to see the Falls at full flood. But
the local news had shown helicopter footage and it had looked
breathtaking, with brown whale-sized waves, exploding haystacks
where the Falls had been, and wings of spray kicking twenty feet
into the air. Did the river rise that much because it narrowed so
dramatically at the Falls?

He shuffled upstairs to pull the
topographical atlas of Maryland from the living-room bookcase. On
the coffee table it opened readily to the page that showed their
street, a quarter-inch east of the C&O Canal at Pennyfield
Lock. The same page showed the Potomac River flanking the canal and
running in a clockwise arc, northwest to southeast. At the top of
the page was Seneca, three miles upstream from Pennyfield. At the
bottom was Great Falls, five-and-a-half miles downriver. Vin had
referred to this page many times last fall, when he and Nicky had
just arrived and were getting their bearings.

Studying the topography at the bottom of the
page, he remembered what he had seen before. Two thousand feet
upstream from Great Falls, Conn Island split the river into
five-hundred-foot-wide channels. Just after the channels reunited,
the Virginia shoreline reversed its curvature where Olmsted Island
thrust into the river from the Maryland side, compressing the
entire flow into a rock-studded channel less than three hundred
feet across.

Following the river back upstream from the
Falls, Vin ticked off the island names in the staggered string:
Olmsted, Conn, Bealls, Minnehaha, Gladys, Claggett, Sycamore,
Watkins – by far the largest and longest – and then Grapevine and
Elm, across from Blockhouse Point, just below Seneca Falls. He
looked back at Gladys Island near the center of the chain and
remembered the photo Betsy Reed had shown him yesterday of Jake and
Howard Reed aboard Annie and Gladys – Emmert Reed’s albino mule.
Gladys Island was equidistant between Maryland and Virginia. It’s
an ironic name, he thought, since Gladys Island is one place I’m
sure the itinerant white mule never knew.

He recited to himself the line he knew by
heart: “The place is well knowed by Emmert Reed’s albino mule.” The
sudden recognition of his long-standing error made him catch his
breath. That’s not right. That’s not exactly what the message says.
He crossed the room and hurried down the stairs. From between two
textbooks, he extracted the note Lee Fisher had written to Charlie
Pennyfield and raced through the text, eyes focused on the line
he’d instinctively shortened and misinterpreted as a result.

The name of the place is well knowed by Emmert
Reed’s albino mule.

It was obvious now and he should have seen
it earlier. It didn’t matter whether Gladys knew the island…or any
other place along the canal. What mattered was that Gladys knew her
name! Carrying the note and the picture, he dashed back up to the
atlas in the living room and couldn’t suppress a smile as he
studied the map again. He picked up a pen and drew a line from
Swains Lock across the towpath and the apron to the river, then
straight out toward the Virginia shore. The line bisected Gladys
Island. He sketched a rapid oval around the island and looked at
Lee’s note again.

…I fear I have been killed because of what happened
today at Swains Lock. I may be buried along with the others at the
base of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing.

Lee Fisher’s joined sycamores were on Gladys
Island! It was close to Swains, but like the other islands in this
stretch of the river, uninhabited and ignored. He studied the map
again. The almond-shaped island might be four hundred yards long
and one-fourth as wide at its mid-point, with its northeast side a
few hundred yards from the Maryland shore. And the Maryland shore
was only fifty paces from the towpath, so it would be an easy
portage and crossing from Swains by canoe. At least when the river
was running at a normal summer level. But the river will start
rising soon, he reminded himself. Tonight. The local rain didn’t
concern him, since the watershed was narrow here. It was the much
larger western expanse that mattered, where the Potomac’s western
tributaries were already funneling Fran’s rainfall to the watershed
floor.