SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (8 page)

“I like it,” Nicky said. “It reminds me how
close we are to the river.”

“I agree,” Vin said. “It’s like it connects
us to this place.”

They carried the bikes out the sliding door,
wheeled them across the back lawn, and walked them down the wooded
path toward the old Pennyfield House at the bottom of the hill. The
trees were slowly enveloping it. “It almost looks haunted”, Nicky
said as they passed the eroding structure. They crossed the meadow
and the footbridge and turned left onto the towpath.

“After you,” Vin said.

“Lazy,” Nicky answered. She stepped onto the
pedals and rode away downstream.

***

Two hundred feet upstream from Pennyfield
Lock, Kelsey stood in the trees abutting the towpath. With
binoculars pressed to her eyes, she looked like one of the many
birdwatchers stalking herons or hawks at the nearby Dierssen
Waterfowl Sanctuary. The sanctuary was a short walk ahead, tucked
beneath the canal and the river, but Kelsey was facing away from
its ponds and birdhouses, peering instead at the meadow near
Pennyfield Lock. She watched Vin and Nicky emerge from the woods
and cross the meadow with their bikes. As they rode away, she put
her binoculars in the jacket pocket that held her photographer’s
loupe. Checking her watch, she stepped out onto the towpath,
telling herself to be back in an hour. She headed down to the lock
and across the footbridge and meadow, found the path she’d seen
them descend, and started up the hill.

***

As Vin and Nicky approached the Great Falls
Visitor Center and its long parking lot, the towpath grew crowded
with pedestrians, so they dismounted and walked their bikes. Vin
admired the Visitor Center as they walked by. Like the majority of
canal structures, it was built on the berm side of the canal, since
the river side and the towpath were generally inaccessible to
carriages and cars. The building was a T-shaped whitewashed stone
house, with its tall façade oriented upstream on the head of the T.
The long axis faced the canal and offered a patio shaded by a
portico roof projecting from the base of the second story. Two
whitewashed chimneys on each axis gave the building an air of
dignified ease.

A nearby sign stated that the building had
been constructed as a locktender’s house in 1829, then enlarged
twice in the ensuing years as it evolved into Great Falls Tavern.
For 19th century Washingtonians who took overnight pleasure cruises
up the canal from Georgetown, it served as a destination, a tavern,
and an inn. But then as now, its proximity to the Falls was the
main attraction.

Vin noticed that the path from the parking
lot to the Visitor Center was decorated with carved pumpkins and
paper-bag lanterns. Cardboard signs pointed arrows toward a
goldmine and a mock gallows. A hanging banner over the gallows read
“Life and Death on the Canal.”

“Must be for some kind of Halloween event,”
Nicky said.

Vin nodded. “I wonder who they’re hanging
tonight.”

When they reached the Falls trailhead, they
locked their bikes in the rack and walked onto a cement arch that
crossed a spur of the Potomac. The water in this tendon of river
was white and flying and Vin was startled by its power and speed.
The arch led to a wooden boardwalk that zigzagged across Olmsted
Island, which a nearby sign explained was a rare example of a
bedrock terrace forest. Vin noticed that the trees were all shorter
and thinner than those along the canal, and that the leaves, moss,
and pine needles that formed the ground-cover lay on a foundation
of roots and rock, rather than topsoil. The sign claimed that trees
and vegetation on Olmsted Island were periodically carried away by
massive floods on the Potomac.

“It does look like this island has a
different ecosystem,” Nicky said. “Everything looks miniaturized…
almost fragile.”

“Like a bonsai version of the plants and
trees up the hill,” Vin agreed. The walkway wove around rocks and
depressions before crossing a rocky, fissured gully studded with
pools of stagnant water. The roaring they had heard in the
background for the last few minutes grew louder. Around a short
ridge and past a swampy basin they reached the observation deck,
which was mounted fifty feet above enormous rocks at the base of
the cliff. They found an opening between sightseers at the railing
and felt the cool breeze that drifted up to the platform from the
river below. Vin’s eyes were drawn to the cycling clouds of spray
where water pierced water at the base of the Falls. For a few
seconds he felt hypnotized, unable to focus elsewhere.

“Unbelievable,” Nicky said, raising her
voice against the roaring. “This is ten times bigger than I
expected.”

Vin blinked his hypnosis away. “Even though
you’d seen the photo of the Falls?”

“The scale must be hard to capture in a
single shot. And the motion.”

Vin nodded. What the 1924 photo of Lee
Fisher and K. Elgin at Great Falls couldn’t convey was the
animation of water following every possible path downstream. At the
head of Olmsted Island, the river was a half-mile wide as it
slipped around and over a field of large rocks. As the island
emerged on the Maryland side, a dented and fissured phalanx of rock
pushed into the river from the Virginia side, framing the top of
the Falls. Great Falls itself was a flowing staircase of three
arch-shaped drops, each over twenty feet high and split and twisted
by immense knuckles of fractured rock worn smooth like putty.
Between the upper, middle and lower drops, the river crawled
downstream through staggered boulders as a fabric of waves and
haystacks, with thousands of white veins writhing and twisting
across its sliding body of jade. The split currents converged again
at the base of the Falls, pulsing downstream as a train of standing
white-maned waves.

Vin looked across the river at the crowded
observation decks atop the cliffs on the Virginia side. “We’re both
looking at the same thing,” he said, “but what we’re seeing is
entirely different.”

Retracing their path along the boardwalk,
Vin studied the landscape of rocks, scrub pines and scrawny
hardwoods. What generation of this island’s trees was he seeing
now? The hundredth? Thousandth? Millionth? He tried to visualize
the scope and power of a flood that could – that had, that would
again – wash all this away. Like the people who had walked here, he
thought, and fished and hunted above and below the Falls across a
hundred generations, and left no trace except a handful of
petroglyphs hidden in the rocks along the river. They must have
left their bones here, too, interred in the underwater caverns and
sieves that lace the Falls. He pictured the degraded bones of those
who disappeared in the cataracts a thousand years ago embracing the
swollen flesh of a recent arrival, a wader who had slipped into the
river above Great Falls this summer and was never seen again.

From the corner of his eye, he saw a flash
of motion in the woods upstream from the walkway. He stopped to
track it, hands on the railing as Nicky walked on. Too large for a
squirrel or a small mammal, but very quiet. Could it have been a
deer? Was the island big enough for deer? Peering at the scrawny
trees and moss-stained rocks, he couldn’t see anything moving.
Whatever he’d seen was out of sight now, eclipsed by a rock or
hidden in a depression. He turned back to the boardwalk and saw
Nicky swing along its next leg, ten paces ahead, hands stuffed into
her pockets, shoulders relaxed and low. Her short brown hair
bounced and gleamed in sunlight, and her legs swung a slender arc
as her biking shoes struck the planks underfoot. Animal grace, he
thought, following her now, closing toward her through a mist of
alienation. He didn’t really know Nicky; they were both just
animals hunting. For what, he wasn’t sure.

She slowed to look back as he approached.
“You OK?”

He nodded. Nicky’s eyes were warm and
inquiring and he remembered visiting her during her residency at
Tufts and watching her reassure an elderly man that his cat should
recover completely from an eye infection. The man had said nothing,
just exhaled in relief, but Vin saw his eyes water and the tension
in his gnarled hand relax as Nicky spoke. Vin caught her hand with
his own and they fell in step together. “I thought I saw
something.”

***

As the path reached the top of the hillside
and emerged from the trees, Kelsey paused to assess the backyard of
the house in front of her. Seeing no humans or canines, she stepped
forward onto the lawn. She was pretty sure the dog was home
somewhere, and she reached into her jacket pocket for reassurance
that the rawhide bone she’d brought was still there. She found it
underneath her camera and pulled it out. With luck, she thought,
the dog will be out on the deck like he was last weekend.

She’d only seen it from the front and the
foyer, but the split-level house looked familiar. The second-story
deck ran almost the length of the house and was connected by glass
doors to a living room. Another set of glass doors below the deck
opened into the first floor. She walked toward these doors. When
her boots crunched the gravel under the deck, she heard a bump
overhead, followed by a clattering of toenails and a rolling chorus
of barks. She backed onto the lawn as Randy lunged to the railing
and continued his guttural assault.

“Hey, buddy,” she said. “You’re a good
watchdog. How about a reward?” She lobbed the bone up to the deck
and it landed with a rattle that drew the dog’s attention. She
proceeded to the sliding door and pulled the handle; it slid open.
Cyclists are so predictable, she thought.

Her eyes adjusted to the unlit room. A
mobile of smooth sticks hung from the ceiling in front of her. To
the right, she opened and closed a door to an unfinished storage
and laundry area. A door to her left opened into a dark garage.
Along the wall near the stairs was a slab desk propped on
sawhorses. The desk was anchored by a monitor and keyboard, and a
skewed arc of printed pages and programming books radiated out from
its center. She glanced at the books and leafed through the papers,
finding nothing of interest, then continued toward the stairs.

In the foyer at the top, she recognized the
table she’d seen last weekend, which now held only the morning’s
unopened mail. Up another half-flight to the living room, and then
a hallway to her left, leading to bedrooms, she assumed. Bone in
mouth, the dog stared at her through the glass door to the deck.
She heard him growl intermittently, but he didn’t seem to think her
presence merited a serious protest. She turned her back and
reviewed the bookshelves on the inner wall.

Books on software and computer networks.
Books on biology, medicine, physiology. Travel books and well-known
novels. Nothing worthy of examination right now. She circled around
to the kitchen. Again nothing. She glanced out the window to
confirm that no one was watching the house, then advanced to the
breakfast nook. On the table she found what she’d come for: the old
photo of Great Falls.

Touching only the edges, she picked it up
and studied it closely. When she turned it over, she saw the
attribution in pencil on its back:

R. L. Fisher and K. Elgin at Great Falls

March, 1924

The names meant nothing to her. Her eyes
fell on the torn ledger page on the table, which she leaned over to
read:

March 29, 1924

Charlie,

If it is April and I am missing, 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. The name of the place is well knowed by
Emmert Reed’s albino mule. One tree leads to the money, the second
leads to the killers and the third leads to the dead. In your
search for me you may find the truth. Be careful you don’t share my
fate.

Your friend, Lee Fisher

Her eyes widened. What had happened at
Swains Lock in 1924? That was a long time ago, but she had lived
less than a mile from Swains for ten years and had never heard of
anything. This note from Lee Fisher… the same person as R.L. Fisher
in the photo? So the girl was K. Elgin? She reached into her pocket
for her camera and took two shots of the note. Then she carried the
photo to the kitchen counter to study it under the light.

An attractive young couple, she thought. Was
Lee too young to grow a mustache? He might be nineteen or twenty
and the girl a little younger than that. Even juxtaposed against
the Falls, her eyes and enigmatic smile drew your attention. Kelsey
fished the loupe out of her jacket pocket and bent toward the
photo. She panned the loupe slowly from top to bottom over the
couple in the center of the image, then drew a sharp breath and
felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. “K. Elgin,” she
whispered. “I know you.”

***

When they crossed from Olmsted Island back
onto the towpath, Vin unlocked the bikes. They wheeled them back
toward the Great Falls Visitors Center.

“Lock 18,” he said, reading a small wooden
sign as they passed one of the locks. Like many of the others he
had seen, this one was in disrepair, its gates and swing beams
decaying. “So that next lock must be Lock 19, and then Lock 20 in
front of the Visitor Center.”

Nicky looked at him. “You clearly have a
talent for numbers.”

“Three locks in only a couple hundred
yards,” he continued. “I guess that’s why there’s a noticeable
slope here.”

“You may want to write this up. Maybe get
some funding for a study.” Vin pushed her shoulder with his palm
and she almost fell onto her bike, laughing as she regained her
footing.

“Let’s find out what all the Halloween stuff
is about,” he said as they approached the Visitor Center. They
steered their bikes onto the footbridge over Lock 20 and walked
toward the patio. Nicky nudged him and pointed to a woman wearing a
Park Ranger’s uniform and talking to a couple with a young girl.
Vin caught her attention as the family strolled away.