If It Is April

by Edward A. Stabler

  “Lock 21,” Tyler said, nodding. “I think they call that Swains Lock.”

  ***

  It was less than a mile back up the towpath to Swains Lock, but it was slow walking. Rocks and pebbles had washed up from the riverbank as the floodwaters rose, and cross-wise runnels had furrowed the towpath as the flood subsided. Elsewhere the comfortable dirt and sandy gravel flattened by countless hooves and feet had been larded over by mud that looked and felt like drying cow-pies.

  Billy and Tyler had seen too many miles of it already. They’d started looking for the scow yesterday, after their father’s cousins failed to make it home. The Emory clan knew the canal was wrecked, and that their boat was stuck somewhere in the wreckage, but they had still expected Kevin and Tom to ride their mules into Washington County a day or two after the water receded. If the scow reached Georgetown on schedule, the men should have been halfway home by the time they were stopped by the flood on Sunday. And if Kevin had been able to sell as much whiskey as everyone expected, he would have been carrying almost a thousand dollars in his toolbox. Most or all of it in the form of gold and silver coins.

  So when Tuesday came and went with no sign of the Emory brothers, their money, or their mules, the clan started to get edgy. Four families had a stake in the moonshine proceeds. On Wednesday everyone’s nerves got worse. On Thursday morning, clan patriarch Abel Emory sent his grandsons Billy and Tyler out to look for his nephews Kevin and Tom. At breakfast all the Emory men had agreed that the first step was to find the scow. Even if it was half submerged, it would tell them where to start searching for Kevin and Tom. And if Kevin’s toolbox was still onboard, the sooner they found the boat, the better.

  Billy and Tyler had driven to Whites Ferry yesterday, figuring that the scow could have traveled no further upstream before the flood. From there they walked five miles down the towpath. No sign of the scow, and three workers clearing debris from the Broad Run culvert halfway between the locks hadn’t seen or heard about it. When Edwards Ferry emerged in the distance, the Emory brothers caught a glimpse of someone leaving the towpath and disappearing behind the lockhouse, but lock 25 was deserted when they reached it. They turned around and retraced their muddy steps to the car.

  Nobody at the tavern in Poolesville that night knew anything about the scow, so the brothers had parked and slept in a vacant field and driven to Edwards Ferry this morning to walk the next level. It was eight miles down to Rileys Lock, but their luck improved. They’d only walked five when a fisherman camped at Horsepen Branch told them he’d seen a boat resembling the one they described. It had washed up below Swains Lock, where the canal bends and a wooded shelf emerges between the berm and the hillside. He said people used to call that place Sandy Landing. Billy and Tyler had thanked the fisherman, walked back to their car, and driven fifteen miles down River Road to Swains Lock.

  They hadn’t bothered to question the plump white-haired man they’d seen sweeping dirt near the entrance to the lockhouse. Now on the walk back to Swains from the scow, Billy hoped he was still around. The man had finished sweeping and gone inside, but he opened the door and doffed his hat when Billy knocked.

  “Jess Swain,” he said, “You men looking for repair work?”

  Billy introduced himself and Tyler and explained that relatives of theirs from Washington County, Kevin and Tom Emory, had been returning from a run to Georgetown when the flood hit. No one had seen or heard from them since. Billy said they had just found the Emorys’ scow washed out of the canal at Sandy Landing, but there was no sign of Kevin and Tom or their two mules. Had Jess seen them? Did he have any idea where they’d gone?

  Jess nodded thoughtfully while Billy was speaking, then cocked his head and stroked his chin as if he was weighing his response carefully.

  “I was away when the flood hit,” he said, “and came back to a real mess on Tuesday. There was a boater staying here while I was gone. A captain from Williamsport. His boat got stuck for the winter just up this level when the Canal Company drained the water off last fall. He came down a couple weeks ago to get it rigged for the season and his sister and kid brother were here helping him, and together they were minding the lock. That boat was tied up good and made it through the flood without swamping or cutting loose. It’s still there now.”

  Billy puffed out his cheeks gradually as he listened, then exhaled his frustration. “What does any of that got to do with Kevin and Tom Emory?”

  “The scow was tied up here when the flood hit,” Jess said. He pointed to a snapped-off sapling trunk on the berm near the mouth of the flume. “Probably moored to that tree. There were two mules here too, on a hitching post at the end of the driveway.”

  “What happened to the men on board?” Tyler asked. “That boat captain say anything about ‘em?”

  Jess shook his head. “Nobody had a chance to ask him. He drowned in the flood, washed up dead a mile downriver, trapped in a strainer on an island above the falls.”

  “How about them other two?” Billy said gruffly. “The sister and the kid brother.”

  Something about Billy’s remark annoyed Jess’s pet goose Jimmy, who had been standing unnoticed in the shadow of the doorway and now concluded that these two visitors were either a nuisance or a threat. Jimmy waddled briskly in front of his master and began squawking in protest and pecking at Billy’s trousers below the knee.

  “Get him off me!” Billy said.

  “Jimmy stop it,” Jess said, but Jimmy ignored the command and swiveled menacingly toward Tyler. “He doesn’t like it when strangers get too close,” Jess explained, without making any effort to restrain the goose. “Seeing as I raised him from the time he was an orphan chick. He’s eleven now and still thinks I’m his mother.”

  Billy and Tyler both took a step back as Jimmy held his ground in front of Jess and wagged his head assertively from side to side.

  “You still ain’t told us,” Billy said. “What about them other two? They must know something.”

  “The boy Pete was the hero,” Jess said. “He woke up when he heard the mules braying in the middle of the night. Came downstairs to check on them and saw the river was almost up to the towpath. Looked like it was still rising. The scow was dark and no one came out of it when he yelled. The captain and his sister were both gone, so Pete got dressed and took the team up the hill to River Road. Saved the mules and maybe saved himself. The scow broke its mooring when the river rose into the canal. Ran aground on the berm down where you saw it.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “She disappeared,” Jess said. “No one has seen her since.”

  Billy scowled. “So the boat captain is dead, the girl is gone, and the kid took our mules? Where was Kevin and Tom? Somebody kidnap ‘em?”

  Jimmy pivoted back toward Billy and advanced, squawking and jabbing the air with his beak. Billy retreated another half step.

  “I never saw those two,” Jess said, “but you might want to stop by Perry’s Store up at the crossroads. Cy Elgin wasn’t the only one that drowned in the flood. A couple other men washed up above the falls. Nobody’s come to claim them yet, so the police laid ‘em out for viewing in Perry’s ice house until somebody does.”

  Chapter 3

  Ice House

  Friday, April 4, 1924

  Leaning in for a closer view, Billy saw the steam from his own breath rise above the mottled face of the corpse. The russet hair and mustache could have belonged to a sleeping man, but the pupils looked like bullet holes fired into sclera the color of fog. Billy and Tyler took their hats off and held them at their sides in respect.

  “That’s Kevin Emory,” Billy said, turning to address the sheriff in the cramped ice house. Sheriff Moore edged forward and lifted the canvas sheet covering the torso of the second body. It had dead-fish eyes and a slack mouth, with receding lips that showed Tom Emory’s yellowish teeth. Both bodies were dressed in working jackets, shirts, and trousers that had once been brown or gray or blue but now seemed just colorle
ss and cold.

  “And that’s Tom Emory,” Billy added. “They was brothers from Washington County, cousins to my father. Tom ain’t married but Kevin got a wife and two kids.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” said Sheriff Moore. As the sheriff prepared to drape the canvas back over Tom’s body, Tyler nudged Billy.

  “Where’s his knife?” he said.

  Billy noticed that the five-inch blade Tom carried on his hip was missing. If the Bowie knife had been snapped into its sheath on Tom’s belt, it shouldn’t have pulled loose in the flood. Billy caught the sheriff’s eye.

  “Anybody strip a knife off him? Go through the pockets and lift what they found?”

  The sheriff gave Billy a dismissive look. “No one fleeced these bodies,” he said. “We had teams of volunteers scouting for three missing people after the flood. Got organized Tuesday morning at the church, and I gave everybody marching orders. Anyone turns up hurt, take ‘em straight to the hospital. Anyone turns up dead, get a message to my office and don’t touch a thing. Lucy Ebbers and her sister got a hound that sniffed out both these men in the first hour. On the Maryland bank above Conn Island, about a hundred yards apart. Lucy sent word and I got there straightaway.”

  “So you didn’t find no knife on Tom Emory,” Billy said as the sheriff lowered the sheet back over the corpse.

  “The only item on that body was a handkerchief in a trouser pocket. The other one had a pouch of wet chewing tobacco in his coat. We threw it away. The coroner undressed ‘em to look for wounds but didn’t find any. He listed drowning as the cause of death for both.”

  “Kevin and Tom was good swimmers,” Billy said, shooting Tyler a skeptical glance. “Been up and down the Potomac their whole lives. Creeks and lakes too. You sure they wasn’t knocked in the head or had their hands tied?”

  “I’m sure your relatives knew how to swim,” Sheriff Moore said with a thin smile. “But this wasn’t a creek or a lake. If your cousins were hare-brained enough to go fishing on the river last weekend, you might say they got what was coming. When it floods, the Potomac has whirlpools that will swallow a canoe and two men in one bite. Spit out the paddles and hold the bodies down for a quarter mile. That is wild brown water, and with a bellyful of whiskey and dressed like this, your cousins might have drowned before they figured which way was up.”

  “Who said anything about whiskey?” Tyler said.

  “Who said anything about going fishing in a canoe?” Billy added.

  The sheriff narrowed his eyes and turned toward Billy, ignoring Tyler. “We found pieces of two canoes that got smashed up going over the falls. One green and one black. Can’t say for sure that your kin were in one of ‘em, but it sounds likely. Their boat was abandoned at Swains, and Jess Swain said a green canoe was missing after the flood. All his other canoes were still tied down.”

  “That don’t make sense,” Billy said. “Kevin and Tom wasn’t the type to leave their boat unmanned, or paddle into rising water. They was in business and sticking to a schedule. Kevin had a pocket ledger he carried around to keep track of customers. You sure no one found that on him?”

  “Just what were your cousins selling?” Sheriff Moore said. “Flood insurance?”

  “Cord-wood,” Billy said defensively. “Delivering a full load to Georgetown.”

  “Not much need for that this time of year,” the sheriff observed.

  Tyler tried to redirect the conversation. “How about keys? You check all Kevin’s pockets for a ring of keys?”

  “There were no keys on either body. I told you that already.”

  Billy nodded and stared at the draped corpse, trying to remember something else he wanted to ask. “Those other three missing turn up? The ones you was searching for?”

  “Two of them did,” the sheriff said. “And one of bodies was just like your kin, not a mark on him. Drowned after a lifetime on the river and the canal.”

  “Was that the boat captain we heared about?” Billy said. “The one staying in the lockhouse at Swains?”

  Sheriff Moore nodded. “Cy Elgin from Williamsport. Nobody can figure how he got caught in the flood. He was supposed to be stocking his boat to get ready for the season.”

  “Jess Swain told us his sister went missing too.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Still missing, we heared.”

  “You seem to have mastered the basics of the situation.”

  “So you think them two was in the other canoe, and maybe she got sucked down at the bottom of the falls? Trapped in a sieve under the rocks?”

  The sheriff turned toward Billy. “It’s possible,” he said in a drawn-out cadence, as if Billy was stretching his patience like a strand of blown glass. “Since as far as I know, Katie Elgin is still missing. Maybe she and Cy were in the other canoe and capsized in the flood. Maybe not. We won’t know until she shows up somewhere – in the river or on dry land. Or as you point out, maybe we’ll never find her.”

  “How about that third person?”

  “His name was Lee Fisher. He washed up on Olmsted Island. We’re pretty sure he didn’t drown.”

  “Why’s that?” Tyler asked, jumping in while Billy digested the name.

  Sheriff Moore rewarded Tyler with eye contact and a matter-of-fact answer.

  “Because his throat was slashed on one side. The coroner said it was a clean cut and opened a major vein. The poor kid bled to death before he had a chance to drown.”

  “Somebody cut him with a knife and throwed him in the river?” Tyler said.

  “We don’t know what sliced his throat, but it wasn’t a rock or a piece of flood trash.”

  “Lee Fisher?” Billy said. “From Seneca? Maybe twenty years old?”

  The sheriff whistled. “Well Mr. Emory, since you seem to know something about all of the deceased, maybe I should be asking you how they ended up in the water.”

  “If it’s the same Lee Fisher,” Billy said darkly, catching Tyler’s eye, “this is gone from horrible to worse.” He turned back toward Sheriff Moore. “Lee Fisher from Seneca is our father’s cousin.” He pointed to the draped corpses. “And first cousin to Kevin and Tom.”

  Tyler scanned the corners of the ice-house. “Do you got Lee on ice somewhere in here too? We could take a look and know for sure.”

  “His father took the body back to Seneca the day we found him.”

  “Would that be Van Fisher?” Billy said. “Married to Sarah Emory?”

  Sheriff Moore nodded. He let Billy and Tyler contemplate their losses for a minute, then led them out of the ice-house.

  Late afternoon shadows striped the yard behind Perry’s Store, but Billy felt grateful to be back outside in warm air. When the sheriff asked him if they wanted to claim the remains, Billy said they’d hoped it was going to turn out different, but that was one of the reasons they were here. The sheriff said he’d prepare the paperwork and place the bodies in simple pine caskets. Billy and Tyler could come back tomorrow at noon to sign, pay twenty dollars, and take the caskets home.

  “Where do you reckon we should go now?” Tyler asked as he and Billy carried a loaf of bread and half a meatloaf out of Perry’s Store. “It don’t seem like we got much chance of finding the money.” They got back into their truck.

  “The last place we know that toolbox been was on the scow,” Billy said, starting the engine. “Even though we searched it already, we might as well go back. Got to spend the night somewhere, and maybe we missed something. Besides,” he added, turning onto River Road for the short drive back to Swains Lock, “that boat is Emory property. And there’s twenty gallons of whiskey in hatch 5.”

  ***

  It was twilight by the time they approached the scow, picking their way down the uneven towpath and navigating warily between puddles and mud wallows on the prism of the drained canal. Billy had to use his hands to ascend the slippery berm. Tyler tossed him the food bag and did the same. The scow had fetched up against two trees, and the brothers scraped mud f
rom the soles of their shoes onto the swamp oak. Closer to the bow, someone had cut a foothold into the anchoring sycamore, and the Emorys used it to mount the five feet to the deck.

  “I reckon it’s too dark to search the hold again,” Tyler said. “But I don’t think that toolbox is down there anyway.”

  “We would of seen it,” Billy agreed. “But we wasn’t looking for Kevin’s ledger before, and now we know he’s dead, we got to find it. It’s worth as much as the money in that box. Maybe more.”

  “If it wasn’t on him, maybe Kevin was keeping the ledger in the toolbox.”

  Billy shook his head grimly and spat off the deck. “Maybe. Or maybe someone lifted it, like someone must of done to Tom’s knife.”

  “Tom had that knife since you and me was kids,” Tyler said. “He wasn’t going to take kindly to handing it over. Must of been dead or on the wrong end of a gun.”

  “Makes me think someone got all three. The knife, the toolbox, and the ledger,” Billy said, scraping mud from the sides of his shoes against the rail. “Whoever it is might as well be holding that knife to our throats, because with no money and no customers, we ain’t going to be doing business this summer.”

  “And no boat until the canal gets fixed, don’t forget about that,” Tyler added.

  “Let’s see if we can get that coal stove lit,” Billy said. “Could get chilly tonight.”

  He followed Tyler along the starboard rail, past the dark window, down three steps, and through the cabin door. Tyler pulled a pack of matches from his pocket and advanced cautiously in the dim light toward the stove on the opposite wall. Billy followed, but as the door closed behind him a hand grasped his wrist and bent his arm up sharply behind his back, and at the same moment he felt a knife blade tap his neck.

  He squawked in pain and surprise, almost dropping the bread and meatloaf he carried in his other arm.

  “What are you fellers doing here?” said a raspy voice just behind his ear. It sounded almost familiar, like it might have belonged to someone from the hill country near Harpers Ferry. Standing near the stove, Tyler lit a wooden match and extended his arm toward the door, illuminating the room’s three occupants in a faint orange glow.