If It Is April

by Edward A. Stabler

  Cole watched in silence as Swain took several sniffling breaths. There was nothing left to learn here. He had to go to Williamsport. He thrust the goose at chest height toward its owner. “Keep on fattening him up,” he said. “If I find out you been lying, I’ll come back and roast you both over a fire.”

  Chapter 10

  Bonfire

  Thursday, April 10, 1924

  A flurry of orange sparks rose into the darkness as the pyramid of driftwood shifted and settled. The flames diminished, so Jake got up and tilted more flood debris onto the fire. As he sat down near April on the sloping lawn behind the lockhouse, he turned his eyes from the brightening firelight to watch it illuminate her face.

  “We used to burn brushwood here in the summers. We’d start piling it up in the spring, sometimes light it on the fourth of July. I was just remembering something my father used to say, so I guess that means it’s not true.” He waited a moment until she turned to look, expecting more. “Nothing like a fire to take your mind off the past.”

  The hint of a smile flickered on her face before she turned her eyes back to the flames.

  “I guess you’re right,” she said. “I don’t need it, and it isn’t working for you.”

  “Maybe you’ll need it soon,” he said, stretching his legs toward the fire and propping his elbows on the matted grass. It felt cold and firm after a week of dry weather. “After you remember, you might decide you want to forget.”

  The remark was enough to make her glance his way again, and he caught a glimpse of her hair and eyebrows in shadow on one side, aglow on the other. But he’d lost ground with the quip; her voice reflected none of the fire’s warmth.

  “I told you, I don’t know what happened to Lee Fisher. I feel nothing when I hear that name. I can’t picture anyone.”

  “Who can you picture?”

  She turned back to the fire and didn’t answer.

  “The older man? The one with the funny name?”

  “Sometimes,” she mumbled.

  “Does he still want to kill you?”

  “I don’t know why,” she said, sounding frustrated and almost anxious. “Maybe I did something to him… stole something or hurt somebody. Maybe he wants to pay me back. What else could it be?”

  “And you don’t know his name either. Are you sure he exists?”

  She gave Jake a wry smile. “I’m not sure of anything.”

  “Let’s give him a name, and you can decide later who he is… or if he’s even real. When I was in prison, sometimes one inmate would kill another. Weapons weren’t hard to smuggle in – knives or razors or wire. Mostly when someone got stabbed or strangled it was just bad blood between two men.

  “But other times it was a job. Somebody on the outside wanted an inmate killed, and there were men on the inside that would do it for you. All you had to do was pay a guard named Beeker. He’d take your money and find you a killer. Make sure the killer got a minute alone with the mark when no one was watching, maybe in the shower or the cannery or the laundry. When the job was done, Beeker would slip the killer cigarettes and cash, sometimes a flask of whiskey and a piece of steak. We called him the Beekeeper, and we called the inmate that took the job a stinger.”

  “That sounds awful. I’m glad you didn’t get stung.”

  “The people who might have wanted to strangle me weren’t criminals.”

  “So you think someone has hired a stinger to kill me?” she asked. She sounded more intrigued than threatened, as if the insertion of an assassin into the picture might somehow exonerate her, because it meant the motive wasn’t vengeance.

  Jake raised himself back into a seated position with his arms around his knees and thought for a few seconds. He didn’t want to put things the wrong way. “If there’s someone who wants to get you killed,” he said slowly, feeling his way through the issue, “we don’t know why he wants that. But he knows why. Like you said, maybe you took something from him, maybe you hurt somebody. If he’s really out there, let’s call him a beekeeper.

  “And if a man just wants to kill you so he can get paid, and no other reason, let’s call him a stinger. So maybe you got both – a beekeeper and a stinger. Or maybe just a beekeeper.”

  “Why do we need secret words?”

  “Because we can’t stay here much longer. When Gladys is healed, I need to take her and Bertie home. She might be ready to walk in three or four days, and it won’t take longer than that to finish cleaning and patching things up. We’ve already done most of the work.”

  “But I don’t have a home,” she said, her brow furrowing. “Just here.”

  Jake turned toward her and tried to sound convincing. “You must have a home. We just need to find it. That means getting out and seeing people, so you can run into a friend or a relative. Or maybe you’ll see someone you remember, and that will help you remember more.

  “But in case we see your beekeeper or stinger, I need to keep calling you April. And you need to use those words to tell me it’s him without letting on that something’s wrong.”

  She nodded. “Perhaps I’ll see someone I recognize in town. But if my name is Katie Elgin – like you seem to think it is – and my picture is on the wall of the post office, plenty of people might recognize me first. That deputy in Poolesville for one.”

  “If you’re Katie Elgin, we want to find your family without tipping off the sheriff. We don’t have to go back to Poolesville first thing. We can go down the towpath to Seneca – that’s just five miles. Whites Ferry is about the same distance upstream, and we can cross over and ride up into Leesburg. But Poolesville is the closest real town, and if they got you posted on the wall, people must think you’re not too far away. So maybe the Elgins live somewhere around there.”

  “If my family lived nearby, why wouldn’t they have found me by now?”

  “I don’t know,” Jake said. It was something that had been gnawing at him as well. It had been ten days since the flood passed, and April had been at Edwards Ferry for at least a week. If she’d walked here, it couldn’t have been from very far away. Shouldn’t someone who knew where she’d been before the flood have been able to track her here? Maybe if Katie Elgin was wanted for questioning related to the death of Lee Fisher, her family thought she should lay low right now.

  “You said the earliest thing you remember was standing on a ridge looking down at the river during the flood. Do you remember how you got there? Where you were walking from?”

  “No. But it’s funny you mentioned that, because while you were tending the fire I remembered something else. From before then. Maybe because we’re out here between the river and the canal at night.”

  “Something about a fire?”

  “No. I remember talking to a young man late at night on the towpath, and he let me borrow his bicycle. I got on and rode somewhere – I don’t know how long it took. It seemed like time stopped and there was just the night and the wind in my face. The black canal on one side and the moonlit river on the other. When I got off, I propped the bike against some kind of post and walked toward a house. And here’s the strange part. I had a pair of shackles in my hand.”

  Jake checked her expression, thinking April might be luring him into a ghost story, but she was gazing at the flames straight-faced with her arms around her knees, wearing a gray sweater she’d bought on their trip to Poolesville. A breath of heat from the fire washed over his head and he leaned back and looked up at the stars to cool down. The image of April holding shackles was disturbing. Maybe she actually had done something shocking, and maybe her memory loss was all a ruse. Had he been wrong to shield her from deputy Boyer? Maybe April was playing him for a sucker. But to what end – Jake had nothing she could steal. The only things Edwards Ferry could offer her after the flood were solitude and a well-stocked pantry.

  “You were riding a bike on the towpath at night,” he said, trying to mine her recollection. “That must have been before the flood. There was a post and a house. Do you remem
ber anything else about the place?”

  “Three mules in a small corral. I went to check on them first.”

  “First before what?”

  “I wanted to count them. That’s all I know.”

  Mules, Jake thought. When the canal was operating, they could be anywhere on the towpath. But at least it was a new memory, another piece in a jigsaw puzzle. If she could recall a few more scenes, maybe they could start fitting the pieces together.

  The image reminded him that he needed to change the dressing on Gladys’s wound tomorrow. And he would have to go back to the feed store once more to buy hay for the trip to Sharpsburg. If Gladys looked good, he could set out with the mules early next week. Was it possible to deliver April into the right hands between now and then?

  Chapter 11

  Williamsport

  Friday, April 11, 1924

  The road from Swains Lock to Williamsport was half again as long as the one Cole had traveled from Harpers Ferry, but it was an easy and familiar drive. Northwest to Frederick, then west on the National Pike, winding up South Mountain and down to Hagerstown. From there only a few more miles to Williamsport on the Potomac River. He had to inquire at the post office, a bank, and a general store before finding someone who knew where the Elgin family lived. Cole told the store manager that he wanted to return a war medal he’d bought at a flea market, after learning the medal had been awarded to a recently-deceased Williamsport veteran named Cy Elgin.

  The Elgins lived on the north side of town, he was told, on a few acres that backed up to Conococheague Creek, near where the creek turned a half-mile-long oval before resuming its journey to the river. Cole found the road after a couple of wrong turns. He sized up the property from a distance before turning into the dirt driveway. The house was a rambling one-story structure that looked like it had spawned additions at right angles over the years. The main axis was white clapboard, but one annex featured unpainted wooden shingles and another showed rough-hewn logs and mortar.

  As he pulled to a stop at the end of the driveway and turned off the engine, Cole heard the clucking and squawking of what sounded like a hundred chickens. The noise was coming from a long shed about fifty feet to his left, and just looking at it made him aware of the smell. Jesus, he thought. I guess some people can learn to live with anything. The front door was ten paces in the opposite direction.

  When Cole knocked, Tessie Elgin came to the door. He guessed she might be fifty. She wore a long-sleeved dress that was snug enough to show her figure was still slender, even though her hair was turning from butterscotch to gray. Take away the prominent worry lines on her forehead and around her mouth and you could see she must have been a looker twenty years ago. She seemed lost for words when confronted with a stranger at her door, so he removed his hat and introduced himself as Delmond Cole from Harpers Ferry. When he said he’d been referred to the Elgins by Jess Swain of Swains Lock, she inhaled sharply and her hand flew to her mouth, as if she were stifling a sob.

  “I was very sorry to hear about Cyrus, ma’am. I never met him, but I knowed other captains on the canal, and they’re special men.”

  Tessie Elgin dropped her hand and nodded, trying to smile as her eyes brimmed with tears. “I’m going to go get my husband,” she said in a strained voice. She left him on the landing with the door opened wide. Cole watched a slow-moving figure approach from the down the hall. It reached the doorway and extended an age-thickened leathery hand.

  “I’m Jack Elgin. What can I do for you, Mr. Cole?”

  Cole assessed him quickly. Even the half-riser advantage of the doorway left the older man short of his own height. Elgin looked powerful but a little hunched, with a scalp that was almost bald and a close-trimmed beard gone gray and white. A jungle of silver chest hair sprouted from the open neck of his collar-less shirt and covered the base of his throat. One of his eyes was badly bloodshot and didn’t seem to follow the other. He resembled the kind of men Cole knew from Jefferson County, the ones who spent their lives outdoors doing physical work.

  Cole told Elgin he had been sent by Abel Emory, the owner of the scow tied up at Swains Lock when the flood struck. “Kevin and Tom Emory was found drownded, same as your son Cyrus, so the Emory family is feeling a heavy loss. The boat come through in one piece, washed up on the berm about a mile down the canal. But no one seen the two mules that was left at Swains.”

  Cole said he’d asked Jess Swain about them and was told that young Pete Elgin had taken the mules to high ground in the middle of the night, as the water rose toward the towpath.

  “Do you know if that’s right?”

  “That’s what Pete told us,” Jack Elgin said. “The flood come through here on Saturday, and we knew it was going to be worse downriver. I drove down there with Lenny, my second boy, on Sunday, soon as we got things squared away near the creek. We found Pete and the mules at the crossroads in Potomac town.”

  “You got to be mighty proud of Pete,” Cole said. “I heared he’s only about ten years old.”

  “Eleven now,” Elgin said.

  “That’s a brave boy to go out on his own like that, take two scared mules up the road at night.”

  Elgin nodded. “Pete done good. We wasn’t thinking so much about the mules that day, with his older brother and sister still missing.”

  Cole lowered his eyes. “I told Mrs. Elgin how sorry I was to hear about Cyrus. I guess I didn’t know you had a daughter gone missing too. She was with Pete and Cyrus at Swains?”

  “Katie was helping Cy get his boat ready for the start of the season,” Elgin said softly. “He got stuck on the White Oak Springs level when the Canal Company drawed the water off last winter. Pete was going to drive mules for him. Now he’s back in school. I think we all seen enough of that damn ditch.”

  “Did your daughter make it home safe after the flood?” Cole asked, trying to portray his interest as empathy.

  Elgin shook his head. “She ain’t turned up yet,” he croaked. He swallowed hard and paused to regain his composure. “We spent a couple days going up and down the river from Swains, but no one seen her. At first we was grateful she didn’t wash up dead, but now we just don’t know. The sheriff said they’ll find her, one way or the other. It’s got her mother worried sick.”

  Cole raised his eyebrows and smiled as if a thought had just struck. “How old is Katie?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “And the sheriff’s office been saying they want her to come in for questions?”

  Elgin’s mismatched eyes converged on Cole. “They said they would put up posters in the area, saying she was missing. We gave ‘em a photo of her. I don’t think it was about questions.”

  “Could be,” Cole said, “that she’s fine. Just hiding out someplace. Maybe she got scared by something she seen happen during the flood. There was a fourth man that washed up dead near Swains, and he had a slashed throat. Maybe she saw who done it and is scared to come forward. Sometimes young folks see trouble up close for the first time and they can’t reckon which way to turn. Then if they hear the sheriff wants to see ‘em, maybe they just freeze up.”

  “I didn’t think about it that way,” Elgin said, stroking his beard between his thickened thumb and index finger.

  “My job is to make sure the scow is ready to float,” Cole said, “after the canal gets fixed and watered. And I got to find the mules and take ‘em back to Washington County. So I’ll be around Swains Lock and up and down the canal for a while. Could be I’ll run into someone that seen your daughter, maybe even someone who knows where she is. If you got a message for her, I could try to get it to her.”

  “The only message we got is ‘tell us you’re safe and let us come get you.’”

  Cole nodded in approval. “If she come through the flood, and she’s scared, that might make the difference. Just telling her it’s safe to come home.”

  “If that’s the situation, I don’t know if it’s going to help much hearing it from a stranger.”


  “Probably wouldn’t help at all. But she would recognize your handwriting, or her mother’s, wouldn’t she?”

  Elgin’s face softened for the first time since he came to the door.

  “She’d know a note from her mother,” he agreed. “I don’t think it could hurt.”

  He straightened a little and stepped back, inviting Cole to wait inside the doorway while he turned down the hall in search of his wife. A few minutes later he returned with a small sealed envelope.

  “If you find a way to get this to her, Tessie and I will be more than grateful,” he said, presenting the envelope. Cole accepted it solemnly, pressing its edges lightly between his fingers. On its front was the single word “Katie”.

  “I’ll be happy to try,” he said, slipping the envelope carefully into his breast pocket. After standing a few moments in silence to let the older man complete his thoughts, Cole reminded him that he’d come to find out what had happened to Abel Emory’s mules.

  “We left ‘em in Potomac,” Elgin said. “With a feller named Perry that runs a general store. He said he knew a horse doctor that could board ‘em until someone showed up to claim ‘em. We stopped by Perry’s a couple days later before we left town, and he told us the doctor already been by to fetch the mules.”

  “Do you know who he was or where he took them?”

  “I think it was near Seneca or Poolesville. And the doc’s name began with a C.” Elgin furrowed his brow as he tried to summon the name he’d heard Perry mention. Then he smiled as if satisfied he could return Cole’s favor. “Now I remember,” he said. “Doctor Cushing.”

  Chapter 12

  Glencarlyn

  Saturday, April 12, 1924

  When the train screeched to a stop at Glencarlyn station, Zimmerman grabbed his empty satchel and shuffled down the aisle to the door. A few teenagers were waiting on the platform, probably heading back to Alexandria after an outing at the park. They let him pass before boarding. It was a two-car train, but nearing six o’clock on a cool spring evening he was the only passenger getting off.