If It Is April

by Edward A. Stabler

  “I saw your poster again,” Jake said. “On the wall at the store. I guess the sheriff still wants to ask you about Lee Fisher.”

  April snorted. “I invited Lee for tea and sandwiches in my garden. When his mouth was stuffed with cornbread, I opened the door to my bee house and he was attacked by a hundred stingers. He was dead before he could even scream.”

  “And then you dumped him in the river. That may be just what they want to hear.” He watched her lick the smeared jam from the knife. “Now that you’ve come clean about that, what other memories are coming back?”

  “Nothing I can make sense of. Nothing with people. Just little things I must have seen. Yesterday you were talking about pole-hooks, and in my mind I saw dozens of them, at least fifty, piled up under a tarp on the porch of a big house with white siding.”

  “Do you remember where that was?”

  She shook her head. “But it must be near the water, or why would anyone need one?”

  “But no people,” Jake confirmed. “So nothing real about Lee Fisher or the Emory brothers.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Or Katie Elgin’s brothers, Cy and Pete, who were staying with her at Swains Lock.”

  “No.”

  “Then it doesn’t sound like you’re going to be telling anyone what they want to hear. Not the sheriff and not Cole.” Jake took a long gulp of water and thought for a few breaths. “Right now I’m more worried about Cole, since he’s the one who tracked you down. Maybe he’s right – maybe Katie Elgin did take the toolbox after Cy drowned. It was probably heavy and hard to walk with, so maybe she hid it somewhere.”

  “On her way up to Edwards Ferry from Swains Lock, you mean,” April said. “Since you think I’m Katie Elgin.”

  Jake didn’t refute her. “You told Cole you had a memory about a toolbox. You could see it falling into a lock. Maybe that’s where Katie hid it.”

  “If so, she’d have a hard time finding it again. Even knowing where it was.”

  “She would,” Jake agreed. “A hundred feet long, fifteen across, and four or five feet of water set for a light boat. Dirty enough you can’t see the bottom. But with the canal mostly drained, it’s just a foot or two deep between the sills now, even with the gates closed. That’s why it only took Cole twenty minutes to fish the lock at Swains.”

  “But he didn’t find it.”

  Jake shook his head. “If he found it, you can bet he had a plan for opening it. And then instead of thrashing you in the stable, he would have been interrogating you about something he thought was missing from the box.”

  April pulled a hunk of bread from the diminishing loaf and dipped it into the jam jar. “I wouldn’t mind eating again today. Something beyond mulberries. What do you think we should do?” She handed Jake the loaf and he tore off part of the heel.

  “There’s still plenty of food at Edwards Ferry,” he said, “but we’ve got to get Cole to back off. Seems like the best way to do that is to find the toolbox and leave it somewhere for him. Until something else comes back to you, we can work with what we’ve got. There’s three more locks on the way to Edwards Ferry: Pennyfield, about three miles up from Swains; Violettes Lock and the guard lock on the Dam 2 feeder; and Rileys Lock at Seneca Creek.

  “We need to move faster, but I think Gladys can do it. And we’ve got to be careful. If we’re lucky, maybe we can fish all three before dark.”

  Chapter 20

  Passing Thoughts

  Monday, April 14, 1924

  Jake wrapped a blanket around April’s shoulders and draped the other over her head like a scarf. It was the first mile on River Road that concerned him the most, since Cole probably drove it twice a day, traveling between Swains Lock and the crossroads in Potomac. After a bend, the road ran dead straight for two miles, so they could see approaching cars from a long way off. He guided April to Bertie’s outer flank, ahead of Gladys who was hitched in line.

  “We’ll stay right and keep checking behind us. When I see a car coming either way, I’ll pull Bertie sideways and start adjusting his bridle. You can duck between the mules, use ‘em as a screen.”

  “Were you a fugitive before you went to jail?” April said as they set off. “You seem to know a lot of little tricks.”

  “It’s just a different way of thinking. You start doing it when you hear enough stories about what went wrong.”

  A few cars passed but no one seemed interested in a young man and his mules, even if one was an albino. They reached Swains Lock Road and Jake cast a wary eye down its green barrel, descending toward the canal under a canopy of emerging leaves. Three more miles to the turn for Pennyfield Lock. When the road turned wooded and hilly, he offered to let April ride, but she was still willing to walk.

  “Yesterday,” he said, relaxing a little as they gained distance from Swains, “you told me Cole didn’t look like a beekeeper. So maybe he’s just a stinger. Maybe someone else wants to kill you and Cole is a hired gun.” He glanced at her across Bertie’s withers and saw she’d lowered the blanket from her head. Her ashwood-colored hair was swinging as she walked, brightening when the sun came free of the clouds.

  “If he’s a stinger, he could have finished me off already. But I guess he won’t do that until I tell him where the toolbox is and how his friends drowned.”

  “In that case, it’s good you don’t remember.”

  “Maybe I never knew.”

  Her contrary charm again, Jake thought. “You said the man who wants to kill you is older and has a funny first name. Cole has a gray streak in his hair, and his first name is Delmond. Is that funny enough?”

  “That depends on your sense of humor.”

  “I bet it didn’t seem amusing while you were bound and gagged.”

  She turned to catch his eye across the undulating saddle. “It didn’t, but I got something else out of it. Now I know how it feels to be rescued.”

  Jake felt a thrill of accomplishment rise like a wave in his chest; he let it pass before pronouncing “We both got lucky. Things could have gone wrong six ways to Sunday.” Then he couldn’t resist a question that betrayed his interest. “Did you think you were done for?”

  “No,” April said, walking a few steps before elaborating. “I couldn’t. Isn’t your life supposed to flash before your eyes? I don’t have one – it’s just beginning. So I couldn’t imagine it was coming to an end. When he was throwing me against the walls, I was just trying to live through the next minute. Just counting my way through the pain.”

  “That’s how I felt during my trial,” Jake said, wondering instantly how that admission slipped out.

  “But when you were in prison, at least you knew you were going to get released. You could count down, instead of counting up.”

  Jake didn’t answer. He was remembering how he felt when the judge read his sentence, seeing his mother clasp her hand over her mouth.

  “What did you think about while you were in prison?”

  “At first I thought about the other people there. The inmates, the guards. How the place works and how not to screw up. You don’t want to give the guards a reason to punish you or the cons a reason to shiv you.”

  “Beekeepers and stingers,” she said with a smile. “You told me that part already.”

  “After you get the hang of things, you start thinking about life outside again. Not all the time, but when you know the rules and know you’re safe.”

  “Thinking about the past or the future?”

  “Both, but you don’t want to get stuck on the past. It always leads back to where you are, behind bars. So I tried to think about the future.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Like something new, somewhere else.”

  “That’s simple,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Just lose your memory and everything is new. Your past is gone!”

  Jake smiled. “Easier said than done. Any work I try to find around here, Hagerstown to Frederick to Baltimore, I’ll keep running into it
.”

  “Then where?”

  “I met an inmate not much older than me. Ben Carlson. He was doing two years for forging checks, and we used to talk about cars. He would buy them broken-down, fix ‘em up and sell ‘em. I knew a little from working with Blyth, telling investors about all the dealers we financed and all the models they were selling.

  “Ben and I would talk about how there were twice as many cars on the road as a few years ago, and how it was going to keep on doubling, again and again. Before long there would be millions of people driving all over the country, and they were all going to need gasoline. He had an uncle in the oil business who wrote a letter saying Ben should come to Texas when he got out. Business was booming, but for every big field that’s pumping now there are five more waiting to be found. Or ten or twenty. It sounds like a place where you can make a clean start.”

  “And nobody in Texas has ever heard of Jake Reed,” April said.

  “So much the better.”

  Turning onto Pennyfield Lock Road, Jake felt like they’d dodged a full cylinder of bullets. No one had spotted April while they’d walked for over an hour on River Road, even though her poster was on the wall at the crossroads store behind them. Gladys was holding up well, walking without any trace of lameness. He’d checked her stab wound this morning and all the exercise hadn’t reopened it. And they had avoided Cole for eighteen hours. If he didn’t catch them on this last mile down to Pennyfield Lock, they’d be back on the towpath, and he’d have to pursue them on foot or on his own mule. His truck could only take him to the locks.

  On the right, near the top of the Pennyfield Lock Road, was Tobytown, a cluster of fifteen tin-roof houses connected by dirt paths and defeated grass to a central well and pump. All but the church were a single story, anchored by stubby chimneys molded of clay and irregular rocks. The smell of woodsmoke hung in the air.

  “Does this place look familiar?” Jake said.

  “I don’t recognize it. Would Katie Elgin?”

  “Probably not. It’s all colored folk, down a few generations from freed slaves. Unless somebody brought her here.”

  “Like Lee Fisher?”

  “He’d know it, being from Seneca.”

  Jake scanned the houses as they passed. The only people in sight were two men at a woodpile, one splitting logs while the other told a story punctuated by bursts of wheezy laughter. Jake thought about asking after Linus and Floyd but decided the men wouldn’t appreciate being interrupted. And the boys should be in school if they weren’t playing hookey. Maybe they’d gone back down to Great Falls to try to sell a catfish that was still holed up in the river.

  Past Tobytown the road tracked a narrow drainage, winding down the hillside under tree cover and brushing up against Muddy Branch before that fat shallow creek slid into its culvert under the canal. As the road swung away, Jake heard bullfrogs croaking, one from each bank.

  “Don’t usually hear ‘em in the morning,” he said. “Mostly they wait ‘til sunset.”

  April didn’t reply, and when he glanced at her she was staring down the quarter-mile straightaway toward Pennyfield Lock. “Two men snoring,” she said in a disengaged voice. “Lying on a boat deck, with their hats pulled down over their eyes.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I don’t know. It came back to me when I heard the frogs.”

  “Is it a memory?”

  “It’s like the other scenes. It only lasts a moment. I just get a single glimpse.”

  “Were you watching from the shore, or were you on the boat?”

  April ignored the question. They were halfway down the last stretch now, passing a boarded-up stable, a chicken coop, and a shed and gaining a clear view of the house at the end of the road. It had white clapboard siding, blue shutters, and a wraparound porch. On the grass expanse that stretched to the lock, a white-planked fence defined a yard and a single car was parked along the fence.

  “That’s the house!” she said, quickening her step.

  “That’s the Pennyfields’ house,” Jake countered. “The family that runs the lock. Everyone knows it. They used to have a fishing camp in the summers. President Cleveland would stay there sometimes.”

  “That’s the house I saw, the one with the pole-hooks piled up on the porch.”

  Jake cast a long look at it as the road narrowed into a path across the grass. There was something resembling a black sofa on the right side of the porch, but it might be a tarp laid over a pile of pole-hooks.

  The path swung away toward the crossing planks that had been laid over the lock. Like its counterpart at Swains, this lock had been swamped but not badly damaged by the flood. And like the one at Edwards Ferry, its lockhouse was built alongside the towpath, with the back foundation wall exposed on the sloping apron. Jake looked down into the lock as they led the mules across – probably less than two feet of water between the closed gates. No sign of the toolbox, but the water was too dark to say for sure.

  “Does the porch look like what you pictured? Think the pole-hooks are still there?”

  “It does. I can’t say about the poles. The things I remember might be different from the things that are here today.”

  “I’d go up and borrow a pole-hook if that car weren’t out front. Don’t really want to explain why I’m fishing a drained lock. Let’s wait a little while and see what happens.”

  Jake led them down the embankment beside the lockhouse and around to the back, where a rake and a shovel were propped beside the stained back door. Someone had begun clearing washed-up rocks and driftwood from the yard. The waste weir wasn’t drawing water from the canal but there were pools of clear water in the channel, so he turned the mules loose to drink while he and April sat on the ground and leaned back against the lockhouse wall.

  “Those two men on the boat, snoring with their hats pulled down,” he said. “Where was the boat… on a lake? A river?”

  April squinted, eyes toward the trees and the river beyond. “There’s no water I can see. Just a stone wall past the rail.”

  “So the boat could be next to a sea wall or a bridge abutment. Or maybe it’s in a lock.”

  “It’s a wooden deck, painted gray, and the men are leaning back against something, with their legs stretched out like ours are now. And there’s the shadow of a person across their trousers. It goes past the rail, onto the stone wall.”

  “Is it yours?”

  “I can’t tell,” she said, shaking her head and reeling her focus in from the trees. “It’s just a shadow.”

  “Just one shadow?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re watching from the same perspective. If the shadow isn’t yours, shouldn’t there be two?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “The scow had a gray deck. Do you think the two men were the Emory brothers?”

  “I don’t know the Emory brothers. And the men are sleeping with their hats over their faces.”

  “Cole was asking you how the Emorys drowned, so they must not have had obvious wounds. Are you holding anything in your hands while you’re watching them sleep?”

  Staring into the trees, April didn’t answer right away, and Jake watched her flexing her hands into fists. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe the shackles.”

  Chapter 21

  Lock Fishing

  Monday, April 14, 1924

  They sat in silence for a while with their backs against the lockhouse wall. April had said she couldn’t remember anything more and Jake didn’t want to press her; the simple scene she’d described was unnerving enough. Two men sleeping on deck, hats lowered over their eyes, and April standing beside their legs with shackles. Could she and Cy have orchestrated the drowning of the Emory brothers? Since Jake didn’t want to dwell on the possibility, the rattle of a car engine came as a relief.

  He sprang to his feet, gestured to April to stay where she was, and peeked along the side of the lockhouse. The black coupe that had been parked next to the fence was t
urning around, and Jake saw a jowly man with gray hair behind the wheel as it puttered down the road and out of sight. He turned to look for the mules; they were still nosing around near the back edge of the yard. April was eyeing him expectantly.

  “Let’s test your memory,” he said, “and see if there’s a pole-hook or two on that porch.”

  They climbed to the towpath and trotted across the lock. Jake decided to tell whoever came to the front door that he was looking for repair work along the canal, and he’d be willing to fish debris out of the lock for no charge as a good faith gesture. But no one answered when he knocked. April had already veered over to the right side of the porch and was lifting the edge of a black canvas tarp that Jake had mistaken for a sofa. A few dozen pole-hooks were piled on top of a pair of crates, hooks all aligned and angled down.

  Approaching from the door, Jake felt a mix of satisfaction and apprehension. One of April’s recollections had proven true, reinforcing his belief that she’d been straight with him. Now he hoped her vision of the toolbox falling into a lock would also be confirmed. But if all her memories proved valid, the shackles seemed like an ominous detail.

  April had pulled out a pole and was examining its hook fitting. Jake draped the tarp back over the pile so it looked undisturbed. He surveyed the road and towpath to make sure no one was watching.

  “Come on,” he said, taking the pole and leading her off the porch. “Let’s go fishing.”

  April kept a lookout, scanning Pennyfield Lock Road and the towpath in both directions. If Cole appeared, Jake was ready to try riding Gladys bare-back. They ought to be able to stay ahead of him on the towpath and shake him again in the woods. But there was no sign of Cole or anyone else during the twenty minutes Jake spent slicing through the dark water at the bottom of the lock.

  “There’s nothing here,” he said. “Let’s get moving. It’s two-and-a-half miles to Violettes Lock, then three quarters to Rileys at Seneca Creek. Then the eight-mile level to Edwards Ferry.”

  “Do you know all the distances between locks? On the whole canal?”