Zimmerman squinted hard at the bartender as the crickets in his heart began stirring. He took a long slow sip of his drink. “What did she look like?” he asked through his teeth.
Werner’s smile dissolved under Zimmerman’s stare. He shifted sideways to gain a little distance. “She was the kind you remember,” he said softly. “Tall and curvy, with auburn hair cut short. Brown eyes and pale skin. Said her name was Isabelle Owens. Maybe twenty or twenty-one.”
Zimmerman nodded and the tension drained out of his face. He took another sip. “When she comes back, ask how she heared my name.”
“I already did. She said it was through the grapevine.”
“The vines I’m working don’t grow them kind of grapes,” Zimmerman said. “Tell her I’ll be here Friday night at eight. Won’t take me long to find out if she’s on the level.”
Metallic raps and muffled thumps interrupted the conversation, so Werner came around to peer through the peephole and open the door. Cole walked in and headed for the barstool next to Zimmerman.
“I didn’t figure I was coming back to an empty boat last night,” Zimmerman said by way of greeting.
“Life is full of surprises.”
“You spend the night tracking the Elgin girl?”
Cole sat down and asked Werner for rum on ice. He laid his Stetson on the bar and raked his fingers through his hair. “No. Had to meet Hoyt Emory down in Georgetown last night. Kevin and Tom’s uncle. Trying to feel our way through Kevin’s contacts so we can find his big fish.”
“You find him?”
“Just a couple of minnows so far. Met one last night who gave us a name, and I found that feller today. But he says he’s done selling hooch and won’t talk about where he got it. We’ll probably keep spinning our wheels until we get Kevin’s ledger.”
“How you think the girl got away?”
Cole shook his head as Werner delivered his drink. He waited for the bartender to retreat.
“Maybe she’s a phantom and slipped under the door,” he said, lifting his rum. “Either that or someone come on board and let her out.”
“I thought I done a pretty good job scaring off the cheechakos.”
“What’s that?”
“Yukon word for a greenhorn. A wannabe gold-digger that never washed out a pan. Nobody come sniffing around the boat for over a week now, except for you.” Zimmerman swirled his gin and took a sip, but Cole was in no hurry to elaborate.
“So who you think done it?”
“Maybe that young feller at Edwards Ferry. I went up there last night, just after dark, and there wasn’t no one home. Empty corral out back. So he could of took his mules on a trip, or maybe he went out looking for her.”
“If it was him, you think he’ll take her back there?”
“Depends,” Cole said. “If he thinks she’s being honest and don’t remember anything, maybe he’ll want to look for the toolbox himself, now that he knows how bad I want it. They might start around Swains. But if he’s in cahoots with her and they got it hidden up at Edwards Ferry, they’ll go back.”
“Maybe she buried it near Swains and they dug it up last night. Could be on their way back to Edwards Ferry right now.”
Cole nodded and held his nose over his glass, inhaling the icy vapors. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
“If you catch her there, you bringing her to the boat?”
“Maybe. But she got sprung once already, so whoever done it might come looking for her again.”
“You mean the feller at Edwards Ferry.”
“I’m guessing it was him. If he ain’t around, I got an idea where I can put her. Let her sit alone in the dark for a few days, until she decides the toolbox ain’t worth it.”
“Feed her a line or two every day and she’ll turn into a junkie. When she starts to want it, cut her off until she coughs it up.”
“I’m hoping it won’t take that long.”
“What if she’s with the young feller?”
“Then he’s a problem. He knows me and I got nowhere to put him. So the best place for him is a shallow grave.”
Chapter 24
Bluffs
Monday, April 14, 1924
Cole made it out to Edwards Ferry under a rising half moon. The lockhouse was dark, as he’d expected it would be. Broken glass littered the weeds beneath the window beside the door; the pole-hook he’d scavenged from the basement lay with its tail end propped on the landing; the door was an inch or two ajar. Everything looked as it had the night before, but as he pushed the door open a conflicting image stopped him, and he turned back toward the crossing planks to review the ground he’d just covered. There it was – a second pole-hook lying in the grass beside the lock wall.
He drew his pistol, slid the safety off, and walked in. Standing quietly in the entryway and listening for a minute persuaded him no one was home, so he pocketed the Colt. He lit an oil lamp in the kitchen and carried it back to the front hall. The note he’d left for Katie Elgin was gone. Had she found her way back to Edwards Ferry earlier today? He shuffled up the stairs. Since he’d pulled the bedrooms apart looking for the toolbox, it was hard to tell, but it seemed like some of her clothes might have disappeared from the floor. The beds in both bedrooms were stripped. Only one set had looked like that last night.
The most noticeable change was in the kitchen, where the breadbox and cupboards had been emptied. He wished he’d taken a few jars of preserves and opened more of the cinched bags in search of smoked meat. A few useful things were left: pots, pans, utensils; half a dozen eggs; a small can of kerosene; a bin with coal for the stove. He set the lamp on the floor, pulled out a chair, and sat down, swinging his legs up onto the kitchen table.
Katie Elgin and – it was almost certain now – the young feller Jake, had come back, packed up, and left with their mules. They left because they didn’t think they were safe here anymore; Cole would come after them. They’d been right about that. But they had food for just a few days, mules to feed, and no car. And how much money? Plenty, if they had the toolbox and had managed to open it. They didn’t have it, though – he knew that intuitively now. They’d been looking for it today and hadn’t found it.
How do I know, he asked himself. Because of the second pole-hook. When she was tied up on the scow, the Elgin girl had claimed she suddenly remembered seeing the toolbox fall into a lock, and Cole had decided it was worth dredging the lock at Swains just in case. He hadn’t found it. And now someone else had brought another pole-hook and left it here after fishing the lock and finding nothing. But Jake must have known there was a pole-hook in the basement, so why would he have carried a second one?
So he could fish the locks between here and Swains. They must have spent the day moving up the towpath, searching the locks Cole had wanted to search himself. And the only reason to drag the pole-hook the last quarter mile from the Goose Creek feeder lock was because they still hadn’t found it. He’d been sure the Elgin girl had stashed the toolbox somewhere, but now he acknowledged the possibility that she was telling the truth. Maybe she really had lost her memory and didn’t know where it was. If so, then unless she’d remembered something else since yesterday, Katie and Jake only knew what he knew – that the toolbox was likely hidden somewhere between Swains Lock and Edwards Ferry.
Their only advantage, he thought, was the girl’s presence. If her memory was resurfacing in pieces, she might suddenly remember where the box was and be able to retrieve it before Cole caught her again. If she could collect it quickly. That was the reason Cole needed to get her back. And it was also the reason, he was convincing himself now, that she and Jake would be returning to Edwards Ferry.
***
Jake watched the silhouette of April’s shoulders dip and roll in rhythm with the gait of her mule. She’d obviously spent some of her forgotten days on horseback. And three miles in, Gladys seemed to be holding up well, her pale shape hovering above the towpath like an apparition in the moonlight. When they’d chang
ed her dressing back at Edwards Ferry, her wound looked completely filled in and scabbed over. Two days of unburdened walking hadn’t worn her out. She was ready to carry a rider like April. A few days ago Jake had pulled her saddle up from the basement and oiled it. Tonight she hadn’t shied or complained when he cinched it on.
Still, he thought, there was no sense pushing her too far too fast, with the campground at Turtle Run just ahead. Whites Ferry was a mile further, and if they kept going they’d have to cross the access road before stopping for the night. There might be people milling around the general store, even at ten o’clock. Better to rest a few hours and sneak past Whites Ferry before dawn. The mules should be ready to sleep. Back at the lockhouse he’d fed them hay and oats while he and April threw blankets and supplies in canvas bags that he’d joined with a short length of rope. Now the makeshift saddlebags hung behind him, draped over Bertie’s blanket. He urged Bertie up alongside Gladys and gestured for April to follow him left into the empty campground.
“I camped here with my father a couple times when I was spending summers at the ferry.” He stopped Bertie along the far edge, where a gap in the trees gave a view toward the river, which was split by a long, peapod-shaped island. Beyond it the moonlit trees rose steeply from the Virginia shore. He waited for April to guide Gladys alongside.
“That’s Harrisons Island,” he said, pointing at the dark wooded mass, “and on the Virginia side is Balls Bluff. There was a battle up there that nobody was ready for. My father told me that’s what happens when you try to turn a mistake into a plan.”
“Does that mean we’re riding into a battle?”
Jake turned toward her and had to suppress a laugh, since April looked more like a newspaper boy than a soldier. She was wearing a flat cap of his that was ten years old and a pair of his twill trousers they’d tailored with scissors and twine. Above it, her velour jersey with green and gold checks, and her gray sweater, buttoned halfway up.
“This was back in the war,” Jake said. “Union scouts rowed over and climbed the hillside in the dark. They thought a row of trees below a ridgeline was a row of tents, so a colonel sent a raiding party. When they saw their mistake, the raiders stayed up there and hundreds more soldiers crossed over, a few boats at a time. Then they got orders to make a move on Leesburg. The rebel army came from two directions and the bluecoats got slaughtered, up on the bluff and sliding down into the river, trying to swim to the island ‘cause there weren’t enough boats. For every rebel down, they lost six Yankees – shot, stabbed, or drowned.”
“It sounds like they picked the wrong scouts.”
“The scouts made the mistake, but it was the colonel who turned it into a plan. He went looking for a fight without knowing what they were up against.”
“Like us?”
“I can’t tell if we know or not.”
They dismounted and led the mules to the nearby creek for a drink. After clearing debris from a tree-screened campsite that offered a crescent of blackened stones, they laid out blankets and Jake got a fire going. Dinner was sourdough bread with smoked pork and apple preserves.
When they’d finished, he handed her the note he hadn’t shown her back at Chisel Branch. He watched as she angled it toward the firelight to read.
“You told me you thought a man with a funny first name would try to kill you,” he said. “Now Delmond Cole wrote you a note that says you’re right. Assuming you’re Katie Elgin and you don’t give him back the Emorys’ toolbox.”
“Go to the sheriff and he will arrest you,” she read in a halting voice. “A witness seen you cut Lee Fisher’s neck at Swains Lock.”
“That’s the line that makes me think we don’t know what we’re up against. We need some time to figure it out. Otherwise we’re climbing the bluff to raid a line of trees.”
April turned her eyes back to the fire and was quiet. With her arms wrapped around her knees, her pose reminded him of how she’d looked at their bonfire last week in Edwards Ferry – when she’d remembered bicycling down the towpath at night and carrying shackles while she checked on the mules. Before they’d ever heard of Delmond Cole and his precious toolbox.
“I remember something else now,” she said without taking her eyes from the fire. “Maybe because you told me about the battle up on the hill.”
“Is it about the toolbox?”
She shook her head. “When we were walking up from Pennyfield this morning and we stopped at the cove... I remembered being there, sitting on a log and curling my toes in the sand. Someone was telling me about climbing the hill behind us like the soldiers did in the war, and finding an old bayonet in the woods.”
“You said he was honest and you thought something bad would happen to him.”
“That’s right. I remember his name now. It was Lee Fisher.”
***
Cole swung his legs off the table and walked back out the front door, taking the oil lamp with him. It was late and he was tired, but there was one more thing do tonight. He walked thirty paces down the towpath toward the abandoned brick shell that was once Jarboe’s store.
The front door was boarded over, the full-length windows on either side of it crud-stained, with cracked and broken panes. The three second-floor windows directly above were black arrays, intact from floor to ceiling but too dirty to reflect moonlight. He continued around the far side, downstream and away from the lockhouse. Toward the back was a narrow, windowless door, locked but loose. He gave it his best kick, stepped back and wasted a bullet, then kicked again, this time breaking the rotting jamb at the latch. Its handle still locked, the door wobbled open when he pushed.
The first floor was one room. He crossed it holding the lamp in front of him, stepping past a dismembered table. Bird-shit stains on the floor, leaves and sticks carried in by a nesting critter, a sagging front counter, and dust-covered shelves lining the walls. What mattered most – an unbroken ceiling. Cole spotted the staircase along the back wall. Half its treads were missing, but his legs were long enough to overstep the gaps.
Upstairs, two back bedrooms that smelled like dust, with missing doors and wooden bunk-beds built into the walls. A living area and a stripped kitchen in front. Cloudy full-length windows overlooking the canal. No rot or water stains on the ceiling, everything dry.
Cole found what he’d been looking for in one of the bedrooms – a window with a view of the lockhouse. He wiped its cobwebs away and was able to shove it open, admitting a stab of fresh evening air. With its faint scent of flowering trees, the breeze suddenly made him think of Missy, who would be four years dead this month. Dogwood blossom season was her favorite time of year. She’d wanted to name the child Caleb or Emily, but she’d bled to death before the baby was delivered. Caleb never drew a breath.
His own breath caught and he sat down on the planks of the lower bunk. Missy was long gone, and he didn’t imagine her face much anymore. A girl who’d still been wearing knee socks and skipping rope when Cole married Missy had fixed him with a playful stare at the cider tasting last fall. Eliza Jenkins. She was seventeen now. They’d met back in Jefferson County every week or two since, and Eliza was the one he wanted.
But first he had to clean up this mess the Emory boys left behind. Kevin Emory had cracked a barrel of Cole whiskey two years ago and tried to hide the problem by cutting what was left with water. Sold it based on an uncut sample. The Cole clan found out and Delmond had threatened to skin Kevin alive if he tried something like that again. Kevin got the message, too well. He told his family he drew a map of all the Cole family stills in his ledger, and he was going to mail it to the Jefferson County sheriff if he thought the Coles were turning on him.
That could land the Cole brothers in jail and ruin the family, so Delmond wasn’t going to let it happen. He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a salt shaker half-filled with white powder. Kneeling beside the bunk, he swept a plank clean with his hand and tapped out a stubby line of heroin. The nine of spades in his shirt pocke
t curled readily into a tool he was beginning to appreciate. At least this Emory business had introduced him to Henry Zimmerman, opening an unexpected door. Once he got the toolbox, things would get back on track, and soon enough there would be more of everything. That was something he wanted to tell Eliza.
Chapter 25
Fogland
Thursday, April 17, 1924
At 3:00 am the swing-beams of Mountain Lock loomed in the fog like floating black bars. Jake looked over his shoulder to check on April. Her head had slumped forward so her eyes were on Gladys’ mane, but her hands were still pressing the reins to the pommel. Hadn’t it only been minutes since she’d pointed out the owl swooping down from a tree across the canal? Maybe half an hour. If she was asleep now, it didn’t seem to be bothering her mule.
A quarter-mile to the bend, Jake told himself, and a two-mile fetch to Antietam Creek. Across the aqueduct they could sleep in a field until the sun’s warmth woke them up. Then one last familiar mile on Harpers Ferry Road. They’d be home in time for a late breakfast.
As the curving path unfurled before him at Bertie’s pace, Jake wondered if he was asleep already like April. The past two days seemed as shrouded in fog as the path ahead. They’d left Turtle Run just before dawn on Tuesday, later than he’d planned. Past a quiet Whites Ferry, then seven more miles under a rising sun. They’d encountered more people that first morning – fishermen, repair workers, the locktender at Woods Lock – than Jake had expected to see, and he’d been relieved that no one recognized April. At Monocacy Creek they’d crossed the aqueduct, turned the mules out in an adjacent field, and unrolled their blankets in the deep shade under the northernmost arch. They’d slept on and off until sunset.
Since then they’d covered twenty-five miles over two nights, and all Jake could summon from the fog was a series of images and moments. A bonfire burning in the river on an island he couldn’t name. Tracks looming over the canal at Point of Rocks. April saying she wanted to see the Grand Canyon someday.
If It Is April Page 16