If It Is April

by Edward A. Stabler

  “Are we still going to Pennyfield? How are we going to get past him?”

  “Now that he knows we heard Pete at Jarboe’s, he’ll probably move him. Maybe lock him up on the scow. Pennyfield’s too close to Swains. We can’t risk running into him down there, getting you captured at gunpoint.”

  He let Bertie slow to an easy walk, and Gladys matched the pace.

  “Well Edwards Ferry doesn’t seem any safer.”

  “Not on this side. But we could try the other one.”

  “What other one?”

  “The other side of the ferry,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the wooded apron and the river beyond. “Virginia.”

  Chapter 33

  Circling

  Tuesday, April 29, 1924

  The two figures on horseback had faded into the darkness, but Cole kept running past the point where his bullets would have struck them. When a nagging stitch in his side convinced him to quit, he stooped to catch his breath and examine the towpath, moving forward slowly. The hoof prints appeared to be widely-spaced and regular. The ground was hard to read in the dark, but he could find no evidence that either mule was stumbling or bleeding. He must have missed. Five wasted bullets. Got to be smarter than that, he muttered to himself, turning back down the towpath. If you ain’t trying to kill somebody, one or two is enough to make your point.

  Back at Edwards Ferry, he shuffled down the slope to the backyard and laughed when he saw the rain barrel blocking the basement door. How fucking lucky was this kid Jake? He pushed the top rim and felt the water slosh inside. Maybe they dropped the toolbox in it, he mused. Hard to carry that box on a galloping mule. He tipped the barrel over and watched the water gush onto the weedy lawn, then rolled it with his foot. Nope.

  When he’d entered the lockhouse, he’d seen that his note to Katie Elgin was gone. They might have had enough time to recover the toolbox from wherever she’d hidden it. Maybe he’d caught them sneaking out of the basement after depositing it under the stairs, as the note had instructed her to do. Sure, and a leprechaun left behind his pot of gold. He opened the door and slipped into the basement, which was still bathed in yellow light from the oil lamp he’d set down on a riser. No box under the stairs. He squinted at his pocket-watch. Not quite three-thirty, too early to stay up. Yawning, he climbed the stairs and headed back to Jarboe’s.

  ***

  As Bertie and Gladys settled into a brisk walk, Jake glanced back over his shoulder every minute or so. The towpath looked as dark and quiet back toward Edwards Ferry as it did ahead. They’d retreated almost a mile and were approaching Broad Run, so unless Cole had a horse of his own or managed to get his truck across the canal, he wouldn’t overtake them now.

  “Where does the next road come in?” April asked.

  “Whites Ferry,” he said, acknowledging to himself that she’d posed the right question. It didn’t make sense to keep checking for a pursuer when the real threat lay ahead. “If he can guess where we’re going, he might be waiting for us.”

  “Maybe he’ll fall asleep in his truck and we can sneak onto the boat.”

  Jake looked over. It was too dark to discern her expression, but he knew she was suppressing a smile.

  “If we’re lucky. We probably woke him up. He should be more tired than we are.”

  “Unless he’s a ghost, like us.”

  “He does seem to drift around a lot at night.”

  “What time does the ferry start running?”

  “Early. Probably at six. Remember when we snuck past it before dawn, a couple of weeks ago? The boat was moored, but there was already a lamp burning in the ferry house.”

  “That was the night we camped at Turtle Run,” she said. “You told me about the Union soldiers who crossed the river to raid some tents on the hill, and the tents turned out to be trees. So the soldiers changed their plan and got slaughtered.”

  “Your schoolteachers must have loved you, remembering everything they said.”

  “It’s easier when you wipe the slate clean and only have to keep track of the last month. We’re not crossing the river to raid tents, are we?”

  “No. We’ll have a better plan.”

  Its rudiments were starting to take shape in his mind. If they could find the toolbox with a quick strike on a shed near Pennyfield Lock, that would be best. They could leave it for Cole at Edwards Ferry. If not, they needed to convince him the box wasn’t nearby. That April didn’t have it anymore, and that he’d be more likely to find it somewhere else on his own. If they were going to confront Cole again, they needed to catch him off balance, engage him on terrain that gave them an advantage.

  “Soon?”

  “By the time we get to Goose Creek. That’s Edwards Ferry on the Virginia side.”

  “If it’s just four or five miles down from the crossing, maybe we can ride there this morning.”

  “It’s more like ten miles. There’s no path along the river, and the road from Whites Ferry goes through Leesburg.”

  “Horseflies! So after we get off the boat, we need to hide out for another whole day?”

  “Not from Cole, unless he realizes we crossed over. And not from your friends in the sheriff’s office, since we’ll be in Virginia.”

  “If there’s nobody chasing us in Virginia, maybe we should just stay there.”

  “One side of the river or the other, Cole still wants Katie Elgin. We won’t be safe until he gives up. To make that happen, one or both of us will have to come back.”

  He turned toward April, who was still wearing his old flat cap, her cardigan, and his cut-off trousers. With the pale shape of Gladys rolling along beneath her, she looked like a newspaper boy delivering pre-dawn papers from a cloud.

  “And there’s two more reasons,” he added. “We’re almost out of food and money.”

  “Unless we find the toolbox.”

  Jake gave her a dismissive look. “If you break into that beehive, you’ll attract a stinger for sure. Let Cole have it.”

  “What’s the other reason?”

  “Family. We need mine for shelter. And we need to send Pete Elgin back to yours.”

  ***

  After a few hours of sleep on a straw tick in the second-floor living area, Cole got up and shuffled toward the kitchen. The sun had already reached the full-length windows overlooking the canal. Must be seven, maybe eight. The kid would be hungry and thirsty. Let him wait. He cut off a piece of sausage and bit into it as he walked back to the stairs, checking the lock on Pete’s bedroom as he passed.

  Outside Jarboe’s he pissed on the nearest tree, then circled around to the lockhouse and made pancake batter in the kitchen. Good thing Romeo and Juliet hadn’t noticed his provisions in one of the cupboards. With no stove at Jarboe’s, there wasn’t much sense keeping the food there. He grabbed the water bucket, filled it at the backyard pump, and started brewing coffee while the pancakes cooked. When they were ready he ate them at the table with jam. He emptied the milk into the coffee and drank it all. Before leaving he opened a can of pork and beans, pocketed a spoon, and grabbed the water bucket and a cup. Prison rations for Pete. That was all he deserved after last night.

  “Even for a kid, that was a dumb thing to do,” Cole said, watching Pete tentatively dip his spoon into the can’s viscous entrails. “Keep your mouth shut and you would of seen your sister. I was going to bring her back here and let you go. And Katie is scot-free the minute she give me back what’s mine. Instead you start hollering and almost get her killed. Now she’s off and running like a scared rabbit and you’re stuck with me until she come back.”

  Pete looked into the can and made a sour face. “Why did you try to shoot her?”

  “If I was trying to shoot her, she’d be dead. I was trying to make her stay put. Sometimes it works, sometimes it don’t.”

  “What if she don’t come back?”

  “She will. It ain’t much of a life, running up and down the towpath, hiding out with that boy Jake. No money, no food,
no friends, no family. If she wants to go back to being Katie Elgin, she got to set things right. Give me back my property and she’s out of trouble – the both of you. That’s the gospel truth.”

  Pete dipped the cup into the bucket and took a few sips. He exhaled as if he were bracing himself, then dug out another spoonful of pork and beans and sloshed it around in his mouth for a while. He set the can and spoon on the floor and pushed them aside with his foot.

  “Maybe Mr. Swain got your toolbox. Seeing as it was in his lockhouse.”

  Cole shook his head. “If he had it, I would have it now. That box walked out with your brother or sister, before Jess Swain come back.”

  “Did he look in the basement? Maybe it was covered up. I can go help him find it.”

  Cole snorted. “You’re going somewhere, but it ain’t Swains Lock. Where we’re headed, your eyes will get a rest. Stomach too,” he said, gesturing to the can with the toe of his boot. “Better finish that, ‘cause there ain’t no lunch coming your way.”

  ***

  Jake and April rested for an hour or so at Turtle Run, then rode Bertie and Gladys to within a hundred yards of Whites Ferry at dawn. Scouting from the trees, Jake saw a car driven by an older man, a truck loaded with hay bales, and another truck carrying quarried stone arrive and fall into line at the end of the road, just above the boat ramp. Neither of the truck drivers looked like Cole. When he saw the ferry pilot emerge from his house, he ran back to collect April and the mules.

  The pilot closed the gate behind them as Bertie and Gladys tentatively followed their riders onboard. April cast her eyes upriver and Jake watched a sunrise breeze blow back strands of her hair. As the ferry churned away from the dock and began tracking its cable toward Virginia, he felt an unexpected sense of liberation, as if they’d cast off from a dark shore and left their oppressors behind.

  “I’m not sure it’s him,” April said.

  “Who?”

  “Delmond Cole.”

  “What about him?” Jake’s inchoate feeling of emancipation started ebbing away.

  “I don’t know if he’s the man who wants to kill me. The one with the funny first name.”

  “He doesn’t want to kill you until he gets his toolbox back. Right now he thinks you can get it for him.”

  “So when he gets it back, you think he’ll turn into a stinger?”

  “Maybe. If he wants revenge. If Lee Fisher was a friend of his and he thinks Katie Elgin killed him. Or if he thinks Katie and Cy robbed and drowned the Emory brothers.”

  “I have this feeling it might be someone else.”

  “But you can’t picture anyone.”

  “Someone older.”

  “Older than you? I guess that rules out teenaged men.”

  “And it might have nothing to do with the toolbox or Lee Fisher.”

  Riding up the hill from the ferry dock, Jake felt the first wave of fatigue. They’d watered the mules and refilled their bottle at Turtle Run, so any place the mules could graze would do. They found a copse-lined pasture alongside Whites Ferry Road, turned the mules loose, and fell asleep in the sunlight on the far side of the trees.

  Two hours later April poked him in the ribs and said she was hungry. Jake retrieved Bertie and Gladys while she scavenged their saddlebags for breakfast. As they ate sliced sausage and cheese, they decided they could stop living like ghosts and travel by day. They were beyond the reach of the Montgomery County Sheriff and Cole was probably hiding out somewhere near Edwards Ferry with Pete. So they saddled the mules and set off toward Leesburg, stopping at a general store on the outskirts to buy bread, smoked fish, and cheese, then cutting across the eastern flank of town toward Edwards Ferry Road.

  When the road began its gentle descent to the river, Jake looked for a path heading right, found one, and guided Bertie south into the woods. The path was a feeder from the road to a well-beaten trail along the northern shore of tree-shaded Goose Creek, which was a hundred feet wide and looked more like a slow-paced river than a typical Potomac tributary. They followed the path east for a quarter mile and found a dirt-floored clearing with a ring of fire-blackened stones that had served as a campsite for fishermen.

  “The river can’t be more than a hundred paces from here,” Jake said. “We’re better off out of sight, and it looks like we got this place to ourselves for now.”

  They unsaddled the mules, let them drink from the creek, and hitched them to trees along the trail. Then they hung the saddlebags from low branches and cleared the campsite of scattered rocks and sticks.

  “Too bad we didn’t bring a fishing rod,” April said.

  “Who says we didn’t?”

  “Is it invisible? I thought we were done being ghosts.”

  “OK, we don’t have a rod, but we got the important stuff. A box of hooks and a spool of line. And a knife. Plenty of green branches, so we can cut ourselves a couple of rods.”

  “What did you have in mind for bait?”

  “June bugs, if we can find ‘em.”

  “I thought it was still April.”

  “April bugs.” He pulled off her flat cap and massaged her scalp with his fingertips. “Where are they hiding?” He let his lightly drumming fingers descend along her neck to her upper back, then spiral down to her ribs and abdomen. “Worms are almost as good,” he said, tracing squirmy curves above the arc of her hips.

  “Did you know that some fish kiss?” April said.

  “If we could catch them doing that, they wouldn’t see us coming. We could just …”

  “Like this,” she said, grabbing the lapels of his jacket and pulling his lips onto hers. Jake felt the tingly unfolding in his groin that April seemed to induce once or twice a day now. It was early afternoon and anyone might happen along, so they settled for wrapping themselves in blankets and stretching out hip to hip on the flattest part of the campsite. He threaded an arm under her neck, curled his opposite hand onto her breast, and fell asleep.

  ***

  Zimmerman gathered the embers in the firebox, added a few sticks of kindling and fresh pieces of coal, and lit the scow’s coal stove. It wasn’t yet four in the afternoon but his stomach was growling. Maybe because he’d bought navy beans, stewed tomatoes, and a nice filet of bass in Leesburg. He’d been overdue for a meeting with Taviston but hadn’t been able to arrange it until today, because he didn’t like taking the train back from Glencarlyn at night anymore. Not after waking up in a cold sweat last time. So he’d scheduled a noon meeting and been thinking about fish stew since he was on the ferry, watching the river drift by. Sometimes that was all it took.

  Today had been a three-jar buy. Two for him and one for Cole. Zimmerman wanted to have spare ounces on hand tonight, in case Tom Owens had a bigger appetite than his niece had indicated. Taviston hadn’t recognized the name, but that didn’t signify, since Isabelle Owens had said Taviston’s father Arch was a friend of a friend. Not as clean a reference as Zimmerman would have liked, but you took some kind of a chance on every deal. It was usually the ones you didn’t worry about that blew up. The worst was when they was part of your network, like Underwood and Folito.

  Loner junkies was predictable, ‘cause they couldn’t think more than a day or two ahead. Federal agents was too busy chasing bootleggers to set up a fake buy. That left your law-abiding medical addicts, and some of ‘em might have a niece that could turn heads like Isabelle Owens. He stirred the tomatoes and beans in the pot and chopped up the browned fish in the frying pan, then added it to the stew. If things went straight with Tom Owens tonight, the best thing would be to let him keep buying through Isabelle. She could mail it to him once a month. For Zimmerman that would be as good as a local customer, maybe better.

  His thoughts were interrupted by a loud knock behind him, as if someone had struck the scow’s hull with a rock. He stopped stirring and waited for the second knock, which was followed after a pause by a third. Then four knocks in quick succession. Cole. He sighed and went back to stirring. That long
-haired coonhound made a habit of showing up whenever Zimmerman was getting ready to eat. He heard someone clambering onto the deck, footsteps along the rail, and a shuffle down the stairs to the cabin door.

  “Go on in,” he heard Cole say. The door opened and a boy stumbled in, prodded by a pistol muzzle against his shoulder blade. The tall man followed, steering the boy onto a chair beside the drop leaf table. He sat down on the lower bunk and inhaled a dramatic breath through his nose. “Smells good,” he said. “Guess I’m just in time.”

  “More like six hours early,” Zimmerman said. “I wasn’t cooking for two, much less three. That Pete Elgin?”

  Cole stretched his leg to kick the boy’s foot. “Best be polite and answer the man. He’s the captain on this boat.”

  “Yes,” Pete said meekly.

  “I thought the two of you was busy up at Edwards Ferry,” Zimmerman said.

  “We was,” Cole said. He took off his black Stetson, finger-raked his hair, and reclined against the forward wall of the cabin. “Had a couple of surprise visitors last night. Pete’s sister and her boyfriend. I was getting ready to welcome ‘em back when Pete got to hollering and scared ‘em off. They took off up the towpath on their mules. Probably laying low somewhere in the woods right now. I reckoned Katie would want to see her little brother, and maybe give me back the toolbox so he could go home, but I was wrong. One thing for sure, the box is around there somewhere. Otherwise they got no reason to come back.”

  “Why’d you bring him here?”

  “He needs a babysitter. I reckon Romeo and Juliet might visit again, and I don’t want to worry about Pete scaring ‘em off, or about Jake trying to spring him the way he done Katie. They know I got him, that’s what counts.”

  “Well I cain’t keep an eye on him,” Zimmerman said. “Got a customer coming.”

  “When?”

  “Eight.”

  “Plenty of time,” Cole said, pulling an unopened can of pork and beans out of his coat pocket and reaching over to place it on the table. “I brought his dinner. He can eat early with us.” He produced the padlock and rope from his other pocket. “And you won’t have to watch him tonight. It’s nice and dark in the stable, with plenty of straw for sleeping.” He quickly tied a loop for a slip-knot at one end of the rope. “I can truss him up, gag him, and lock the door. Just check on him when you’re done with business tonight.”