The next paragraph described the Rileys’ neighbors and friends, but Vin’s focus was drawn sideways to an annotation. The name Charlie Pennyfield was underlined in the text and an arrow pointed to the right-hand margin, where a penciled comment read:
Be careful you don’t share my fate.
The final line from Lee Fisher’s message to Charlie Pennyfield! Written, he thought, in a woman’s hand. His mouth suddenly felt dry and he swallowed and rubbed his temples. No one but he and Nicky had seen Lee’s note! The writing wasn’t hers. Instinctively he scanned the library to see if anyone was watching him. He leaned forward and pushed the book deeper into the shade of the cubicle. Following impulse, he used his pencil to erase the arrow and annotation, then swept away the residue and set Kytle’s book atop the others on the desk.
He carried his notepad and pencil back to the card catalog and flipped through the entries under Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. One caught his attention. The call number led him back to the shelf he’d already perused, but this book was missing. He searched the shelves nearby to see if it had been misfiled; no sign of it.
It was 5:35 pm according to the library’s clock, so Nicky should be getting home from the Clinic any time now. He took his four books to the checkout desk, where the librarian issued him a library card. When he mentioned he was interested in an additional book that appeared to be checked out, the librarian asked if he wanted to reserve it and be notified when it came back.
“Sure,” he said, and she turned to her terminal.
“Can you tell me the author and title?”
Vin checked his scrap of paper. “It’s by Wesley Vieira,” he said, spelling the surname as she typed. “And the title is The Level Trade: Lock-Tenders and Merchants on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal.”
She studied her screen. “Well,” she said, “I can place a hold on it for you, but I’m not optimistic. Our system says it isn’t checked out. It should be on the shelf. So someone may have walked off with it.”
He thanked her and left the library. The air had cooled noticeably and the last sunset colors were fading to black.
***
Nicky heard the muffled thump of a car door in the driveway and looked up from her magazine to watch Randy trot down to the front door. Then came one of Vin’s standard greetings: “Randolfo! Howza whatza, buddy?”
Trailed by Randy, Vin came to greet Nicky on the couch, putting his books on the coffee table and leaning over to give her a kiss. She eyed the books. “Looks like you’ve been to the library.” She spun them to read their spines. “The Great National Project – A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. I’m amazed you were able to get this!” she said, feigning enthusiasm. “It must be really popular with book clubs.”
“You laugh, but one of the books I wanted was checked out. Or maybe stolen.”
“I guess you’re not the only canal nut,” Nicky said. A flash of worry darted like a sparrow across the path of her thoughts and she squinted, turning her eyes a darker blue. “Wasn’t today supposed to be a consulting day for you?”
“It was,” he said, turning toward the kitchen, “and it was. I spent an hour on a conference call with Rottweiler this morning. They like most of what I sent them but my old team in Boston wants to add some features.”
Nicky watched him recede across the living room. With his loping gait, he sometimes reminded her of a wolf. Those stone-colored khakis must be ten years old. And that loose cotton sweater over his broad, bony shoulders gave him the angular aspect of a college boy. Nicky started to smile but sighed instead. And sometimes the maturity of a college boy, she thought. What accounted for that?
“Anyway, I got a green light for the main specifications on phase one,” Vin said, returning to the living room with a beer. “And I spent most of the day writing definitions for the stuff they want to add.” He sat down in an armchair and stretched his legs onto the table. “And then I decided I needed a break. And a little local culture.”
“So I see.” Nicky pulled her knees up to her chest and tucked her feet under a cushion on the couch. At least it sounded like Vin was committed to the Rottweiler project. It seemed like he was on the hook to develop this database and Web stuff for the next six months. But where were things headed after that? He hadn’t said anything about looking for a full-time job. Their wedding remained entirely unplanned, a concept. They hadn’t even picked a date, since Nicky’s parents were spending two months at a university in Tokyo next fall and the dates for that trip remained tentative. They could start working on the wedding logistics, she thought, but Vin hadn’t taken the initiative, so she would have to push things along herself.
Instead he seemed to be immersing himself in a riddle spawned by the 1924 note he’d found in that decrepit shed a few weeks ago. And now this incipient obsession with the canal. Did it imply some kind of low-level detachment?
“It’s really fascinating, reading about the C&O. When we walk along the towpath, the history is all around us. It’s practically alive.” He sipped his beer. “If I ever figure out what happened at Swains Lock, it might make a good screenplay.” He laughed and slumped back in his chair.
Nicky looked at him but said nothing as her eyes narrowed and another sparrow flashed behind them.
Chapter 7
Newspapers
Friday, December 1, 1995
The periodicals room at McKeldin Library was quiet on a Friday morning, with students scattered at tables and through the carrels. It had taken Vin fifteen minutes of fast-paced walking to reach the University of Maryland library from the visitors lot, but then only a few words from the librarian and a minute in the rows of filing cabinets to find the reel of microfilm he wanted.
He placed it on the spindle, threaded it onto the empty reel across the viewing plate, and scrolled forward. Near the end of the tape he found the newspaper edition he was looking for.
The Washington Post: Sunday, March 30, 1924
Death and Loss in Flood Widespread
Floods in the upper Potomac and upper Ohio rivers and their tributaries have brought death and vast destruction. Bridges have been swept away and trains marooned.
Cumberland, MD property loss – Railroads, $5,000,000; buildings, $1,000,000.
Flood deaths – McCoal, MD., 6; Cumberland, MD., 3; Newark, OH., 4; Johnstown, PA., 1; Pittsburgh, 2; Melcroft, Penn., 3;
The remainder of the article cited a cold wave and snow in the midwest.
He advanced slowly but found no reference to an incident at Swains Lock on the preceding day. None of the other articles even mentioned the C&O Canal. He scrolled to the next day’s issue and found only one related article:
The Washington Post: Monday, March 31, 1924
Pittsburgh Flood Ebbs; Steel Mills are Hard Hit
A score of city blocks in the lower sections were inundated, and sections for several miles upstream laid waste when both the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, meeting here to form the Ohio, left their banks today in Pittsburgh’s greatest flood in 10 years. No loss of life was reported…
Aware that the Potomac flood had actually reached Washington on March 31, he advanced the reel again.
The Washington Post: Tuesday, April 1, 1924
Crest of Flood is Receding, but Damage Has Increased
The crest of the flood-swollen Potomac swept swiftly by Washington yesterday with the ebbing tides. After a futile effort at high tide yesterday to touch the high water mark at 8 feet registered on the morning rise, the waters quickly fell back in their path and raced on to the bay, with the remnants of the wreckage from upstream…
Water observers estimated that the current was moving at a greater speed than the day before, but it raced off solemnly, its wrath apparently spent. No waters overlapped the others in the flow; they all kept in their place. It was a rhythmic, quick march of a victor to the sea…
There was one float that gave mute evidence of the havoc wrought in one popular industry of the river swamps. It was a copper sti
ll, its tarnished nose bobbing about on the racing water like a buoy.
With communication lines along the Potomac damaged by the flood, Vin guessed that a full description of the devastation in the upper valley would have taken several days to trickle in to the Washington newspapers. And those papers were no doubt focused on stories of more global interest. Whatever Lee Fisher saw or experienced at Swains Lock on March 29 would not be chronicled in the 1924 Washington Post, the Baltimore Evening Sun, or any other newspaper archived at libraries. So Vin’s search for Lee Fisher’s truth would have to rely on the words in his note. Rewinding the microfilm, he parsed the message once more in his head.
Charlie,
If it is April and I am missing, I fear I have been killed…
The books made clear that Charlie Pennyfield tended Pennyfield Lock in 1924. Maybe Lee’s fear had proven idle; maybe he hadn’t been killed because of what happened at Swains Lock. But then why hadn’t he retrieved the note? Why should he leave a clue to buried money behind a marked plank in Charlie’s shed if he were alive and well in the days that followed?
Vin wondered whether the money Lee referred to was stolen. If so, Charlie could have launched some kind of investigation, putting Lee at risk of being considered a criminal or an informer. If Lee were alive in April, 1924, why not just take the money himself? It didn’t make sense, he thought, looking up and arching his back. For that matter, if Lee survived into April, why abandon a useful hand-drill that might be expensive to replace?
To Vin, the prospect that Lee’s fear had come true seemed more likely. Maybe Lee was buried along with the others at the base of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing. Something had happened to Lee, and Charlie never found the message that would lead him to the communal grave beneath the sycamores. Who else was buried there? The note gave no hint. Was Emmert Reed involved? Maybe his albino mule had hauled the bodies to the clearing it “knowed well”. Along the towpath somewhere?
If Vin could find the place and its joined sycamores, what else would he find? The money, the killers, and the dead? The dead might still be there. The killers, if given a chance, would have come back for their spoils. But maybe the flood had interfered somehow. Or maybe the killers had been caught or killed. Maybe the money was still there, waiting to help Vin tell the story of what happened at Swains Lock. The story’s tentacles had begun to embrace him, and for reasons he couldn’t define, he almost felt destined to become part of it himself. Maybe the last line in Lee’s note really did apply to him.
He boxed up the Post and Sun microfilms and returned them to their filing cabinets. Walking back across the campus to his car, he forced himself to snap out of his musings. He’d been working on the Rottweiler project all week and needed to submit an invoice to them tomorrow. He slowly pieced together a snapshot of the project in his mind. One day away from it and already it seemed tedious; the problems it posed were straightforward and didn’t require creative or elegant solutions – just grinding away.
His trip to College Park had been fruitless, since he’d found the same books he’d already seen at the C&O Visitor’s Center, the Potomac Library, or the Montgomery County Historical Society. None provided additional insight into the only leads he possessed: Lee Fisher, K. Elgin, Charlie Pennyfield, Emmert Reed. Aside from Pennyfield, all the surnames were common to the area. Across Maryland and Virginia, there were hundreds of Fishers, Elgins, and Reeds. And the joined sycamores reference, he thought, wasn’t much help either. The sycamores along the river and the towpath were too numerous to count.
Chapter 8
Spanish Ballroom
Saturday, December 30, 1995
As the lead singer issued his best Joe-Cocker moan and backed away from the microphone, all three saxmen raised their horns and the first tenor launched into a wailing lead. The bass and rhythm guitar set a crawling floor under the horns and the keyboard player hammered trills. Spinning through a swing-dance sequence with Vin, Nicky saw the dimly-lit features of the Spanish Ballroom blur into panorama: the walls painted pale yellow with inlaid patterns of faded blue, orange, and green tiles; the mission-style squared-arch openings to the outer arcade that surrounded the floor; the tall, worn obelisks with art-deco accents flanking the raised stage; the second-story casement windows and balconies with balustrades, looking down on the dance floor; and the blond, rock-maple floor itself, dulled and dry but unbroken, stretching off over a hundred feet from the stage through dim light to the far end of the ballroom. Toward that end, two long tables formed a bar that faced the stage. Past the bar stood a Christmas tree, fifteen feet tall and twined in colored lights and ornaments.
The singer strode forward again, grabbing the microphone from its stand and shooting a look at the two women singing backup vocals. When the lead sax fell back into the rhythm, he belted out the final verse of “Unchain My Heart.” And the whole band let loose on the refrain, with the lead singer clutching and bleating and the backup singers wailing soulfully against the saxes.
Vin spun away from a swing move as he and Nicky segued into solo steps. The floor had grown crowded near the stage and Nicky felt an elbow spear her upper arm. She looked over at Vin, who was bobbing his head and shoulders toward the floor and holding his outstretched fingers before him, aping the saxmen as his black blazer flopped from his sides. He arched upright again, released the imaginary sax, and swept his hair back from his glistening forehead. He smiled at Nicky and the sharp point of his upper canine tooth gave him a wolfish look. The dancers around him thrust and spun.
She smiled back, closed her eyes, and danced a rhythmic shuffle as the refrain repeated and built toward a climax. Opening her eyes she saw the painted balustrade of a windowed balcony on the side wall and suddenly felt disoriented. She looked at the crowd, at Vin, and recognized no one. The arm she extended wasn’t her own. As the band held the final note and the cymbals rattled into a terminal bass-drum thump, she turned toward the stage. The music stopped and she felt a light hand on her shoulder. She turned and saw Vin. Through the whistling and applause, the lead singer said the band would take a break.
“That was strange,” she said, catching her breath. “I had the feeling for a moment that I didn’t exist, even though I could see and hear everything around me.”
“Like a trance?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Like a combination of amnesia and déjà vu.”
“I think they call that early-onset Alzheimer’s.”
“Great,” she said glumly. “It only lasted a second.”
Vin prescribed champagne and set off to retrieve two glasses. Nicky said she’d wait near the side wall as he turned to negotiate the drifting crowd. Making her way toward the wall, she felt someone squeeze her forearm.
“Hey, you!” said Abby Tuckerman. “I was hoping you and Vin would be here!”
“We weren’t going to miss it,” Nicky replied. “Especially since it was the only New Year’s party we heard about! Plus it’s for a good cause, and Vin was excited about the band. He’s been doing his Joe Cocker imitation for days.” She rolled her eyes as Abby laughed.
“Speaking of that good cause,” Abby said, leading Nicky away by the forearm, “let me introduce you to one of the beneficiaries.” She tapped a tall black woman on the shoulder and the woman turned toward them. Faint lines around her mouth and eyes told Nicky she might be in her early forties. She wore a tight-fitting gold sweater over black pants and leather mules. Casual and elegant at the same time, Nicky thought. The woman greeted Abby and listened.
“Teresa, this is Nicky Hayes. Nicky’s a vet; she works with me at the Potomac Clinic. Nicky and her fiancée just moved here from Boston a few months ago.”
“Well, welcome,” Teresa said. She held out her hand and Nicky took it – long fingers and artistic onyx and amber rings.
“And this is Teresa Carillo,” Abby said, “one of the original members of the Glen Echo Artists Collaborative.”
Teresa’s laugh was quick and
bright. “I was afraid you were going to say oldest!” To Nicky she said earnestly, “Thanks for coming to our party. I’m glad someone told you to dress warm, since the Spanish Ballroom has never had heat!”
“It’s an amazing place, anyway,” Nicky said.
“It still is,” Teresa agreed, surveying the room. “Even though it’s just a ghost of its former self. In the 1930s and 1940s, hundreds of couples came to dance in this ballroom on spring and summer nights.”
“And the old Glen Echo amusement park here was the biggest and best in the area,” Abby said. “It had a roller coaster, a carousel, and the Crystal Pool… People used to take the trolley out here from D.C. I think they finally shut it down in the late 60s.”
“Too bad,” Nicky said. “It seems like a perfect location… on a hillside above the river.”
“But now it provides studios for struggling local artists,” Teresa said.
“Don’t give me that struggling stuff, Teresa! Maybe in the 70s, but not now!”
“What kind of art do you create?” Nicky asked.
Teresa explained that she was a sculptor, and that early in her career she had designed large architectural and spatial compositions out of mixed media, “the kind of stuff you’d see in a public park”, but that those pieces were hard to sell. Now she was working primarily in bronze, creating smaller abstract works for the grounds of suburban estates.
Abby mentioned that Teresa’s dog Floyd, an enormous Great Dane, was well known at the Clinic, and Teresa said she hoped Floyd would meet Nicky soon. She excused herself and Abby turned toward Nicky. “How’s everything going with you guys? I never get a chance to chat with you at work. Is Vin still consulting?”
“We’re doing well. We’ve almost got a date for the wedding, which looks like late October. And Vin’s plugging away on his consulting project. He hasn’t begun looking for a permanent job, but I’m hoping he’ll get started after the holidays. Sometimes he goes off on tangents. Right now he’s fascinated by the history of the C&O Canal.”
SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) Page 8