SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1)

by Edward A. Stabler

  It dawned on him that the tree to his right was a sycamore. He tilted his head back to look up and saw another sycamore. Don’t tell me, he thought, as he turned to look down the slope. The lower end of the railing was nailed to a third sycamore. Three joined sycamores. His pulse quickened, then fell back as exhilaration was undermined by doubt. He looked at the sycamores in turn. Could these trees be over seventy years old? He’d learned that sycamores lived for hundreds of years, so maybe all three dated back to 1924. But if they’d been large enough to support a railing then, shouldn’t they be massive now?

  And could this have been what Lee meant by “joined”? Both two-by-fours were stained and dirty beneath a crown of snow, but the boards couldn’t be seventy years old. Maybe they were replacement boards. He swept away snow near their juncture on the center tree. They were solid, unrotted, no more than ten years old. Just a few scratches on the top edge of the horizontal board. The scratches caught the snow, so he brushed over them again with his glove.

  With the surrounding snow gone, he saw that the scratches formed a word. Incised with careless writing, probably with an awl or a screwdriver. And written in white, since his glove had driven snow into the etched letters. “Killers.” Vin inhaled sharply, staring at the inscription, then snowshoed to the board’s opposite end. He brushed the snow from the railing where it met the tree and found another inscription. Just a single white symbol: “$”. He sighed and retraced his steps, sweeping the snow from the middle of the two-by-four but finding no additional words.

  He stepped back and took a picture of each tree, then put his camera away and started down the slope, sweeping snow from the descending railing. Halfway down he found more snow-filled words. “Why are you here?” He exhaled hard and the steam from his breath rose like smoke. A vague anxiety welled up and he pressed along the railing with his glove to clear the board down to the third sycamore. Where the railing was nailed to the tree, the final white inscription was what he expected. “Dead.”

  He snowshoed back down toward the Billy Goat Trail. “Why are you here?” Was the question addressed to him? If so, was he someone’s puppet? And what exactly did “here” mean? And the blatant reference to Lee Fisher’s note:

  “One tree leads to the money, the second leads to the killers and the third leads to the dead.”

  Clearly Kelsey had steered him here. Was this her work? Maybe this was a great joke played on newcomers like Vin and Nicky, a joke about Swains Lock and 1924 that everyone else in Potomac was in on. He tried to calm himself by breathing with his lower abdomen as he slid down to the trail. Nicky was waiting, stepping absently from one foot to the other and back. She’d put her scarf and hat back on and re-zipped her jacket.

  “I’m getting cold,” she said. “Let’s get moving.” Vin noticed that a cloud was screening the sun for the first time all morning. He felt too embarrassed and frustrated to describe the inscriptions on the railings.

  “You’re right. We shouldn’t stand around for too long after sweating.” He put his hat and daypack on and started forward along the trail. Soon it curved left, following a bend in the river bank. The bright sunshine returned. To their right a funnel of innocent rapids emerged in the center of the thousand-foot-wide river, and the oscillating wave crests shone against patches of blue water like diamonds on sapphires. The indentations of the old tracks in the snow led onward. Continuing to assess the terrain above him, Vin spotted another opening in the trees and a wedge of sky above it. This time there were no descending tracks, but he couldn’t resist his impulse to take a look. Maybe the previous trees were a diversion; maybe the real sycamores were here.

  Nicky shook her head when he mentioned a quick detour – she didn't want to get cold again. “Do what you need to do, but I’m going to keep moving.” She added that since she’d have to break trail, it would be easy for him to catch up.

  At the top he was annoyed to discover that he was now standing on an annex of the same field he’d visited earlier; it was screened from the main field by a row of trees. He realized that the curve of the trail meant that they’d been walking around and below the field. There were no sycamores nearby. He slid back down and followed Nicky’s tracks along the Billy Goat Trail. They should be only a half-mile or so from its downstream trailhead on the towpath. He crossed a ditch, noticing from Nicky’s tracks that it had taken her more than one attempt to climb out.

  “Why are you here?” Why indeed, he wondered. Now he felt guilty about his preoccupation with Lee Fisher’s note to Charlie Pennyfield. Why wasn’t it enough to snowshoe in the woods with Nicky on a beautiful snowy day? She had alluded to his attempt to solve the implicit riddle of Lee’s note as a “treasure hunt”. Was she right? Was that all it was? If so, why was he deliberately inserting it between them? Why, he knew she wondered, wasn’t he focused on planning their wedding or finding a full-time job? Good questions, he thought.

  He snowshoed over a mound and saw a gulley in front of him, steep-sided and eight or ten feet deep. It was a frozen streambed buried by snowdrifts. The trail veered left along the rim of the gulley, then crossed it on a narrow snow-covered footbridge. The entrance to the bridge was flanked by two wooden posts and Nicky was slumped awkwardly on her side just beyond them – one leg skewed under the other, a snowshoe-tail flipped away from her boot, propped on an elbow with her hands still in the pole-straps. He hurried toward her.

  “Nicky! Are you OK?” The snow around her on the bridge was disturbed and he wondered if she’d tried unsuccessfully to stand up.

  “I’m alright,” she said. Her voice was airy and soft and she only turned part way toward him. He knelt to help her up and she took several breaths before continuing. “I guess I must have tripped. I don’t really remember. I was kind of lost in thought, and then all of a sudden I was lying here. Almost like I blacked out for a minute.”

  Vin brushed the snow from her jacket and helped remove her pole-straps. “Probably low blood sugar,” he said. “We should get some calories into you before you stand up.”

  “OK,” she said weakly, looking at him now. Vin pulled the cookies from his daypack. He watched Nicky drink water and eat a few fig bars, then ate and drank a bit himself.

  “Ready to get up?”

  “Ready.”

  He reached over to realign her snowshoe with her boot, then stood up and supported her hands as she got to her feet. “How do you feel?”

  “Better,” she said. “I think the sugar helped a lot. I feel OK now.”

  He handed Nicky her poles and started forward along the bridge. As he slung his pack over his shoulder and stepped, his right leg met no resistance and he plunged through the bridge into the gulley below. He’d lowered his shoulder toward the strap, and when his leg dropped his body tilted downhill along the axis of the gulley. This is surreal, he thought, falling head-first toward the drift. I feel like a cartoon character duped into stepping off a cliff. He twisted to get his hands beneath him and braced for a collision with a rocky streambed.

  Instead he felt a cushiony deceleration as soft snow enveloped him. Blowing snow had filled the gulley more than six feet deep, and his gloved hands pushed down into the drift. The press of freezing snow against his face and head was shocking and made him skip a breath. He extended his arms deeper into the snow to press against the streambed for support but couldn’t find it. His snowshoes held near the surface, so his legs and feet were above his buried upper body.

  He opened his eyes and saw that the bright light outside had faded to a dim glow. He twisted his head to create free space that he could breathe from, but his exhaled breath froze instantly, and he felt a cradle of ice forming around his face. His heart was racing and electric shivers of energy coursed through his arms and legs. Adrenaline. Jesus! A lifetime in the snow and he’d never fallen into a ridiculous position like this! He kicked his feet to free them of loose snow, then tried to bend his knees and pry his torso up against them. His knees pushed deeper into the drift. He tried to lift
his head, but the snow above it felt like a frozen hand holding him down.

  He rested, breathing shallowly against the ice cradling his face. I’m not getting enough air, he thought. He could hear Nicky calling his name and the sound of rhythmic motion through snow. She’s digging toward me. Not enough air. My arms, he thought, twisting his torso a few degrees. If I can pull my arms back to my chest, there will be air from the arm holes. On his third attempt he was able to pull an arm out of its tunnel in the snow and bend it up underneath his chest. He swiveled his head and inhaled, trying to draw air from the vacated hole.

  “Vin!” Nicky’s voice was louder now and the sound of digging had grown more frantic.

  “Here!” he tried to yell, but the shell of his snow coffin reflected the sound and he wasn’t sure he could be heard. He struggled to twist his upper body, then pushed a hand up into the snow above him. Powder tumbled against his face.

  “Nicky!” he yelled, punching into the ceiling of snow again. His arm went a few inches further. “Nicky, here!” He felt his voice fading and a prickly sensation encircled his forehead and temples, as if a vine had been looped around his head and was being tightened. It grew darker and he saw a row of diffuse orange spots. He punched once more into the snow overhead and felt his hand break through to the weightless air.

  “Vin!” he heard Nicky scream again.

  “Here!” he answered, but it was barely a rasp. He withdrew his hand into the snow, saw light reach the channel he had opened, and felt a taste of sharper, dryer air. He hyperventilated toward the air channel, then thrust his hand as far as he could back toward the surface.

  This time he felt contact, and Nicky’s gloved hand grasped his own. He rotated his arm and Nicky pushed his hand into a widening spiral. Loose snow fell onto his face, and he blinked and shook his head as the widening hole filled his snow coffin with air and light. Nicky dug snow away from his upper body with both hands. The weight on his torso and neck diminished and he was able to twist onto his back and reach both arms toward her. She yanked him sideways and he managed to bend a foot beneath him, push his snowshoe down, find leverage at last. He dragged his other foot into the pit, then kicked and thrust until he managed to stand.

  Panting and too tired to speak, he turned toward Nicky. She was breathless too, her face red with exertion and her arms, hat, and hair covered with snow. He leaned in to hug her, bracing his knees and waist against snow. He felt her choke through silent sobs that resolved into fast and shallow breaths.

  “God, Vin! That was horrible!” She pulled away to see him through tearing eyes. “What happened?”

  Vin felt his own eyes water. He wiped his face with his sleeve, freed the snow around his ears. “I don’t know,” he said between breaths. “I stepped right through the bridge.” He took off his hat and shook the snow loose. “Are you OK?”

  Nicky nodded as he crawled out of the pit. They helped each other stand and their snowshoes prevented them from sinking deeper than their knees. Nicky collected her poles and they plowed to the far side of the gulley, where Vin helped her climb out to the trail beyond the bridge. As he started to follow her, he realized his shoulders were unencumbered.

  “My pack,” he said. “It came loose when I fell. Hang on.” He waded back toward the bridge. Passing the snow pit he’d created, he tried to envision the trajectory of his fall. He saw Nicky’s tracks entering the gulley and a second crater in the snow. That must have been where she was digging at first, he thought. How could she have missed the right spot by six feet? His daypack had created its own hole in the snow. He fished it out, then leaned in to examine the underside of the bridge.

  In the middle section the four right-most planks were missing, and the joists beneath the missing planks looked new. They’d been covered by a sheet of building-wrap that had been strong enough to support the snow but incapable of holding his additional weight. Swearing to himself, he reached under the bridge to pull the building-wrap loose. As it shed its snow blanket, he noticed a flash of orange beneath the bridge. He draped the wrap back onto the bridge, looked underneath again, and saw a flat, orange diamond splattered with fallen snow. It was a sign, and his head throbbed lightly as he read the words on its front. “Bridge Out. Trail Ahead Closed.” He jammed the sign into the snow with its words facing the trail behind them, then followed his tracks to the edge of the gulley and climbed out. Nicky leaned back and extended her poles for him to use as handholds.

  They walked the remainder of the trail in silence and without incident, with Vin leading. The last stretch veered away from the river, up a gentle grade through thinning woods. The flat white towpath and the open space over the canal emerged through the trees. Approaching the trailhead, Vin saw that it was blocked by posts nailed together with cross-boards, and that another sign was affixed to these boards. They sidestepped around to the towpath, then stopped to read it. Vin already knew what it would say. “Trail Closed. Use Alternate Trailhead.”

  While hiking in silence he had aligned the pieces in his mind, and though they didn’t quite connect, he was unable to abandon the framework. Whoever had etched the words on the railings must have seen Lee Fisher’s note. If it was Kelsey, that would mean she had quoted it twice. And that she had tried to lead him here.

  And the question, “why are you here?” Did that mean Carderock? The Billy Goat Trail? Potomac? The D.C. area? Or did the question refer to his search itself? He thought about it in the context of the note. When he’d read the question on the railing, he had been standing between the tree of the killers and the tree of the dead. Was that what “here” meant? And what about the half-covered tracks leading from Carderock toward the footbridge? And the displaced “Bridge Out” sign, that obviously should have been attached to the naked wooden posts flanking the entrance to the bridge?

  “I don’t think we’ll have to worry about broken bridges or missing signs from here on,” he said, still staring at the sign. Nicky laughed and sniffled. He turned to see her wiping her nose on her sleeve, and noticed now that she’d been crying. “What’s the matter, honey?” He put his gloved hands on her shoulders and lowered his head toward hers. She squinted through teary eyes and sniffled again.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I couldn’t find you and was afraid I was going to lose you when you fell. And I felt like it was my fault. Like I was trying to help you but I was doing the wrong things.” She exhaled deeply. “I don’t know…” she repeated, shaking her head. “I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  Chapter 10

  High-Water Marks

  Sunday, January 21, 1996

  Driving the downslope toward the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac, Kelsey saw the river emerge through the trees to her right. The silt-stained current rolled and twisted through bare trees that normally stood a hundred feet from the water’s edge. Looking upstream from the bridge, she saw a writhing brown body below the orange sun; it seemed as if the river had risen halfway toward the level of her eyes. And in rising, like a cobra, it had grown half again as wide.

  The highway ascended into Virginia and she turned onto a serpentine road that ran through woods and pastures, tracking the river upstream. After a few miles she reached the entrance road to Great Falls Virginia National Park. A police car was parked across the road, its lights flashing. Kelsey slowed to turn and the officer waved her onward, instructing her to bypass the park. She reversed course in a driveway and drove back past the entrance, then retraced another half-mile to the dirt lot for the Difficult Run trailhead. Since it was 5:10 pm on a winter Sunday, she wasn’t surprised to see the lot almost empty. Difficult Run was a Potomac tributary that drained a local watershed and formed the southeast border of sprawling Great Falls Park. A muddy path from the parking area followed the stream toward its confluence with the Potomac, then joined trails leading west, back into the heart of the park.

  She parked in the lot and got out, and with daylight fading climbed directly into the woods beside the road. A sha
llow draw led up the hillside and she found a deer path within it. She followed the path to the crest of the drainage where it met a legitimate trail, then turned west through the trees and jogged along the top of the ridge.

  The thaw had begun on Thursday with heavy rain and temperatures in the low 60s. The last three days had been unseasonably warm and all that was left of the Blizzard of ’96 were dirty pyramids of snow in the corners of parking lots and patches of melting snow in the woods. The residual snow along the ridge-top reflected twilight and made the trail easy to follow. When it dead-ended at the entrance road to the park, she stood in the shadows and looked up the road to her left. The police car she’d seen earlier was two hundred yards away, still guarding the entrance, lights flashing. To her right the road descended through dark woods toward the guard kiosk, just under a mile away. She turned downhill and set off at a light run.

  The air was still warm, so she shed her fleece pullover and wrapped it around her waist. The shuttered guard kiosk appeared through the gloaming; she passed it and cut onto the grassy picnic area between the road and the cliffs. She continued toward one of the viewing platforms that sat astride the rocks, overlooking the river below and the Falls a quarter-mile upstream.

  But through the ebbing light she could see that the cliffs were gone. Instead the edge of the river undulated over the cement floor of the platform and encroached a few feet further into the park. Where it was compressed into the gorge below Great Falls, the river had risen seventy feet. She proceeded toward the water’s edge, passing a wooden post that denoted the high-water marks of past floods. At the level of her knees, a small sign read “1985.” At chest-height another read “1937.” Nearly six feet up the post, “1972.” Ten feet up, “1942.” The highest sign read “1936.” No earlier floods were chronicled.