SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1)

by Edward A. Stabler

  The rosters were ordered by boat number, and Vin skimmed quickly through the list of boats and captains for the 1903 season without finding the name he was looking for. He turned to the roster for 1904 and found the following entry partway down the page:

  32 Emmert Reed Harpers Ferry Road, Sharpsburg, Maryland

  Flipping through the subsequent rosters confirmed that Reed had captained boat 32 from 1904 through 1912. Each entry listed the same address; Vin penciled it down along with the boat number on the provided scrap paper. He paged through the rest of the appendices, closed the ledger, and slipped it back into its document box. After returning the boxes and signing out of the room, he walked downstairs to the lobby, returned his badge, and signed out of the building.

  His visit to the National Archives had required stepping through a gauntlet of checkpoints but taken less than two hours from start to finish. And look what was offered! A chance to sift at his own pace through original documents that were well-preserved and a hundred years old. It was a benefit of moving to the D.C. area that he’d never considered before.

  Since it was the Friday before Labor Day, traffic was lighter than usual and he made it home by four. He went straight to his desk, where he dialed into the network at Rottweiler’s Boston office. He browsed to a white-pages website, entered “Reed” as the surname and “Sharpsburg, MD” as the city, and clicked the Search button. Four listings appeared: Cameron, E J, Elizabeth, and Martin. None of the addresses were on Harpers Ferry Road. He printed the page and disconnected the call, then dialed all four numbers.

  Cameron sounded like a young guy, maybe in his early twenties. Vin didn’t leave a message. The number for E J was answered by a “no longer in service” recording, which left him wondering how current the listings were as he crossed off E J’s entry. His call to Elizabeth went unanswered. That doesn’t happen very often anymore, he thought. Maybe an elderly person? Martin’s phone was picked up by a teenage girl. Without much conviction, he repeated the query he’d used previously, that he was a researcher interested in a canal-era locktender named Emmert Reed. Would she or anyone in her family know that name?

  “I haven’t heard of him. You’ll have to ask my Dad.” She went on to mention that her Dad was away on business but would be back in ten days. Vin wrote “call 9/10” next to Martin’s name.

  That was a quick exercise in futility, he thought. He skimmed the list again – it wasn’t useless yet. He hadn’t trusted Cameron to return his call, but a few more attempts to catch him might be worthwhile. And maybe Elizabeth was one of those people who hate answering machines and he’d called while she was out. Even Martin was worth another try, though it was hard to imagine waiting ten days to do it.

  He sensed a presence behind him and swiveled in his chair. Randy was squatting nearby, watching him hopefully while wagging his tail on the rug. It was time for a run on the towpath.

  Chapter 32

  One Red Leaf

  Saturday, August 31, 1996

  Leaning forward in her patio chair, Kelsey pressed the shedding blade against the base of Allie’s neck and stroked back along her flank. When the blade reached the dog’s hindquarters, she shook loose a clot of hair that fell into a paper bag between her feet. Allie stood still with half-closed eyes and the trace of a smile, panting lightly in the early-morning air.

  “You’d be happy if we did this all day, wouldn’t you?” The dog eyed Kelsey and closed its mouth to swallow, then resumed panting as the blade traversed its left side and chest. The early morning sun was already warming the air, so Kelsey unbuttoned her lavender sweater and draped it over the back of her chair. She looked down at the growing haystack in the paper bag.

  “Maybe next year we’ll just shave you on Memorial Day and be done for the summer.” She tugged the dog’s collar to turn her around and began stroking Allie’s right side. When the yield of hair tapered off, she slapped the dog lightly on the breast and laid the blade on the patio table. Allie slumped down on shaded flagstones as Kelsey sipped her cooling coffee and leaned back in her chair.

  In the sweetgum tree past the edge of the flagstones, a single bright red leaf near the center stood out against the litter of green stars. It’s a harbinger, she thought, of events that are now close at hand. Looking up she saw blue sky, with traces of cirrus to the southwest. It’s funny that my sense of anticipation is heightened now, when a generation ago I was oblivious. Maybe now, all these years later, the truth will rise to the surface and become clear. As it had become clear to her subconscious already. A light breeze stirred the sweetgum’s leaves and chilled her arms and shoulders. And the money? That might be compensation for the long, long wait. She crossed the patio toward the glass doors. It was time for her vigil to start.

  Chapter 33

  Reeds

  Tuesday, September 3, 1996

  Vin paged through the Washington Post in the breakfast nook as he finished his coffee. Labor Day weekend was over and Nicky had left for the Clinic early, anticipating a long day. To his surprise, Rottweiler had thrown the ball back into his court over the weekend by sending him the specifications he needed for the suggestion-rating feature. He sighed, unenthused by the prospect of getting back to work. This feeling – that what he produced was trivial and dull – was what had made him want to quit his job in the first place.

  He reached for the front-page section, which he usually saved for last, and read an article about two hurricanes that the media had been covering for the last week.

  A few days ago Hurricane Edouard seemed destined to deliver a jarring punch to southern New England, but benevolent forces prevailed and the hurricane swung back over open waters during the weekend. Now 195 miles southwest of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Edouard has been downgraded to a tropical storm. While Edouard left buildings and infrastructure intact, its slashing rain immobilized thousands of coastal residents and visitors in traffic gridlock as they attempted to evacuate Cape Cod and the island communities ahead of the storm.

  With Edouard receding, Atlantic seaboard residents are turning their attention to Hurricane Fran, whose 80-mile-per-hour winds were gaining strength as Fran passed 495 miles east of the Bahamas, en route toward a possible landfall later this week in the Carolinas.

  Vin wondered whether his friends in West Falmouth were among those who had fled Edouard to idle in traffic on the arteries that connected Cape Cod to mainland Massachusetts. And for no reason, as it turned out – a waste of a long weekend at the beach. The wind and rain dispersed the crowds and made sailing small boats or windsurfers on Buzzards Bay a thrill.

  He folded the paper – there was no postponing work any longer – and went downstairs to his office, where he examined the array of pages on his desk. Lying askew to his binders and notes was an orphaned page near the phone… a screen-print from the white-pages website he’d consulted after his trip to the Archives. With the listings for Cameron, E J, Elizabeth, and Martin Reed in Sharpsburg. He’d already crossed out E J’s listing, and for Martin written “call 9/10.”

  He tapped out Elizabeth’s number and hit the dial button. The annoying buzz of a busy signal blared from the speaker. No voice-mail and no roll-over, he thought. At least she’s consistent. He dialed Cameron and got voice-mail again. While listening to the greeting he composed a message, but hung up instead at the beep.

  What is wrong with me? he asked himself. Why am I worried that a message about Emmert Reed will sound idiotic? Or maybe quixotic is the word. Is it because I believe that myself? Why can’t I stay focused on my work? It’s a legitimate project for decent pay. Just like the job I walked away from in Boston. I could get back on a career path here… maybe at one of the Beltway-bandit firms. God knows there are enough of them around. Obviously that’s what Nicky wants. He sighed and dialed Elizabeth’s number again. This time he heard ringing, followed by a live voice at the end of the line.

  “Hello?” The word was extended into three bright syllables. She responded to his inquiry by telling him her
name was Betsy. Her voice was warm and brittle and he guessed that she was in her sixties, maybe seventies. He launched into his script: he was researching an article for the Maryland Historical Society about the C&O Canal and looking for information about Emmert Reed, who had tended lock and captained a canal boat in the 1910s and 20s.

  “That’s a name I haven’t heard for a long time,” she said, and Vin thought he heard a note of wistfulness.

  “Emmert Reed?”

  “He was my husband’s grandfather,” she said, a warm tone returning to her voice.

  “Do you suppose your husband might be able to help me find…”

  “My husband passed on three years ago,” Betsy interrupted gently.

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Yes.” She paused long enough that he wondered how to break the silence. Betsy did it for him. “Dan always loved to pass along the stories he heard from his grandfather. To our children, when they were young. About the boating life. He would always tell them that it was a hard life back then, but a good and simple life. And everyone knew you only got what you worked for. Dan used to worry sometimes that young people don’t see things that way.”

  Vin made small sounds of affirmation to let her know he was listening.

  “Of course, I think our children turned out alright,” Betsy said, “but now I wonder if they’re raising their children the same way!” She chuckled, and Vin could picture an elderly woman smiling and shaking her gray curls in bemused admonishment. He tried to steer the conversation back toward Emmert Reed.

  “Did your husband know his grandfather well?”

  “Oh yes,” Betsy said. “I mean, he did as a boy. Old Grandpa Em – that’s what Dan called him when he talked to our children – was still alive back then, living here in town. I think Jake and Ida used to take Dan and Sarah over to see their grandparents quite often. Of course, Emmert died many years ago. Sometime around 1950, I think. And then Dan would drop by to check on his grandma Helen as she got on.”

  Vin cupped a hand over the receiver and cleared his throat as he thought about how to phrase the next question. “I’d love to hear some of your husband’s stories about his grandfather. Did he… write any of them down?”

  Betsy laughed. “Oh no. Dan wasn’t the type to do that. He could write a letter now and then when he had to, but that wasn’t something he enjoyed doing very much.”

  “I see. Did your husband’s grandfather ever…”

  “He did like to take pictures, though.” Vin didn’t mind the interruption, since the question he had been about to pose, whether Emmert Reed had bequeathed a journal to his grandson, seemed ludicrous even to him.

  “…and collect them in photo albums,” she said, finishing her thought. “And so did his father, though Jake mostly just kept them loose in an old box.”

  “Hmmm, that’s interesting,” Vin said softly, encouraging her. Betsy sailed on.

  “But Dan took all those old pictures and put them into an album for his father. That was a few years before Jake died. Jake died in 1971.”

  A young girl’s voice pealed brightly from the far side of the line, “Grammy we’re waiting.”

  “I’m sorry,” Betsy said. “My daughter is visiting with my grandchildren, and I guess I’m holding up the show.” Vin heard fumbling at the other end of the line as her voice grew distant for a second. Then she was back, and he sensed an opportunity that would vanish in an instant.

  “I’d very much like to stop by and meet you, Betsy…if that’s OK with you. We could talk some more about your husband and his grandfather. If we looked at your husband’s photos, you might have a recollection or two that would help my research.”

  “Oh, I think I might enjoy that. But it would be easier for me to do it after Alison and the girls go home. They leave on Thursday morning.” Vin happily agreed to visit her house Thursday afternoon and confirmed her address in Sharpsburg.

  “I never really find a reason to take those albums off the shelf anymore,” Betsy said. “Who knows? There might even be a picture of old Grandpa Em in there.”

  Chapter 34

  Sharpsburg

  Thursday, September 5, 1996

  Approaching the colonial-era city of Frederick, Maryland, Vin checked the rear-view mirror again. He half expected to see a charcoal-gray sedan with tinted glass. At first it had looked familiar, but he hadn’t been able to place it. Even in upscale Potomac, the gray Audi wasn’t the kind of car you saw everyday. And now he’d seen it three times in the last three days. Parked on Ridge Line Court when he and Nicky had returned home from Cool Aid early Monday afternoon. On the opposite side of the street on Tuesday at sunset, a bit further from the house. And again on Wednesday during his late-afternoon run. The car had been parked in the dirt lot at Pennyfield Lock, a stone’s throw from the route he and Randy traveled to the towpath.

  When he saw the exit sign for Route 70, he suddenly remembered where he’d seen the car before. In his driveway, last fall. It was Kelsey Ainge’s car. He glanced in the rear-view mirror as he changed lanes and slowed for the exit. No gray Audi. He shook his head, surprised he hadn’t made the connection earlier. Before he fell on his hip in the woods and got sick, he’d had the sense that she was shadowing him. Or maybe just steering him around. From Carderock and the joke of the joined sycamores to the toy crosses on top of the Bear Island stop-gate. As if she were guiding and mocking his search for Lee Fisher’s truth at the same time.

  And now he remembered something he’d seen over the weekend at Cool Aid. The farm where the party took place was bordered to the south by a bend in the shallow Gunpowder River and to the southeast by a railway line that had been converted to a dirt-and-limestone trail. The trail was carried over the river by an old railroad bridge. Bikers and runners often stopped on the bridge to peer out over a strip of woods at the sprawling lawn between the river and the rolling hills on the northern edge of the farm. On Cool Aid weekend a necklace of two hundred tents dotted the periphery of the lawn, surrounding a central music stage, a white-canopied food tent, a refrigerated beer truck, and a pond with a white-sand beach. Vin and Nicky had joined friends from New Jersey and hundreds of other guests on Saturday and Sunday in a low-impact pentathlon of lounging, wading, listening to music, eating, and drinking.

  The shin-high grass of the Cool-Aid parking area was only a few hundred yards from the rail-trail, and when he ambled back to the car for one reason or another, Vin liked to scout the trail users watching from the bridge. Late Saturday afternoon, he’d noticed a slim woman with honey-colored hair standing on the bridge with her elbows propped on the iron railing. From a distance it didn’t look like she was dressed for biking or running; her lavender top had a button-down front and long sleeves that she’d pushed up her forearms. She was watching Cool Aid through pocket-sized binoculars. Sensing there was something different about her, Vin had stopped to gaze up and out at the bridge. And as soon as he did that, she lowered her binoculars and turned away. He watched her deliberately cross the rest of the bridge and disappear behind the trees. Later he’d used his camera’s zoom lens to study the bridge from further away. She was back, with her elbows on the railing and eyes behind binoculars, watching. He couldn’t see her face clearly, but something about her looked familiar.

  Trying to visualize the woman on the bridge again, he almost missed the exit for Route 40. A glance confirmed that there was still no gray sedan behind him as he swung west on the Old National Road. The woman watching from the bridge on Sunday and then the parked car on Monday and Tuesday – by themselves those sightings were hardly worth notice or reflection. But now he felt compelled to reconsider them in the context of Wednesday afternoon.

  Yesterday afternoon he and Randy had run down the wooded hillside and out into the meadow next to the old Pennyfield House, then crossed over the lock and turned upstream, as they usually did. A quarter-mile past Pennyfield, the towpath bisected the Dierssen Waterfowl Sanctuary. To their right a backwater eddy extended into
the flat, swampy woods of the berm. On the left a string of shallow ponds choked with marsh plants stretched for half a mile, occupying most of the terrain between the towpath and the river. Dierssen offered stilted boxes for wood ducks and also attracted herons, songbirds, beavers, and foxes. On its downstream side, a dirt trail used by birdwatchers branched off toward the river and circled the ponds.

  Randy was lagging as Vin approached the branching trail. His sniffing completed, Randy sprinted to catch up. Vin saw the dog’s ears flex as it passed him. Randy skidded to a stop, stood alert for a moment, and then bolted along the trail toward the river. Vin jogged in place and waited. Randy couldn’t resist pursuing a deer or fox, or even a goose or heron, but Vin knew the animals could escape by taking to the air or water, or by outrunning or outwitting his dog. Randy’s chases were brief and typically ended with his return to the towpath winded and muddy.

  Wednesday’s pursuit lasted only a few minutes. Randy was panting when he trotted back, but he hardly seemed tired and wasn’t muddy at all. Whatever creature he’d heard or scented must have escaped before luring the dog far off the trail. As he usually did after bolting without permission, Randy stood directly in front of Vin, wagging his tail. Vin was never sure whether the dog’s motive was to ingratiate himself or to tell Vin about his encounter with the one that got away. While noting the surprising lack of burrs or mud on Randy’s legs, he saw that a piece of paper, rolled into a tube about the size of a cigar, had been slipped under his collar and pinned against the back of his neck.