Swains Lock

by Edward A. Stabler

  “Yep. I think that piece is part of the N,” she said, reaching back into the bag. “So this must be part of the V.” She pulled out a slightly larger stick and laid it at an angle to the left of the first. “And here’s the other half of the V.” She withdrew a femur-sized stick and set it symmetrically to form a V. She used two more driftwood sticks to form a wobbly N to the right of the V. Fishing once more into the bag, she found two finger-sized sticks, which she placed on top of each other at right angles in the center.

  “V plus N,” Vin said. “I love it.”

  “It’s a mobile. I found a big pile of sticks in a crevice between two rocks on the Billy Goat Trail next to the river. For some reason I couldn’t take my eyes off them. I wanted to bring a few pieces home, but I couldn’t think of anything to do with them. Then I remembered your birthday.”

  “It’s brilliant,” he said. “We can hang it in the living room.”

  “I was thinking the basement.”

  “Hey wait,” he said, squinting at Nicky. “Is this a symbolic gift?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Driftwood.”

  “Well… you are a bit adrift. I mean both of us... or in transition anyway. Getting married, me starting a new job and you finding one, considering the baby thing.” She stood up, put her arms around his waist, and kissed him lightly on the lips. “But first things first – there’s more champagne tonight. And tomorrow’s your birthday, so that means more presents, plus dinner and cake at the Tuckermans.”

  Vin set his glass on the table, then bent down quickly and put an arm behind Nicky’s thighs. He pulled her legs off the ground, catching her back with his other arm.

  “Cake tomorrow?” he said with mock incredulity as he marched toward the door. “I want my dessert now!”

  “I think reading driftwood sticks has turned you into a caveman.”

  “Caveman no read,” he grunted. “Cave too dark. Dark cave good for having sex with cavewoman.” He carried her into the master bedroom and dropped her face-up on the bed, then knelt astride her and pinned her wrists to the mattress.

  “Well you may be Conan the Barbarian,” Nicky said, thrusting her lower half sideways to free a leg, “but I’m Houdini.” She yanked an arm loose and flipped to her knees, parallel to Vin. He kept one of her hands pinned and tried to repin the other while she tried to push his shoulder away.

  “Houdini was a guy.”

  “OK,” she said, catching her breath. “I’m Mata Hari.” She threaded a leg between his knees and pushed his shoulder hard. He flipped onto his back and she hopped on his waist and held his wrists to the bed, grinning and dangling her hair toward his face.

  “Well you may be Hari,” he said, “but I’m a hairy beaver!” He capsized her and she rolled onto her hands to prevent him from pinning them again. He lowered his chest onto her back and thwacked the mattress with his open palm. She made a muffled squeal in surprise. “I’m a raging wild beaver!” he said, pounding his palm into the mattress again, closer to her thigh. “I’m a wild, drifting beaver,” this time smacking her butt cheek with his palm as Nicky yelped. “And I am going to thwack you with my tail!”

  Chapter 2

  Discovery

  Sunday, October 22, 1995

  After breakfast the Clinic called. Carlos had car trouble and couldn’t make it to work, so Nicky was needed after all. A woman had just come in with a cat that needed emergency surgery for a broken leg.

  “Sorry, honey,” Nicky said. “It’s not much fun being alone on your birthday.”

  Vin told her he felt bad that she’d had to work so much recently. He’d been hoping they could spend a lazy day together.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” Nicky said, before reminding him they were going out tonight.

  He felt his spirit deflate as he remembered their dinner engagement at the Tuckermans, then silently chastised himself. Abby was Nicky’s boss and the Tuckermans knew everyone. He and Nicky were new here and needed to make an effort.

  “Oh, I almost forgot,” Nicky added, “if the dog-fight woman comes by, give her the gentamicin spray on the medicine shelf in the pantry. Dosage is on the label.”

  Vin kissed her goodbye and returned to the breakfast table, where he finished the Sunday paper. He washed his dishes and walked out to the deck – another clear day in the low seventies. Randy was napping in a sunny corner and the driftwood sticks from last night lay arrayed on the table. That’s what I can do today, he thought.

  He bagged the sticks and brought them into the house, then padded down to the finished half of the first floor. With a fireplace and a sliding glass door to the backyard, this room resembled a den, but Vin had made it his office. He opened the door to the cement-floored laundry and storage area and saw nylon ski bags leaning against the far wall. Beside them on the floor sat two pairs of snowshoes they’d bought last year in Maine. He smiled as he remembered snowshoeing through the woods with Nicky near his parents’ house over Christmas, then wondered wistfully if it made sense to own skis or snowshoes in Washington, D.C.

  Next to the snowshoes was a stack of boxes with a rope ladder heaped on top. He’d acquired it a few weeks ago when he came home from biking to discover he had locked himself out of the house. So he’d biked five miles to a cluttered hardware store in Potomac and found the ladder. He hooked it to the deck and climbed up, re-entering the house through the glass doors to the living room. For a while he left the ladder in place, but when the novelty wore off he’d resorted to leaving the lower-level sliding door unlocked when he went running or biking.

  His folding sawhorses were nearby and he moved them to the foot of the stairs. A plastic crate held his power drill, socket wrenches, screwdrivers. He pawed through a shoebox of screws and bolts but wasn’t satisfied with what he found. I need to go to the hardware store anyway, he thought, for wire.

  He drove to the intersection of River and Falls, where two strip malls comprised the heart of downtown Potomac. The narrow-aisled hardware store had an unpredictable inventory of products piled on shelves to the ceiling, but he’d come to appreciate it over the course of several visits. Finding the rope ladder on his first visit had been serendipitous. This time he only needed standard items: picture-hanging wire, a wooden dowel, glue, bolts, and eyelet-screws. He paid for them and drove home, then carried his tools and sawhorses out to the driveway. When he examined his purchases, he realized he’d forgotten something.

  “Damn. I need a work surface.” Plywood or planks or something. He had no desire to drive in search of boards he only needed for an hour or two, so he shuffled back downstairs to the storage area. Nothing. The house looked like it had been built in the early 1970s; it didn’t have old cellar doors or a plank fence he could scavenge. He circled the exterior of the house just in case, knowing already that he wouldn’t find anything. Looking out over the back lawn he remembered the abandoned shed on the wooded hillside below. That might work.

  He retrieved a hammer and a small crowbar from his tool crate and set off across the lawn toward the woods. Halfway down the hill, the brown sides of the wooden shed took shape through the trees. He angled toward it.

  It was larger than he expected, maybe eight by ten feet, with thick clapboard siding and an overhanging shingled roof. The front door faced downhill and was flanked by a pair of small windows. It was tightly closed and fitted with a swing latch but no padlock.

  He climbed two worn-out steps, flipped back the latch, and pulled the door open. It groaned away from the jamb. Looking in he saw floating dust in the light from the windows. The shed’s interior felt dry and the air smelled generations old, devoid of life. He stepped inside and the floorboards creaked as his eyes adjusted to the light. Directly before him was an old wooden workbench built into the back wall. He ran his fingers through the dust on its pockmarked surface and felt the random grooves and drill holes left by unknown hands. Someone worked long hours here, he thought, wondering if he would trade the logical tools on his own desk for the
physical tools that once rested here. A narrow shelf above the bench sagged forward but held only dust. He gripped the front edge of the workbench with both hands and pulled up. It was solidly attached to the wall, so he studied the remainder of the shed.

  To his right the ruins of three wooden chairs were propped against the wall. In the back left corner stacks of wooden shingles were devolving into a shapeless pile. The center portion of the left wall was unobstructed, with a series of naked hooks hanging on every third plank of siding. He stepped to the wall and ran his fingers along a plank. When he rapped it with his knuckles, it returned a solid sound. Maybe cedar.

  Looking down he noticed that a plank was badly cracked and dented at the level of his knees. He tapped below the crack with his hammer to separate the pieces, then examined the portion above the break. The plank was ten inches wide, half an inch thick, and still solid. Perfect. Its edges were nailed to wooden studs.

  He used the crowbar and hammer claws to free the long portion of the broken plank, then unscrewed the metal hook and tossed it onto the workbench. Now he could now see the planks on the outer side of the studs that supported the exterior siding. He marveled at the quantity of wood and labor that had been invested in this simple shed decades ago. Today it would be pre-fab particle-board and vinyl, he thought, and fall apart in fifteen years. He started work on an adjacent plank. This one came free more quickly, since he had better leverage.

  Sweating now, he stopped to brush his hair back from his forehead and dry his palms on his sleeves. Might as well take a third, he thought, and have two whole ones. He could put them all back in place easily enough when he was done with them. He used the crowbar and hammer to free the edges of the third plank. A pile of shingles blocked its base, so he pushed them out of the way. His eye was immediately caught by a strange mark that the shingles had obscured. It was a C-shaped arc overlaid with three straight slashes that converged to a point.

  Like a symbol or letter from an extinct language, he thought, tracing the mark with his finger. It appeared to have been carved quickly and carelessly into the plank, almost like graffiti.

  He extracted the nails at the base and pulled the plank free, catching a glimpse of something behind it. A shingle-fragment resting on half-driven nails had been placed between the studs to form a shelf, and the shelf held an old eggbeater-style hand drill. When he picked it up, he was surprised by how heavy it felt. It might be fifty years old. He gripped the handles and turned the gear wheel. The first rotation was jerky and uneven but after that the gear and chuck turned smoothly. He shook his head in admiration.

  The drill had pinned a thin sheaf of yellowing papers to the exterior planks, so he set it down and reached for them. The folded pages enclosed an old black-and-white photograph, which he lifted to the light from the windows. It was five by eight inches and remarkably well-focused, like old photographs always seemed to be. Cycles of heating and cooling had left it dry and stiff but otherwise undamaged. In the foreground a young woman leaned against a hip-high rock, upper body facing the camera and legs angled away. She wore a trim jacket over a light-colored dress with a sash around the waist, and her hat had an asymmetric upturned brim. A pendant necklace shaped like an elm leaf rested against her dress below the collar. Her lips were closed in a half smile and her wavy hair glinted where it fell into curls halfway down her neck.

  Beside her stood a tall young man, clean-shaven and serious…dark thigh-length coat, white shirt, and gray pants tucked into boots that rose over his calves. He held a flat cap in one hand, leaving his close-cropped hair uncovered, and one foot was propped jauntily on a rock.

  A farrago of boulders lay behind the couple, beyond which the surroundings fell away. In the background Vin saw ten or more waterfalls plunging different heights and tilting in different directions, connected by a wide labyrinth of flowing whitewater and enormous knuckles of fractured rocks. The chaos of water and rock extended into the distance upstream, and it was hard to tell where the water came from or where it went. He turned the photo over and saw a faded penciled annotation in the bottom corner:

  R. L. Fisher and K. Elgin at Great Falls

  March, 1924

  He unfolded the pages surrounding the photo and noticed their left edges were uneven, as if they’d been torn from a book or ledger. The outer page was blank except for a pre-printed list of underscored column headings:

  Date Time Boat no. Capt. Cargo Tonnage Origin Destination

  Maybe this page had been ripped from an old log-book for canal traffic, he thought. The remnants of Pennyfield House were only a stone’s throw away at the bottom of the hill, and this shed must have belonged to its owners. And the whitewashed stone locktender’s house stood boarded up and abandoned, just across the canal.

  Since there was no other writing on the outer page, he guessed it served as a protective envelope. The inner page had the same pre-printed column headings, but a note had been written in ink below them. Though the penmanship was inconsistent, the margins were flush and the lines evenly-spaced. It looked like a carefully composed letter from an unpracticed author.

  March 29, 1924

  Charlie,

  If it is April and I am missing, I fear I have been killed because of what happened today at Swains Lock. I may be buried along with the others at the base of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing. The name of the place is well knowed by Emmert Reed’s albino mule. One tree leads to the money, the second leads to the killers and the third leads to the dead. In your search for me you may find the truth. Be careful you don’t share my fate.

  Your friend, Lee Fisher

  As he re-read the note, Vin felt the back of his neck chill. He studied the photo of the young couple again, turning it over to see the notation “R. L. Fisher and K. Elgin at Great Falls”. That could be Lee Fisher in the picture, he thought, since Great Falls was only a few miles away and the picture was also dated “March, 1924”. He turned back to the letter. Who was Charlie? And why was the note placed here, where Charlie – hell, anybody – would have been highly unlikely to find it? Maybe Charlie had already found the note and hidden it here himself. But then why would the drill be hidden along with the papers? Strange.

  He plucked the finishing nails from the planks, then carried them back to the house along with his tools and the newfound drill and papers. On his way to the driveway his throat felt dry, so he set everything down in the foyer and climbed the half-flight to the breakfast nook and kitchen for a glass of water.

  Between sips in the foyer, he finger-tapped the planks as they leaned against the wall. Definitely cedar and quite solid. The strange mark was facing outward at the top of one plank, so he spun the plank to its original orientation. The curve and one of the slashes suggested a sickle, but the other two slashes made the symbol look alien. Wondering whether there was a connection between the mark and the photo, he studied the picture again but couldn’t find one. The doorbell rang and he nearly jumped out of his skin. He laid the photo on the foyer table and opened the door.

  “Hi, Vin,” the woman at the door said. He stared at her blankly for a second. “We met yesterday.” Her gray-green eyes flitted left and right, then settled on his own. She smiled as he remembered yesterday’s dogfight.

  “Sure, sure,” he said, sweeping his hair back from his brow. “You’re Kelsey, right? I’m sorry, I was asleep on my feet when you rang. Come in.” He stepped back and held the door.

  “Thanks. Where’s your dog?”

  “Napping on the deck. At least he better be.” She laughed as Vin found himself locating the faded scar on her left temple. He quickly made eye contact again. “How does your dog’s ear look today?”

  “About the same. I’m trying to make sure she doesn’t scratch it, but given the amount of time she spends rolling around outside, the ear spray sounded like a good idea.”

  “Right, the gentamicin. Nicky told me where to find it. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  Kelsey watched as he headed
off to the kitchen. He ducked into the pantry, flicked on the light, and started checking labels on the medicine shelf.

  ***

  In the foyer Kelsey surveyed her surroundings. A split-level from the late sixties or early seventies, she thought, with no major updates. A generic pendulum lamp overhead and a cute little red-and-orange kilim rug over slate tiles. To the right, a half-flight down to the first floor and another up to a breakfast nook. An alternate half-flight on the left led up to the living room. An antique table in front of her and cedar planks propped beside it against the wall. Her gaze drifted down the face of the nearest plank and her eyes widened when she saw the symbol carved near its base. Her mind went blank in disbelief and all she could think of or feel was the hammering of blood against the walls of her heart. The mark from Whites Ferry. A vague intuition formed like a bubble in her subconscious and ascended until it became a discernible pearl. The pearl shattered into a premonition, and the premonition flew beyond her grasp.

  Chapter 3

  Whites Ferry

  Tuesday, June 20, 1972

  Destiny Gowan, née Melissa, pushed the twelfth and final four-by-four until its opposite end nudged the windshield just above the dash. She swept tiny beads of sweat from her forehead, then looked up at her boyfriend and smiled. “That’s the last one,” she said, slamming the tailgate shut. The yellow Ford station wagon squatted cautiously in the heat, unused to its burden of two hundred paving stones and a dozen beams of varying lengths.

  Miles Garrett checked his watch and brushed the dirt from his hands. “Damn, I hope so,” he said. “Since we still need to take all of this shit back out.” He pulled on the tailgate to make sure it was fully closed. “I thought artists were supposed to use art supplies. Like paint…or chalk...or clay.”

  “It’s architectural sculpture, Miles,” Des said. “Tell him, Kelsey.”