Swains Lock

by Edward A. Stabler

  “What we do know is that nobody but us and the killer knows they’re dead. Since they was on a bootlegging run, no one’s going to miss ‘em for a few more days. Maybe even a week. But sooner or later someone’s going to come looking for them. Maybe some other cousins of yours, maybe some business partners, maybe the police. When that happens, we can’t have any evidence around here that points to us. ‘Cause we got nobody else we can point to instead.”

  Staring at the coins on the table, Lee said he agreed. Cy was right that members of the Emory clan would come looking. And they would probably find someone at Great Falls who had seen the scow heading upstream and someone above Swains who hadn’t. Bootlegging was a family business, so the clan would wonder what had happened to their money. Anyone flashing silver and gold coins would get looked at funny, since that was how Kevin Emory carried his profit. Lee met Cy’s gaze. “What do you reckon we should do?”

  Cy seemed to be measuring Lee with his eyes. “The bodies,” he said. “Bury ‘em somewhere safe. It’s the only thing. Otherwise, we’re the easy suspects, and maybe we spend our lives in jail. If we bury ‘em, only the killer knows they’re dead. Maybe it looks like your cousins just took the money and ran off.”

  Lee felt something harden inside him. Maybe it was his skin hardening and forming a new layer or shell. One that was scarred and compromised by time and events in a way it never had been before, but would be irredeemably calloused from now on. “So you must have an idea for the money as well,” he said.

  “The coins are too hot to handle,” Cy said. “Whoever comes looking for your cousins will want the gold and silver, too. We got no safe place to put it. I say we put it back in the box and bury it for a while. Until things blow over.” Cy reached for the wad of soggy bills, which he pulled from the clip, unfolded, and laid on the table. “But I got no problem with the paper money. We can split that even right now.”

  “How much is it?” Lee caught himself thinking that a few extra dollars would be useful. He’d lost his ride upstream to Harper’s Ferry, so now he might need to buy a train ticket. His lips cracked into a cynical grin at the thought. The new, calloused Lee was a practical man.

  Cy leafed through the bills and counted. “Eighty-eight dollars. Plenty of singles.” He separated the bills into two piles and handed one of them to Lee, who stuffed them into the pocket of his wet pants. He touched Katie’s pendant in the process and felt a pang.

  “What about the scow and the mules?”

  “I can take care of the mules,” Cy said. “Find ‘em a nice home before I set out on Tuesday. But the boat is like an arrow that points right at us. Too big for you and me to drag it out of the canal. I think we should scuttle it.”

  “Can’t scuttle it in the canal, unless you turn it into sawdust first. The canal’s too shallow.”

  “Not here. Widewater. Below Six Locks and Great Falls. Parts of it are sixty feet deep.”

  Lee thought about it for a second. Widewater was the old channel of the river between Bear Island and the Maryland shore that had been incorporated into the canal. “It’s deep enough. But you got more people coming and going down there.”

  “We’d have to do it at night,” Cy said. “Late tonight. Pull the scow down there and chop a few holes in the hull. Maybe bring some stones on board. She’s heavy enough to go down.”

  “Maybe. Can’t think of anyplace else it would work. What about the bodies?”

  “I don’t like sending ‘em down with the scow. If they’re in the canal, they might pop back up. Sooner or later, they’ll get found.”

  “I know a safe place we can bury ‘em…along with the money.” Lee gestured with his thumb toward the kitchen window, which looked out toward the apron between the towpath and the river. “Out there on an island,” he said. “We’ll need a canoe.”

  “We got a canoe, but it leaks. Can’t hold four men.”

  “A second canoe.”

  “Jess Swain got a whole rack of canoes, but they’re locked up.”

  “I can bring one down from Pennyfield,” Lee said. “Might take me a couple of hours to get up and back.” He thought for a second. “Unless you seen a stray bicycle lying around.”

  Cy looked at him with a furrowed brow and shook his head. “Ain’t no rush,” he said. “We got to wait until after dark to move the bodies anyway.” He rose from the table and gestured toward the corpses. “But we can’t leave ‘em here. Katie and Pete could walk in any minute. Let’s get ‘em down to the basement.” Lee knelt down alongside Kevin Emory’s left ankle, which was still cuffed by the leg-irons. He reached into his pocket for the key.

  “Leave it on,” Cy said abruptly. “Since the bodies are staying here while you’re gone. Got to have something pointing to you as well. Keeps us both honest.” Lee looked up and squinted but left the cuff attached. He held his cousin’s ankles while Cy gripped the body by the armpits. They carried the bodies downstairs and laid them in a dark corner of the basement.

  Back in the kitchen, Lee put the ledger in the box along with the pouch of coins and the refilled coin tray. He closed the cover and set the latches, then pulled out the key ring and locked the toolbox. “That was a good idea you had,” he said. “About keeping us honest. Made me think I should leave the box with you until tonight. I’ll take the key with me. That way we trust each other. And we don’t have to worry about someone else bumping into it.”

  Cy put the box on top of a cabinet, where it was unlikely to be noticed right away. They walked out toward the lock, where Lee retrieved his damp clothes from the swing-beam.

  “Let’s lock the scow down,” Cy said. “Get it out of the way and set us up for later.” They reset the lock, brought the scow through, and moored it to a post near the mouth of the flume. Lee led the mules across the lock and tied them up near the water. Cy peered out at the uninhabited islands in the center of the river. “Show me again where you’re thinking,” he said.

  Lee pointed at the island. “There’s a huge sycamore we can use as a landmark. And flat ground next to it for digging.” They agreed that Lee would bring a second canoe down from Pennyfield at seven and Cy would find a reason to send Katie and Pete to Great Falls before he arrived.

  “One more thing,” Cy said as Lee set out. “If you got one, bring a shovel.”

  Chapter 24

  Pennyfield Pages

  Saturday, March 29, 1924

  During Lee’s walk back to Pennyfield, his thoughts spiraled from the central question: who had killed his cousins? His fingers reached past the wet bills in his pocket to absently finger Katie’s sandstone pendant. He resisted reason, which told him that she must have been involved. Maybe against her will. He had given her the leg-irons and no one else at Swains had ever seen them. But if she’d used them to lock the bicycle, they never could have been used to drown the Emorys, because he hadn’t given her the key. So she must have chosen not to lock it. That was troubling – a breach of faith, however small. There must be another explanation, he thought, as his fingers closed around the pendant. If she was coerced into helping the killer, he prayed she hadn’t been hurt in turn. Maybe she would return to Swains and tell Cy she had left the leg-irons unlocked by mistake. Someone else must have found and used them.

  Cy. Lee still sensed that he might have had a hand in the killings. He knew that Cy owed his cousins money. And he knew that Cy’s vices – gambling and drugs – meant he might not have been able to pay. So Cy had a motive, both to steal and to cancel a debt. But the gold and silver was still in the toolbox and that didn’t make sense. Maybe Cy had come across a payback killing and scared the killer away. And then he was preparing to saw the toolbox free of the leg-irons when Lee arrived at Swains. No matter how Lee tried to construct a logical thread, it fell apart when he thought it through.

  But instinct told him that Cy was dangerous. Whether or not he was involved in the murders, Cy would regard Lee as a witness who might incriminate him. Or he might worry that Lee would exhume the Emory
s’ money for himself. As he assessed this possibility, Lee realized that he was the one at risk. By disposing of Lee, Cy could silence him and keep all the gold and silver. But Lee was younger, faster, strong; if he kept his guard up, he thought he could defend himself.

  What if Cy returned to the burial spot by himself in the days ahead? If the money was missing when he and Cy went back for it, Lee could tell the Emory clan that Cy had been seen passing gold and silver coins. And that would mean he would have to spend the next seven months wondering when a bullet would find him from the woods along the canal. So it was in Cy’s interest to live up to his agreement with Lee. Each of them would get almost four hundred dollars of the Emorys’ money. Even for Cy, that had to be enough.

  But Lee still felt anxious. Striding fast on the approach to Pennyfield, he lightly tapped Tom Emory’s knife in his pocket. It would come with him tonight. And he needed more… some other form of insurance. Not for his safety, since that was up to him alone. But in case things went wrong. What if Cy managed to betray and bury him along with the bodies of his cousins? He shuddered at his next thought. What if Katie really was involved in the murders and was collaborating with Cy? What if everything he felt about Katie, about the two of them together, was an illusion? He shook his head and willed the doubt away. That couldn’t be, and he would return from tonight’s loathsome tasks to be with her again. She would be innocent. He held the pendant lightly in his pocket. And if he was wrong, if he was killed tonight, he would make sure he left a thread for others to follow.

  By the time he reached Pennyfield, this thread was forming in his mind. He entered the lockhouse and went straight to the dining room. On top of a bureau he found the locktender’s log-book, which he carried to the table. He hung his coat on the back of a chair and tore out a blank page from the back.

  As he considered how to word his message, he struggled with the many purposes it had to serve. If he was killed by Cy tonight, he wanted someone to find his body. The only person he could trust right now was Charlie Pennyfield. This was Charlie’s lock, and he had trusted Lee to watch over it the last ten days. And Charlie wouldn’t be conflicted, since he was outside the circle of Emorys and Elgins. He was due to return on Sunday or Monday. So the message had to tell Charlie where to look. And it had to warn him that the killer or killers were still at large. He could leave an additional clue at the burial site that would implicate Cy for his own killing and the murder of his cousins. And Katie? He ardently believed she was innocent, but if she was part of it, then something should point to her as well.

  If he survived and made it back to Pennyfield, he could recover the note before Charlie found it. But what if someone else intercepted it first? His blood chilled as he considered another possibility: maybe Katie was the killer, and maybe she would find it. If that happened, she and Cy would go free and his body would never be found. He needed to leave the message in a place only Charlie would see it… somewhere no one else would care to look. Maybe the shed. And just in case, he needed to guide Charlie to the burial site using terms that wouldn’t help an unwanted reader. He tapped his pen in rhythm against the table as he thought.

  He still hoped that his cousins had been killed by enemies from their bootlegging world. If so, their deaths were a sad fate of their own making. And if Cy lived up to his word, he and Lee would split the Emorys’ silver and gold. A few hundred dollars would be a stake he could build on. He could start saving for a house. Something small in Seneca, with a view of the meadows. Would Katie like it there? Keep your focus, he scolded himself. These are the only words you can speak from your grave.

  What day was it? The 29th. Tapping the pen, he visualized the intended burial spot again. A name and an image crystallized and he began to write. When he was finished, he changed a few words and rearranged the sentences. Then he tore another page and wrote the message as legibly as he could.

  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

  He read the note a second and third time. It was the best he could manage. Charlie had spent many years at Pennyfield Lock and Lee felt sure he would understand the reference to Emmert Reed and his albino mule. To most others the clue would be opaque. He folded the note and left it on the table. Was there something else he should he leave as a clue? A reference to Katie, in case his fears came true. The photograph of them at Great Falls. She had left it near the porch-swing during her visit last night, and he found it this morning while cleaning up. If Lee went missing, the photo would provide a tacit pointer to the people Charlie should find.

  The flask with C. F. Elgin inscribed on its holster lay next to his travel bag on the stairs. Katie had probably neglected it last night because she’d been busy trying to keep him on his feet. And now he’d forgotten to return it to Swains today. Just as well, since she wasn’t there to receive it, and it would have been strange to hand the flask directly to Cy. He shook his head, amused at his diffidence. Instead you showed him the key to the leg-irons that killed your cousins! He opened the bag and pulled the photo out from between the pages of a book. Appraising the flask, he realized it would be useful tonight.

  He tore another blank page from the log-book and folded it to serve as a sleeve, then placed the message and the photo inside it. His idea about where to leave the note still made sense, so he carried the papers across the lock and turned into the woods on the path up to Charlie’s shed.

  The drill he’d bought recently was lying on the workbench where he’d left it, next to a hammer and a handsaw. He thought about leaving the message on the bench but realized that anyone who wandered in would see it. A safer approach occurred to him. He set the note and photo aside and took the hammer to the unadorned wall of cedar siding planks to his left.

  He chose a plank near the center of the wall and used the claws to remove the nails that held it in place, tossing them on the floor one by one. The studs behind the plank could hold a little shelf of cut shingle, and there was a pile of shingles in the corner. At the workbench he cut one to fit, then tapped in new nails from the workbench jar to support it. He propped the drill on the shelf – it held. He placed the photo and his note behind it, pinned against the inner face of the thick outer siding. It was a strange place to leave a message, but no stranger than the events of the day.

  He laid the plank face up on the floor. From his pockets he removed Tom Emory’s knife and Katie’s sandstone pendant, then examined the pendant’s symbol. First a curve like a tipping C, then three converging slashes. He tested the blade with his thumb; his cousin kept it sharp. He carved a shallow C near the base of the plank. Its outline was rough but he didn’t care – he was etching the symbol for himself, and to Charlie it would just be a mark. From the lower end of the curve, he extended the slashes.

  He sat back with his arms around his knees and yawned, knowing he wouldn’t sleep much tonight. Leaning against the wall, he closed his eyes for a few minutes. A stab of hunger jarred him awake. Grabbing the plank and hammer, he pulled a handful of nails from the jar and hammered the plank back in place, with Charlie’s drill and the message he hoped no one else would ever read hidden safely behind it. He left the shed and walked down through the woods.

  One more note to write… a note so pedestrian that no one but Charlie would care about it. At the dining room table he removed another page from the log-book.

  March 29

  Charlie,

  Welcome home. I left your drill in the shed, behind the marked plank.

  Lee

  He left the note in the center of the ta
ble and put the log-book away, then scraped together leftovers in the kitchen. Fried sausage and potato salad from last night and the remnants of a loaf of bread. He finished what was left of his mother’s ham with a glass of water. After eating he dragged himself up the stairs and laid down. Years of boating had taught him how to sleep while still keeping track of time. He let go and was asleep within seconds.

  When he woke up, the angle of the light striking the wall told him sunset was still an hour away. He closed his eyes and visualized the steps he needed to take. Bring the canoe and a paddle down from the rack next to Charlie’s house. He was pretty sure there was an old rubberized canvas tarp in the basement of the lockhouse that would be useful to cover a body in the canoe. And if they wanted to use it as a burial shroud for the toolbox, it probably wouldn’t be missed for a while. Charlie kept a pair of shovels in the shed and Lee had already carried one to the lockhouse a few days ago. It would take him almost an hour to paddle down to Swains. He took a deep breath and got to his feet.

  A few minutes before six, he dragged the black birchbark canoe down the berm. The shovel and tarp were under the stern seat as he pushed that half of the canoe into the water. On a final visit to the lockhouse he retrieved his coat, sliding Cy’s flask into the empty hip pocket, balancing the one that held Katie’s pendant and Tom’s knife. He pulled his cap from a hook on his way out the door. The air felt cool now as he crossed the lock, jogged down the bank to the waiting canoe, and pushed off.

  As the canoe sliced through still water, he felt a surge of adrenaline and dread. What he was going to do with Cy had to be done – there was no alternative. If he backed out, Cy would consider him a threat and might hunt him down. Or he could use Lee’s leg-irons as evidence against him. He was committed to the plan, but a subliminal fear kept reminding him his life might end tonight. He faced the stern from the bow seat, picked up the paddle, and aligned the boat’s heading with short strokes. His heartbeat slowed. He clung to the hope that Katie would return to Swains unhurt and be able to identify the killer or killers. The hope that someone other than Katie or Cy had murdered his cousins. He paddled resolutely downstream across the darkening water as the sun descended into the trees.