Swains Lock

by Edward A. Stabler

  For an instant he remembered being buried in a snowdrift after falling through the bridge on the Billy Goat Trail while snowshoeing with Nicky. He had found her lying with limbs askew, and she had seemed distant, almost entranced. Vin had helped her up and then fallen headfirst into the drift-filled gully, because the orange warning sign had been thrown into the snow under the dismembered bridge. His scalp tightened underwater as he realized now that Nicky had removed the sign. Then she had dug for him in the wrong place while he struggled to forge an airway through the snow before suffocating. He had been living with someone who, unconsciously or not, had tried twice to kill him in the last eight months.

  When his hip reached the floor of the lock, he brought his feet beneath him and swept his free hand until he touched the shackle. Where was its keyhole? He ran his fingers over the converged C-arms, then rubbed the base with his thumb. The chain must have been twisted when Nicky closed the cuff, because the keyhole was facing his foot. As he reached the key around to find it, he snagged a link of chain and the key jerked out of his fingers. In disbelief, he snatched at the chain with an open palm, then swung his hand through the water below it, hoping to catch the key before it settled into the silt. He touched only water. His head throbbed and he almost gagged. He saw himself on an icy mountain ridge, taking a single, false step and beginning to slide, confronting the reality as he accelerated that he had passed the point of no return. His lungs were burning and he needed air. Fuck!

  He sprung skyward, kicking hard and thrusting his arms. This time his mouth barely reached the surface and he took a breath of watery air. Eyes directed up, he couldn’t see the lock walls, but the sound and turbulence of flowing water had diminished. The lock might not fill much further. He dropped back to the bottom and gathered himself.

  There was a second key. If it opened the toolbox, he could dump out the contents and try to tread water despite its weight. Or maybe he could drag the box to the gate and find a way to climb it. He dug the remaining key out of his pocket, then traced the chain to the handle of the toolbox. His entire body burned with lactic acid and fatigue as he stroked the box in search of the lock plate. Where was it? Here! He brought his fingers together and attempted to insert the key, pressing it against the box as he adjusted its position. It slipped into the lock! He pushed it in fully, then tried to twist it left and right. The key refused to turn.

  No! He twisted harder but couldn’t turn it. Was the lock rusted? Broken? Fuck! He let go, set his feet against the lock floor, and sprung toward the surface again, keeping his arms at his side and exhaling as he rose. The chain stopped him as the crown of his head broke the surface. He kicked violently with his free leg, thrust hard with his arms and hands, and felt the toolbox rise from the lock floor. As his mouth neared the surface, he thrashed harder. Close, closer, a breath. How many more times could he surface before his strength gave out? When he reached the bottom again, he ignored the box and rested, tethered underwater. Thoughtless seconds later he fought his way up for another breath and screamed.

  ***

  Kelsey opened her eyes toward the roots of the trees and saw stars. They spun and receded as the dark trunks of the swamp oaks took shape. She rolled onto her back and raised her right hand tentatively to her warm, sticky scalp. The bleeding had stopped and the blood was drying now, but it had run freely down her temple, dripped onto her neck, and pooled in the hollow of her ear. She traced the stained skin lightly with her fingers. Someone had screamed in the distance a minute ago. She looked up at the canoe rack and saw a single looming hull on its uppermost arms. The two lowest slots were empty.

  Shards of memory fell back into place. There had still been daylight when she walked over to examine the rack with the missing canoe. She had seen the wire cutters lying on the ground. And then as she was kneeling to pick them up, she’d heard a footstep and turned to see the iron rod diving toward her head. She’d flinched and ducked, and the bar had grazed her scalp and slammed into her shoulder.

  Lying on the beaten grass between the canoe rack and the trees, she gingerly raised her right arm. A bolt of pain shot through her shoulder and neck. She closed her eyes and lowered her arm to the ground. Her throat felt dry and she tried to swallow. Another scream rose and echoed from a nearby well. She opened her eyes, propped her left hand against the ground and sat up. The humid air seemed chilly but the sweater she had tied around her waist was gone. Remembering what she had come for, she staggered to her feet. The canoe rack reeled before her and she leaned against it to regain her balance. Then she walked unsteadily across the lot toward the gates of Swains Lock. To confirm the truth of Whites Ferry. And so it wouldn’t happen again.

  ***

  Suspended underwater, Vin felt himself slipping into a world between the living and the dead. The lock was quiet now, the water over nine feet deep. He realized that if the canal were still in use, the water in the lock and the level upstream would have been two feet higher and he wouldn’t be able to reach the surface. He could barely reach it now. He had refined his technique, but his exhausted body was burning its last reserves of energy after hours of exertion and fear. The skin around his ankle was flayed and abraded from the cuff. And he was cold. All he wanted was to breathe, and it almost didn’t matter anymore whether the breath was air or water. Just to inhale, exhale, and forget about the fight.

  He dropped into a crouch on the lock floor and shot toward the surface like a hungry fish, flutter-kicking and driving with his arms as his mouth stretched for a breath from the ocean of air overhead. But now his shackled ankle flinched from the pain of kicking and its reticence left him short; his nose was still underwater when he stalled and began falling back. His lungs caught fire and he was compelled to exhale as he descended.

  He felt as if his brain was being squeezed like a grapefruit for denying his body an underwater breath. I can’t! I’ll drown! Try for the surface again! A roaring arose in his ears and it seemed as if the water was beginning to move. This is it, he thought. The flood is here. It’s washing downriver, covering everything in its path. It’s here to bury me in Swains Lock. He sensed now that he’d come full circle, to the foot of a great turning wheel that would grind him into the past, uniting him with his forebears while rolling in place, raining down generations of the living, claiming and recycling the dead.

  He fell back into a crouch at the bottom, head and lungs throbbing, every strand afire. Fuck it. My body and mind are lost and I have nothing left to lose. He shot again toward the surface, kicking and thrashing through the pain, and his mouth broke the skin of the water for a breath. He inhaled and fell to the bottom where he hunched like an ancient amphibian. Water flowed across his back and shoulders and uncounted seconds passed before he sprung skyward again. This time his whole head emerged and he managed two breaths.

  Falling again, he became aware the lock was draining. He pushed for the surface and was able to tread water and breathe without lifting the box. A woman with disheveled honey-colored hair and blood stains on her face and neck was standing on the lock wall, looking down at him with a ragged smile. He tried to smile back but tears filled his eyes instead. He blinked to see more clearly and drew a grateful breath. It was Kelsey Ainge.

  Chapter 38

  Revisiting

  Sunday, September 7, 1997

  When his feet touched ground at the base of the rock face at Carderock, Vin pulled slack into the belay rope and opened his hand to reveal a gleaming gold coin in the center of his palm.

  “You have learned well, grasshopper,” Kelsey said.

  “You did a lousy job of hiding it.”

  “I wasn’t trying to hide it. I just wanted to put it in a challenging spot. To make sure you didn’t wimp out and take the novice route.”

  “What if I had?” Vin said, untying the rope from his climbing harness. “That’s a five-hundred-dollar coin. You would have had to climb back up yourself and get it.”

  “I had faith in you.”

  He swept his
hair back from his sweating forehead and smiled. “Be careful when you do that. I’ve learned that people aren’t always what they seem.”

  Kelsey laughed and pulled the belay rope down. “So I’ve heard. You didn’t seem like a budding research historian when you moved here.” Her smile dissolved when she saw the distant look in Vin’s eyes. “Are you thinking about Nicky?”

  “I was, for a second. It’s been a year now, but I keep expecting to see her somewhere. Maybe passing on the sidewalk with someone else. Or across a crowded theater.” He looked up at the line of trees above the rock face and saw a squirrel leap from branch to branch. “Or walking through the woods.”

  “I don’t think you’ll see her again,” Kelsey said as she began coiling the rope. “You or anyone else.”

  “You’ve said that before, and I’ve never asked you why. So now I will. Just because no one we know has heard from Nicky, what makes you think she’s dead?”

  “I never said I thought she was dead. I think she doesn’t exist anymore. Not as Nicky, anyway.”

  Vin gave her a puzzled look. “So you think she’s alive, but has a new identity?”

  “It’s strange, I know. But they never found Des Gowan’s body at Whites Ferry either. And I still believe she survived.”

  “I’m sticking with Melissa Gowan, not her hippie-chick name, since MG was carved on the trunk of the killers. The one I thought memorialized the dead.”

  “Mel changed her name to Destiny,” Kelsey said, winding the rope in loops around her bent arm, “during our junior year in college. Just before she met Miles Garrett. After that, there were times I felt I didn’t know her at all. She sometimes had this expression that made you think her mind was a hundred miles away. Like she was inhabited by someone else.” She looked up from the rope to catch his eye. “That’s how she looked when she shifted into reverse at Whites Ferry.”

  “What?” Vin felt the back of his neck begin to throb.

  “I’ve never mentioned it to anyone before,” she said, turning back to her coiling. “Whites Ferry wasn’t an accident. Consciously or not, Des knew what she was doing. And I still think she’s out there somewhere.”

  Kelsey reached the end of the rope and began to wrap it like a python around the gathered loops. “I think Nicky survived the flood, too,” she said. “And she may eventually come looking for Vincent Emory Illick again...” She tied off the rope and looked at him and he noticed the faint scar on her temple, “…but it will be as someone else.” Her gray-green irises flitted in tiny oscillations as they had when Vin first met her on the towpath at Swains. When they steadied, he saw reflected in them a glimmer of Lee Fisher’s truth.

  ************

  Thanks for reading SWAINS LOCK. While the characters are imaginary, all of the places in the novel (with the exception of a few renamed residential streets) are real, and the devastating floods the book describes occurred on the dates depicted in the story. If you enjoyed the novel, I’d greatly appreciate a brief positive review on Amazon or Goodreads.

  The River Trilogy continues with BURYING ZIMMERMAN, which stars the heroin dealer from SWAINS LOCK. You can find a blurb about BZ on my website, at http://khola.com .

  If you're interested in learning more about the history of the C&O Canal, I encourage you to track down the books that Vin consulted in the story, all but one of which exist and are informative resources. Here's the list:

  The Great National Project: A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal by Walter S. Sanderlin, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946, 2005

  Home on the Canal by Elizabeth Kytle, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983

  The C&O Canal Companion by Mike High, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000

  The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: Pathway to the Nation's Capital by Thomas F. Hahn, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984

  Images of America: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal by Mary H. Rubin, Arcadia Publishing, 2003

  Most of all, I encourage you to visit the C&O Canal National Historical Park. Walk the towpath and stop to examine the broken locks, waste weirs, and boarded-up lockhouses. Read the informative display signs that the Park Service continues to add and you'll get a sense for the people and pace of the canal era. Visit Great Falls (on the Maryland or the Virginia side) and imagine a young George Washington standing where you stand, squinting upriver as he pondered how to bring Ohio Valley barges past those thundering falls. And if you feel an ephemeral chill or sense an unseen presence as you walk back toward the park entrance, remember that Grace's spirit still roams those woods.

  Edward A. Stabler