SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (36 page)

Chapter 28
The Level Trade

Tuesday, August 27, 1996

Passing the sleek trunk of a crepe myrtle
protruding from her patio, Kelsey caught a glimpse of the
television through the glass doors to the study. She’d left it on
when she stepped outside to water her plants, and the screen now
displayed a satellite image of red-orange spots on a familiar blue
field. Three spots were aligned from west to east – the westernmost
a whorl with an icy blue eye and emerging spiral arms; the central
spot broader but split and unfocused; the easternmost off the
African coast and underscored by a dotted line of fiery scars. She
shaded her eyes and squinted through the glass at the image on the
screen. Below the picture was a boldface caption, “Hurricane
Edouard and Tropical Storm Fran.” She felt a spike of adrenaline
and resolve. Her quarry’s illness and slow recovery had made the
last five months uneventful, but those listless days were over
now.

She finished her morning chores and drove to
her studio, where her concentration repeatedly strayed from an
editing project. Whatever was going to happen had to begin now. At
two o’clock she hung the “Closed” sign on the front door with a
note saying she would reopen at three. She drove home to Vera Lane
and went straight to her study. Allie rose up from her dog bed in
the corner of the room, wagging at Kelsey’s early return.

“Not yet, honey. We’ll take a nice walk
later, when it cools down.”

Facing her built-in bookcase, she pulled a
slim volume from the shelf that held books with library tags. Its
dust jacket was missing, but the book’s gray cover was clean and
unscuffed, its title clearly legible on the spine. She carried it
to her desk and pulled the Montgomery County phonebook from a
drawer. It was easy to find the unusual name; she wrote the phone
number down on scrap paper. Looking at the library book, she jotted
down its title, author, and call number, then slid the book into
her purse, pocketed the paper, and headed back out to the car.

A few minutes later she stood before the
card catalog in the Potomac Library, opening the Ca – Ch drawer and
flipping through cards aimlessly for a minute or two, then
scribbling on the scrap paper from her pocket. She closed the
drawer and used the scrap to navigate to the Maryland geography and
history shelf, where she knelt to study the numbered spines. When a
glance confirmed she was unobserved, she slid the book out of her
purse and inserted it between its assigned neighbors. She retreated
past the checkout desk with her purse open, but no one asked to
examine it.

In the entryway she stopped in front of a
payphone on the wall and dialed the phone number she’d looked up at
home. After several unanswered rings she heard a recorded voice.
That was the outcome she’d been hoping for, since it foreclosed the
possibility she’d be questioned. She left a message, hung up, and
drove across the street to her studio.

***

Vin entered the house and carried the
dog-food up to the kitchen, greeting Randy on the way. On the
kitchen counter, the answering machine’s green message light was
flashing. He poured himself a glass of water and pushed the play
button.

“Hi, this is the Potomac Library calling for
Vincent Illick,” the woman’s voice said. “We’re calling to notify
you that a book you requested has been returned. The book is called
The Level Trade: Lock-Tenders and Merchants on the Chesapeake
and Ohio Canal
, by Wesley Vieira. If you’re still interested,
we’ll be happy to reserve it for you. Thanks and we look forward to
your next visit.”

He listened to the message twice; the
woman’s voice seemed familiar but he couldn’t place it. He thought
about his trip to the library last fall. That was before his
illness. Before the fever, fatigue, and strange dreams that
accompanied his battle with mycobacterium abscessus. The infection
had started in March when he’d fallen on the little wooden crosses
he’d found on Bear Island. After the pus was drained from his wound
and his diagnosis confirmed, the antibiotics had helped his hip
begin healing within a few weeks. But his loss of appetite and
energy had lasted much longer, and it was mid-June before he’d been
able to work for more than an hour or two or leave the house for
any length of time. During his weeks of enervation, Nicky had
called his condition “Vin’s 1924 flu.”

As the symptoms diminished and disappeared,
he’d been able to start moving forward with work again, launching
phase two of the Rottweiler project. And last month he and Nicky
had finally mailed the invitations to their October 19th wedding.
The venue – Goose Creek Vineyards, across the Potomac near Leesburg
– was nailed down, and they had a celebrant to perform the service.
They had a band, the same one he and Nicky had heard at the New
Year’s party at the Spanish Ballroom. And a photographer, Joel
Bettancourt. They’d both liked the wedding pictures that Kelsey
Ainge had shown them, but Vin couldn’t shake the suspicion that she
was shadowing him, that she had somehow infiltrated his search for
Lee Fisher’s buried money and truth.

On the heels of his illness, progress with
Rottweiler and the wedding had eroded his attachment to that
search. By now Lee Fisher, K. Elgin, and the 1924 mystery almost
seemed like an antique snow globe sitting on a mental shelf of
curios and puzzles, the snowflakes drifting over a young couple in
period dress and a mule-team pulling a canal boat.

And yet… He’d enjoyed reading the books he’d
found about the history of the canal and the old newspaper articles
chronicling the flood of 1924, even if they’d provided no
references to Lee Fisher or K. Elgin and no leads to Charlie
Pennyfield or Emmert Reed. He remembered the Vieira book he’d found
listed in the catalog but missing from the shelf. Hadn’t the
librarian told him it wasn’t checked out? She’d suggested it was
probably stolen and wouldn’t reappear.

Yet here it was behind the flashing green
light on his answering machine, trying to get his attention. He
felt a dormant flame flare up, like a furnace triggered by the
season’s first cold breaths. During the spring and summer the pilot
light had flickered but never gone out. Just to gain closure it
made sense to get the book. Like the others it would offer no
leads, and after reading it he could bequeath Lee Fisher’s 1924 to
the past.

Chapter 29
Edwards Ferry

Wednesday, August 28, 1996

The following afternoon Vin stood on a dirt
ramp that led from the towpath to the river, examining a display
sign that offered historical perspective on Edwards Ferry.

An Ideal Crossing

The Potomac River is calm and narrow here, making it
an ideal location for a ferry crossing. In 1791 Edwards Ferry began
to operate here, connecting Maryland farmers to the Goose Creek
Canal in Virginia and to Leesburg markets. The ferry closed in 1836
but the community that grew around it continued, carrying on the
name. Over time, a general store, a warehouse, and 36 residents
composed the Edwards Ferry community. With the coming of the
C&O Canal the small village prospered from the increase in
commerce.

The text was arrayed above two old images of
Edwards Ferry. The uppermost was an illustration of foot soldiers
and horse-drawn caissons marching down a broad dirt avenue and
passing a cluster of houses on their way to the river, visible in
the distance beyond. The caption read “General Stone’s Division at
Edwards Ferry” and the sign elaborated:

During the Civil War, Edwards Ferry connected Union
Maryland with Confederate Virginia. Harper’s Weekly depicted Union
troops passing through Edwards Ferry in October 1861. Many troops
and supplies from both sides crossed the river here throughout the
war.

The
Harper’s Weekly
illustration was
superimposed on an enlarged photograph from the early 1900s, taken
from the vantage point Vin occupied now. It showed leafless trees
flanking a deserted path leading down to a wooden boat ramp.
Presiding over the path was a brick building with tall windows on
both stories. Vin looked at the gutted shell to his left. All that
remained now were its side walls and a portion of the back wall.
The sign explained its fate.

The crumbling Jarboe’s Store remains here today. It
was a general store and post office operated by Eugene E. Jarboe in
the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Flood damage forced the
National Park Service to partially tear down the unstable
structure.

He opened the book in his hand to the
bookmark he’d inserted an hour ago at the library. Author Wesley
Vieira provided a more detailed account of the proprietors and
times of Jarboe’s Store, but from Vin’s perspective those times
ended too soon. After the ferry stopped running in 1836, Jarboe’s
relied on the canal for both customers and supplies. Diminishing
canal traffic undermined the store, and Jarboe’s closed in
1906.

It was a passing reference Vieira made to a
denizen of Edwards Ferry during the last decade of canal operations
that caught Vin’s attention at the library.

Emmert “M-Street” Reed tended Lock 25 at Edwards
Ferry from 1913 until the canal’s demise in 1924. To help fill the
void left by Jarboe’s, Reed built a smokehouse and sold smoked pork
and turtle to boatmen and local residents. Reed’s nickname
reportedly derived from his affinity as a younger man for the
Georgetown taverns at the terminus of the canal. During
Prohibition, rumors held that thirsty boatmen could sidestep the
law and purchase pints of moonshine whiskey from Reed while
transiting Lock 25.

A penciled arc extended from the space
between the words “Reed” and “tended” in the first line. The arc
curved to an annotation in the right margin that read “and his
albino mule?”, and was written in a woman’s hand that he’d seen
before – in the Kytle book, on his trip to the library last fall.
He had smiled grimly while connecting the dots. His encounter with
Kelsey Ainge at the New Year’s party, with her disingenuous comment
about joined sycamores. The words he’d found under the snow, etched
into the railings that joined the sycamores at Carderock.
“Killers.” “Dead.” “Why are you here?” The visit to her studio with
Nicky, when he’d seen the photo of the mason’s mark on her wall.
And the little crosses planted on top of the stop-gate at Bear
Island, directly above the mark. Then yesterday’s message from the
library in a voice that sounded familiar. And now this handwritten
reference to Emmert Reed’s albino mule. She was playing a cryptic
game with him using excerpts from Lee Fisher’s note. The game had
lost its momentum during his illness, but now it seemed to be
starting again.

There was no other mention of Emmert Reed in
Vieira’s book, but after reading the annotated passage, Vin had
been unable to leave the book behind at the library and abandon Lee
Fisher’s puzzle and Kelsey Ainge’s game for good. Though he had
been drifting toward obsession last winter, he’d started swimming
toward shore when his fever broke. Each stroke represented forward
progress on his Rottweiler project or the wedding plans and pulled
him closer to the limen. But now with one foot on terra firma and
one in the water, he felt he was falling back in. He had checked
the book out at the circulation desk and headed home.

And driving out River Road from Potomac, he
found himself passing the turn for Ridge Line Court. Then passing
Pennyfield Lock Road. And Seneca Road, three miles beyond, after
which River Road turned to gravel and zigzagged through
seemingly-deserted sod farms before ending at an unmarked
intersection with a forgettable county lane. Two more miles brought
him to Edwards Ferry Road, which led through tangled trees to the
canal. There was an unpaved parking area, a wooden bridge across
the lock, and the dirt path down to the river. This setting must
have been known well by Emmert Reed’s albino mule. As he approached
the bridge, he’d scouted the nearby trees for sycamores joined at
the base.

***

He closed Vieira’s book and climbed the dirt
incline toward the towpath. The lockhouse stood boarded up to his
left, flanked on three sides by lush grass. He detoured onto the
back lawn. The two upper stories were whitewashed bricks but the
foundation was made of rough-hewn stone from which the paint had
worn away. Because the house was built on a downslope from the
towpath, the rear half of this foundation was above ground. It
featured generous windows and two doors, all boarded up with
green-painted wooden partitions that were screwed into the frames.
He circled to the far side of the house and climbed the grassy
pitch to the towpath. The front door and windows were sealed the
same way.

He looked up and down the towpath and saw no
one. On a weekday one or two cyclists, joggers or birdwatchers
might pass Edwards Ferry on the towpath every few hours, but the
site was far enough from major roads that it received a small
fraction of the traffic that swarmed over the towpath every day
around Great Falls.

Feeling a stab of dejection, he returned to
his car. What had he expected to find here? A plaque next to the
lockhouse detailing the exploits of famous locktender Emmert Reed?
Unless his memoirs were stashed somewhere inside the lockhouse, old
M-Street had left no trace of his tenure at Edwards Ferry. Grasping
at straws, Vin decided to drive home through Poolesville, the
closest real town on the Maryland side of the river. Vieira’s book
mentioned that Charlie Poole had tended lock and managed Jarboe’s
store in the years before Emmert’s tenure at Lock 25, so Vin
guessed that old M-Street Reed might also be a local product. If
he’d lived in Poolesville while not tending lock, maybe his
grandchildren lived there today.

At the Poolesville post office he thumbed
the community phone book and found listings for Ben Reed, D Reed,
and Thomas H. Reed. He copied the names and numbers into a spiral
notepad he kept in the car and drove back toward Potomac.