SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (4 page)

“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.