SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (43 page)

Jesus. Was that island really where he
planned on going for his “quick investigation”? If so, how did he
plan on getting there? Swimming? He and Nicky didn’t have access to
a boat. But maybe, she realized, he could rent a canoe. Like they’d
done last fall at Swains. He was an experienced canoeist, and she
knew it wouldn’t be difficult for him to ferry across to the island
if the river wasn’t running too high. Still, if that was his
destination, why wouldn’t he have driven to Swains? She shuddered
for an instant. Maybe Kelsey drove him there. Or maybe, she forced
herself to acknowledge, the circled island had nothing to do with
his absence. Maybe it was part of some innocent tangent he’d
pursued earlier.

She collected her keys and continued
downstairs, realizing as she descended that there was a simple way
to assuage her concern. If Vin was planning to canoe to the island,
he would certainly take his own paddle. He and Nicky both hated the
cheap plastic paddles that rental operations dispensed. At the
bottom of the stairs, she crossed the carpet and opened the door to
the laundry and storage area. Her gaze settled on the nylon ski
bags leaning against the far wall and the snowshoes beside them on
the cement floor. Their canoe paddles were usually part of the same
cluster. She crossed to the far wall and found her paddle propped
upside-down next to the ski bags. Behind it she saw only the iron
lock-key that looked like a useless fireplace tool leaning against
the wall. The glowing thread in her subconscious burned a shade
brighter, and her sense of time and place collapsed as her irises
darkened to indigo. Vin’s paddle was gone.

Chapter 36
Joined Sycamores

Friday, September 6, 1996

When Vin glided to a stop on the towpath,
slanting sunlight was piercing the pebbled clouds and painting the
lockhouse walls at Swains Lock. Past the scattered cars in the lot,
two canoe racks stood against the ascending green of the berm. They
held inverted aluminum canoes that looked old, with dented hulls
and boat numbers stenciled in fading black paint. He locked his
bike to a post and straightened his mud-spattered shorts, pushing
the contents of his pockets down to secure them. A quick
reconnaissance showed a middle-aged couple approaching along the
towpath from downstream and a man loading a mountain bike onto his
car rack.

Vin walked casually up Swains Lock Road,
then stepped into the woods and found his canoe paddle and shovel
where he’d left them, leaning against a thick swamp oak. He carried
them back to the lot, where the middle-aged couple had reached
their car.

He crossed the footbridge and walked down
onto the apron between the towpath and the river. Its flat dirt
floor was punctuated with old trees and a few campsites that were
used regularly in the summer but had been closed by the Park
Service yesterday as part of the protocol for a regional hurricane.
Now the apron was deserted. He followed a shallow draw that dropped
onto a flat mud landing where it met the river. Hopping down to the
landing, he laid his shovel and paddle against the wet bank. On his
return to the lot he scouted for potential witnesses.

A woman walking her tiny dog was a hundred
yards away upstream, headed toward Swains. Even if she’s parked in
the lot, he thought, I can cut a canoe loose before she sees me. He
jogged across the footbridge, then fell into a frustrated stroll as
a Volvo rolled into view. With the dog-walker getting closer, now
he’d have to wait another five minutes. At least the gray Audi
hadn’t reappeared.

He sat down at a wet picnic table. No point
in trying to stay dry, he thought, if I’m going to be hacking my
way through the woods. Tapping his foot impatiently, he thought
about the best way to search the island. His atlas showed that it
was shaped like an almond. If he landed at the tail end, he could
approach the island’s head along a path halfway between the center
and the Maryland side, then return on a line between the center and
the Virginia side. It was narrow enough that Lee Fisher’s clearing
should be visible from one of those two routes. And if the clearing
were overgrown, he should still be able to spot the joined
sycamores.

The man driving the Volvo let two large
poodles out of the back, then led them across the footbridge and
down the towpath The woman with the Pekingese took forever to towel
off her dog and start her car. Vin tapped his foot as his
frustration mounted. It was a bit after seven now – how long much
longer could he wait? The Audi might creep into the lot at any
minute. What if Kelsey Ainge saw him paddle out to Gladys Island?
She might follow him, or lie in wait when he returned. The
Pekingese-owner crept out of her parking spot and eased away.

He loped back to the towpath. The man with
the poodles was receding and no one was approaching from either
direction. Adrenaline sent him sprinting to the canoe rack. No cars
were visible on Swains Lock Road. He chose the waist-level canoe
closest to the berm, then crouched to assess it.

A thin wire cable was looped under the stern
seat and around the nearest cross-arm, its ends connected by a
padlock. He pulled out his wire-cutters and cut the cable in a
single snip. A sound startled him and he froze; it sounded like a
woman’s voice, calling cheerfully to someone nearby. He laid the
wire-cutters down and stood up, turning slowly in place to survey
the gravel lot and the area around the lock, but heard and saw
nothing. He crouched to pull the cable free, then stood up and
looked again – nothing.

Now it was time to appear deliberate and
unconcerned. He reached an arm over the canoe at its mid-point and
stepped back to lift it. Once clear of the rack, he elevated the
bow, ducked inside, adjusted his grip, and started across the lot.
I could just drag it down to the river, he thought; that’s probably
how a lot of people treat these canoes. But this way I look like I
know what I’m doing. Let’s hope I know what I’m doing. He portaged
across the apron to the dirt pitch and slid the canoe down the bank
to the landing.

If the river was already rising, the landing
would be underwater, he thought. He looked out past the eddy line
and the current toward Gladys Island. Most of the channel was only
chest-deep and the sunlit shoulders of scattered rocks still broke
the surface, as they had for most of the summer. Not for much
longer. He scrambled down the bank, slid his paddle and shovel into
the canoe, stepped in with one foot and pushed off.

It felt strange sitting in the bow seat and
paddling the canoe stern first, which was how you piloted a two-man
canoe by yourself. All of his recent outings had been with Nicky.
He stroked on alternate sides to gain momentum, then aimed upstream
as he crossed the eddy line. He set a narrow ferry angle and
paddled hard on his left to keep the current from swinging the bow
downstream. If that happened he’d be swept down past the island.
Away from shore, an army of evanescent wave crests bobbed toward
him, stretching into the distance upriver. When an occasional slap
of chop swung the canoe straight into the current, he reset the
angle with a sweep to starboard. The light breeze and the sound of
waves sliding under the hull made it seem like the boat was moving
faster than it really was. From the perspective of someone watching
from the shore, he was moving steadily across the river and
slipping slowly downstream.

The current diminished as he approached the
rocky tail of Gladys Island. When he closed within a few boat
lengths, he back-paddled on port to spin the canoe. The bank was a
steep mud pitch that rose six feet from the water before flattening
out on the island’s wooded terrain. He paddled down along it until
he found a spot where three rocks protruded from a small inlet.
Probably a miniature drainage for the island. He maneuvered the
canoe until it was lightly grounded between the rocks and nudging
the cut dirt bank. There was no way to climb out without submerging
his feet in deep silt at the water’s edge, but he’d worn his old
running shoes for that reason. He pulled the canoe further up the
cut, then grabbed the shovel and studied his landing area. A light
sweat dotted his torso and his t-shirt clung to his back. He caught
his breath, squinting into the darkening thicket.

The nearest trees were box elders and oaks
interspersed with thigh-high vines and ferns. He beat his way in
from the bank, avoiding clusters of poison ivy, ducking under wet
branches, using the shovel as a machete to bat pricker bushes
aside. Scattered large flat rocks and fallen trees created open
spaces. He took a dozen steps inland and turned toward the head of
the island, occasionally scouting the branches overhead for open
sky that would signify a clearing. The first sycamore emerged on
his left. Its scaling bark fell away to pale wood halfway up the
trunk and its highest branches fanned out sixty feet above him. But
it wasn’t part of Lee Fisher’s trinity.

He left it behind, proceeding past the broad
waist of the island. A young sycamore, and then a massive one,
extending a thick arm out over the river, appeared on each side as
the island’s curving profile pushed him leftward. The upstream end
was shaped like a fish-head and defined by a narrow channel
separating it from the broken tail of Watkins Island. He knew he
was near it when the sky closed in from both sides. It was past
sunset now; orange waves in the western sky were fading to crimson,
purple, and gray.

When he concluded there was no triad of
sycamores near the head of the island, he thrashed the shovel
through vines and picked his way toward the Virginia side before
turning to head back downstream. On this route he found evidence of
prior travelers scattered through the brush: rusted beer cans, a
tangle of fishing line, the remnants of a wooden stepladder. He
crossed a fern-infested gully and stumbled into an old campsite
with a fire ring of blackened stones under a canopy of branches.
This must have been a fisherman’s camp, he guessed; the
Virginia-facing bank had shelves of broken rocks reaching out into
the river – better than the Maryland-facing bank for launching
small boats. There were no sycamores around the campsite, though it
was getting harder to identify trees in the failing light.

He pushed on through the brush, detouring
around a fallen trunk. The face of his watch was unreadable, so he
pushed the backlight button – seven forty-five. He twisted his
headlamp on and stretched the straps over his head. Twilight was
yielding to ambient light from the open sky over the river. He
swung the shovel in frustration against shadowy foliage as his
silt-stained legs stung from their encounters with vines and his
shirt clung to his chest and back.

Why am I looking, he asked himself, for Lee
Fisher’s “truth?” Why search for something that nobody else –
except possibly Kelsey Ainge – knows or cares about… if it even
exists? It’s Friday night, he thought, and Nicky is coming home at
the end of a long work-week. Right now we should be slicing up a
baguette and cheese, eating olives, pouring red wine. What missing
thing from that sure-footed surface-world has led me here, to hack
through dark, dripping woods in the middle of an untamed and rising
river? He resisted framing the answer in words because he knew it
was an inexorcisable aspect of himself – the part that wanted to
believe there was something mysterious and valuable hidden close at
hand, something others couldn't see. The trait that in childhood
had him imagining rough gemstones imprisoned in the rocks on a
hillside, or gold dust stirred into the sand beneath his feet.

He ducked under the branches of a box elder
and stepped onto a furrowed rock that only extended an inch or two
from the ground. It was part of a cluster of low rocks that thinned
the woods. Before him was a tree with scaling bark, maybe a river
birch. He bypassed it on the stepping-stone rocks, using the shovel
as a walking stick, then saw two forgettable trees in his path… and
beyond them the silhouette of an enormous trunk. He stopped in
place and his heart beat faster as he lifted his eyes to the
treetops. Soaring above the clutter of neighboring branches, the
arching, bone-white arms of a tall sycamore stretched into the
darkness in all directions. He took a deep breath and exhaled, then
pulled off his headlamp and swept back his hair. He put the lamp
back on and aimed its beam at the base of the tree. It was the
largest sycamore he had ever seen.

There was open space behind it – a clearing.
As he drew near, his headlamp found a dark seam that rose from the
ground to a few feet overhead. Above it the trunk split into arms
of an elongated V. He smiled and slid his hand to the balance point
of the shovel, then clocked around the sycamore and into the
clearing. Moss and thin grass over flat rocks, and the third
conjoined trunk emerged. A soft breeze stirred the clearing as
drying sweat chilled his arms. He looked up and saw a dark carpet
of shifting leaves against the sky, held aloft by swaying branches
that conjured a forest of fallen antlers. He lowered the shovel
blade to the moss-covered rock and rested against it, hands on the
shaft, smiling involuntarily and wagging his head in admiration.
After almost a year of futility and false starts, he had found Lee
Fisher’s joined sycamores. For reasons he couldn’t explain, his
eyes momentarily teared with gratitude. He recited the last half of
Lee’s note to himself as thoughtlessly as a familiar prayer.

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.

Was he about to learn Lee Fisher’s fate? He
hefted the shovel and approached the tree. Along the clearing’s
perimeter, the moss-covered rocks gave way to thin topsoil and
wispy meadow grass. He stood at the roots and touched flaking
patches of tan and gray bark with his fingertips. This was the
sycamore’s third trunk. Or maybe the first, he thought, since it
was closest to the clearing. Did it lead to the money, the killers
or the dead? He squinted at the roots fanning out beside his feet,
then assessed the trunk up to eye level and beyond. It seemed
completely normal, bearing nothing that could be interpreted as a
sign.