SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (10 page)

***

Pedaling the five-plus miles back to
Pennyfield Lock, Nicky fell in behind Vin. The tourist traffic
thinned out a mile above Great Falls and Vin tried to visualize
what the canal must have looked like while it was still operating.
Mule teams moving steadily down the towpath and barges gliding
silently around the bends, day and night. How long ago was that? He
thought the ranger had said the C&O shut down in 1924. That was
the year written on Lee Fisher’s photo! Or had he heard
incorrectly?

Two miles along, he saw the whitewashed
stone lockhouse at Swains emerge on the berm side of the canal. He
let his bike decelerate up the incline beside the lock.

“Let’s stop for a second, honey.”

“At the scene of your latest dog-fight?”
Nicky dismounted and bent to stretch her lower back as Vin laid his
bike down. The downstream gate was open, set flush into the lock
wall, so its swing-beam ran parallel to and above the wall. He
tried to push the end of the beam toward the towpath to close the
gate. It moved an inch and stopped. He noticed a thin wire cable
connecting the swing-beam to its counterpart across the lock. Since
the wire was taut and the beams were designed to swing in opposing
directions, neither beam could move. When he pushed the beam again,
the cable transferred his effort to the beam across the lock.

Nicky had finished stretching and walked
over to him with her bike. She ran its front tire slowly over his
foot. “Hey Inspector Clouseau – tell me this is a temporary
obsession.”

He extracted his foot. “I was just admiring
the construction. This lock is like Lock 20; it’s still in good
shape. The lock-keys are missing, but the original iron stems and
hinge collars are all intact.” He pointed at the upstream face of
the swing-beam. “There’s the old iron stirrup bracket that must
have been used to support the block that held the crossing plank. I
guess they took the planks away on the downstream gates.” He
surveyed the lock walls. “And look at the red stone bricks they
used to build the lock. Imagine how much work it must have been to
hand-cut all of these stones.”

“OK, that’s the end of today’s history
lesson. You can write it up for your social-studies teacher. Let’s
keep moving.”

They pedaled upstream toward Pennyfield,
passing a scattering of Swains-based dog-walkers and joggers en
route, and Vin’s thoughts drifted to the next set of tasks on his
project for Rottweiler. If he got some comments back by Monday or
Tuesday, he could start designing the database by mid-week.
Otherwise he’d have to spend the week reading programming books and
playing with sample code. He kept his eyes on the towpath and
didn’t notice as they passed a slender woman wearing dark glasses
and a canvas jacket and walking back toward Swains.

“Hey,” Nicky said as they passed the woman.
“Wasn’t that your victim?”

“What?” He looked back to hear her
better.

“From last weekend. Your mysterious
photographer friend.”

Chapter 6
Books

Wednesday, November 15, 1995

Vin walked into the Potomac Library for the
first time. It was small but inviting, with a perimeter of stacks
surrounding circular reading tables and half-height reference
shelves in the center of the room. A librarian at the information
desk guided him to a shelf devoted to Maryland geography and
history, a portion of which held books about the Chesapeake and
Ohio Canal. After thumbing the relevant titles, he carried four
books to a cubicle on the far wall.

Sunlight slanting through tinted windows
warmed his shoulders as he placed a notepad and pencil on the
cubicle desk. He jotted down the names of the authors and leaned
back to open the first book, Walter Sanderlin’s
The Great
National Project: A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
.
The 1946 book chronicled the history of the canal’s construction,
operation, financial troubles, and demise in densely-footnoted
detail, beginning with the chartering of the Ohio Company in 1749
in an attempt to develop a trade route connecting the Ohio River
territory with Washington and Baltimore via the Potomac River
valley.

He set it aside and opened
A Towpath
Guide to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
by Thomas F. Hahn, which
offered a terse mile-by-mile discussion of the architecture,
history, topography, and ecology of the C&O Canal, from
Georgetown to Cumberland. The pages covering locks 21 and 22
provided structural details on the locks and lockhouses at Swains
and Pennyfield, but no information about the 1920s denizens of
those lockhouses.

Another Hahn book,
The Chesapeake and
Ohio Canal: Pathway to the Nation’s Capital
, seemed more
promising. He skimmed an entertaining account by an itinerant New
Englander of his experience as a novice boathand on a coal barge
during a trip from Cumberland to Georgetown and back in 1859. And
he found descriptions of 19th-century canal characters, along with
recollections and anecdotes from aging boatmen that Hahn had
interviewed in the 1960s and 1970s. Getting closer to the mark, he
thought. By now he had memorized Lee Fisher’s note, so he knew what
names to look for. He turned to the index listings under R.

Renner. Rumsey. No Reed. No Elgin or Fisher
in the index either, and no reference to Swains Lock, but four
listings under Swain. Based on the remarks attributed to them in
the text, he was confident that Clifford and John Swain were
boatmen. Mamie Swain seemed to be a boater’s wife and Otho Swain’s
occupation wasn’t specified, though he was quoted on the
superiority of mules to horses for canal work. Vin was sure that
one or more of those Swains had inspired the colloquial name for
Lock 21. And if that were true, maybe the Hahn book had a relevant
listing under Pennyfield, the name associated with Lock 22.

No listing in the index for Pennyfield Lock,
but he found this: Pennifield, Charlie. His eyebrows arched as he
silently recited the beginning of Lee’s note. “Charlie, If it is
April and I am missing…”.

Dismissing the spelling discrepancy, he
flipped to page 134 and read, “Charlie Pennifield at lock 22 made
and sold boat poles and pole-hooks to the boatmen.” I found
something in your shed last month, Charlie – not far from the
workbench you used to build your poles and hooks. A message someone
left for you seventy years ago. Why was it hidden? Why didn’t you
ever find it yourself? What happened to Lee Fisher? Did Lee’s note
reflect an unfounded fear, or was he really “buried along with the
others at the base of three joined sycamores?”

And what of the young woman, K. Elgin? The
Hahn book held no other insights into Charlie Pennyfield, so he
closed it on the cubicle desk and opened the fourth book.
Home
on the Canal
by Elizabeth Kytle. Along with a distilled
chronology of the C&O Canal’s construction and seventy-five
years of operations, the book gave a simple explanation for its
demise: on March 29, 1924, an epic flood struck the upper Potomac
Valley and swept downstream, reaching Washington on March 31 and
wrecking much of the canal’s infrastructure along the way. While it
was the first major flood on the Potomac in decades, the March
freshet was followed two months later by a comparable flood, and
the combination of extensive structural damage and poor economic
prospects ended operations on the C&O Canal forever.

He felt a tingling at the edges of his
scalp. March 29, 1924. That was also the date on Lee’s note. “…I
fear I have been killed because of what happened today at Swains
Lock.”

But Swains was on the lower portion of the
canal, and if the flood hit D.C. on March 31, the floodwaters must
still have been far upstream when Lee wrote those words. So the
event Lee alluded to must have preceded the arrival of the flood at
Swains. And once it hit, wouldn’t the locks and the towpath at
Swains and Pennyfield have been swamped? But Charlie Pennyfield’s
shed, Vin remembered, was part-way up the wooded hillside above the
Pennyfield house. So even if the flood had submerged the towpath
and the lock, the shed would have remained dry.

He flipped through the second half of
Kytle’s book and smiled when he realized that it consisted largely
of transcribed interviews the author had conducted in 1979 with
survivors of the canal era. The interviewees had grown up on the
canal and were teenagers or young adults when it closed, but the
interviews were full of references to memorable characters from the
generations that preceded them.

The first reminiscences were from a person
Vin had just encountered in Hahn’s book: Otho Swain. Otho had been
born on his father’s barge and boated with his father until 1909,
when he was eight. At that point his father gave up boating and
assumed responsibility for tending Lock 21. Otho’s father Jess
Swain was the person for whom Lock 21 was named.

Vin skimmed through several more interviews,
then turned to the index. No listings for Elgin, Fisher, or Reed,
but one for Pennyfield, Charlie, and one for Pennyfield, George.
Both listings pointed to a page in the interview with Raymond
Riley, who was born and raised at Lock 24 in Seneca – better known
as Riley’s Lock. All Vin could learn from the mention of the
Pennyfields was that Charlie was George’s son and had assumed
responsibility for Lock 22 after “old man Pennyfield” died.

The next paragraph described the Rileys’
neighbors and friends, but Vin’s focus was drawn sideways to an
annotation. The name Charlie Pennyfield was underlined in the text
and an arrow pointed to the right-hand margin, where a penciled
comment read:

Be careful you don’t share my fate.

The final line from Lee Fisher’s message to
Charlie Pennyfield! Written, he thought, in a woman’s hand. His
mouth suddenly felt dry and he swallowed and rubbed his temples. No
one but he and Nicky had seen Lee’s note! The writing wasn’t hers.
Instinctively he scanned the library to see if anyone was watching
him. He leaned forward and pushed the book deeper into the shade of
the cubicle. Following impulse, he used his pencil to erase the
arrow and annotation, then swept away the residue and set Kytle’s
book atop the others on the desk.

He carried his notepad and pencil back to
the card catalog and flipped through the entries under Chesapeake
and Ohio Canal. One caught his attention. The call number led him
back to the shelf he’d already perused, but this book was missing.
He searched the shelves nearby to see if it had been misfiled; no
sign of it.

It was 5:35 pm according to the library’s
clock, so Nicky should be getting home from the Clinic any time
now. He took his four books to the checkout desk, where the
librarian issued him a library card. When he mentioned he was
interested in an additional book that appeared to be checked out,
the librarian asked if he wanted to reserve it and be notified when
it came back.

“Sure,” he said, and she turned to her
terminal.

“Can you tell me the author and title?”

Vin checked his scrap of paper. “It’s by
Wesley Vieira,” he said, spelling the surname as she typed. “And
the title is
The Level Trade: Lock-Tenders and Merchants on the
Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
.”

She studied her screen. “Well,” she said, “I
can place a hold on it for you, but I’m not optimistic. Our system
says it isn’t checked out. It should be on the shelf. So someone
may have walked off with it.”

He thanked her and left the library. The air
had cooled noticeably and the last sunset colors were fading to
black.

***

Nicky heard the muffled thump of a car door
in the driveway and looked up from her magazine to watch Randy trot
down to the front door. Then came one of Vin’s standard greetings:
“Randolfo! Howza whatza, buddy?”

Trailed by Randy, Vin came to greet Nicky on
the couch, putting his books on the coffee table and leaning over
to give her a kiss. She eyed the books. “Looks like you’ve been to
the library.” She spun them to read their spines. “
The Great
National Project – A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal
.
I’m amazed you were able to get this!” she said, feigning
enthusiasm. “It must be really popular with book clubs.”

“You laugh, but one of the books I wanted
was checked out. Or maybe stolen.”

“I guess you’re not the only canal nut,”
Nicky said. A flash of worry darted like a sparrow across the path
of her thoughts and she squinted, turning her eyes a darker blue.
“Wasn’t today supposed to be a consulting day for you?”

“It was,” he said, turning toward the
kitchen, “and it was. I spent an hour on a conference call with
Rottweiler this morning. They like most of what I sent them but my
old team in Boston wants to add some features.”

Nicky watched him recede across the living
room. With his loping gait, he sometimes reminded her of a wolf.
Those stone-colored khakis must be ten years old. And that loose
cotton sweater over his broad, bony shoulders gave him the angular
aspect of a college boy. Nicky started to smile but sighed instead.
And sometimes the maturity of a college boy, she thought. What
accounted for that?

“Anyway, I got a green light for the main
specifications on phase one,” Vin said, returning to the living
room with a beer. “And I spent most of the day writing definitions
for the stuff they want to add.” He sat down in an armchair and
stretched his legs onto the table. “And then I decided I needed a
break. And a little local culture.”

“So I see.” Nicky pulled her knees up to her
chest and tucked her feet under a cushion on the couch. At least it
sounded like Vin was committed to the Rottweiler project. It seemed
like he was on the hook to develop this database and Web stuff for
the next six months. But where were things headed after that? He
hadn’t said anything about looking for a full-time job. Their
wedding remained entirely unplanned, a concept. They hadn’t even
picked a date, since Nicky’s parents were spending two months at a
university in Tokyo next fall and the dates for that trip remained
tentative. They could start working on the wedding logistics, she
thought, but Vin hadn’t taken the initiative, so she would have to
push things along herself.