SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (2 page)

They carried her along the drainage,
continuing straight through sparse trees over flat terrain when the
outlet stream swung away to the left. Accustomed to lifting heavy
stones, they bore her body easily as they wove through a cordon of
boulders and approached large rocks that rose to a rounded ridge.
Beyond the ridge crest was blue sky.

Dragging the girl’s upper body with one arm,
Richard climbed onto the base of the ridge and waited for Johnny to
scramble up alongside him. The girl’s loose shoe fell and rolled
into a crack in the rock. The men reclaimed their grips,
sidestepped to the crest, and looked down at the river below. It
ran swiftly and impassively between the cliffs of the gorge.

Staring at the swirls and folds of the
current, they rested for a few breaths. Richard caught Johnny’s eye
and Johnny nodded. Holding the body by its wrists and ankles, they
swung it like a pendulum toward the river. On the second swing they
let go at the height of the forward arc, and the girl’s body soared
out into the air above the river. Her arms flew free from her sides
and hung in the air like those of a dancer as her body carved a
graceful arc toward the water. From the cliff above, they saw an
ephemeral flash of bright water, its sound lost in the rush of the
current. The body knifed into colder water beyond the reach of the
sun, then rose slowly toward the surface as the river carried it
away.

***

Sunday, May 8, 1831

Greyanne Alstyne pressed the sandstone
pendant against the smooth stick of driftwood she held in her palm.
She carefully wrapped the cord around the leaf-shaped pendant and
the stick, knotting the end to hold the two together. Looking down
at her husband Parry, she saw tears streaking his sunburned cheeks
as he worked, and she brushed a tear away from her own eye. Sitting
on a broken log he had set across the tail of the pond, he leaned
forward, tools in hand, toward the stone wall.

On a waist-high block on the southern face
of the stop-gate, Grace’s symbol was taking shape. He had already
inscribed the curve of the G and was tapping out the vertical arm.
It was a mark that Grace had designed and drawn herself, to
surprise her father when she was only seven. Greyanne watched as
Parry gently set his chisel to the stone and tapped rhythmically
with his hammer. The prominent veins on his large hands were
stained with sweat and dust. She curled her fingers around the cord
that lashed the driftwood to the pendant and turned away.

Searching for Grace, they had found her
necklace yesterday in the rough grass near the tail of the pond. It
was only a few feet from the stop-gate that had been built last
month by the vermin who killed her, with stones that Parry and the
other masons had cut. Grace had met a friend at Great Falls on
Tuesday morning, and a few people at the Tavern had seen her set
out downstream on the towpath early that afternoon. She never made
it home to Cabin John. That was five days ago now.

On Friday night one of the masons had heard
the English laborer Richard Emory, whiskeyed up with his work crew,
brag about how he and “Johnny” had “had our way with that little
half-breed Alstyne whore out on Bear Island and then fed her to the
fishes.” The mason had said that Johnny was another laborer from
Liverpool – John Garrett. And that Emory’s eye was hemorrhaged and
blackened.

Greyanne and Parry, and others who offered
to help, had scoured Bear Island in search of Grace, hoping the
boast was only half truthful, clinging to the prospect she might
still be alive. They hadn’t found their only child, dead or alive,
on the island or along the banks downstream. But they had found
Grace’s bloodstained necklace by the stop-gate. And then worse, one
of her shoes lying upside-down in a crevice on the ridge, only a
few paces from the cliffs that lined the gorge.

Greyanne walked toward those cliffs now. She
clenched her fingers in anger around the driftwood, knowing that
even if Grace’s body were found, her killers would go free. At the
base of the ridge, she fixed her long black hair into a loose knot,
then climbed up onto the rocks. She switch-backed toward the
rounded crest and continued a few steps to the precipice.

Two hundred feet away across the gorge, the
Virginia cliffs were lit by the warm morning sun. Below her the
broad coursing river reflected the soft blue sky of mid-spring. She
turned toward the upper gorge and the indomitable falls beyond it,
as her ancestors had while fishing this river five hundred years
ago. A light breeze stirred as she spoke to her lost daughter in a
clear voice and a forgotten tongue.

“Grace, those men have taken your life and cast your
body into the water.

They have stolen the lives of your children and ended
your line forever.

Now for ten generations, your spirit will rise with
the river

to drown a son of Garrett or Emory.”

She held the driftwood with its sandstone
rider aloft and flung it with all her strength into the sky above
the river. It arched through the sunlit void between the cliffs and
dropped into the water with a silent splash. A great blue heron on
the rocks below unfolded its wings and took flight. She watched
Grace’s talisman bob away in the current, then softly finished her
invocation.

“In their dreams they will see and fear you,

but they will not recognize you in their waking
lives,

until the floodwaters come to carry them away.”

The driftwood disappeared in
the march of water and time.

Chapter 1
Figure Eights

Saturday, October 21, 1995

Vincent Emory Illick opened the sliding
glass door to the backyard and stepped outside as Randy bolted past
him, headed for the woods. He closed the door, leaving it unlocked,
and turned to follow. A barely visible trail descended a wooded
hillside and he shuffled down it, dodging the branches that
occasionally blocked his path. Halfway down he saw the decaying
shed he used as a navigation reference, a hundred feet away through
the trees. Moments later he saw ghostly white walls emerge through
foliage at the base of the hill. He left the woods and entered a
field of uncut grass next to the fenced-off remnants of the
Pennyfield House, at Pennyfield Lock in the Chesapeake and Ohio
National Historical Park. Randy was already across the canal,
urinating on a tree next to the towpath. He turned back to locate
Vin, wagging his tail in anticipation. Vin jogged across the meadow
and the wooden bridge that spanned the lock, then turned south with
Randy following for the three-mile run down the towpath to
Swains.

Thin gravel on the towpath crunched beneath
his feet, beating out a melancholy rhythm that had stalked him the
last few months… thirty – five – thirty – five – thirty – five. On
October 22 – tomorrow – Vin would be thirty-five. That was almost
half a life and he didn’t feel like he had much to show for it.
Twelve years of experience along a career path he cared less and
less about. A few months severance and some stock options he’d been
able to cash in as part of the buyout. A small network of family
and friends scattered across New England and the west coast. And as
of three weeks ago, a new city, a new place to live. With Nicky –
that was one positive. And at least Nicky was sanguine about her
own career. He also had a vague and inchoate sense that he belonged
here, was here for a reason. He’d never lived in the mid-Atlantic
before, but long-dead ancestors on his mother’s side had roamed the
Maryland hills near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah
rivers for generations. For Vin, moving here somehow seemed like
coming home.

As the towpath curved clockwise in a shallow
bend, he watched his shadow slide in the opposite direction, out
over the leaf-spattered water of the canal. It bounced rhythmically
forward over the sun-drenched and slowly drifting pool, keeping
time with the thumping of his feet as he ran. Sycamores, swamp
oaks, and maples soared high overhead, sending gold, green, and
vermilion branches arching toward each other above the water. The
arms receded along the axis of the canal but never embraced. He
felt the uneven northeast breeze stiffen into an extended gust. A
shower of leaves took flight and the clear skin of the canal
morphed into a fingerprint of ripples. The falling leaves spun a
slow descent toward their graves along the canal and the towpath,
as they had for a hundred and sixty-five years.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Randy
pawing at a root. For a Saturday afternoon, this stretch of the
C&O Canal was surprisingly quiet, given that it was only
fifteen miles from the Maryland-D.C. line. He focused on the path
ahead and ran on.

Rounding a lazy bend, he saw the whitewashed
stone lockhouse at Swains emerge in the distance. He jogged
backward and whistled for Randy while scanning the terrain. An
apron of brush and trees eased down from the towpath toward the
broad Potomac River, hints of which he saw glinting in the sunlight
through the trees. The towpath itself was a flat dirt ribbon, eight
feet across. Low vegetation and vines sloped down a few feet from
the towpath to the canal, which was forty feet wide. The wooded
bank across the water rose steadily away from the canal.

Randy burst up onto the towpath from behind
a tree and jogged toward Vin, tongue hanging. Medium-sized, with a
short coat and silky ears, Randy looked to most people like a
skinny chocolate lab. But Vin had realized years ago that there
must be something else mixed in – maybe Doberman. Nicky said pit
bull. Randy was panting hard when he reached Vin, who clipped the
retractable leash he was carrying onto the dog’s collar. He turned
downstream and they ran together for the last quarter-mile to
Swains.

Like many of the old lock sites along the
C&O Canal, Swains Lock provided recreational access to the
towpath and the river. A small gravel parking lot was connected to
the towpath by a wooden footbridge over the stone lock. Between the
lot and the footbridge, a stand sold soft drinks and rented canoes
during the warm months of the year. The whitewashed locktender’s
house stood empty and shuttered, set back from the lock by trampled
grass.

Slowing to a walk, Vin examined the parking
lot as he approached the footbridge. Nicky’s wasn’t among the
handful of cars, so maybe she’d been delayed at the Clinic. He
hoped not, since she needed a break and they’d planned an afternoon
outing together. He drew his leg up onto the railing of the
footbridge to stretch his hamstring and let the leash extend so
Randy could sniff the grass beside the towpath. A man and his son
wheeled their bikes across the footbridge, and then two older women
walked past with their dogs. Vin glanced back at Randy, who was
gazing across the thinly-wooded apron toward the river.

Vin turned back to his stretching and saw a
woman crossing the parking lot toward him, holding a slack leash
clipped to a large dog – probably some kind of Akita-shepherd mix.
The dog bobbed its head eagerly from side to side, but the woman
looked straight ahead and seemed to glide forward like a cat. She
wore faded jeans and a simple sweater under a purple vest, with her
hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Her hiking boots were scuffed
and streaked with dirt. Vin glanced up as she passed and saw a
thin, faded scar descending from her left temple to the top of her
cheekbone. He guessed she might be forty, maybe a little older.

A second later the towpath behind him
erupted in a cacophony of canine aggression. A woman yelled “Allie
– let go!” as Vin whirled to see a snarling tangle of fur and fangs
where Randy had been. “Randy, no!” he yelled, sprinting back to the
towpath. He retracted the leash to yank Randy back from the other
dog, pulled it tight over Randy’s head, and put a foot on his
hindquarters to push him into a sitting position. Randy was
panting, his face and neck streaked with saliva from the other
dog’s jaws. Vin angrily held his open palm directly in front of
Randy’s eyes, then looked up at the woman and her dog.

“I’m really sorry. Are you OK?” His hair had
fallen across his forehead and he brushed it back along with
pinpricks of sweat. The woman had placed her dog into a sitting
position and was stroking its withers. She looked up at Vin.

“She must have lost her mind. That’s not
like her at all.”

Vin caught a trace of bemusement in her
voice. “What happened?”

“Your dog came over to sniff as we walked
by,” the woman said, still stroking her dog’s neck. “Allie growled
and showed her fangs, but your dog kept coming. Then Allie decided
she’d seen enough and jumped your dog.” Standing up, she took her
hand from the dog and looked at Vin. Her eyes were grayish-green
and for a moment they seemed to flit left and right as she met his
gaze.

Vin approached Allie slowly and extended a
hand toward the dog, fingers down. “That’s OK,” he said soothingly.
“Good girl, Allie.” He let her sniff his hand, then lightly ran his
fingers along the thick fur on the dog’s neck.

“I hope this is a friendly pow-wow!” called
a familiar voice. He turned to see Nicky crossing the
footbridge.

“It is now,” he said as she joined them. He
turned back toward the woman. “By the way,” he said, extending his
hand, “my name is Vin and this is Nicky.”

The woman hesitated for a second and her
eyes darted quickly from Vin to Nicky and back. They steadied and
she smiled. “I’m Kelsey,” she said.

“And it looks like our dogs have already
introduced themselves,” Nicky said. Randy was still breathing
rapidly, with his tongue hanging and flecks of saliva drying on his
neck. “Did they go at it?” she asked Vin, kneeling down in front of
Randy and pushing up her sleeves.

“For a few seconds. It sounded worse than it
actually was.”

“It usually does.” Nicky pressed her fingers
against one side of Randy’s neck and worked them around toward the
other. Wrapping her arm around his head, she tilted it back gently,
pulled his lower jaw down, and quickly inspected his teeth.