SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (30 page)

“Fuckin’ whore!” Tom swore.

“No use cussin’ her now, Tommy,” Kevin said
grimly. He shook his head and spat into the lock, then looked up
toward Katie on the lock wall above. “If you help us out, Miss
Elgin, we can forget about what your brother owes us,” he said,
using his unchained leg to bounce against the floor of the lock.
“Maybe better than that… maybe we could provide some financing for
him.” He shaded his eyes to see her better. “I mean, for both of
you. You and Cyrus.”

Katie looked down at him with no sign of
recognition.

“I think using the ladder might be easiest,”
Kevin said. “Or if you got a key for these cuffs…”

She walked over to where the ladder had been
and picked up the lock-key, then carried it to the upstream gates,
stepped onto the walkway, and turned to face the lock. The
outermost stem was in front of her and she placed the socket over
its squared end. With both hands on the key, she rocked it to make
sure it was seated, then swung it ninety degrees at full force.
Water flooded through the open wicket and a kicking,
haystack-shaped fountain formed instantly at the bottom of the
gate.

“What the hell are you doing?” Kevin
screamed above the sound of rushing water.

“The bitch is fixing to drown us!” Tom
yelled.

Ignoring the men, she jiggled the key and
lifted it off the stem. She sidestepped across the walkway, set the
key on the second stem, and swung it to open the wicket. The roar
of the water intensified as the level in the lock surged higher.
She looked up to find the Emorys. The water was rising toward their
chins. She twisted the key off the second stem and continued across
the walkway toward the stems on the opposite gate.

The wall of the lock offered the Emorys no
handholds but the rail of the scow was within reach, if they could
thrust their heads high enough above the water. They dog-paddled
toward the side of the boat, dragging their cuffed legs and the
toolbox between them. Both men slipped underwater, drove hard
against the lock floor with their legs, and propelled themselves
above the surface. They thrust their arms toward the rail and all
four hands were able to grasp it.

“Got to climb back up!” Kevin said, pulling
himself toward the rail. Tom was able to elevate his chin to the
level of the deck and Kevin reached that level with his eyes. But
the weight of their shared anchor prevented them from climbing
higher. Their muscles burned and both men slowly extended their
arms, lowering their bodies back toward the water. The scow rode
almost four feet above the surface, so for as long as their arms
held out, the Emorys could keep their heads above water. But as the
water rose, their chained legs raised the toolbox from the floor of
the lock, its weight borne by both men. Their muscles throbbed and
the cold water sapped their energy. The water churned higher,
filling the lock at an accelerating rate. Three of the four wickets
were opened wide, and the haystacks had broadened and converged
into a wall of tumbling whitewater behind the upstream gates.

Katie opened the fourth wicket and left the
key in place. She stepped from the plank onto the towpath, where
her view of the Emorys was blocked by the hayhouse in the bow. She
eased downstream past it. Two faded fedoras, one black and one
gray, sat serenely near the center of the deck. She looked down and
saw the surging flow was a long foot from the top of the lock wall.
So the water in the lock was now over twelve feet deep.

She studied the scow’s starboard rail. Four
sets of fingers were lined up along the edge, not far from the
forward wall of the cabin. The hands were perfectly spaced,
shoulder-width apart, with all of the fingers pointed in her
direction. The bent fingers rose into pale and bony knuckles
straining toward the sky. Screams from the tiring men pierced the
background chorus of bubbling water. She watched the two left-most
sets of fingers slip off the rail and disappear. Seconds later the
right-most fingers followed. The screaming fell silent and no
fingers remained.

She turned away from the scow and walked up
the towpath, stepping around the towline that lay flat on the dirt.
The Emorys’ mules were grazing unperturbed along the fringe of
grass just past the lock. She passed them and continued down to the
apron. At Swains this ground was commonly used for campsites, since
it was flat and open with grass and scattered trees. Ahead the
campground gave way to thicker foliage, and the river and towpath
diverged until one was invisible from the other. She found the end
of an old path and followed it into the witnessing woods.

Chapter 23
Angling

Saturday, March 29, 1924

Cy rounded a bend on his way up from Great
Falls and the lockhouse at Swains came into view. With every step
on the two-mile walk, his satisfaction from selling the bicycle was
eroded by the grinding pain in his hip. From a distance he could
see that a boat with a blue-painted cabin was riding high in the
lock. It had to be the Emorys’ scow. They must have locked through
at Great Falls while he was selling the bike. The mule team was
grazing beyond the lock, but he saw no other evidence of life.

Usually you’d see the locktender or
boathands standing around the swing-beams while a boat was locking
through. Get close enough and you’d hear the banter of voices.
Boatmen might be buying groceries from a locktender or exchanging
news from along the canal. He was close enough now, but he heard no
voices. The two benches along the façade of the lockhouse were
empty. And something else about the scene looked strange, but he
couldn’t point to it right away.

It registered as he approached the closed
gates. The lock-keys were missing. The naked, square ends of the
stems were sticking up through the swing-beams into the air.
Without the keys, the lock was useless. A few steps later he
realized that one key was still in place – the one closest to the
towpath on the upstream gate. He angled over to the mid-point of
the lock wall. As he’d surmised, the lock was full and the scow was
a light boat, still snubbed to the post with the usual amount of
slack in the line. Aside from two well-worn hats lying in the
center of the deck and a jug, plate, and cups near the forward wall
of the cabin, the scow looked deserted. On a mild spring day under
the noon sun, the scow in the full lock and the quiet lockhouse
formed a placid scene, but Cy was unnerved. There was something
profoundly wrong with the view before him.

He stood in silence on the lock wall and
stared at the scow. What the hell was happening here? The scow was
heading upstream, so it must have come into a drained lock. Then
with all but one of the keys removed, how did the lock get filled?
It only made sense if the keys were removed after the water was in
the lock. But why would anybody do that? And once the lock was
filled, why wouldn’t the Emorys have opened the gates and pulled
their boat out of the lock? Where the hell were the Emorys? For
that matter, where the hell were Katie and Pete? And why did the
Emorys wander off without their hats? He reflexively pulled the
sagging brim of his Stetson down against his forehead. He didn’t
always wear a hat, but he couldn’t remember seeing either Emory
without one.

He called out for Katie and Pete but no one
answered, and the sound of his own voice hanging in the air made
his skin tighten. He called out “anybody on board?” but got no
response. He shuffled across on the planks and headed to the
lockhouse. The door was unlocked. He stood in the hallway at the
base of the stairs and called again. No answer. Nothing looked
disturbed. Poking his head in the kitchen, he saw a pan of
cornbread and a jam jar on the counter but nothing unusual. He cut
himself a slice of cornbread and headed back to the door.

Propped beside the door he saw the
lock-keys, which he counted while finishing his cornbread. There
were seven, so that accounted for all of the naked stems. He
gathered the keys into a bundle in his arms and dumped them outside
on the grass. The iron keys jangled as they collided, giving voice
to the melee of fears and suspicions in his mind. He stared at them
while considering how to proceed. He had to move the scow.

He opened the upstream gates, unwrapped the
snub-line, and coaxed the mules into pulling the scow a hundred
feet out onto the next level, where he tied it up to a thick tree.
Walking back to the lock, he was no closer to understanding what
had happened. Swains still offered no sign of life, and the
thousand-foot reach of canal visible below the lock was equally
deserted. He focused on the disturbing sight of the single lock-key
suspended above the nearest upstream gate. Along with the seven
naked stems, it told a story that he couldn’t decipher or ignore –
an unavoidable story he sensed would not end well. He shut the
upstream gates and the lock became a closed chamber, ripples on the
water reflecting from the gates and walls.

He stopped to catch his breath and peer up
and down the towpath. Nothing and no one. He returned to the pile
of lock-keys and for the first time noticed a tangled rope ladder
lying on the ground nearby. It hadn’t been there a few hours ago.
His pulse quickened as he carried two keys to the downstream gate.
He leaned out over the swing-beam and opened the gate’s two
wickets. Ripples formed from wall to wall as water began flowing.
Opening all four wickets would drain a lock in under three minutes;
with two open it took about five, and that was fast enough for Cy.
He stood on the wall and stared down at the receding water. His
intuition told him there was something at the bottom of the lock,
and he hoped it wasn’t Katie or Pete.

When he was a kid boating with his father,
they’d come upon a young couple that drowned in the canal up near
Big Pool. Others had found them first, but you couldn’t take a boat
past a drowning victim – that was the law. You had to leave at
least some part of the body in the water until the police arrived,
even if it was just the feet. That never made much sense to Cy. The
couple had rented a canoe to paddle out for a picnic on a Sunday
afternoon. The canal was only seven or eight feet deep in most
places, but that was deep enough if you couldn’t swim. Cy watched
the churning water drain away.

When the lock was half-empty, he saw the
first dark strands of sea-moss bob to the surface, and his gut
tightened. Human hair. The moss welled up again and unveiled a pale
ear. He exhaled with relief when he realized the hair didn’t belong
to Katie or Pete. A second shape floated to the surface near the
first, a thicker, russet-colored specimen of moss. These bodies
must be the Emorys. His hand slipped to the roll of bills in his
pocket. They wouldn’t need his money now. Their heads were face
down in the water and their necks and shoulders rounded into view
as the water fell. His dread flared again as he realized that other
bodies could still be submerged. What if the Emorys had dragged
Pete and Katie into the lock with them? But how could the men have
fallen or been pushed into the water in the first place? There was
only a gap of a few feet between the scow and the lock wall!

One verdict was revealed as the water
reached parity with the level downstream and stopped flowing. Pete
and Katie were not lying drowned in the lock. Not unless they’d
been weighted down, since less than five feet of water remained in
the chamber and he only saw two bodies. The water was clear enough
that if they were in there, they should be visible.

The other answer was still somewhere
underwater, along with the extremities of the drowned men. He could
see their upper bodies breaking the surface, but their legs
converged in dark water at the bottom of the lock. It looked as if
something was holding their feet down. He stared at the scene,
unsure of what to do. Then he went to the lockhouse and found a
pole in Jess Swain’s basement. It had a three-pronged hook and was
long enough to probe the water.

He thrust its hooked end into the water and
swept it between the bodies. The pole snagged something flexible
and the body with dark sea-moss hair spun a half-circle. It felt
like he was pulling a tether that bound an anchor to the corpse. He
explored until he hooked the anchor, then carefully drew the pole
straight back, hand over hand, flexing his arms and widening his
stance as its full weight came onto the pole. The bodies of the
dead men drifted on the ripples, and as he raised the anchor, their
legs rose with it. When it was a foot from the surface, he saw a
line connecting the dead men’s ankles. As the anchor broke the
surface, he realized he couldn’t lift it further with the pole. The
dead men were chained to it through a sturdy handle they had been
unable to break before drowning. It was a toolbox, one he’d seen
before. The Emorys used it to hold their cash, and he knew that if
it hadn’t been plundered, the box held enough money to change his
life.

***

By the time Lee Fisher passed Cy Elgin’s
number 41 boat tied up against the berm, his headache was nearly
gone. The boat looked uninhabited, but he could see it had been
cleaned up for the start of the season. He quickened his pace. He’d
slept much later than he wanted, then spent the rest of the morning
getting ready to head upstream with the Emorys. After packing his
bag and squaring away the lockhouse, he’d checked the big
Pennyfield house to make sure everything looked proper. But he
still needed to retrieve Charlie Pennyfield’s bicycle. Reaching
into his coat pocket, he fingered the key to the leg-irons. Then he
remembered what he’d forgotten to bring. Cy Elgin’s pint flask. The
one Katie had brought to their dinner last night, filled with the
whiskey that he was still feeling today.

Despite last night’s intoxication, he
remembered Katie saying she would lock the bicycle to the canoe
rack on the berm. He hoped now that he’d see her again at Swains
this morning before he left. He could tell her where to find Cy’s
flask at Pennyfield. And maybe they could arrange to meet again on
his first run down from Cumberland with Ben Myers.