SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) (44 page)

I may be buried along with the others, at the base
of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing.

He drove the shovel blade straight into the
earth, feeling the grind of small roots and stones transmitted to
his hands. The digging would be slow work here. He freed the blade
and circled counter-clockwise around the tree.

Of the three trunks, the next was closest to
the Maryland shore. He aimed the headlamp’s glow at its base.
Raising the light steadily up the trunk, he scanned for a mark or
sign. Just above the level of his eyes he found one, and his
fingers reached to trace it. Two parallel diagonal slashes. The
surrounding bark had scaled away and the slashes were blistered
scars on the smooth skin of the trunk. What did they mean? The
second tree leads to the killers? If so, this was the trunk he
cared least about.

He continued to the trunk nearest the
Virginia shore, then aimed his headlamp at the roots and guided the
glow upward. At eye-level he saw a smooth patch where the bark had
skinned off, and he felt a surge of vindication as a symbol slid
into view. The mason’s mark! This was its fifth appearance. First
on the plank of siding in the Pennyfield shed. Then on the photo in
Kelsey Ainge’s studio, where he had learned its name. Then carved
in stone on Bear Island – the mark Kelsey had photographed. And
again just yesterday, traced in the dust of his rear window at
Sharpsburg.

Like the slashes, the mark in front of him
was scabbed and coarse, discolored with decades of aging. He ran a
finger along its C-curve, then along the three rays. Was this Lee
Fisher’s symbol? Did he chisel it on the Bear Island stop-gate? If
not, what did it mean?

He steered the lamplight further up the
trunk, where he’d sensed the presence of another mark, then stepped
back and took a deep breath. Not one, but a string of them, rising
from the mason’s mark along the axis of the trunk. Initials. The
lowest read KE. Next LF. K. Elgin? Lee Fisher? His throat
tightened. The third tree leads to the dead. The top-most initials
seemed to be carved in a different hand. MG. They were aged and
gray but less blistered than the prior pair. As if they had seen
fewer rings of growth.

He took a deep breath and set the shovel
blade an arm’s length from the base of the trunk. This was Lee
Fisher’s unfulfilled wish, he reminded himself. “In your search for
me you may find the truth.” He slammed his heel down, driving the
blade into the earth. What did he need to find? Whether Lee’s fear
of being killed and buried along with the others had been realized.
He could never identify a decomposed corpse, so he would settle for
any sign of human remains… a femur or an ulna, a finger or a skull.
He turned the first shovelful and studied it under his headlamp but
found only pebbles and mud.

Expanding the hole from the center, he
examined more shovelfuls, working around a snake-sized root. Then a
strike caught something solid. Not another root, because he was
able to work the blade beneath it and scoop it out. A small rock?
He dumped the shovel’s contents onto the growing dirt pile to his
right and directed the light onto it.

A rectangular shape caught his eye. He
picked it up, scraping away the caked mud that covered it. A knob
emerged on one end, with a dark cord wrapped around it. Near the
neck, the dull glitter of dirty glass. The shape was a flask,
encased by a black, rotting holster that may have once been
leather. He scraped more mud away, then stopped for fear of
destroying the holster. Did this discovery mean anything? Maybe the
killers had been drinking during the burial and tossed the flask on
top of the bodies as they filled in the grave.

There was something inserted between the
holster and the flask, and he tried to work it loose with his
fingers, unwrapping the cord from the bottleneck to pull it free.
Under the glow of his headlamp, it looked like a leaf-shaped
pendant of some kind, made of stone. One face was dirt-stained but
unmarked, as far as he could tell. As he cleaned the other face,
dirt held inside an etching and the emblem emerged again – a sixth
sighting of the now-familiar mark. He gently dislodged the dirt
with his fingernails. There was no mistaking the C-curve and
converging rays; they had become shorthand for his search and the
symbol of things beyond his grasp. He laid the pendant down on the
dirt pile and raised the shovel again.

More barren shovelfuls before the blade
stabbed something solid. He stopped to illuminate and probe the
hole, scraping away loose dirt to reveal a root wider than his
thigh. He sighed and wiped his dripping forehead against his
sleeve. This was no place to dig a grave. Flat rocks covered most
of the clearing and the tree’s perimeter was laced with
impenetrable roots. It would have been a chore to bury a dog here,
so it was hard for Vin to imagine skeletons lying beneath his feet.
Maybe he’d misinterpreted the words in Lee’s note. Was there
another way the trunks of the joined sycamores could lead to the
money, the killers and the dead? Maybe the flask and the pendant
provided the path. But the note had specifically said, “I may be
buried…”

He rested against the shovel. There were two
more trunks – one with the parallel slashes, the other unmarked. If
not bodies, maybe there was more evidence like the flask and the
necklace buried there. Or maybe, he reminded himself, the money is
buried there. He retreated to the trunk on the Maryland side,
angled the shovel blade to the slashes, and drove it into the dirt.
Five minutes of digging was unimpeded by large rocks or roots.
Maybe they were cleared away by the killers, he thought. He spread
each new shovelful carefully onto the pile, alert for small objects
he might uncover, but found only earthworms and stones. He widened
the hole from the center, then dug deeper.

A thrust was met by a hard surface that
stopped the blade with an audible thump. It didn’t seem to bite
into a root or clang off a rock. He straightened to study the hole,
then struck again. Another thump. There’s something there!

He scraped dirt away until he could see the
object. It looked flat, slick and black, like decaying canvas or
rubber laid on top of a board. The skin on his forearms tightened.
Could it be a coffin? That wouldn’t make sense. What killers would
go to the trouble of using a coffin at a remote site like this? He
dug and scraped to find the borders of the object. It wasn’t large
at all – maybe eighteen inches long, half as wide, and less than a
foot tall. It seemed like a box covered with a canvas mat or tarp
of some kind.

He dug to expose its sides, then worked the
blade beneath it to pry it loose. He strained over the hole to find
purchase on the box. The canvas mat was filthy, and his arms were
smeared with mud as he freed it from its resting place. He heard a
metallic rattle when he set the object down beside the hole.

He fixed his headlamp on the covered box.
Too small for a coffin… and too opaque to just be a pointer to the
killers? Unless it was full of guns and knives, he guessed this
might be Lee Fisher’s buried fortune. The mat encasing the box
didn’t seem to be fastened or tied, just scrolled and tucked on
each side. He worked the ends loose and unfurled the scroll. It
didn’t fall apart, and he realized the mat had been coated with wax
or rubber for waterproofing. Flattening it out, he heard the sound
of a snapping branch.

He froze in place and held his breath but
heard only his thudding heart. The sound had seemed to come from
the downstream side of the clearing, an area he hadn’t explored
yet. He pivoted toward it but the mass of the sycamore blocked his
view. He turned his headlamp off and let his eyes adjust to the
darkness. Ten seconds passed, then twenty more, in silence. He
exhaled, drew a breath, still listening. Nothing. The sound must
have been innocent or imagined. He turned his headlamp on and
unfolded the mat, revealing the object beneath.

It was a metal toolbox, and something else
that slipped with a clatter from the top of the box. Handcuffs. And
in the light of his headlamp, two small keys beside them on the
mat. But the chain connecting the cuffs was too long. They must be
shackles instead. Both cuffs were open, and he picked them up. They
weren’t rusted or muddy, and as he worked the C-arms, the hinges
responded stiffly, then more readily. The cuffs were the first
evidence of coercion he had found. Though his digging had unearthed
no bones, maybe something sinister had happened here after all.

He laid the shackles on the mat and turned
the face of the toolbox toward him. What improbable riches lay
within? He lifted the creaking latches and flipped the handle
upright to open the box. The lid stayed closed and he noticed the
lock plate with its keyhole between the latches. So one of the two
keys lying on the mat must be…

His thoughts were punctured by a
high-pitched scream that came from beyond the clearing, near the
Virginia bank. He turned toward the sound and heard it echoed by
two more shrill cries. It sounded like a woman’s voice desperately
calling his name! He immediately envisioned Nicky in danger, or
trying to warn him about Kelsey Ainge. He snatched the two keys
from the mat, leapt to his feet, and ran around the sycamore into
the clearing, panning the headlamp side to side. Trees and shadows
at the edge of the woods took shape and dissolved again as the
circular glow passed over them.

He felt as if his senses had been sanded
raw. Stuffing the keys in his pocket, he pulled out his knife and
flipped the blade open. No one was visible in or around the
clearing, but he noticed a gap in the foliage. He approached it and
illumined a seam through the woods. Was it a trail? Maybe it was
just a deer path, but it led in the direction of the screams. He
ducked beneath a branch and darted into the woods.

The path crossed a vine-filled gully before
swinging left and right, and he kept the lamp focused on the ground
in front of him to avoid losing the trail. Within thirty yards it
spilled out from under head-high branches onto a finger of ridged
rock on the Virginia-facing bank. Crouching with knife in hand, he
looked around and saw no one. He stood to catch his breath, his
headlamp casting a glow on the finger of rock extending into the
calm eddy. The waterline on the rock pulsed lightly, but it looked
as if the river hadn’t risen yet. Beyond the eddy, dark water still
rolled at the steady, gurgling pace of summer.

He swept the beam in a deliberate arc from
the flat rocks upstream to the water in front of him. As the light
swung down toward the island’s tail, he saw a dim flash when it
struck a metal shape that nosed above the waterline, beside the
last rock in a chain extending from the island. He brought the beam
back toward the object and saw it reflect again. Though he knew
instantly what it was, he stared for a moment, looking for signs of
motion but seeing none. He pocketed his knife and scrambled along
the shoreline toward the shape.

The chain of rocks that led to the
overturned canoe began twenty paces downstream and he had to weave
around overhanging trees to reach it. He stepped and hopped across
narrow channels to traverse the first rocks in the chain, then
lowered himself into waist-deep water and waded a few feet, his
feet and legs colliding with the creviced jumble of rocks beneath
the surface. He pulled himself up and out, but the final rock in
the chain was beyond the eddy, and the river flowed around it on
both sides. As he dropped back into the current, he was surprised
to find it much deeper here; he needed to swim to keep his head
dry. The water felt almost as warm as the air. That would change
when the floodwaters arrived.

His pulled himself onto the rock, drenched
up to his neck, water pouring from his running shoes. When he fixed
his headlamp on the capsized canoe, he saw it resembled the one
he’d commandeered an hour ago at Swains. The flipped aluminum hull
was covered with scratches and dents. Pinned and balanced against
the rock’s leading edge, it swayed gently while deflecting the
current. He couldn’t tell the bow from the stern, but it was
obvious what had caused the boat to flip.

Just past the hull’s midpoint was a jagged
hole bigger than his fist. Given tonight’s moderate current, how
could a collision with any rock in the river have been violent
enough to cause that hole? Maybe there was a tooth-shaped rock near
the surface of the water, somewhere just upstream. He scanned the
moving water in search of a threatening rock. Or a body, or bodies.
What had happened to the canoe’s pilot? Between Gladys Island and
the Virginia shore, the river was alternately deep and shallow.
Anyone who fell overboard should have been able to find a rock to
cling to or a place to stand. And if not, it was a short swim to
the island’s eddy, and not far to the Virginia mainland.

A grim image arose as he considered another
possible location for the canoe’s occupants. He knelt at the
midpoint of the canoe, set his hands on the aluminum hull where it
nudged the rock, and pushed his arms in up to his elbows. The
opposite gunwale rose from the water, and when he pulled it toward
him, the canoe rotated on its axis.

The flooded cockpit came into view, and to
his relief he didn’t see a corpse. The paddle must have vanished
with the paddler. Only a small octopus floating under the bow seat
remained, and he leaned over to pull it out. It was a woman’s
cardigan sweater – lavender when lit directly by the lamp. He knew
he’d seen it before, and the recollection took shape. Worn by a
woman he’d seen standing on a railroad bridge… the woman with the
binoculars observing Cool Aid. Had his shadow in the gray Audi
followed him here? If so, where was she now? Whoever paddled the
canoe had been washed away or swum to shore. Or waded to shore, he
corrected himself. Or, he thought as the next option crystallized…
or landed ashore, and scuttled the canoe. Shit!