The periodicals room at McKeldin Library was quiet on a Friday morning, with students scattered at tables and through the carrels. It had taken Vin fifteen minutes of fast-paced walking to reach the University of Maryland library from the visitors lot, but then only a few words from the librarian and a minute in the rows of filing cabinets to find the reel of microfilm he wanted.
He placed it on the spindle, threaded it onto the empty reel across the viewing plate, and scrolled forward. Near the end of the tape he found the newspaper edition he was looking for.
The Washington Post: Sunday, March 30, 1924
Death and Loss in Flood Widespread
Floods in the upper Potomac and upper Ohio rivers and their tributaries have brought death and vast destruction. Bridges have been swept away and trains marooned.
Cumberland, MD property loss – Railroads, $5,000,000; buildings, $1,000,000.
Flood deaths – McCoal, MD., 6; Cumberland, MD., 3; Newark, OH., 4; Johnstown, PA., 1; Pittsburgh, 2; Melcroft, Penn., 3;
The remainder of the article cited a cold wave and snow in the midwest.
He advanced slowly but found no reference to an incident at Swains Lock on the preceding day. None of the other articles even mentioned the C&O Canal. He scrolled to the next day’s issue and found only one related article:
The Washington Post: Monday, March 31, 1924
Pittsburgh Flood Ebbs; Steel Mills are Hard Hit
A score of city blocks in the lower sections were inundated, and sections for several miles upstream laid waste when both the Allegheny and Monongahela rivers, meeting here to form the Ohio, left their banks today in Pittsburgh’s greatest flood in 10 years. No loss of life was reported…
Aware that the Potomac flood had actually reached Washington on March 31, he advanced the reel again.
The Washington Post: Tuesday, April 1, 1924
Crest of Flood is Receding, but Damage Has Increased
The crest of the flood-swollen Potomac swept swiftly by Washington yesterday with the ebbing tides. After a futile effort at high tide yesterday to touch the high water mark at 8 feet registered on the morning rise, the waters quickly fell back in their path and raced on to the bay, with the remnants of the wreckage from upstream…
Water observers estimated that the current was moving at a greater speed than the day before, but it raced off solemnly, its wrath apparently spent. No waters overlapped the others in the flow; they all kept in their place. It was a rhythmic, quick march of a victor to the sea…
There was one float that gave mute evidence of the havoc wrought in one popular industry of the river swamps. It was a copper still, its tarnished nose bobbing about on the racing water like a buoy.
With communication lines along the Potomac damaged by the flood, Vin guessed that a full description of the devastation in the upper valley would have taken several days to trickle in to the Washington newspapers. And those papers were no doubt focused on stories of more global interest. Whatever Lee Fisher saw or experienced at Swains Lock on March 29 would not be chronicled in the 1924 Washington Post, the Baltimore Evening Sun, or any other newspaper archived at libraries. So Vin’s search for Lee Fisher’s truth would have to rely on the words in his note. Rewinding the microfilm, he parsed the message once more in his head.
Charlie,
If it is April and I am missing, I fear I have been killed…
The books made clear that Charlie Pennyfield tended Pennyfield Lock in 1924. Maybe Lee’s fear had proven idle; maybe he hadn’t been killed because of what happened at Swains Lock. But then why hadn’t he retrieved the note? Why should he leave a clue to buried money behind a marked plank in Charlie’s shed if he were alive and well in the days that followed?
Vin wondered whether the money Lee referred to was stolen. If so, Charlie could have launched some kind of investigation, putting Lee at risk of being considered a criminal or an informer. If Lee were alive in April, 1924, why not just take the money himself? It didn’t make sense, he thought, looking up and arching his back. For that matter, if Lee survived into April, why abandon a useful hand-drill that might be expensive to replace?
To Vin, the prospect that Lee’s fear had come true seemed more likely. Maybe Lee was buried along with the others at the base of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing. Something had happened to Lee, and Charlie never found the message that would lead him to the communal grave beneath the sycamores. Who else was buried there? The note gave no hint. Was Emmert Reed involved? Maybe his albino mule had hauled the bodies to the clearing it “knowed well”. Along the towpath somewhere?
If Vin could find the place and its joined sycamores, what else would he find? The money, the killers, and the dead? The dead might still be there. The killers, if given a chance, would have come back for their spoils. But maybe the flood had interfered somehow. Or maybe the killers had been caught or killed. Maybe the money was still there, waiting to help Vin tell the story of what happened at Swains Lock. The story’s tentacles had begun to embrace him, and for reasons he couldn’t define, he almost felt destined to become part of it himself. Maybe the last line in Lee’s note really did apply to him.
He boxed up the Post and Sun microfilms and returned them to their filing cabinets. Walking back across the campus to his car, he forced himself to snap out of his musings. He’d been working on the Rottweiler project all week and needed to submit an invoice to them tomorrow. He slowly pieced together a snapshot of the project in his mind. One day away from it and already it seemed tedious; the problems it posed were straightforward and didn’t require creative or elegant solutions – just grinding away.
His trip to College Park had been fruitless, since he’d found the same books he’d already seen at the C&O Visitor’s Center, the Potomac Library, or the Montgomery County Historical Society. None provided additional insight into the only leads he possessed: Lee Fisher, K. Elgin, Charlie Pennyfield, Emmert Reed. Aside from Pennyfield, all the surnames were common to the area. Across Maryland and Virginia, there were hundreds of Fishers, Elgins, and Reeds. And the joined sycamores reference, he thought, wasn’t much help either. The sycamores along the river and the towpath were too numerous to count.
Chapter 8
Spanish Ballroom
Saturday, December 30, 1995
As the lead singer issued his best Joe-Cocker moan and backed away from the microphone, all three saxmen raised their horns and the first tenor launched into a wailing lead. The bass and rhythm guitar set a crawling floor under the horns and the keyboard player hammered trills. Spinning through a swing-dance sequence with Vin, Nicky saw the dimly-lit features of the Spanish Ballroom blur into panorama: the walls painted pale yellow with inlaid patterns of faded blue, orange, and green tiles; the mission-style squared-arch openings to the outer arcade that surrounded the floor; the tall, worn obelisks with art-deco accents flanking the raised stage; the second-story casement windows and balconies with balustrades, looking down on the dance floor; and the blond, rock-maple floor itself, dulled and dry but unbroken, stretching off over a hundred feet from the stage through dim light to the far end of the ballroom. Toward that end, two long tables formed a bar that faced the stage. Past the bar stood a Christmas tree, fifteen feet tall and twined in colored lights and ornaments.
The singer strode forward again, grabbing the microphone from its stand and shooting a look at the two women singing backup vocals. When the lead sax fell back into the rhythm, he belted out the final verse of “Unchain My Heart.” And the whole band let loose on the refrain, with the lead singer clutching and bleating and the backup singers wailing soulfully against the saxes.