He dropped into a crouch on the lock floor and shot toward the surface like a hungry fish, flutter-kicking and driving with his arms as his mouth stretched for a breath from the ocean of air overhead. But now his shackled ankle flinched from the pain of kicking and its reticence left him short; his nose was still underwater when he stalled and began falling back. His lungs caught fire and he was compelled to exhale as he descended.
He felt as if his brain was being squeezed like a grapefruit for denying his body an underwater breath. I can’t! I’ll drown! Try for the surface again! A roaring arose in his ears and it seemed as if the water was beginning to move. This is it, he thought. The flood is here. It’s washing downriver, covering everything in its path. It’s here to bury me in Swains Lock. He sensed now that he’d come full circle, to the foot of a great turning wheel that would grind him into the past, uniting him with his forebears while rolling in place, raining down generations of the living, claiming and recycling the dead.
He fell back into a crouch at the bottom, head and lungs throbbing, every strand afire. Fuck it. My body and mind are lost and I have nothing left to lose. He shot again toward the surface, kicking and thrashing through the pain, and his mouth broke the skin of the water for a breath. He inhaled and fell to the bottom where he hunched like an ancient amphibian. Water flowed across his back and shoulders and uncounted seconds passed before he sprung skyward again. This time his whole head emerged and he managed two breaths.
Falling again, he became aware the lock was draining. He pushed for the surface and was able to tread water and breathe without lifting the box. A woman with disheveled honey-colored hair and blood stains on her face and neck was standing on the lock wall, looking down at him with a ragged smile. He tried to smile back but tears filled his eyes instead. He blinked to see more clearly and drew a grateful breath. It was Kelsey Ainge.
Chapter 38
Revisiting
Sunday, September 7, 1997
When his feet touched ground at the base of the rock face at Carderock, Vin pulled slack into the belay rope and opened his hand to reveal a gleaming gold coin in the center of his palm.
“You have learned well, grasshopper,” Kelsey said.
“You did a lousy job of hiding it.”
“I wasn’t trying to hide it. I just wanted to put it in a challenging spot. To make sure you didn’t wimp out and take the novice route.”
“What if I had?” Vin said, untying the rope from his climbing harness. “That’s a five-hundred-dollar coin. You would have had to climb back up yourself and get it.”
“I had faith in you.”
He swept his hair back from his sweating forehead and smiled. “Be careful when you do that. I’ve learned that people aren’t always what they seem.”
Kelsey laughed and pulled the belay rope down. “So I’ve heard. You didn’t seem like a budding research historian when you moved here.” Her smile dissolved when she saw the distant look in Vin’s eyes. “Are you thinking about Nicky?”
“I was, for a second. It’s been a year now, but I keep expecting to see her somewhere. Maybe passing on the sidewalk with someone else. Or across a crowded theater.” He looked up at the line of trees above the rock face and saw a squirrel leap from branch to branch. “Or walking through the woods.”
“I don’t think you’ll see her again,” Kelsey said as she began coiling the rope. “You or anyone else.”
“You’ve said that before, and I’ve never asked you why. So now I will. Just because no one we know has heard from Nicky, what makes you think she’s dead?”
“I never said I thought she was dead. I think she doesn’t exist anymore. Not as Nicky, anyway.”
Vin gave her a puzzled look. “So you think she’s alive, but has a new identity?”
“It’s strange, I know. But they never found Des Gowan’s body at Whites Ferry either. And I still believe she survived.”
“I’m sticking with Melissa Gowan, not her hippie-chick name, since MG was carved on the trunk of the killers. The one I thought memorialized the dead.”
“Mel changed her name to Destiny,” Kelsey said, winding the rope in loops around her bent arm, “during our junior year in college. Just before she met Miles Garrett. After that, there were times I felt I didn’t know her at all. She sometimes had this expression that made you think her mind was a hundred miles away. Like she was inhabited by someone else.” She looked up from the rope to catch his eye. “That’s how she looked when she shifted into reverse at Whites Ferry.”
“What?” Vin felt the back of his neck begin to throb.
“I’ve never mentioned it to anyone before,” she said, turning back to her coiling. “Whites Ferry wasn’t an accident. Consciously or not, Des knew what she was doing. And I still think she’s out there somewhere.”
Kelsey reached the end of the rope and began to wrap it like a python around the gathered loops. “I think Nicky survived the flood, too,” she said. “And she may eventually come looking for Vincent Emory Illick again...” She tied off the rope and looked at him and he noticed the faint scar on her temple, “…but it will be as someone else.” Her gray-green irises flitted in tiny oscillations as they had when Vin first met her on the towpath at Swains. When they steadied, he saw reflected in them a glimmer of Lee Fisher’s truth.
************
Thanks for reading SWAINS LOCK. While the characters are imaginary, all of the places in the novel (with the exception of a few renamed residential streets) are real, and the devastating floods the book describes occurred on the dates depicted in the story. If you enjoyed the novel, I’d greatly appreciate a brief positive review on Amazon or Smashwords.
The River Trilogy continues with BURYING ZIMMERMAN, which stars the heroin dealer from SWAINS LOCK. You can read the first few chapters of this sequel on my website, at http://rivertrilogy.com.
If you're interested in learning more about the history of the C&O Canal, I encourage you to track down the books that Vin consulted in the story, all but one of which exist and are informative resources. Here's the list:
The Great National Project: A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal by Walter S. Sanderlin, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1946, 2005
Home on the Canal by Elizabeth Kytle, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983
The C&O Canal Companion by Mike High, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000
The Chesapeake and Ohio Canaclass="underline" Pathway to the Nation's Capital by Thomas F. Hahn, The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1984
Images of America: The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal by Mary H. Rubin, Arcadia Publishing, 2003
Most of all, I encourage you to visit the C&O Canal National Historical Park. Walk the towpath and stop to examine the broken locks, waste weirs, and boarded-up lockhouses. Read the informative display signs that the Park Service continues to add and you'll get a sense for the people and pace of the canal era. Visit Great Falls (on the Maryland or the Virginia side) and imagine a young George Washington standing where you stand, squinting upriver as he pondered how to bring Ohio Valley barges past those thundering falls. And if you feel an ephemeral chill or sense an unseen presence as you walk back toward the park entrance, remember that Grace's spirit still roams those woods.
Edward A. Stabler