In the foyer at the top, she recognized the table she’d seen last weekend, which now held only the morning’s unopened mail. Up another half-flight to the living room, and then a hallway to her left, leading to bedrooms, she assumed. Bone in mouth, the dog stared at her through the glass door to the deck. She heard him growl intermittently, but he didn’t seem to think her presence merited a serious protest. She turned her back and reviewed the bookshelves on the inner wall.
Books on software and computer networks. Books on biology, medicine, physiology. Travel books and well-known novels. Nothing worthy of examination right now. She circled around to the kitchen. Again nothing. She glanced out the window to confirm that no one was watching the house, then advanced to the breakfast nook. On the table she found what she’d come for: the old photo of Great Falls.
Touching only the edges, she picked it up and studied it closely. When she turned it over, she saw the attribution in pencil on its back:
R. L. Fisher and K. Elgin at Great Falls
March, 1924
The names meant nothing to her. Her eyes fell on the torn ledger page on the table, which she leaned over to read:
March 29, 1924
Charlie,
If it is April and I am missing, I fear I have been killed because of what happened today at Swains Lock. I may be buried along with the others at the base of three joined sycamores at the edge of a clearing. The name of the place is well knowed by Emmert Reed’s albino mule. One tree leads to the money, the second leads to the killers and the third leads to the dead. In your search for me you may find the truth. Be careful you don’t share my fate.
Your friend, Lee Fisher
Her eyes widened. What had happened at Swains Lock in 1924? That was a long time ago, but she had lived less than a mile from Swains for ten years and had never heard of anything. This note from Lee Fisher… the same person as R.L. Fisher in the photo? So the girl was K. Elgin? She reached into her pocket for her camera and took two shots of the note. Then she carried the photo to the kitchen counter to study it under the light.
An attractive young couple, she thought. Was Lee too young to grow a mustache? He might be nineteen or twenty and the girl a little younger than that. Even juxtaposed against the Falls, her eyes and enigmatic smile drew your attention. Kelsey fished the loupe out of her jacket pocket and bent toward the photo. She panned the loupe slowly from top to bottom over the couple in the center of the image, then drew a sharp breath and felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck. “K. Elgin,” she whispered. “I know you.”
***
When they crossed from Olmsted Island back onto the towpath, Vin unlocked the bikes. They wheeled them back toward the Great Falls Visitors Center.
“Lock 18,” he said, reading a small wooden sign as they passed one of the locks. Like many of the others he had seen, this one was in disrepair, its gates and swing beams decaying. “So that next lock must be Lock 19, and then Lock 20 in front of the Visitor Center.”
Nicky looked at him. “You clearly have a talent for numbers.”
“Three locks in only a couple hundred yards,” he continued. “I guess that’s why there’s a noticeable slope here.”
“You may want to write this up. Maybe get some funding for a study.” Vin pushed her shoulder with his palm and she almost fell onto her bike, laughing as she regained her footing.
“Let’s find out what all the Halloween stuff is about,” he said as they approached the Visitor Center. They steered their bikes onto the footbridge over Lock 20 and walked toward the patio. Nicky nudged him and pointed to a woman wearing a Park Ranger’s uniform and talking to a couple with a young girl. Vin caught her attention as the family strolled away.
“Is there some kind of Halloween event going on here?”
“There sure is,” she said brightly. “Tonight we’re staging Life and Death on the C&O Canal. We do it every year on the Saturday before Halloween.”
“What’s that?” Nicky asked.
“Well, we set up a haunted walk… around the Visitor Center, and past the entrance to the goldmine up the hill there.” She pointed toward the signs and pumpkins that Vin and Nicky had noticed earlier. “And we put on a play about some event from the canal era. It’s different every year. This year we’re re-enacting a shootout between the police and the notorious gangster Finn Geary from the 1920s. His syndicate sometimes used the canal to smuggle moonshine whiskey into Georgetown during Prohibition.”
“We’re tied up tonight,” Nicky said, “but it sounds like fun.”
“Well if you’re interested in the canal era, there’s a talk going on right over there about the history and operations of the C&O,” the ranger said. She pointed to a dozen people standing next to an old canal barge that was up on blocks on the dirt driveway.
As the ranger walked away, Vin cocked his head toward the barge. “Let’s go listen for a minute,” he said. But the group was already walking toward them, following another uniformed ranger. He strode purposefully by, wearing a flat-brimmed straw hat, wire-rim glasses, and a bushy salt-and-pepper mustache. The group followed and formed a half-circle around him as he stood on the stone wall of Lock 20, midway between the gates. Vin and Nicky walked their bikes within earshot. Vin noticed that Lock 20 was well preserved, probably because it was used for demonstrations. Like all the other locks he’d seen, its upstream gates were closed and downstream gates open, leaving it with thigh-deep water.
The ranger resumed his presentation. “From the time the C&O opened in 1850 until it closed in 1924, the canal went from one financial crisis to another. Floods and breakdowns were a headache, but the main problem was that the C&O was competing with the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad from the start. And the railroad got bigger, faster, and cheaper year after year, until the canal couldn’t compete.
“In the first few decades the canal carried timber, limestone, grain, and other agricultural products, but the only cargo that ever really amounted to anything for the canal was coal. During the later stages of the canal era, coal accounted for over 99% of the business.”
He pointed back to the barge the group had just examined. “That barge is essentially identical to all of the barges that carried coal down from the Cumberland mines in the later years. Not surprising, since after 1890 all the coal barges were built and owned by the Consolidation Coal Company. Anybody want to guess who owned the Consolidation Coal Company?”
“Rockefeller?” said a fleshy man at the front.
“Nope. The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad,” the ranger said with a conspiratorial squint. “In fact, toward the end the B&O Railroad owned the canal, too. But that’s another story.” He shifted his stance and cleared his throat.
“Anyway, that coal barge behind you is ninety-three feet long and fourteen-and-a-half feet wide. And all the locks on the canal are a hundred feet long and fifteen feet wide. So you can see that putting a barge through a lock was a pretty tight squeeze. And the boats coming downstream loaded with coal had momentum – they were hard to stop. So they would use a snubbing post to bring the boat to a halt inside the lock. That would keep it from crashing into the downstream gates.” He turned and pointed to a waist-high cylindrical post about six feet back from the opposite lock wall. “A boathand would wrap a heavy rope from the boat around the snubbing post and the boat would come to a stop as the rope tightened.”
He spun back toward his audience. “Most boat captains would tie up for the night somewhere along the berm side of the canal by ten or eleven, but some captains wanted to make the circuit from Cumberland to Georgetown and back as fast as possible, so they kept their boats moving around the clock. That meant a locktender had to be ready to lock a boat through at any time of day or night. So most of them would sleep in a shanty near the lock. That way they could hear the mule driver yell or blow a horn when a boat was approaching.”