It dawned on him that the tree to his right was a sycamore. He tilted his head back to look up and saw another sycamore. Don’t tell me, he thought, as he turned to look down the slope. The lower end of the railing was nailed to a third sycamore. Three joined sycamores. His pulse quickened, then fell back as exhilaration was undermined by doubt. He looked at the sycamores in turn. Could these trees be over seventy years old? He’d learned that sycamores lived for hundreds of years, so maybe all three dated back to 1924. But if they’d been large enough to support a railing then, shouldn’t they be massive now?
And could this have been what Lee meant by “joined”? Both two-by-fours were stained and dirty beneath a crown of snow, but the boards couldn’t be seventy years old. Maybe they were replacement boards. He swept away snow near their juncture on the center tree. They were solid, unrotted, no more than ten years old. Just a few scratches on the top edge of the horizontal board. The scratches caught the snow, so he brushed over them again with his glove.
With the surrounding snow gone, he saw that the scratches formed a word. Incised with careless writing, probably with an awl or a screwdriver. And written in white, since his glove had driven snow into the etched letters. “Killers.” Vin inhaled sharply, staring at the inscription, then snowshoed to the board’s opposite end. He brushed the snow from the railing where it met the tree and found another inscription. Just a single white symbol: “$”. He sighed and retraced his steps, sweeping the snow from the middle of the two-by-four but finding no additional words.
He stepped back and took a picture of each tree, then put his camera away and started down the slope, sweeping snow from the descending railing. Halfway down he found more snow-filled words. “Why are you here?” He exhaled hard and the steam from his breath rose like smoke. A vague anxiety welled up and he pressed along the railing with his glove to clear the board down to the third sycamore. Where the railing was nailed to the tree, the final white inscription was what he expected. “Dead.”
He snowshoed back down toward the Billy Goat Trail. “Why are you here?” Was the question addressed to him? If so, was he someone’s puppet? And what exactly did “here” mean? And the blatant reference to Lee Fisher’s note:
“One tree leads to the money, the second leads to the killers and the third leads to the dead.”
Clearly Kelsey had steered him here. Was this her work? Maybe this was a great joke played on newcomers like Vin and Nicky, a joke about Swains Lock and 1924 that everyone else in Potomac was in on. He tried to calm himself by breathing with his lower abdomen as he slid down to the trail. Nicky was waiting, stepping absently from one foot to the other and back. She’d put her scarf and hat back on and re-zipped her jacket.
“I’m getting cold,” she said. “Let’s get moving.” Vin noticed that a cloud was screening the sun for the first time all morning. He felt too embarrassed and frustrated to describe the inscriptions on the railings.
“You’re right. We shouldn’t stand around for too long after sweating.” He put his hat and daypack on and started forward along the trail. Soon it curved left, following a bend in the river bank. The bright sunshine returned. To their right a funnel of innocent rapids emerged in the center of the thousand-foot-wide river, and the oscillating wave crests shone against patches of blue water like diamonds on sapphires. The indentations of the old tracks in the snow led onward. Continuing to assess the terrain above him, Vin spotted another opening in the trees and a wedge of sky above it. This time there were no descending tracks, but he couldn’t resist his impulse to take a look. Maybe the previous trees were a diversion; maybe the real sycamores were here.
Nicky shook her head when he mentioned a quick detour – she didn't want to get cold again. “Do what you need to do, but I’m going to keep moving.” She added that since she’d have to break trail, it would be easy for him to catch up.
At the top he was annoyed to discover that he was now standing on an annex of the same field he’d visited earlier; it was screened from the main field by a row of trees. He realized that the curve of the trail meant that they’d been walking around and below the field. There were no sycamores nearby. He slid back down and followed Nicky’s tracks along the Billy Goat Trail. They should be only a half-mile or so from its downstream trailhead on the towpath. He crossed a ditch, noticing from Nicky’s tracks that it had taken her more than one attempt to climb out.
“Why are you here?” Why indeed, he wondered. Now he felt guilty about his preoccupation with Lee Fisher’s note to Charlie Pennyfield. Why wasn’t it enough to snowshoe in the woods with Nicky on a beautiful snowy day? She had alluded to his attempt to solve the implicit riddle of Lee’s note as a “treasure hunt”. Was she right? Was that all it was? If so, why was he deliberately inserting it between them? Why, he knew she wondered, wasn’t he focused on planning their wedding or finding a full-time job? Good questions, he thought.
He snowshoed over a mound and saw a gulley in front of him, steep-sided and eight or ten feet deep. It was a frozen streambed buried by snowdrifts. The trail veered left along the rim of the gulley, then crossed it on a narrow snow-covered footbridge. The entrance to the bridge was flanked by two wooden posts and Nicky was slumped awkwardly on her side just beyond them – one leg skewed under the other, a snowshoe-tail flipped away from her boot, propped on an elbow with her hands still in the pole-straps. He hurried toward her.
“Nicky! Are you OK?” The snow around her on the bridge was disturbed and he wondered if she’d tried unsuccessfully to stand up.
“I’m alright,” she said. Her voice was airy and soft and she only turned part way toward him. He knelt to help her up and she took several breaths before continuing. “I guess I must have tripped. I don’t really remember. I was kind of lost in thought, and then all of a sudden I was lying here. Almost like I blacked out for a minute.”
Vin brushed the snow from her jacket and helped remove her pole-straps. “Probably low blood sugar,” he said. “We should get some calories into you before you stand up.”
“OK,” she said weakly, looking at him now. Vin pulled the cookies from his daypack. He watched Nicky drink water and eat a few fig bars, then ate and drank a bit himself.
“Ready to get up?”
“Ready.”
He reached over to realign her snowshoe with her boot, then stood up and supported her hands as she got to her feet. “How do you feel?”
“Better,” she said. “I think the sugar helped a lot. I feel OK now.”
He handed Nicky her poles and started forward along the bridge. As he slung his pack over his shoulder and stepped, his right leg met no resistance and he plunged through the bridge into the gulley below. He’d lowered his shoulder toward the strap, and when his leg dropped his body tilted downhill along the axis of the gulley. This is surreal, he thought, falling head-first toward the drift. I feel like a cartoon character duped into stepping off a cliff. He twisted to get his hands beneath him and braced for a collision with a rocky streambed.
Instead he felt a cushiony deceleration as soft snow enveloped him. Blowing snow had filled the gulley more than six feet deep, and his gloved hands pushed down into the drift. The press of freezing snow against his face and head was shocking and made him skip a breath. He extended his arms deeper into the snow to press against the streambed for support but couldn’t find it. His snowshoes held near the surface, so his legs and feet were above his buried upper body.
He opened his eyes and saw that the bright light outside had faded to a dim glow. He twisted his head to create free space that he could breathe from, but his exhaled breath froze instantly, and he felt a cradle of ice forming around his face. His heart was racing and electric shivers of energy coursed through his arms and legs. Adrenaline. Jesus! A lifetime in the snow and he’d never fallen into a ridiculous position like this! He kicked his feet to free them of loose snow, then tried to bend his knees and pry his torso up against them. His knees pushed deeper into the drift. He tried to lift his head, but the snow above it felt like a frozen hand holding him down.