He felt suddenly lightheaded as he remembered where. In the old shed, on the plank that had guarded the drill, the photo, and Lee Fisher’s note. He leaned closer to read the penciled words below the image. “Mason’s Mark – Bear Island”. He shot a quick glance back toward Kelsey but she was on the phone again, staring down at her desk. He plunged through the archway to catch up with Nicky.
She was reviewing the photos on the other side of the partition. On the way to the car, they compared what Kelsey had shown them with what they’d seen from Joel Bettancourt. Vin was neutral and Nicky liked Kelsey’s work a little better, so price might be the deciding factor. As he was backing out of their parking spot, Vin braked and looked at Nicky.
“I forgot my sunglasses. I must have left them in her office.”
Nicky sighed disapprovingly. “At least you realized it before we got home.”
He double-parked and hopped out, leaving the engine running, and jogged to the studio door. When he reached the archway, Kelsey was off the phone. She looked up from her desk as he entered. “I thought you might be back.”
“I forgot my sunglasses,” he said with a smile that vanished instantly. He retrieved them and circled toward her desk, squinting at her in silence for a second. “And I forgot to tell you something.”
She raised her eyebrows inquisitively.
“Be careful on the Billy Goat Trail below Carderock. There’s a bridge out.”
“I’d heard about that.”
“And the warning sign is poorly placed.”
Her gray-green eyes flitted left and right, steadied.
He gestured to the photo beside the archway. “That’s an interesting picture,” he said tersely. “A mason’s mark?”
She nodded. “That’s what a park ranger called it when I showed it to him.”
“It reminds me of a symbol a friend of mine showed me once. Maybe you know him. Lee Fisher.” She gave a thoughtful look and shook her head. He searched for a hint of uncertainty or guilt but couldn’t find one. “One more question,” he said. “Is there something you want from me?”
She stood up and leaned her thigh against the top of her desk, regarding him calmly. “I want you to find what you’re looking for.”
“That’s funny. I was starting to get the opposite impression.”
He turned to leave but pivoted in the archway. “I just thought of something my friend Lee once said: ‘be careful you don’t share my fate.’ You might run into those words in a library book sometime.”
“That’s good advice,” she said with a smile that reinforced his suspicions. “I’ll keep it in mind.”
Chapter 12
Falling
Tuesday, March 19, 1996
Vin walked past the Great Falls Visitor Center and onto the footbridge across the top of Lock 20. It was a cool and windswept morning, so today there was no ranger delivering a long-winded lecture on the workings of the canal. He stopped to study the reddish-brown stone blocks that formed the walls of the lock. Their faces were pockmarked and discolored by sediment and moss, but he saw no mason’s marks.
As he had learned from a trip to the Potomac library, some of the blocks used to construct the aqueducts, culverts, and locks on the canal had these marks etched into them. The marks were traditionally used by stonemasons to ensure they would be paid for the stones they had cut, and each mason carved a distinct symbol to designate his work. But since the masons hired to build the C&O in 1829 were paid monthly wages, rather than by the piece, there were few mason’s marks to be found on the structures of the canal. He crossed the footbridge to the towpath and turned downstream.
Locks 19 and 18 were just ahead, and he reflexively stopped to scan the lock walls as he passed them. No mason’s marks. The walkway out to Great Falls emerged to his right and he noticed that the tendon of river it spanned was brown and frothy, flying at the high level of spring. Past the walkway, Lock 17 lay in tatters, its downstream gates and swing beams gone. No marks here either. When the wooded slope to his right fell away into a cliff, he veered over to the wooden railing to look down. As he suspected, the cliff wasn’t natural; it was a man-made isthmus of stacked rocks that carried the canal and the towpath from the Maryland riverbank to Bear Island. So the isthmus had severed a finger of the river and annexed it to the canal. Across it the rocks and woods of Bear Island rose abruptly on his right.
He stopped to read a display sign that referred to two massive stone walls that squeezed the towpath and the canal just ahead.
Structures such as this stop-gate were designed to divert flood waters from the canal. Wooden planks were dropped into slots, forming a dam which diverted rushing waters along a stone levee and back into the Potomac.
He proceeded to the stop gate and scanned its ten-foot-thick walls for mason’s marks, finding none. Vertical slots as wide as his hand faced each other across the sliver of canal and towpath. The wall before him end-capped a levee of stone and earth that receded through the Bear Island woods toward the river. He walked back to the display sign. Below its text was a grainy photo of the Potomac during a massive flood. His eyes widened when he read the caption.
Flooding in 1924, at Six Locks near Great Falls.
Not far from where he was standing now. In the photo’s foreground, the river had risen dozens of feet to engulf the canal and the towpath just below a lock. Scattered tree-tops scarred the water halfway to the Virginia shore. If the photo was shot from the hillside above the Great Falls Tavern, those submerged trees might have sprung from Olmsted Island, and the lock might be Lock 17 or 18. Right now he stood below those locks on the towpath, or underwater during the flood of 1924. He read the remaining text in the corner of the sign:
Although this stop-gate was a local success, the canal as a whole suffered great damage from periodic floods which became more frequent and violent as land was cleared for farms and towns along the Upper Potomac. By World War I, traffic and revenues along the canal had dwindled to a point where it was touch-and-go to continue operations. After violent spring floods wrecked miles of canal and towpath in 1924, the “old ditch” was closed for good in all but the Georgetown area.
“A local success”. He tried to imagine the 1924 floodwaters coursing along several feet overhead and slamming into the stop-gate’s planks and stone walls, then draining across Bear Island, guided by the earth-and-rock levee that extended from those walls.
The trailhead for Section A of the Billy Goat Trail abutted the sign, and feeling he was unlikely to find Kelsey Ainge’s elusive mason’s mark along the heavily-trafficked towpath, Vin followed the trail toward the cliffs overlooking the Potomac’s Mather Gorge. The levee peeled away and dissolved into the woods as thin trees gripped patches of dirt between lichen-stained rocks. He crossed knee-deep fissures along the ridge and clambered over rounded rocks packed together like sea mammals on a beach, some the size of a walrus and some the size of a whale. He found himself searching for the next blue blaze, then deciding on the best rock-hopping sequence to reach it.
When the trail swung onto the highest rocks, he stopped to assess Mather Gorge. It was dead straight for over half a mile, with the cliffs on the Virginia shore mirroring those he presided over now, the two-hundred-foot-wide river running swift and deep between them. Turning through a panorama, he saw no one else along the trail or across the river. And no sign of human presence: no houses or buildings; no towers, wires, or roads; no boats. Just the mid-morning sun peeking through sliding clouds to illuminate the cliffs on the far side of the gorge. Nor any human sound – just the shrill moan of the northwest wind driving endlessly past his ears. This, he realized, was what the Algonquin saw five hundred years ago as they climbed down to fish. Today made timeless, in Kelsey Ainge’s words.