“Their legs are shackled,” Cy said. “To each other and a toolbox. Might as well have been chained to an anchor.”
Lee took shallow breaths and tried to regain his equilibrium. Shackles. His leg-irons. He’d given them to Katie to lock the bicycle, but he still had the key. How had they become unlocked? Maybe Cy had intercepted her and taken the leg-irons away. His cousins were dead! Had Cy killed them? A darker feeling settled over him when he considered the possibility that Katie might be an accomplice, but he cast the thought aside. He couldn’t imagine that she was involved. The toolbox… was that the motive? He knew that the Emorys used it as a safe, and Katie had told him that Cy was always on the edge financially. Where was Katie now? Maybe Cy had sent her away so he could rob the Emorys when they arrived at Swains… and then use the leg-irons and the plundered toolbox to drown them? It seemed unbelievable. But those were his cousins lying face down in the water! He slid his hand into his coat pocket as if he were inserting it into a hornet’s nest and took out the key.
“Those cuffs,” he said, swallowing hard and holding up the key. “I think they’re mine.” He put the key in the pocket of his pants, stripped off his coat, and started down the rope ladder. From the lowest rung he jumped backward into the lock, and the press of cold water against his chest made him breathe faster. He hopped through the water toward the nearest body, placed his hand under a floating shoulder, and lifted it several inches. The head flopped forward as it came out of the water, but Lee could see that the dead man was Tom Emory. He recoiled at the sight of his cousin’s colorless face, then paused briefly with his head bowed in silence.
Kevin’s body floated within reach but Lee saw no reason to confirm its identity. He pivoted Tom’s body until he was alongside the chained leg, then reached down with both hands to raise it. He could feel the chain tug the toolbox at the bottom of the lock. He pulled Tom’s shin upward until his hands broke the surface. The leg-irons caught the light and Lee saw the small keyhole near the hinge of the closed cuff.
He carefully extracted the key from his pocket, guided it into the keyhole, then twisted it and felt the C-arms fell apart. He let Tom’s leg drift away and slid the key back into his submerged pocket. Still gripping the opened cuff, he lowered his hand into the water and looked up at Cy. “I don’t know how those leg-irons got here,” he said. He started to say that he had given them to Katie last night, but his instincts intervened and he left the thought unspoken.
Cy met his gaze with a stern look. “The law says you can’t pull a body out of the canal,” he said. “Got to call the police and let them do it.”
Lee nodded, acknowledging the protocol.
“But I don’t think either one of us is going to want to explain this,” Cy continued. “Seeing as they was drownded with your shackles at my lock.”
Lee’s jaw clenched as he considered the situation. Cy was right. Lee’s only explanation – that someone had used his leg-irons without his knowledge to drown his cousins – would sound far-fetched, especially if it turned out the Emorys had not been robbed. And the weight of the toolbox gave him the impression that it wasn’t empty. And what if Cy claimed that he had found Lee at the lock with the dead men? It might look like Lee still intended to rob them and just hadn’t finished the job yet. Maybe he killed his cousins for some family reason. They might have trusted him enough to let down their guard. Or it might look like Cy and Lee were in league against the Emorys. To the police, the various ways Lee might have been implicated in the death of his cousins would inevitably sound more plausible than the truth. And the truth made no sense even to Lee, since he still couldn’t believe that Katie was involved.
“We got to get them bodies out,” Cy said.
With his reasoning at a dead end, Lee nodded his assent.
“I’ll fetch a canoe and paddle in,” Cy said. He pointed to the berm beyond the lock. “We can take ‘em out and unload ‘em near the flume, then get ‘em into the house. Better get moving before anybody else happens along.”
“OK,” Lee said. “I’ll stay here to help lift ‘em into the canoe.”
Cy opened the berm-side gate and limped up past the driveway toward the green canoe Pete had been using to launch his stick armada. He untied it and dragged it onto the berm, across the grass, and down the embankment to the lower level of the canal.
While Lee grew cold standing in the lock, he lifted the open cuff back out of the water. The toolbox and Kevin Emory’s ankle rose toward the surface. He saw something wrapped around the toolbox handle and pulled it closer. An arrow stabbed his heart as he recognized Katie’s sandstone pendant. He released the cuff and untied the cord from the handle. The pendant came free, shedding water into the lock as tears formed in the corners of his eyes. What had happened to Katie? How could she have been involved? He thrust the pendant into his pocket and turned blindly away from his cousin’s body, dropping his hand and the toolbox to his side. Untethered from its anchor, Kevin Emory’s corpse floated freely on the surface.
Lee turned to see Cy paddle into the lock, sitting in the bow seat of a green canoe. He glided over to Tom Emory’s body, and Lee waded awkwardly alongside him. “Better get this loaded first,” Lee said. He hoisted the toolbox up to Cy, who set it between the thwarts. Lee tried to hold the birchbark canoe steady while they worked Tom’s body over the rail. Lock water poured from the corpse’s clothes as it slumped onto the floor of the canoe. Cy knotted his brow, staring at a small hole in the starboard side that was now only an inch or so above the waterline. “I reckon we’ll take on water after we load the other one, but it don’t matter,” he said. He took a stroke to draw the boat toward Kevin’s body, and together they lifted the corpse on board. The hole in the starboard side was below the waterline now and a steady stream flowed through it. “Better get back to the berm before she sinks,” Cy said. Lee pushed the bow toward the open gate as Cy stroked. Only a few inches of freeboard remained, but that was enough to reach the bank near the flume. Shivering freely, Lee waded to the rope ladder and climbed the lock wall.
It was early afternoon now and the air above the lock felt much warmer than the water. He stripped off his shirt, shoes, and socks and laid them out on the swing-beam to dry, then strode barefoot to the mouth of the flume to help Cy pull the canoe onto the bank.
They carried the bodies into the lockhouse as quickly as they could and laid them face up on the kitchen floor. While Cy looked for something to cover them, Lee rifled through Kevin Emory’s pockets and retrieved a key-ring with a wooden fob and a few keys attached. From the other corpse he took Tom’s sheathed Bowie knife, which he held before him as Cy returned. “I was thinking it should stay in the family,” he said, forcing a smile. Cy only glared as Lee slid the knife into his pocket and offered to retrieve the toolbox. Cy grunted to suggest indifference, but his bloodshot stare betrayed his interest.
Lee jogged back out to the lock wall and scouted the towpath – no one in sight. Even though the canal’s official opening was still three days away, they had been lucky to remove the bodies without being seen. Remove the bodies – how easily that phrase traversed his thoughts! On one level, the thought of what he’d just experienced, and of what he and Cy were doing now, was still unfathomable. He knew his cousins were unattractive characters – scofflaws at best, criminals at worst – but even though he’d felt little affinity for the Emorys, he had a hard time believing they deserved to die. And someone had drowned them, or killed them first and thrown them in the lock, leaving Katie’s pendant tied to the instrument of their death. The fear that she was somehow responsible was pierced by a sharper fear; maybe she’d fallen victim to the same killer! Maybe he had stripped off her necklace and used it as a macabre signal or warning. Or had killed her and was trying to frame her for the Emorys’ deaths!