Despite the field of rocks further out, the river here was six feet deep and unbroken. It was early spring but the water felt comfortably cool. Vin reached Randy and rolled over onto his back alongside the dog. They pointed their legs downstream and drifted with the current. He looked over at Randy – the dog’s tongue was lolling from his mouth and his eyes were half closed. He seemed to be smiling.
Vin surveyed the oncoming cliffs of Blockhouse Point to his left. On a high branch of a cliff-top tree, he noticed a white shape. As his viewing angle improved, he realized it was a large bird, the size and shape of a great blue heron but entirely white. When he and Randy drew even with the cliffs, Vin saw the heron lean forward and unfold its wings as it pushed away from the branch and took flight. After a few awkward flaps, the heron pulled its legs into alignment with its body. A hundred and fifty feet above them, the bird flew a short distance downstream, circled toward the center, and began flying back upriver, still high above the water. The heron turned clockwise until it was heading directly toward them. When it was almost overhead, it retracted its wings and tilted its dagger-like beak at the water. Vin couldn’t avert his eyes as the bird plunged toward them. Forty feet, thirty feet, twenty, ten. Like a helpless herring, he waited for the heron’s beak to strike his heart. He woke up drenched in sweat, his fever broken.
Chapter 28
The Level Trade
Tuesday, August 27, 1996
Passing the sleek trunk of a crepe myrtle protruding from her patio, Kelsey caught a glimpse of the television through the glass doors to the study. She’d left it on when she stepped outside to water her plants, and the screen now displayed a satellite image of red-orange spots on a familiar blue field. Three spots were aligned from west to east – the westernmost a whorl with an icy blue eye and emerging spiral arms; the central spot broader but split and unfocused; the easternmost off the African coast and underscored by a dotted line of fiery scars. She shaded her eyes and squinted through the glass at the image on the screen. Below the picture was a boldface caption, “Hurricane Edouard and Tropical Storm Fran.” She felt a spike of adrenaline and resolve. Her quarry’s illness and slow recovery had made the last five months uneventful, but those listless days were over now.
She finished her morning chores and drove to her studio, where her concentration repeatedly strayed from an editing project. Whatever was going to happen had to begin now. At two o’clock she hung the “Closed” sign on the front door with a note saying she would reopen at three. She drove home to Vera Lane and went straight to her study. Allie rose up from her dog bed in the corner of the room, wagging at Kelsey’s early return.
“Not yet, honey. We’ll take a nice walk later, when it cools down.”
Facing her built-in bookcase, she pulled a slim volume from the shelf that held books with library tags. Its dust jacket was missing, but the book’s gray cover was clean and unscuffed, its title clearly legible on the spine. She carried it to her desk and pulled the Montgomery County phonebook from a drawer. It was easy to find the unusual name; she wrote the phone number down on scrap paper. Looking at the library book, she jotted down its title, author, and call number, then slid the book into her purse, pocketed the paper, and headed back out to the car.
A few minutes later she stood before the card catalog in the Potomac Library, opening the Ca – Ch drawer and flipping through cards aimlessly for a minute or two, then scribbling on the scrap paper from her pocket. She closed the drawer and used the scrap to navigate to the Maryland geography and history shelf, where she knelt to study the numbered spines. When a glance confirmed she was unobserved, she slid the book out of her purse and inserted it between its assigned neighbors. She retreated past the checkout desk with her purse open, but no one asked to examine it.
In the entryway she stopped in front of a payphone on the wall and dialed the phone number she’d looked up at home. After several unanswered rings she heard a recorded voice. That was the outcome she’d been hoping for, since it foreclosed the possibility she’d be questioned. She left a message, hung up, and drove across the street to her studio.
***
Vin entered the house and carried the dog-food up to the kitchen, greeting Randy on the way. On the kitchen counter, the answering machine’s green message light was flashing. He poured himself a glass of water and pushed the play button.
“Hi, this is the Potomac Library calling for Vincent Illick,” the woman’s voice said. “We’re calling to notify you that a book you requested has been returned. The book is called The Level Trade: Lock-Tenders and Merchants on the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, by Wesley Vieira. If you’re still interested, we’ll be happy to reserve it for you. Thanks and we look forward to your next visit.”
He listened to the message twice; the woman’s voice seemed familiar but he couldn’t place it. He thought about his trip to the library last fall. That was before his illness. Before the fever, fatigue, and strange dreams that accompanied his battle with mycobacterium abscessus. The infection had started in March when he’d fallen on the little wooden crosses he’d found on Bear Island. After the pus was drained from his wound and his diagnosis confirmed, the antibiotics had helped his hip begin healing within a few weeks. But his loss of appetite and energy had lasted much longer, and it was mid-June before he’d been able to work for more than an hour or two or leave the house for any length of time. During his weeks of enervation, Nicky had called his condition “Vin’s 1924 flu.”
As the symptoms diminished and disappeared, he’d been able to start moving forward with work again, launching phase two of the Rottweiler project. And last month he and Nicky had finally mailed the invitations to their October 19th wedding. The venue – Goose Creek Vineyards, across the Potomac near Leesburg – was nailed down, and they had a celebrant to perform the service. They had a band, the same one he and Nicky had heard at the New Year’s party at the Spanish Ballroom. And a photographer, Joel Bettancourt. They’d both liked the wedding pictures that Kelsey Ainge had shown them, but Vin couldn’t shake the suspicion that she was shadowing him, that she had somehow infiltrated his search for Lee Fisher’s buried money and truth.
On the heels of his illness, progress with Rottweiler and the wedding had eroded his attachment to that search. By now Lee Fisher, K. Elgin, and the 1924 mystery almost seemed like an antique snow globe sitting on a mental shelf of curios and puzzles, the snowflakes drifting over a young couple in period dress and a mule-team pulling a canal boat.
And yet… He’d enjoyed reading the books he’d found about the history of the canal and the old newspaper articles chronicling the flood of 1924, even if they’d provided no references to Lee Fisher or K. Elgin and no leads to Charlie Pennyfield or Emmert Reed. He remembered the Vieira book he’d found listed in the catalog but missing from the shelf. Hadn’t the librarian told him it wasn’t checked out? She’d suggested it was probably stolen and wouldn’t reappear.
Yet here it was behind the flashing green light on his answering machine, trying to get his attention. He felt a dormant flame flare up, like a furnace triggered by the season’s first cold breaths. During the spring and summer the pilot light had flickered but never gone out. Just to gain closure it made sense to get the book. Like the others it would offer no leads, and after reading it he could bequeath Lee Fisher’s 1924 to the past.
Chapter 29