He froze in place as he heard footsteps overhead. Someone’s upstairs! He stopped breathing to listen intently. Five seconds – ten – nothing. Cool beads formed on his brow as he stood motionless, holding the key. Think rationally. The door and windows into the floor above you are boarded up, front and back. Someone might have followed you into the basement, but there’s no way to get upstairs. There’s no one up there, so that wasn’t a footstep. Or was it?
Breathing lightly now, he aimed the flashlight straight down. He started to put the lock-key back but thought again. Maybe someone followed me in; if so it’s a weapon. Holding the key by its socket end, he crept along the partition wall toward the bottom of the stairs. When he reached the landing, he stood motionless with the light aimed backward for two full minutes. No sound. He stealthily edged onto the landing and sidestepped across it.
Peering into the darkness of the other side he saw nothing moving, just light pouring in through the unboarded window. He panned the room with the flashlight. It looked as it had before. Still carrying the lock-key, he crossed to the open window. A furtive peek told him no one was waiting in ambush. He tossed the lock-key and flashlight on the grass and climbed out.
Back on the lawn, he paused to gather his wits. The rain had stopped but it was still humid and overcast and he wiped sweat from his forehead. Why was I so spooked, he wondered as his pulse eased down. He found the drill where he’d left it and dug into the pocket of his jeans for the screws. The green partition fit neatly back into the open hole and after all the screws took their places, the boarded window looked as it had when he’d arrived. He surveyed the dirt slope to the boat ramp and the empty towpath in both directions. Clutching the lock-key, drill, and flashlight, he strode back across the lawn and up to the towpath. A vibration in his chest made him glance nervously back at the lockhouse from the bridge, half expecting to see a girl’s pale face and hands in the window. Only the boarded windows stared back.
***
After a fruitless hour trying to debug the code for a nested loop, Vin realized that he had been incrementing the wrong counter variable. He snorted in disgust and substituted “i” for “j”. The loop executed correctly. What an idiot. He climbed the stairs to the kitchen. When he overlooked simple things like that, it was time to take a break – even though he’d only been at his desk for a couple of hours after returning from the lockhouse. He carried a glass of iced tea into the living room, where the lock-key was lying next to the Vieira book on the coffee table. He slumped onto the couch and opened the book. Maybe there were other insights laced within it. In the sections on Harpers Ferry, or Big Slackwater, or the Paw Paw Bends.
He was still reading when Nicky got home from the Clinic. In response to his usual query she said the last part of her day had been awful; she’d had to put down a sick kitten that had been adopted by a family with young children. It was vomiting and had diarrhea, and it hadn’t responded to the antibiotics she’d prescribed. “The little thing just couldn’t get his intestines to work. I hate having to tell the owners it’s hopeless.” She reached for a sip of Vin’s iced tea. “What are you reading?” He raised the book to show her the cover, and she squinted in admonishment. “You’re kidding, right? Don’t tell me you’ve resurrected your quest.”
“It’s not really a quest,” he said. “Just curiosity. Trying to discover the truth.”
“Aaaaggh!” she howled affectedly. “You are starting again! I recognize that phrase ‘the truth’.”
He laughed and put a hand on her shoulder. “Honey, relax. I’m just treating it like a research hobby. The way some people study birds or trees.”
“But, Vin, birds and trees are real, living things! You can see them or touch them – today! They’re alive right now! They’re not some imaginary mystery involving people no one has ever heard of who have been dead for a generation!”
He dropped his hand from her shoulder. “Nicky, it’s interesting to me. The history. We live right up the hill from a national historic landmark – what’s wrong with trying to understand it? These were real people who lived and worked here.” He picked up the lock-key from the coffee table. “See? This is a real lock-key, from the canal era. It’s not imaginary.”
Nicky squinted hard, then shook her head and backed away. Her narrowed eyes now looked entirely blue, but Vin could sense darker colors darting behind them. “Where did you get that?” she demanded. “And why on earth did you bring it home?”
He smiled sheepishly. “I don’t know… I guess it’s a souvenir. I wasn’t really thinking about keeping it. I just…”
“You weren’t really thinking about it?” Nicky’s tone implied frustration and disbelief. “How does that happen? Where did you find it?”
“Just... a little ways up the canal,” he said, scrambling to cut his losses, “in a pile of stuff. Most of it was trash.”
“And that’s not trash? Oh, great. You’re spending the afternoon poking around through piles of old garbage! Vin, you’re really scaring me now. Isn’t there work you need to be doing? Did you actually do any work today?”
“Sure. I worked today.”
“For what, ten minutes?”
He frowned and cocked his head. “No. For more than ten minutes.”
“Is the Rottweiler stuff on track?”
“I got done what I needed to get done.” That’s almost true, he thought.
Nicky sighed as her expression melted into one of resignation. “The wedding is less than two months away. Doesn’t it make sense to try to get the project done before then? So you won’t have to think about it on our honeymoon? And so you can start fresh when we get back?”
He nodded as she spoke but raised his fingers when she finished. “The pace of the project is really determined by Rottweiler. I should have phase two done by early October, but who knows how long it will take them to review it and sign off. And then we’re supposed to have a couple of brainstorming sessions about phase three.”
Nicky walked back to the kitchen shaking her head. “It just sounds like this will drag out indefinitely. And you’ll spend the next two years huddled over your desk in the basement.”
“God forbid!” he said, stifling a laugh. “But there’s always that risk.”
Chapter 31
Archives
Friday, August 30, 1996
On Friday morning Vin was working on his last consulting task of the week: developing a suggestion-rating feature for Rottweiler’s website. As he considered the user interface, he realized the requirements weren’t fully specified. Could anyone post a rating? If not, what sort of credentials were needed? While e-mailing a series of questions to his project manager, he felt a combination of disappointment and liberation. It was how he’d felt in grade school when a Friday of exams was canceled because the furnace broke. You knew you’d have to take the exams later, but for now you had the rest of the day and the weekend off.
After sending his message, he uploaded his project to the Rottweiler server. Through no fault of his own, he reminded himself, there was no more work worth doing today – and it wasn’t even ten yet. He climbed the stairs, poured what was left of the breakfast coffee, and leaned into the living-room couch with Vieira’s book.
Instead of continuing with the chapter about Cumberland, he returned to the Edwards Ferry page that referenced Emmert Reed. Something about the words penciled in the margin had been nagging him. The arrow implied that the phrase “and his albino mule?” should be inserted between the words “Emmert ‘M-Street’ Reed” and “tended lock 25”. The phrase was posed as a question and the question gnawed at him now. Why would a locktender have an albino mule? Or any mule? Along the canal, mules were primarily used to pull boats.