Текст книги "Swains Lock"

Автор книги: Edward A. Stabler

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SWAINS LOCK

Edward A. Stabler

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Edward A. Stabler. All Rights Reserved.

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

SWAINS LOCK is a work of fiction and its characters are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance of these characters to actual persons living or dead is unintended and coincidental.

*****

For Martha, who made this book possible, and for those

who have walked the towpath or put their feet in the river.

*****

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

Blood Pendant

PART ONE

Chapter 1 – Figure Eights

Chapter 2 – Discovery

Chapter 3 – Whites Ferry

Chapter 4 – Candles

Chapter 5 – Sightseeing

Chapter 6 – Books

Chapter 7 – Newspapers

Chapter 8 – Spanish Ballroom

Chapter 9 – Snowshoeing

Chapter 10 – High-Water Marks

Chapter 11 – White Mules

Chapter 12 – Falling

Chapter 13 – Fever

PART TWO

Chapter 14 – Locking Through

Chapter 15 – Paying for Ten

Chapter 16 – The Big Fish

Chapter 17 – Shadowmen

Chapter 18 – Cordwood

Chapter 19 – Silver and Gold

Chapter 20 – Sunset

Chapter 21 – Unwinding by Starlight

Chapter 22 – Swains Lock

Chapter 23 – Angling

Chapter 24 – Pennyfield Pages

Chapter 25 – Grave Dance

Chapter 26 – Paper Spear

PART THREE

Chapter 27 – Rising

Chapter 28 – The Level Trade

Chapter 29 – Edwards Ferry

Chapter 30 – Emmerts Lockhouse

Chapter 31 – Archives

Chapter 32 – One Red Leaf

Chapter 33 – Reeds

Chapter 34 – Sharpsburg

Chapter 35 – Pas de Deux

Chapter 36 – Joined Sycamores

Chapter 37 – Full Circle

Chapter 38 – Revisiting

Prologue

Blood Pendant

Tuesday, May 3, 1831

The two men sat on sloping rocks shaded by a Bear Island hackberry tree. Sweat trickled down their backs and foreheads and their reddened hands were streaked with dirt. Five hours of work on a spring morning had raised a thigh-high stone wall that bisected a swampy drainage. The feeder was operating now, watering the C&O Canal down from Seneca, and the sixty-foot depth of Widewater across the towpath was slowly filling. When their half-built wall was finished, it would prevent this grafted vein of the canal from draining out across the island toward the Potomac River.

Glancing through slender trees toward the towpath, the man with curly hair noticed the girl when she was still forty paces away. He caught the other man’s attention with a low whistle. Screened by sunlit trunks, they could watch her approach without being seen. She wore a tan skirt that might have been buckskin and a long-sleeved blouse. Her hands and dark hair swung a gentle rhythm as she glided forward with feline grace. A grin widened on the face of the man with curly hair as he watched the girl.

“She moves like an animal, eh Richard?” He gathered a clot of saliva in his mouth and spat it out tersely between his feet. “Bet she fucks like one too.”

“Just one way to find out,” Richard said, stroking his red-gold mustache. He rocked forward to crouch in the shade on the balls of his feet.

“No sign of poppa today,” the man with curly hair whispered, grinning again.

“Probably sleeping off his whiskey back at the quarry,” Richard whispered back. “It’s lonely out here on the island today, Johnny.”

Johnny pushed himself away from the rock and crouched alongside Richard. The girl was only twenty feet away now and they could hear her singing softly to herself, the tune rising and falling as she passed. Richard stepped quietly to the towpath and Johnny followed. Their eyes met and they loped toward the girl. When she turned toward the crunch of footsteps, Richard’s arm encircled her neck. His hand clamped her mouth as Johnny lifted her legs to his waist. The girl shook her head and tried to scream but her voice and teeth were overpowered by Richard’s calloused hand.

Richard lowered her to horizontal, hand still across her mouth, and the gesture jerked open her top button, displacing the silk cord of a pendant necklace that lay against her dust-colored skin. She writhed and twisted as the men carried her back into the Bear Island woods. Past their half-built stone wall, a fish-shaped pond occupied the lap of the drainage. They carried the girl along a slope of brown grass toward the tail of the pond.

“I think we’re beyond earshot,” Richard said over his shoulder.

“Aye. We ain’t seen no one pass in hours anyway.”

Together the men dropped their arms to the ground. The girl tried to roll onto her stomach, screaming as her mouth came free, but Richard quickly muzzled her with one hand and pinned her arm with the other. He knelt facing Johnny, who pressed her ankles to the earth.

“Well now, Johnny,” he said with a smile. “You seem to have ended up in the favored position. I guess that means you get the first taste.” He looked down at the girl. Her gleaming hair was speckled now with dried grass and her dark eyes oscillated wildly under an emerging skin of tears. “You just relax and enjoy this now honey. Might be the only chance you get with two full-blooded white men.” She bit at the fingers of his hand, but they were tough and thick and he waggled them to avoid her teeth. When he looked up again, Johnny had already dropped his trousers and was yanking down his grimy undershorts, still pinning her thigh with one hand as she frantically tried to twist away. Johnny cradled his craning member and shuffled toward her on his knees.

“Here I come, darlin’,” he said, pawing at her underwear and smiling, “like a big old barge sliding into a tight little lock.” With his hands still pressed to the girl's mouth and elbow, Richard glanced down and saw that her eyes had dried. She was reaching inside the neck of her blouse and pulling something with her free hand.

“Hey, Johnny,” he said, looking up again. “I think she likes the look of your boat. Seems she fixin’ to open the gates for…” Before he could finish he saw a moving shape and a flash of white light, then felt a stabbing pain. His left eye closed reflexively as warmth flowed down his face and trickled onto his lips. Turning back toward the girl, with one eye he saw his own blood raining onto her face and neck. His occluded left eye was buried behind a red, throbbing field.

“God damn it!” he roared. “Fucking half-breed whore!” Johnny jerked back onto his knees in surprise. The girl stopped struggling momentarily and Richard saw a thin smile form on her lips. Her free hand was clenched around a reddish stone shaped like an elm leaf and stained a deeper red with his blood.

In one motion he grabbed a fistful of hair and stood up, yanking her to her feet. He pressed his wrapped fist to her scalp and dipped to sweep her legs off the ground. When she tried to scream, he pulled her hair until the tears resurfaced and her voice trailed off. The pond was a half-dozen paces away and he strode quickly toward it. Johnny had hoisted his suspenders and was shambling to catch up.

“I told you she was an animal,” he said. “Fucking injun blood.”

“Well she better ask her medicine man to turn her into a fish,” Richard said as they reached the water. Johnny gestured toward the stop-gate near the tail end of the pond.

“Let’s go behind it. Too open here.”

Past the stop-gate, Richard thrust her down at the water’s edge, then bent her right arm behind her back and forced her to her knees. “Time to join your ancestors, you pagan bitch!” he said as the blood slowed and grew viscous on his face. The girl inhaled sharply as he thrust her head into placid water discolored by decaying leaves. Her body was quiet for a moment, then lunged violently upward. Johnny placed his hand on top of Richard’s and together they held her head below the surface. Still clutching its weapon, her left hand flailed for another target.

The girl’s resistance subsided and her body grew quiet. Her dark hair fanned out across the water, like an aura surrounding the oppressive hands. She pulled her free arm into the pond and groped for leverage in the muck at the bottom. Then her legs and arms erupted in another spasm as she fought to push upward and back. The reddened hands and arms held fast. She tried to dive forward but was tethered by Richard’s grip on her bent arm. Her third and final lunge was a fading echo of its predecessors, and after that the girl was still.

Johnny pried the object from her fingers and laughed. “Some kind of stone leaf. Maybe a necklace…with an idiot symbol. She’s a fucking native, like we thought.” He tossed the sandstone pendant onto the bank. Richard pushed her head under the surface in disgust, then brought his hand gingerly to his face to gauge the damage while Johnny knelt back from the water and watched.

“I don’t think she caught you square in the eye.”

The girl’s head bobbed to the surface and her hair undulated on the water like sea moss.

“Maybe not,” Richard said, “but that whore got a piece of me. My eye’s too swelled up to open.” He gently washed drying blood from his face with wet fingers. “Let’s get rid of her,” he said, spitting savagely at the dirt.

The men stood up and Johnny pulled her limp body from the water and laid it on the bank. Her dark eyes were fixed at infinity and a stream of water trickled from the side of her mouth. Johnny bent to grab her ankles. One of her heels had twisted out of its shoe, and the shoe hung from her toes. Richard gripped her wrists and turned toward the thin tail of the pond.

They carried her along the drainage, continuing straight through sparse trees over flat terrain when the outlet stream swung away to the left. Accustomed to lifting heavy stones, they bore her body easily as they wove through a cordon of boulders and approached large rocks that rose to a rounded ridge. Beyond the ridge crest was blue sky.

Dragging the girl’s upper body with one arm, Richard climbed onto the base of the ridge and waited for Johnny to scramble up alongside him. The girl’s loose shoe fell and rolled into a crack in the rock. The men reclaimed their grips, sidestepped to the crest, and looked down at the river below. It ran swiftly and impassively between the cliffs of the gorge.

Staring at the swirls and folds of the current, they rested for a few breaths. Richard caught Johnny’s eye and Johnny nodded. Holding the body by its wrists and ankles, they swung it like a pendulum toward the river. On the second swing they let go at the height of the forward arc, and the girl’s body soared out into the air above the river. Her arms flew free from her sides and hung in the air like those of a dancer as her body carved a graceful arc toward the water. From the cliff above, they saw an ephemeral flash of bright water, its sound lost in the rush of the current. The body knifed into colder water beyond the reach of the sun, then rose slowly toward the surface as the river carried it away.

***

Sunday, May 8, 1831

Greyanne Alstyne pressed the sandstone pendant against the smooth stick of driftwood she held in her palm. She carefully wrapped the cord around the leaf-shaped pendant and the stick, knotting the end to hold the two together. Looking down at her husband Parry, she saw tears streaking his sunburned cheeks as he worked, and she brushed a tear away from her own eye. Sitting on a broken log he had set across the tail of the pond, he leaned forward, tools in hand, toward the stone wall.

On a waist-high block on the southern face of the stop-gate, Grace’s symbol was taking shape. He had already inscribed the curve of the G and was tapping out the vertical arm. It was a mark that Grace had designed and drawn herself, to surprise her father when she was only seven. Greyanne watched as Parry gently set his chisel to the stone and tapped rhythmically with his hammer. The prominent veins on his large hands were stained with sweat and dust. She curled her fingers around the cord that lashed the driftwood to the pendant and turned away.

Searching for Grace, they had found her necklace yesterday in the rough grass near the tail of the pond. It was only a few feet from the stop-gate that had been built last month by the vermin who killed her, with stones that Parry and the other masons had cut. Grace had met a friend at Great Falls on Tuesday morning, and a few people at the Tavern had seen her set out downstream on the towpath early that afternoon. She never made it home to Cabin John. That was five days ago now.

On Friday night one of the masons had heard the English laborer Richard Emory, whiskeyed up with his work crew, brag about how he and “Johnny” had “had our way with that little half-breed Alstyne whore out on Bear Island and then fed her to the fishes.” The mason had said that Johnny was another laborer from Liverpool – John Garrett. And that Emory’s eye was hemorrhaged and blackened.

Greyanne and Parry, and others who offered to help, had scoured Bear Island in search of Grace, hoping the boast was only half truthful, clinging to the prospect she might still be alive. They hadn’t found their only child, dead or alive, on the island or along the banks downstream. But they had found Grace’s bloodstained necklace by the stop-gate. And then worse, one of her shoes lying upside-down in a crevice on the ridge, only a few paces from the cliffs that lined the gorge.

Greyanne walked toward those cliffs now. She clenched her fingers in anger around the driftwood, knowing that even if Grace’s body were found, her killers would go free. At the base of the ridge, she fixed her long black hair into a loose knot, then climbed up onto the rocks. She switch-backed toward the rounded crest and continued a few steps to the precipice.

Two hundred feet away across the gorge, the Virginia cliffs were lit by the warm morning sun. Below her the broad coursing river reflected the soft blue sky of mid-spring. She turned toward the upper gorge and the indomitable falls beyond it, as her ancestors had while fishing this river five hundred years ago. A light breeze stirred as she spoke to her lost daughter in a clear voice and a forgotten tongue.

“Grace, those men have taken your life and cast your body into the water.

They have stolen the lives of your children and ended your line forever.

Now for ten generations, your spirit will rise with the river

to drown a son of Garrett or Emory.”

She held the driftwood with its sandstone rider aloft and flung it with all her strength into the sky above the river. It arched through the sunlit void between the cliffs and dropped into the water with a silent splash. A great blue heron on the rocks below unfolded its wings and took flight. She watched Grace’s talisman bob away in the current, then softly finished her invocation.

“In their dreams they will see and fear you,

but they will not recognize you in their waking lives,

until the floodwaters come to carry them away.”

The driftwood disappeared in the march of water and time.

Chapter 1

Figure Eights

Saturday, October 21, 1995

Vincent Emory Illick opened the sliding glass door to the backyard and stepped outside as Randy bolted past him, headed for the woods. He closed the door, leaving it unlocked, and turned to follow. A barely visible trail descended a wooded hillside and he shuffled down it, dodging the branches that occasionally blocked his path. Halfway down he saw the decaying shed he used as a navigation reference, a hundred feet away through the trees. Moments later he saw ghostly white walls emerge through foliage at the base of the hill. He left the woods and entered a field of uncut grass next to the fenced-off remnants of the Pennyfield House, at Pennyfield Lock in the Chesapeake and Ohio National Historical Park. Randy was already across the canal, urinating on a tree next to the towpath. He turned back to locate Vin, wagging his tail in anticipation. Vin jogged across the meadow and the wooden bridge that spanned the lock, then turned south with Randy following for the three-mile run down the towpath to Swains.

Thin gravel on the towpath crunched beneath his feet, beating out a melancholy rhythm that had stalked him the last few months… thirty – five – thirty – five – thirty – five. On October 22 – tomorrow – Vin would be thirty-five. That was almost half a life and he didn’t feel like he had much to show for it. Twelve years of experience along a career path he cared less and less about. A few months severance and some stock options he’d been able to cash in as part of the buyout. A small network of family and friends scattered across New England and the west coast. And as of three weeks ago, a new city, a new place to live. With Nicky – that was one positive. And at least Nicky was sanguine about her own career. He also had a vague and inchoate sense that he belonged here, was here for a reason. He’d never lived in the mid-Atlantic before, but long-dead ancestors on his mother’s side had roamed the Maryland hills near the confluence of the Potomac and Shenandoah rivers for generations. For Vin, moving here somehow seemed like coming home.

As the towpath curved clockwise in a shallow bend, he watched his shadow slide in the opposite direction, out over the leaf-spattered water of the canal. It bounced rhythmically forward over the sun-drenched and slowly drifting pool, keeping time with the thumping of his feet as he ran. Sycamores, swamp oaks, and maples soared high overhead, sending gold, green, and vermilion branches arching toward each other above the water. The arms receded along the axis of the canal but never embraced. He felt the uneven northeast breeze stiffen into an extended gust. A shower of leaves took flight and the clear skin of the canal morphed into a fingerprint of ripples. The falling leaves spun a slow descent toward their graves along the canal and the towpath, as they had for a hundred and sixty-five years.

He glanced over his shoulder and saw Randy pawing at a root. For a Saturday afternoon, this stretch of the C&O Canal was surprisingly quiet, given that it was only fifteen miles from the Maryland-D.C. line. He focused on the path ahead and ran on.

Rounding a lazy bend, he saw the whitewashed stone lockhouse at Swains emerge in the distance. He jogged backward and whistled for Randy while scanning the terrain. An apron of brush and trees eased down from the towpath toward the broad Potomac River, hints of which he saw glinting in the sunlight through the trees. The towpath itself was a flat dirt ribbon, eight feet across. Low vegetation and vines sloped down a few feet from the towpath to the canal, which was forty feet wide. The wooded bank across the water rose steadily away from the canal.

Randy burst up onto the towpath from behind a tree and jogged toward Vin, tongue hanging. Medium-sized, with a short coat and silky ears, Randy looked to most people like a skinny chocolate lab. But Vin had realized years ago that there must be something else mixed in – maybe Doberman. Nicky said pit bull. Randy was panting hard when he reached Vin, who clipped the retractable leash he was carrying onto the dog’s collar. He turned downstream and they ran together for the last quarter-mile to Swains.

Like many of the old lock sites along the C&O Canal, Swains Lock provided recreational access to the towpath and the river. A small gravel parking lot was connected to the towpath by a wooden footbridge over the stone lock. Between the lot and the footbridge, a stand sold soft drinks and rented canoes during the warm months of the year. The whitewashed locktender’s house stood empty and shuttered, set back from the lock by trampled grass.

Slowing to a walk, Vin examined the parking lot as he approached the footbridge. Nicky’s wasn’t among the handful of cars, so maybe she’d been delayed at the Clinic. He hoped not, since she needed a break and they’d planned an afternoon outing together. He drew his leg up onto the railing of the footbridge to stretch his hamstring and let the leash extend so Randy could sniff the grass beside the towpath. A man and his son wheeled their bikes across the footbridge, and then two older women walked past with their dogs. Vin glanced back at Randy, who was gazing across the thinly-wooded apron toward the river.

Vin turned back to his stretching and saw a woman crossing the parking lot toward him, holding a slack leash clipped to a large dog – probably some kind of Akita-shepherd mix. The dog bobbed its head eagerly from side to side, but the woman looked straight ahead and seemed to glide forward like a cat. She wore faded jeans and a simple sweater under a purple vest, with her hair pulled back in a short ponytail. Her hiking boots were scuffed and streaked with dirt. Vin glanced up as she passed and saw a thin, faded scar descending from her left temple to the top of her cheekbone. He guessed she might be forty, maybe a little older.

A second later the towpath behind him erupted in a cacophony of canine aggression. A woman yelled “Allie – let go!” as Vin whirled to see a snarling tangle of fur and fangs where Randy had been. “Randy, no!” he yelled, sprinting back to the towpath. He retracted the leash to yank Randy back from the other dog, pulled it tight over Randy’s head, and put a foot on his hindquarters to push him into a sitting position. Randy was panting, his face and neck streaked with saliva from the other dog’s jaws. Vin angrily held his open palm directly in front of Randy’s eyes, then looked up at the woman and her dog.

“I’m really sorry. Are you OK?” His hair had fallen across his forehead and he brushed it back along with pinpricks of sweat. The woman had placed her dog into a sitting position and was stroking its withers. She looked up at Vin.

“She must have lost her mind. That’s not like her at all.”

Vin caught a trace of bemusement in her voice. “What happened?”

“Your dog came over to sniff as we walked by,” the woman said, still stroking her dog’s neck. “Allie growled and showed her fangs, but your dog kept coming. Then Allie decided she’d seen enough and jumped your dog.” Standing up, she took her hand from the dog and looked at Vin. Her eyes were grayish-green and for a moment they seemed to flit left and right as she met his gaze.

Vin approached Allie slowly and extended a hand toward the dog, fingers down. “That’s OK,” he said soothingly. “Good girl, Allie.” He let her sniff his hand, then lightly ran his fingers along the thick fur on the dog’s neck.

“I hope this is a friendly pow-wow!” called a familiar voice. He turned to see Nicky crossing the footbridge.

“It is now,” he said as she joined them. He turned back toward the woman. “By the way,” he said, extending his hand, “my name is Vin and this is Nicky.”

The woman hesitated for a second and her eyes darted quickly from Vin to Nicky and back. They steadied and she smiled. “I’m Kelsey,” she said.

“And it looks like our dogs have already introduced themselves,” Nicky said. Randy was still breathing rapidly, with his tongue hanging and flecks of saliva drying on his neck. “Did they go at it?” she asked Vin, kneeling down in front of Randy and pushing up her sleeves.

“For a few seconds. It sounded worse than it actually was.”

“It usually does.” Nicky pressed her fingers against one side of Randy’s neck and worked them around toward the other. Wrapping her arm around his head, she tilted it back gently, pulled his lower jaw down, and quickly inspected his teeth.

“He’s fine,” she said to Vin, “but I see a little blood on his gums.” She turned toward Kelsey. “Do you mind if I take a quick look at your dog? I’m a vet.”

Kelsey gave her assent, retreating a step while Nicky kneeled in front of Allie. The dog looked back toward its owner for reassurance. The source of the blood was a small cut on Allie’s ear. Nicky bent the ear toward Kelsey and pointed it out.

“Maybe that will teach you not to pick on chocolate Labs,” Kelsey chided.

“It wasn’t entirely her fault,” Vin said, remembering the last dog-fight he’d broken up. “Randy’s not as innocent as he looks.”

“It’s a superficial cut, so I don’t think she’ll need stitches,” Nicky said, standing up and pulling down her sleeves. “You can just clean it with soap and warm water when you get home. We live off River Road by Pennyfield Lock. If you want to swing by tomorrow, I can give you some gentamicin spray. It’s a topical antibiotic. You should be OK just treating her with that for a week or so and monitoring her ear as it heals.”

Kelsey asked for the address as she fished into her vest pocket for a pen. Vin gave her the number on Ridge Line Court and told her it was the driveway at the end of the cul de sac. “My name is on the mailbox. Illick.”

“Illick,” Kelsey echoed, writing the address on her wrist. She said she’d stop by early tomorrow afternoon and Nicky said to look for the medicine in the mailbox if they weren’t home. Vin watched Kelsey flick the leash lightly against Allie’s ribs, then glide away downstream on the towpath with her dog.

Nicky poked him in the ribs and smiled. “I brought your stuff. Still up for a paddle?”

“Absolutely.” He took the keys and jogged to her station wagon to retrieve a daypack with picnic supplies and their custom-made wooden canoe paddles. They didn’t own a canoe, but he’d bought the paddles this spring to celebrate Nicky’s passing grade on the veterinary licensing exam. There was no one in line at the rental counter and within minutes they were paddling up the canal in an aluminum canoe, Nicky from the bow seat and Vin from the stern. Randy sat between the thwarts, eyes and nose trained on the wooded bank to their right.

Vin watched Nicky’s shoulder blade swell when her paddle caught the water with each stroke. She had grown up canoeing during summers in New Hampshire, so her strokes were long and even. She and Vin had canoed on a lake in Maine while visiting his parents in June. After a few seconds, he matched her rhythm and their paddles hit the water together. At the end of each stroke, their blades released and sliced toward the bow, shedding teardrops as the canoe glided forward. With their strokes synchronized, he hardly had to steer to keep the canoe heading straight.

Nicky held her paddle against the gunwale and pointed to the bank ahead, where Vin saw the olive-black shells of a string of turtles sunning themselves on a fallen tree arm that leaned into the canal. Nose to tail, they extended up the branch from the water, the biggest turtle the size of his daypack and the smallest the size of his hand. Vin had read that this stretch of the canal was maintained by the Park Service, and any trees attempting to take root between the towpath and the canal were quickly culled. But generations of trees had grown up on the bank opposite the towpath – the berm – since the canal’s commercial demise. Many of these trees shed branches into the water or died and eventually collapsed into the canal. Large fallen trunks were cut away, but branches that didn’t block the entire canal were left in place. The rotting limbs allowed the turtles to crawl out of the water into sunlight, remaining safe from predators while warming their antediluvian blood.

The canal curved gently and Swains Lock disappeared behind them. The woods along the berm grew steeper, in places turning to rock faces that had been blasted or cut away during the canal’s construction over a century and a half before. Vin surveyed the stretch of towpath he’d just finished running. Most of the leaves had yet to fall, so the wide brown river beyond the towpath and the woods was more sensed than seen.

From the berm he heard a rush of air, like the sound a sail makes when it suddenly fills with wind, and from the corner of his eye he saw a tilting of blue-gray shapes. Randy put his front paws on the gunwale, growling and barking as the great blue heron extended its wings, leaned forward, and with two powerful flaps was airborne over the water, long legs splaying behind. It flew upstream over the canal, ascending slowly as its legs came together to form a rudder.

“That’s amazing,” Nicky said, turning toward the heron’s abandoned perch. “I was looking right at it and didn’t even see it! They’re like statues. They blend right in with the terrain.”

“I didn’t notice him either,” Vin said. “They’re so skinny that when they look straight at you, their beak, eyes, and head almost converge to a single point. Imagine if you were a fish. The beak could be just above the surface and you’d never see it.”

“I’m glad I’m not a fish.”

“Plus they can stand dead still for a half-hour, then strike in a heartbeat.” He looked straight at Nicky, expressionless and silent for a second, then jabbed his extended fingers toward her as she yelped in surprise.

“I’m really glad I’m not a fish.”

“I’m glad you’re not a fish, too. Though I do like fish.”

She smiled and they paddled quietly until Vin steered toward the bank beneath the towpath and proclaimed their arrival. The grade from the towpath down to the river here had been cleared of trees. They carried the canoe up to the edge of the towpath, then waded through meadow grass down to the river as Randy raced ahead. At the downstream edge of the meadow, they sat on a fallen tree trunk and stretched their legs toward the water. Randy zig-zagged along the opposite edge sniffing clumps of grass, periodically sighting Vin and Nicky to confirm their presence. Vin spread the contents of the day-pack out on the log.

Watkins Island and its smaller kin severed this stretch of the Potomac like ragged stitches, but here its trees had been felled for a buried gas pipeline, so Vin and Nicky had a clear view across to Virginia. The river sparkled in the late afternoon sun, with whirls and ripples lacing its surface where the current poured over rocks hiding just below the waterline.

Vin tore a baguette into small hunks and sliced off pieces of cheese as Nicky bit into an apple. “So it’s been a while since Randy’s last dog-fight,” she said between bites.