“That’s where her accident was,” Doug said.

“You mean Kelsey?” Nicky said.

Doug nodded. “She was with another girl and a guy – friends from college I think – when their car drove off the back of the ferry in the middle of the river and sank to the bottom.”

Vin issued a low whistle. “How could that have happened?”

“I guess the car got shifted into reverse and blew through the retaining gate or something,” Doug said. “Rumor was they were smoking pot.”

“But they got out OK?”

“Kelsey got out OK,” Doug said. “She was pulled out of the water by a rescue boat.”

“What about her friends?” Nicky said.

“They drowned,” Doug said. “A diving team went out for them and they recovered the guy’s body from the car later that day. They kept searching for the other girl, but the river started rising and they had to suspend the search. They never found her. She disappeared in the flood.”

“That’s horrible,” Nicky said.

“It’s strange that Kelsey was able to get out and the other two weren’t,” Vin said.

Doug nodded. “Strange is a good word for it. When they raised the car, the windows were open. Maybe the other girl got out but couldn’t swim. Or maybe she was knocked unconscious and drowned.”

“How about the guy?” Vin asked. “Why couldn’t he escape?”

“He never had a chance. He had a seatbelt knotted around his ankle.”

Chapter 5

Sightseeing

Saturday, October 28, 1995

Vin finished his leftover jambalaya and walked to the bookcase in the living room, where he pulled out a topographic atlas for the state of Maryland he’d bought recently. He opened to the page that covered the Potomac River northwest of Washington, D.C. From the intersection of River and Falls – the center of the village of Potomac – he traced River Road four miles northwest to River’s Edge Drive. A left turn, and then two more turns on sinuous neighborhood streets took him to Ridge Line Court. His finger continued past the cul-de-sac to the canal, less than a quarter-inch away on the map. That quarter-inch was the yard behind his house, the wooded hillside beyond it, and the meadow next to Pennyfield Lock. The map showed the border surrounding the canal in green, denoting the area of the National Historical Park.

He traced the path of the Potomac River from Pennyfield Lock down to Great Falls, five-and-a-half miles downstream. A splintered clot of islands split the river from just above Pennyfield to just below Swains, after which the river narrowed and regained focus, passed to either side of oval Conn Island, and then was compressed into a writhing torrent by Olmsted Island before plunging over the Falls. Olmsted. Kelsey Ainge had mentioned that name while looking at the old photo of Lee Fisher and K. Elgin at the Falls.

He read the island names from the Falls back up to Pennyfield: Olmsted, Conn, Bealls, Minnehaha, Gladys, Claggett, Sycamore, Watkins, Grapevine, and Elm. Watkins Island dwarfed and overlapped the rest of them, beginning near Pennyfield and stretching almost to Swains. He and Nicky had watched the beaver swimming between Watkins Island and their picnic spot on the Maryland shore a week ago.

It was almost 1:30, so Nicky should be home in about an hour. They had planned to ride their bikes down the towpath to Great Falls. He looked out the sliding glass doors – mostly cloudy, but still warm for late October. It would be good to get outside, since he’d spent most of the rainy week at his makeshift desk in the first-floor office. On Monday, he’d sent e-mail to his former boss saying he was ready to get started on the technical-support database project. By the time you’re thirty-five, maybe it’s harder to be unemployed for a while without feeling guilty, he thought. It certainly seemed as if Nicky had brightened when he told her that he was starting his consulting work. He’d spent the rest of the week wading through documents from Weill Networks and roughing out a database structure and programming requirements. This morning he’d e-mailed his thoughts back to ‘Rottweiler’ for comments. Now he needed to read a couple of books on scripting languages, but that could wait until Monday.

He sat on the couch and studied the photo and note he’d found in the shed last weekend. The scene in the photo was his destination today. He re-read Lee Fisher’s note to “Charlie”, and was struck by the line: “In your search for me you may find the truth.” What truth was it that Lee hoped Charlie would find? Did it relate to the money, the killers, the dead… or something else? He was vaguely aware that this question was gaining a foothold in his psyche, like a virus that had infiltrated his bloodstream at imperceptible levels but was steadily consolidating its presence. He almost felt as if Lee’s directive applied to him, or that perhaps he had inherited the task from Charlie.

If Charlie never found Lee’s note, then no one else would find it now. Vin had replaced the planks in the shed this morning, but kept the drill, the photo, and the note. So in a sense, he thought, he had picked up a torch that Charlie never carried. And if he could find Lee, maybe Vin could find the truth – whatever truth that was. With a wry smile, he wondered if this meant the last line in Lee’s note would also apply to him. “Be careful you don’t share my fate.”

Nicky got home and drank a glass of iced tea with him in the kitchen. She eyed the open atlas, note, and photo on the living-room table and shook her head in mock reproach. “I thought you had work to do today,” she said.

“I did. I finished what I needed to finish and sent it in. And I put the planks back in the shed. Let’s get our stuff and head out.” They changed into biking clothes and went down to the first floor to collect their bikes and helmets from the storage area, passing the V+N driftwood mobile hanging in Vin’s office. It spun slowly, acknowledging their presence.

“I like it,” Nicky said. “It reminds me how close we are to the river.”

“I agree,” Vin said. “It’s like it connects us to this place.”

They carried the bikes out the sliding door, wheeled them across the back lawn, and walked them down the wooded path toward the old Pennyfield House at the bottom of the hill. The trees were slowly enveloping it. “It almost looks haunted”, Nicky said as they passed the eroding structure. They crossed the meadow and the footbridge and turned left onto the towpath.

“After you,” Vin said.

“Lazy,” Nicky answered. She stepped onto the pedals and rode away downstream.

***

Two hundred feet upstream from Pennyfield Lock, Kelsey stood in the trees abutting the towpath. With binoculars pressed to her eyes, she looked like one of the many birdwatchers stalking herons or hawks at the nearby Dierssen Waterfowl Sanctuary. The sanctuary was a short walk ahead, tucked beneath the canal and the river, but Kelsey was facing away from its ponds and birdhouses, peering instead at the meadow near Pennyfield Lock. She watched Vin and Nicky emerge from the woods and cross the meadow with their bikes. As they rode away, she put her binoculars in the jacket pocket that held her photographer’s loupe. Checking her watch, she stepped out onto the towpath, telling herself to be back in an hour. She headed down to the lock and across the footbridge and meadow, found the path she’d seen them descend, and started up the hill.

***

As Vin and Nicky approached the Great Falls Visitor Center and its long parking lot, the towpath grew crowded with pedestrians, so they dismounted and walked their bikes. Vin admired the Visitor Center as they walked by. Like the majority of canal structures, it was built on the berm side of the canal, since the river side and the towpath were generally inaccessible to carriages and cars. The building was a T-shaped whitewashed stone house, with its tall façade oriented upstream on the head of the T. The long axis faced the canal and offered a patio shaded by a portico roof projecting from the base of the second story. Two whitewashed chimneys on each axis gave the building an air of dignified ease.