“Speaking of towpath,” Vin said, “I need to catch up with my fiancée and hit the trail. Thanks for the presentation.”

“You bet,” the ranger said. He raised the brim of his hat and looked back at the barge, which a young couple and their small children were admiring. “Excuse me,” he said, turning in their direction.

Vin found Nicky waiting on the brick walkway near the entrance to the Visitor Center.

“That was kind of scary,” she said. “I was worried he was going to drag you back to the barge to show you how the mules were hooked up, or start telling you what the boat captains ate for breakfast.”

“I guess we missed that part of the program. Maybe we should come back next Saturday… get here a little earlier…”

“Be my guest. Maybe you can learn the material and be his assistant.”

“I wonder if he knows anything about Lee Fisher. Or Emmert Reed. Hmmm…maybe I could write a book about all this canal stuff.”

“You could call it Life at Two Miles per Hour,” Nicky said. “Or how about, I Was a Teenage Mule Driver.”

***

After examining the photo of Lee Fisher and K. Elgin for several minutes, Kelsey carefully laid it back on top of Lee’s note on the breakfast-nook table, then walked downstairs and slipped out the sliding door. As she crossed under the deck, Randy rushed to the railing and serenaded her with another threatening round of barks. She ignored him and traversed the lawn toward the hillside, where she found the path and disappeared into the woods.

***

Pedaling the five-plus miles back to Pennyfield Lock, Nicky fell in behind Vin. The tourist traffic thinned out a mile above Great Falls and Vin tried to visualize what the canal must have looked like while it was still operating. Mule teams moving steadily down the towpath and barges gliding silently around the bends, day and night. How long ago was that? He thought the ranger had said the C&O shut down in 1924. That was the year written on Lee Fisher’s photo! Or had he heard incorrectly?

Two miles along, he saw the whitewashed stone lockhouse at Swains emerge on the berm side of the canal. He let his bike decelerate up the incline beside the lock.

“Let’s stop for a second, honey.”

“At the scene of your latest dog-fight?” Nicky dismounted and bent to stretch her lower back as Vin laid his bike down. The downstream gate was open, set flush into the lock wall, so its swing-beam ran parallel to and above the wall. He tried to push the end of the beam toward the towpath to close the gate. It moved an inch and stopped. He noticed a thin wire cable connecting the swing-beam to its counterpart across the lock. Since the wire was taut and the beams were designed to swing in opposing directions, neither beam could move. When he pushed the beam again, the cable transferred his effort to the beam across the lock.

Nicky had finished stretching and walked over to him with her bike. She ran its front tire slowly over his foot. “Hey Inspector Clouseau – tell me this is a temporary obsession.”

He extracted his foot. “I was just admiring the construction. This lock is like Lock 20; it’s still in good shape. The lock-keys are missing, but the original iron stems and hinge collars are all intact.” He pointed at the upstream face of the swing-beam. “There’s the old iron stirrup bracket that must have been used to support the block that held the crossing plank. I guess they took the planks away on the downstream gates.” He surveyed the lock walls. “And look at the red stone bricks they used to build the lock. Imagine how much work it must have been to hand-cut all of these stones.”

“OK, that’s the end of today’s history lesson. You can write it up for your social-studies teacher. Let’s keep moving.”

They pedaled upstream toward Pennyfield, passing a scattering of Swains-based dog-walkers and joggers en route, and Vin’s thoughts drifted to the next set of tasks on his project for Rottweiler. If he got some comments back by Monday or Tuesday, he could start designing the database by mid-week. Otherwise he’d have to spend the week reading programming books and playing with sample code. He kept his eyes on the towpath and didn’t notice as they passed a slender woman wearing dark glasses and a canvas jacket and walking back toward Swains.

“Hey,” Nicky said as they passed the woman. “Wasn’t that your victim?”

“What?” He looked back to hear her better.

“From last weekend. Your mysterious photographer friend.”

Chapter 6

Books

Wednesday, November 15, 1995

Vin walked into the Potomac Library for the first time. It was small but inviting, with a perimeter of stacks surrounding circular reading tables and half-height reference shelves in the center of the room. A librarian at the information desk guided him to a shelf devoted to Maryland geography and history, a portion of which held books about the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. After thumbing the relevant titles, he carried four books to a cubicle on the far wall.

Sunlight slanting through tinted windows warmed his shoulders as he placed a notepad and pencil on the cubicle desk. He jotted down the names of the authors and leaned back to open the first book, Walter Sanderlin’s The Great National Project: A History of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal. The 1946 book chronicled the history of the canal’s construction, operation, financial troubles, and demise in densely-footnoted detail, beginning with the chartering of the Ohio Company in 1749 in an attempt to develop a trade route connecting the Ohio River territory with Washington and Baltimore via the Potomac River valley.

He set it aside and opened A Towpath Guide to the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal by Thomas F. Hahn, which offered a terse mile-by-mile discussion of the architecture, history, topography, and ecology of the C&O Canal, from Georgetown to Cumberland. The pages covering locks 21 and 22 provided structural details on the locks and lockhouses at Swains and Pennyfield, but no information about the 1920s denizens of those lockhouses.

Another Hahn book, The Chesapeake and Ohio Canal: Pathway to the Nation’s Capital, seemed more promising. He skimmed an entertaining account by an itinerant New Englander of his experience as a novice boathand on a coal barge during a trip from Cumberland to Georgetown and back in 1859. And he found descriptions of 19th-century canal characters, along with recollections and anecdotes from aging boatmen that Hahn had interviewed in the 1960s and 1970s. Getting closer to the mark, he thought. By now he had memorized Lee Fisher’s note, so he knew what names to look for. He turned to the index listings under R.

Renner. Rumsey. No Reed. No Elgin or Fisher in the index either, and no reference to Swains Lock, but four listings under Swain. Based on the remarks attributed to them in the text, he was confident that Clifford and John Swain were boatmen. Mamie Swain seemed to be a boater’s wife and Otho Swain’s occupation wasn’t specified, though he was quoted on the superiority of mules to horses for canal work. Vin was sure that one or more of those Swains had inspired the colloquial name for Lock 21. And if that were true, maybe the Hahn book had a relevant listing under Pennyfield, the name associated with Lock 22.

No listing in the index for Pennyfield Lock, but he found this: Pennifield, Charlie. His eyebrows arched as he silently recited the beginning of Lee’s note. “Charlie, If it is April and I am missing…”.

Dismissing the spelling discrepancy, he flipped to page 134 and read, “Charlie Pennifield at lock 22 made and sold boat poles and pole-hooks to the boatmen.” I found something in your shed last month, Charlie – not far from the workbench you used to build your poles and hooks. A message someone left for you seventy years ago. Why was it hidden? Why didn’t you ever find it yourself? What happened to Lee Fisher? Did Lee’s note reflect an unfounded fear, or was he really “buried along with the others at the base of three joined sycamores?”