Read Online SWAINS LOCK (The River Trilogy, book 1) by Edward A. Stabler - Free Book Online Page A

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.
    A nearby sign stated that the building had
been constructed as a locktender’s house in 1829, then enlarged
twice in the ensuing years as it evolved into Great Falls Tavern.
For 19th century Washingtonians who took overnight pleasure cruises
up the canal from Georgetown, it served as a destination, a tavern,
and an inn. But then as now, its proximity to the Falls was the
main attraction.
    Vin noticed that the path from the parking
lot to the Visitor Center was decorated with carved pumpkins and
paper-bag lanterns. Cardboard signs pointed arrows toward a
goldmine and a mock gallows. A hanging banner over the gallows read
“Life and Death on the Canal.”
    “Must be for some kind of Halloween event,”
Nicky said.
    Vin nodded. “I wonder who they’re hanging
tonight.”
    When they reached the Falls trailhead, they
locked their bikes in the rack and walked onto a cement arch that
crossed a spur of the Potomac. The water in this tendon of river
was white and flying and Vin was startled by its power and speed.
The arch led to a wooden boardwalk that zigzagged across Olmsted
Island, which a nearby sign explained was a rare example of a
bedrock terrace forest. Vin noticed that the trees were all shorter
and thinner than those along the canal, and that the leaves, moss,
and pine needles that formed the ground-cover lay on a foundation
of roots and rock, rather than topsoil. The