BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Read online

  BURYING ZIMMERMAN

  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 your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  BURYING ZIMMERMAN 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 Bob and Mary,

  and for the Yukon gold-seekers who shared their stories.

  *****

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 1

  Andrew Thompson

  1874 – 1902

  Blind unbelief is sure to err,

  And scan His work in vain.

  God is His own interpreter

  And He will make it plain.

  April 29, 1924

  Even in twilight my brother's gravestone looks much older now, like it almost belongs among St. Gabriel's rotting stones. When I kneel before it the flask in my coat pocket nudges my ankle like a faithful dog. Without thinking I pull it out. It's a trusted friend and will come with me tonight. I'm barely acquainted with the pistol in my other pocket, but it's coming too. We're going to meet Henry Zimmerman, who hasn't seen me in twenty-two years and thinks I'm someone else. He'll finally have to explain why he and Drew left without me that night. And why he turned his back on my brother, leaving him alone with a killer in the woods.

  I stand and untwist the cap for a slug, wincing at the irony as I read the epitaph and the alcohol burns my mouth. I still can't interpret Drew's death, but my own trinity has been made plain enough. Whiskey, fire, and fear have locked arms around me and repelled everything good: my studies at the ruins of the Pecos pueblo; my ability to sleep through the night; the steady hand I depend on to sketch.

  And now my wife. At some level I must have known my dissolution would drive Clara away. But I couldn't acknowledge that she'd take my eight-year-old daughter with her. Six weeks ago Winnie pushed my shoulder until I stirred, black-headed and fully clothed, and opened my eyes into sunlight stabbing through a window in the adobe wall. I squinted and tried to remember what day of the week it was.

  "Papa, aren't you coming? The car is here!"

  I brushed back Winnie's hair, but my mouth was too dry and my brain too withered to speak. Instead I looked over her shoulder to the open doorway, where Clara stood with their bags packed, shaking her head.

  "No," she whispered. "Owen, no."

  ***

  I pocket the flask and reach for the Colt. With six bullets in the magazine, it feels balanced in my hand, the checkered rosewood grip a bit warmer than the night. I extend my arm to sight a silhouette along the barrel and imagine that it's not just a swamp-oak flanking the graveyard. It's Gig Garrett standing in the woods near Cabin John Creek, on the night in 1902 that he and Drew shot each other before Garrett's cabin went up in flames. My index finger flexes until the safety catches. It doesn't matter – I'm twenty-two years late.

  What's left of Garrett's corpse lies in the Methodist graveyard, less than two miles northeast on Falls Road. And right now Zimmerman is even closer, waiting for me northwest at Sandy Landing, in an abandoned scow that was disgorged from the canal by last month's Potomac flood.

  The world turned sinister for me on that night in 1902, but for Drew things unraveled eight years earlier, when Jessie Delaney was found face down in the creek below the aqueduct bridge at Widewater. The coroner concluded she drowned after falling from the bridge. There'd been no witnesses, although a locket that belonged to Jessie was found near her body, its cord broken as if it had been torn from her neck. Drew was convinced Gig Garrett threw her from the bridge, but Garrett disappeared before he could be questioned. By 1899 we heard he was getting rich in the Yukon Territory.

  Henry Zimmerman's misadventures with Gig Garrett began earlier still. Garrett was a thirteen-year-old guttersnipe plucked from the docks by Zimmerman's boat-captain father, and the two boys grew up together on the canal. Henry took his lumps along the way. By the time he came back from the Yukon, Henry agreed with Drew that Garrett was responsible for Jessie's death. At least that's what he told Drew, and that's what Drew told me.

  So when Gig Garrett quietly returned to Maryland in 1902 and built a cabin near the mouth of Cabin John Creek, Henry and Drew decided they should escort him to the sheriff's office to be fingerprinted. That's what they were going to do on that September night, and even though I was only seventeen, I was going with them. Drew and Henry had revolvers and I had cuffs. There would be three sets of eyes and hands trained on Garrett, in case he decided to resist.

  Until they went ahead without me, making it two against one.

  And then Henry walked away, for reasons I've tried years to fathom, leaving Drew alone with Garrett. I'm convinced that if either one of us had been there, Gig Garrett would be in jail and Drew would be alive today. Instead his bones are decaying beneath my feet, and Henry Zimmerman will have to explain that tonight.

  Chapter 2

  I have been mulling my own complicity in Drew's death for years, because I'm the reason Zimmerman, Garrett, and Jessie Delaney entered our lives. They were canal kids, and though Drew and my sisters and I also grew up along the Potomac, we lived in Cabin John (though back then we called it Seven Locks), while those three came from ninety miles upriver at Williamsport. Henry and Gig had been boathands for Henry's father Captain Oliver Zimmerman, and Jessie had spent a few seasons on the canal with her parents. All three of them could navigate to Georgetown with their eyes closed, which is why they would occasionally hop a train or drift downstream on the towpath, when their boating days were over but they couldn't find work in Williamsport.

  That's why Henry and Jessie were panning for gold in Rock Run, in the woods between Great Falls and Cabin John, on a June afternoon in 1893. Drew and I were working our way up the creek toward a fishing hole that day, or rather I was working and Drew was g
liding from rock to gravel-wash to twisted root to rock, even though he was carrying a fishing rod and a tackle box. Half of my steps ended with a foot in the water as I tried to keep up. When he remembered to look back, Drew would stop and wait with an outstretched hand to pull me to an even footing. He was nineteen and I was eight.

  ***

  From the time I could pronounce his name, I thought the world of Drew, maybe because he was my only brother, but also because everyone else seemed to think the world of him too. It wasn't because he was perfect. My father was an engineer for the Washington Aqueduct and my mother taught school, but Drew never exhibited the academic curiosity that otherwise ran in our family. Miss Foster, the long-tenured school librarian who came to know me well, was surprised to learn I even had an older brother. Nor was Drew the most reliable or disciplined child a parent could have wished for. My sisters Cornelia and Penny claim they regularly inherited his unaccomplished household chores.

  But Drew had an innate balance and a lightheartedness that people found infectious. He'd look you in the eye deadpan after saying something unexpected, then succumb to a slow-spreading tight-lipped grin that made you feel the two of you were in on a secret that could consume the world. By the time I was old enough to address him as a peer, he had found work and left home. But as a kid I was always following in his wake, watching from the sidelines, or fending off his tickling fingers.

  Three and five years younger, Cornelia and Penny were closer to Drew's age than mine, but they were as captivated as I was. Occasionally the canal would freeze before the Canal Company could drain it for the winter, and when that happened Drew would borrow a pair of ice skates from one of the managers at the Cabin John Bridge Hotel. My sisters had a friend named Lucy whose family owned a sled, and Drew would shepherd the three girls down to the canal, criss-cross a rope around his torso, then slash his way down the ice at breakneck speed with the careening sled and shrieking girls tied behind him. If the girls hadn't all tumbled off by the time he got tired, he would stop abruptly in a shower of ice-dust, then dodge the oncoming sled and prepare to get yanked off his feet. Sometimes his skates would fly out from underneath him without any assistance from the sled. My mother would shake her head at dinner when Drew invariably rolled up his sleeves to reveal forearms bruised from encounters with the ice.

  ***

  As I followed Drew from stone to bank to stone, my shoes and socks felt like drenched sponges, but I was determined to keep myself dry above the knees, so I focused intently on my target for each impending step. I didn't realize that Drew had stopped until he was pulling me onto a flat rock in the center of the creek. He pointed with his fishing rod toward the nearest bank.

  "See him? He's a beauty!"

  It was curled on top of a fallen log, but the snake's colors blended so well that I only noticed it when it raised its head to assess us.

  "I think he's a Copperhead," Drew whispered. "Should we catch him?"

  My eyes widened and I gripped his hand harder. "Copperheads are poisonous!"

  I didn't think he was serious, but I hadn't forgotten about the snake prank.

  ***

  When the weather turned warm in the spring, snakes sometimes emerged from their dens to sun themselves on the towpath. A few springs ago, Drew had managed to snare a four-foot black rat snake and transport it home in the tied-off sleeve of his jacket, which he'd cinched and carried like a gunny sack. Without announcing his trophy to the rest of us, he'd fashioned a cage in the shed out of an empty wooden barrel, then offered the snake a chicken egg.

  Penny, who would have been ten or eleven at the time, had a pet mouse named Darcy who lived in a straw-lined wooden box in her bedroom. Darcy was tawny gray with a pinkish nose, and tame enough that he would perch on Penny's shoulder, sniffing and twitching while Penny sat at her desk to read or write. After school Penny always brought Darcy a tiny piece of bread crust, and she loved to watch his little teeth jigsaw into it. Darcy's box was covered by a window-screen held in place by stones.

  Two days after being imprisoned in the shed, Drew's rat snake finally swallowed the egg. When he noticed the snake's distended esophagus, Drew waited until his sisters were helping our mother clean up after dinner. Then he stole into their room and stashed Darcy in a dresser drawer. Minutes later his snake had taken up residence in the mouse's warm nest and was coiling and stretching to measure the place.

  Drew ambled into the kitchen and tapped Penny's shoulder. He pulled an unshelled walnut from his pocket, saying that he'd found it earlier and wondered whether Darcy might like it. Penny's eyes lit up, so Drew cracked the walnut open on the kitchen counter with a whetstone and handed her the pieces with a smile. Penny swept off toward her bedroom.

  Within seconds Penny and Cornelia were screaming, I was crying, and Drew had rushed in to capture the offending snake. Assuring my sisters that mice were amazing escape artists, he helped them execute a thorough search that eventually produced an unperturbed Darcy. The full story emerged months later, when emotions had run their course.

  ***

  To my relief, Drew led us to the opposite bank and we left the copperhead alone.

  I wasn't old enough in 1893 to know there were placer mines dotting the wooded slopes of Rock Run, but Drew was probably aware of them. So little gold had been pulled out during the prior three decades that nobody paid the miners much heed. There was a stamp mill up at Sawyers Mine, but that was beyond our fishing hole and we never heard it operating that day. I do remember passing a few trails that led up into the woods from the creek, so one or more of those mines may have been operational, but for every pit that was still being worked there were probably two or three that had been abandoned.

  We reached our fishing hole – a broad pool framed at the bottom by a fallen tree and at the top by a boulder that intruded halfway across the creek – and Drew studied it from the left bank.

  "See that undercut on the far side," he said, pointing with the fishing rod, "where it's shady below the current?"

  I nodded. "It looks deep."

  "They'll be cooling off near the bottom of that hole... just waiting for bugs to wash by overhead." I watched him open the tackle box and choose a hook, then tie it on and bait it with a piece of live worm.

  "After you, Alphonse." Drew had bestowed that nickname on me after the Alphonse and Gaston comic appeared that year. Alphonse and Gaston always deferred to each other until they were hamstrung, but Drew was no Gaston. Hefting the rod, he tightroped across the creek on the fallen log at the base of the pool, swinging one leg at a time around a branch near the halfway point. I tried to follow, but I couldn't negotiate the branch and had to retreat. Drew told me that I could scout the left bank beyond the boulder to look for a crossing spot, then navigated into position near the hole. He flicked the rod so his baited hook hit the current and drifted down.

  I watched him fish for a few minutes before continuing up the bank and past the boulder. The next bend of Rock Run was shallow, but broader and faster, and all of the rocks I could reach from the bank were underwater. My shoes had begun to feel less waterlogged and I didn't want to immerse them again, so I picked my way further upstream along the bank, checking downed tree trunks warily for camouflaged copperheads. When I noticed the trampled leaves and absence of green that signified a faded trail leading up from the creek, I got the feeling I was being watched.

  My eyes jerked away from the water and met large dark eyes a dozen steps up the path. We stared at each other for several seconds as I watched the doe lift its wet nose and sniff for my scent. When I let my eyes slip past it, I saw a fawn frozen twenty feet further into the woods, staring intently at me like its mother. Deciding I was neither friend nor foe, the doe hop-stepped into the trees, then paced away from the trail with its fawn in tow. Deer were still fascinating to me at that age, and I had spent hours trying to copy illustrations I'd seen on a wildlife poster at school. I jogged up the path into the woods and tried to keep them in sight.

 
; The trail was blocked by a downed tree, so I detoured around it, climbing to the right. When the trail cut through a stand of mountain laurel and turned parallel to the valley, I lost track of the deer. But I was ascending a rise that looked like it might offer a view of the creek upstream. The trail leveled off with Rock Run still out of sight, but I could see the path start descending back toward the valley floor just ahead.

  Between here and there was a broad-based cone of upturned earth. The mound was covered with leaves and fallen sticks, but nothing grew from it and rocks of various sizes studded its surfaces. Toeing its base, I realized that the mound had been built with dirt excavated from a hole in its center. I crawled up the mound and peered down into the hole.

  The opening was roughly square, with five-foot sides that were framed by a cribwork of interlaced logs extending down to ground level. A rotting plank spanned the hole, dividing it in half. A dirty rope had been wrapped a dozen times around the plank, and its free end descended into the hole. At the bottom of the hole, maybe fifteen feet down, there appeared to be a bucket, and something in the bucket caught the marginal light. What was it? I'd read stories about wishing wells and wanted to find out.

  I crawled to the top of the mound, centered one hand on the plank, and stretched the other forward until I could grasp the rope. And the plank snapped in half, sending me tumbling into the mine. To slow my fall and protect my head, I must have instinctively kicked and grabbed at the dirt walls as I fell, because I flipped and landed on my back and shoulders. I was lucky to miss the bucket and land in puddled mud, but the impact knocked the breath out of me. I lay twisted and inverted, with pressure in my chest and numbness everywhere else as I tried to breathe. Sensation slowly returned to my legs and feet, and I noticed my hand was still clutching the rope near where it was wrapped around the broken plank.

  My eyes teared up and I could feel myself starting to cry, but knowing that no one could hear me made me sniffle and stop. I pulled my legs down one at a time and rolled carefully onto my hands and knees, trying to get my breath back. My shoulder ached and my left arm tingled, but I realized I wasn't seriously hurt. I looked up at the window of light and could see treetops swaying in the free air far overhead.