Chapter Ten

High-Water Marks

Sunday, January 21, 1996

Driving the downslope toward the American Legion Bridge over the Potomac, Kelsey saw the river emerge through the trees to her right. The silt-stained current rolled and twisted through bare trees that normally stood a hundred feet from the water’s edge. Looking upstream from the bridge, she saw a writhing brown body below the orange sun; it seemed as if the river had risen halfway toward the level of her eyes. And in rising, like a cobra, it had grown half again as wide.

The highway ascended into Virginia and she turned onto a serpentine road that ran through woods and pastures, tracking the river upstream. After a few miles she reached the entrance road to Great Falls Virginia National Park. A police car was parked across the road, its lights flashing. Kelsey slowed to turn and the officer waved her onward, instructing her to bypass the park. She reversed course in a driveway and drove back past the entrance, then retraced another half-mile to the dirt-lot for the Difficult Run trailhead. Since it was 5:10 pm on a winter Sunday, she wasn’t surprised to see the lot almost empty. Difficult Run was a Potomac tributary that drained a local watershed and formed the southeast border of sprawling Great Falls Park. A muddy path from the parking area followed the stream toward its confluence with the Potomac, then joined trails leading west, back into the heart of the park.

She parked in the lot and got out, and with daylight fading climbed directly into the woods beside the road. A shallow draw led up the hillside and she found a deer path within it. She followed the path to the crest of the drainage where it met a legitimate trail, then turned west through the trees and jogged along the top of the ridge.

The thaw had begun on Thursday with heavy rain and temperatures in the low sixties. The last three days had been unseasonably warm and all that was left of the Blizzard of ’96 were dirty pyramids of snow in the corners of parking lots and patches of melting snow in the woods. The residual snow along the ridge-top reflected twilight and made the trail easy to follow. When it dead-ended at the entrance road to the park, she stood in the shadows and looked up the road to her left. The police car she’d seen earlier was two hundred yards away, still guarding the entrance, lights flashing. To her right the road descended through dark woods toward the guard kiosk, just under a mile away. She turned downhill and set off at a light run.

The air was still warm, so she shed her fleece pullover and wrapped it around her waist. The shuttered guard kiosk appeared through the gloaming; she passed it and cut onto the grassy picnic area between the road and the cliffs. She continued toward one of the viewing platforms that sat astride the rocks, overlooking the river below and the Falls a quarter-mile upstream.

But through the ebbing light she could see that the cliffs were gone. Instead the edge of the river undulated over the cement floor of the platform and encroached a few feet further into the park. Where it was compressed into the gorge below Great Falls, the river had risen seventy feet. She proceeded toward the water’s edge, passing a wooden post that denoted the high-water marks of past floods. At the level of her knees, a small sign read “1985.” At chest-height another read “1937.” Nearly six feet up the post, “1972.” Ten feet up, “1942.” The highest sign read “1936.” No earlier floods were chronicled.

Right now the water was lapping at the path just ahead, but the picnic areas behind her were swampy and studded with pools of standing water. She knew that the crest of the flood had passed Great Falls before noon, and that the river must have left flood stains on the post once more.

She peered out at the river. The nearest fifty feet of water lay within a lazy eddy defined by a submerged promontory of the cliffs upstream. Little ripples flowing in from the main current traversed the eddy and collided with their mirror images reflecting from the shore. Out beyond the eddy line, the current was a traveling, caramel-colored vortex laced with deep ephemeral folds and whirlpools. And at its center the river raged as a series of exploding brown waves and haystacks, spewing whitewater twenty feet in the air.

Kelsey saw that the Falls were gone, buried entirely beneath the surface of the river. A severed tree trunk shot out where the base of the Falls had been, then collapsed into the water and vanished. A half-minute later its torn roots emerged to spin inside a transient whirlpool, a long swim downriver from where it had disappeared. The bright and steady background roar of the Falls at normal water levels was missing too, and she found its absence unnerving. In its place the flood had brought a deep rumbling sound, punctuated by erratic booming and popping noises emanating from the center of the river.

A small snapped tree flowed past and she realized that it might have been swept from the distant western edge of the watershed. The sudden thaw throughout the mid-Atlantic had funneled blizzard runoff from four states into the torrent she confronted now. Or maybe the tree was a local casualty, she thought, and had only been in the river a day, drifting down from somewhere like Whites Ferry. She turned toward the high-water post and sought out the sign at its midpoint. 1972. She absently traced the faded scar on her temple with her fingers.

Des, where are you? Did you drift this far from Whites Ferry in the days they searched for you before the flood? Are you here now? Staring at the post, she felt a chill breeze caress her shoulders. Final colors were draining from the sky. Shivering, she untied the pullover from her waist and put it on. When her eyes opened, they found the knee-level sign that read “1985”. Early November, she thought, crossing her arms and squeezing her sides for warmth. I was here then too, and saw nothing, learned nothing. But something seems different this time. Why?, she asked herself, turning back toward the wild and kicking flow.

This time I feel your presence. Maybe your bones have been here all along, in an ageless chamber under the Falls. Or maybe you’re still with us. Do you miss your boyfriend, Des? Poor Miles who never had a chance… never saw the Stones. And something else is different. I’ve seen your sign, the mason’s mark. Twice now. And I met the person who found the second one. Vincent Emory Illick, born October 22, 1960. I know that much, Des. And this: he also found an old photo, and a note that may bring me what I’ve been looking for. I need your help to resolve it. What to make of Vin Illick? And what to make of his fiancée?

She unzipped her pocket and pulled out an empty plastic bottle, tilting it skyward so the label caught light. “Gentamicin. Dr. Nicky Hayes, DVM.” Twisting off the cap, she knelt down at the water’s edge. Ripples broke against the gravel of the path and tiny counter-waves reflected back across the eddy. She held the bottle’s mouth underwater long enough to fill it halfway before screwing the cap back on. She stood up, set herself, and threw the bottle hard toward the current. It landed just inside the eddy line, drifted slowly out and downstream, then caught an eddy current and bobbed back upstream and shoreward. She waited while it flirted with the threshold. Which way is this going, Des? A harmless reflecting wave pushed the bottle past the eddy line and it vanished in the maw of the flood.

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