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Drew's hands; the
fingers weren't his. I crawled toward the opening and, shielding my
eyes from the smoke, tried to see what was in the cellar. Smoke.
And burning logs and kindling, framing a silhouette. The blackened
body of man, rimmed with flickering blue flames. I sprung to my
feet, lunged out the door, fell on my knees in the dirt, and
vomited up the ashes in my throat.

Chapter 5
    By the time I stopped vomiting, I was no
longer alone. Two men had run up to the cabin, and together they
dragged Drew's body out and laid it on level ground by the path.
Then more people were coming, some carrying buckets. The fire must
have been visible from the Bridge Hotel. Maybe a canal barge had
tied up to help. A bucket brigade formed, then grew, and soon water
from the creek was being dumped into the fiery cellar.
    A man showed me a badge pinned to the lining
of his coat, then asked if I could identify the corpse and if I
knew what had happened. I wiped my mouth and told him my name. I
said that Gig Garrett must have shot my brother Drew, that he and
Henry Zimmerman had come to the cabin without me, and that I'd seen
another body in the cellar. And then when I tried to stand up, I
collapsed.
    I don't remember anything else from that
night. I woke up the next morning in my own bed at my parents'
house. The police had turned me over to my father at Lock 7, after
a doctor pronounced me well enough to go home. For three days I
slept feverishly, hardly ate, rarely got out of bed. My parents
were shattered and spoke in whispers. Inspector Bullard visited
twice to question me, though I had nothing new to tell him. Maybe
he thought I was lying and would trip myself with an inconsistent
detail, but I stuck to the limited facts I knew. And I told him to
find Henry Zimmerman, though I wasn't certain Henry had ever shown
up that night. But it just seemed impossible that Drew would have
ventured to Garrett's cabin alone.
    They tried to find Henry, both because of my
story and because the sheriff confirmed that Henry and Drew had
talked with him about Garrett. But Henry was gone. He never went
back to the boarding house in Big Pool or his job at the railroad
yard. People wondered whether he'd had a hand in the shootings and
fled west. That seemed possible, because Henry had migrated five
years earlier, when he'd joined Garrett in the Yukon during the
Klondike stampede.
    Without Henry to provide an account of the
scene at Garrett's cabin, Inspector Bullard and the police were
left to construct their own. After the fire was drowned, they
examined its source in the wood cellar, where they found Garrett's
blackened, smoking corpse. A broken oil lamp was beside him, and
the extensive burns on the body convinced them that Garrett had
been doused with kerosene. A full kerosene can in the corner had
caught fire and helped spread the flames. The shotgun found near
Garrett's body had delivered the fatal volley to Drew's chest.
Drew's revolver was found tucked into the waistband of Garrett's
trousers, with five bullets still in the cylinder. The sixth had
splintered Garrett's right clavicle. Its casing was found on the
floor near Drew.
    The heavy gold ring seared onto Garrett's
right pinky identified its owner. It was a trophy from his
gold-rush years, and had drawn attention to him during his recent
visits to the Rathskeller tavern in the basement of the Bridge
Hotel. No one knew for sure how much gold Garrett cleaned up or
stole in the Yukon. Thousands of dollars worth at a minimum. Some
said tens of thousands.
    And gold was purportedly the reason he'd
settled in Cabin John, not Williamsport, even though some people
still associated him with Jessie's death near Great Falls eight
years earlier. Maybe Garrett thought he could strike pay-dirt on
one of the nearby Potomac tributaries. Or maybe he believed he
could find the pirate treasure that legend claimed was buried
somewhere along the creek named for the 18th-century hermit "John
of the Cabin". Whatever led