BURYING ZIMMERMAN (The River Trilogy, book 2) Read Online Free

Drew and then back to Jessie, but she didn't
seem to notice.
    Like Drew, Gig Garrett was nineteen years old
in 1893, and Jessie was his girl. Gig and Henry had grown up in the
same household and could have been fraternal twins. But Henry must
have long since realized that his adopted brother was a quicksilver
version of himself, and that Gig's impulsive spirit and dissembling
charm made him more interesting in Jessie's eyes. When Henry
squinted at whatever circuit was arcing between Jessie and Drew on
that June afternoon, could he have sensed that it would be enough
to inflame our lives?

Chapter 3
    Fifteen months after she helped rescue me
from the mine, Jessie Delaney was found dead in the wooded creek
below the aqueduct bridge at Widewater. We learned later that her
windpipe had been crushed, but the coroner declared her injuries
"consistent with a fall from the bridge." Jessie was the first and
only real love of Drew's life, and after she died I often caught
him staring absently into space. He still called me Alphonse, but
the pranks and tickling ended.
    The police came to talk to him, and it must
have been Drew who steered them to Jessie's parents in
Williamsport. And to the Zimmerman family, also in Williamsport,
and their son Henry and adopted son Gilbert "Gig" Garrett. Garrett
had been seeing Jessie until she took a job at Anglers Inn to be
near Drew in Cabin John. And Garrett disappeared right after
Jessie's death, finally surfacing eighteen months later in Alaska,
at a gold-mining camp on the Yukon River.
    I never saw Gig Garrett alive. I was nine
years old in 1894 when he fled after strangling Jessie, and eight
years later I met his charred corpse in the smoking ruin of his
cabin. But Jessie told Drew a few stories about Garrett that she'd
heard while growing up, like how the Zimmermans adopted him and how
he got his nickname. So what I know about Garrett I heard from Drew
– mostly in the days before they killed each other in 1902.
    Gilbert Garrett was born in 1874 in
Georgetown. That made him Drew's age, but unlike Drew he had
parents who didn't amount to much. His father would travel around
the area with a painting crew, but he didn't always come home
between one job and another, and sometimes he came home broke,
having spent his earnings at the nearest tavern.
    And then before Gilbert turned four, his
father vanished – disappeared from the river span of Chain Bridge
while he and his crew were working. It was getting late on a winter
afternoon and the painters were squaring away the work site, when
something must have spooked a horse on the bridge. Whatever it was
made the horse try to reverse direction and sent the empty caisson
it was pulling swerving across the bridge. The painting crew
scattered, reassembling once the driver got his horse settled and
caisson straightened out.
    That's when one of the men realized Garrett's
father was gone. When the crew was finally sure he wasn't on the
bridge, they climbed down to the water, but that stretch below
Little Falls has deadly currents and the river was running high and
cold. Fishermen found the body three days later, down near
Fletcher's boathouse.
    After his father died, Gilbert and his sister
went to live with their father's mother in Georgetown, because
their own mother wasn't up to the task of raising them. She
eventually ran off to Pittsburgh with a worker on the painting crew
who already had children and didn't want two more. But once Gilbert
got to be eleven or twelve, Grandma Garrett couldn't stop him from
hanging around the Georgetown streets and wharves.
    When the canal boats reached Georgetown,
they'd usually lie at the wharf for a day or two waiting their turn
to unload coal. Kids who were boating with their father or parents
would go swimming or visit the candy stores on M Street, and the
adults would start preparing the boat for the week-long run back to
Cumberland. That meant provisions would be brought on board and
sometimes lie unattended on