Whiskey Island (11 page)

Winston sounded instantly suspicious. “How come? You planning to get us in there and do something to us?”

Niccolo’s stomach knotted as he thought about all the things these kids had to fear. “Yeah, I am. I’m going to show you what I’m doing with the house, then give you hot chocolate to warm you up. It’s cold out here. That’s it. But you’re smart to wonder, and smarter to ask.”

Winston’s tough guy veneer fell back in place. “That’s us. We’re just a couple of smart guys, me and him.”

“Great. The world needs all the smart guys it can get.” Niccolo waved a quick salute, then opened the driver’s door and slid inside. When he started the engine and turned to back out, he saw that the boys had moved out of his way. That seemed like a good sign. He started toward Whiskey Island.

Few cities had thirty acres of prime property standing vacant in the heart of a bustling downtown. Even fewer had vacant lakefront and riverfront acres with priceless vistas. Cleveland had plans for those empty acres on Whiskey Island, although the plans were still being hotly debated. In the meantime, a portion of the peninsula was deserted.

Niccolo hadn’t lived in the city for long, but he knew that in ten years’ time Cleveland had been transformed from the Midwest’s “Mistake by the Lake” to its “Comeback City.” Cleveland was the home of several beloved sports teams, as well as what many critics considered to be the finest symphony orchestra in the world. It housed a number of highly regarded museums and world-class medical institutions. Gloriously refurbished theaters brought in top entertainers and productions; the “Emerald Necklace” parklands ringing the city brought out hikers and athletes of every stripe.

But no matter how ambitious community leaders were, not everything could be accomplished at once. The Flats, where Moses Cleaveland had come ashore in 1796 to claim the land for the Connecticut Western Reserve, had received the first burst of enthusiasm and money. Warehouses and factories along the Cuyahoga River had been converted into a Great Lakes, toned-down version of Bourbon Street, with restaurants and bars that raucously overflowed on weekends.

Whiskey Island, connected to the Flats by the distinctive River Road bridge, was still a transformation waiting to happen. It was an industrial area, home of a working salt mine deep under Lake Erie that provided all of northern Ohio with salt for icy winter roads. Cargo and container ships sailed the river and the lake. A busy east-west railway bisected the peninsula.

Farther west along the lakefront, two abandoned lighthouses testified to the lake’s killer storms and the city’s historic importance as a port. Still farther west were the acres that would someday be turned into restaurants and condominiums as one more draw for the tourists who were just beginning to discover Cleveland’s charms. A new marina sat along the Whiskey Island lakeshore, waiting for the funding and approval to expand into a bustling complex.

This morning Niccolo turned his car toward the marina. On his last trip he had driven what he could of the rest of the peninsula. Much of it was posted and private. He had questioned everyone he’d run across, from security guards to passing workers, but he’d received little information in return.

He might have given up his search, except for Megan’s visit.

The road to the new marina was rough. From his first visit to Whiskey Island he had discovered that this northeastern quadrant of the peninsula had recently housed a community of vagrants who existed near the shore in tumbledown sheds abandoned by a dredging company. The sheds were gone now, and, supposedly, so were the vagrants. Not so long ago, packs of wild dogs and the occasional white-tailed deer had also lived here. The land near the marina was still so undeveloped that he could imagine it.

He drove up a low grade and parked, then walked farther up toward the river for a better view of the closest lighthouse at the old Coast Guard station.

The ground was fill, soil liberally laced with ore pellets and colorful pottery shards. He wondered what an archaeologist might find if digging through these layers. What signs of earlier inhabitants whose lives were now buried under tons of twentieth century rubble?

At the river he stood on the breakwall and gazed across the narrow stretch at restaurants and bars preening in the winter sun. Because the season had been milder than normal, the lake had never frozen, and there was still minimal traffic along the river. Not far in the distance, a dun-colored bridge rose majestically to let a ship pass through. To the west, silver gravel mountains sported hundreds of huddling seagulls that, from this distance, looked like strands of iridescent pearls.

After a few minutes Nick started south, looping his way through the woods. He could just make out the whine of self-loading ore elevators in the distance, but despite having urban Cleveland at its front door, this portion of Whiskey Island felt like a rural retreat. It seemed to hold its breath, to live somewhere between past and future, in a time that wasn’t quite the present.

The woods weren’t dense. Nick knew that if he continued through them, he would probably end up at one of the manmade dunes of ore, sand or salt that gave the peninsula its lunar landscape. Instead he wove back and forth, expecting nothing but looking for anything.

The largest trees grew in hollows three or four feet below the fill, and as he walked through them, the ground sloped until he reached an area with dark soil that looked like the real thing. He found the wreckage of a houseboat and poked around it for a while, looking for clues that someone still lived there. He found the ruins of other boats as well, and piles of debris that reminded him of the dens of foxes or the elaborate constructions of beavers.

He was tired of his explorations and growing too cold to go much farther when an arrangement of branches caught his eye. It looked like a shelter of sorts, perhaps erected by wind and water, but perhaps not. There was something intentional about it, although Niccolo’s conclusion was more instinctive than rational. The branches and driftwood that covered a shallow depression just off the path seemed too neatly laid out to be a product of Mother Nature.

He picked his way around more debris and down toward the depression until he was standing just above it.

“Is anyone there?” He waited, then repeated his question a little louder.

When no one answered, he stooped and examined the pile, noting that some of the smaller branches were woven basket-style to hold them in place.

“I’m looking for someone.” He spoke the words before he’d known he was going to. “A man who might have saved my life.”

There was no answer.

This time he squatted where some of the smaller branches seemed to have been moved back from the edge. When his eyes adjusted, he saw that the depression was really nothing more than a shallow hole about six feet long and four feet wide. But it had been scooped free of rocks and rubble by human hands, and carefully lined with layers of newspaper and plastic trash bags.

“Good lord.” It was half a prayer, half a curse. He could not imagine any man except the most desperate living like this. In contrast, Billy’s alcove at St. Rose of Lima’s had been a luxury hotel.

Niccolo sat back on his haunches, staring at the driftwood roof. What kind of man chose this existence over any other? What had brought him here, and why hadn’t he sought help? Alcoholism? Mental illness? A criminal past?

This person, whoever he was, had gone to great lengths to disappear from society. Niccolo knew that something had driven the burrow’s resident here and he—or she—wouldn’t appreciate his spying or interference. He was afraid that Megan Donaghue had been right about that much.

He scribbled a note on a piece of scrap paper asking the man or woman to get in touch with him. He gave his name, address and phone number, then tucked the paper down into the hole. He might have left it at that if the note hadn’t fluttered to the bottom in a crooked arc. As he watched, it lodged between a newspaper and a plastic bag, where it would never be seen. He got down on his knees and leaned headfirst into the hole, carefully moving branches out of the way until he had a better view. He retrieved his note, but as he looked for a better place to leave it, he saw a bundle of papers just out of reach.

He stared for a moment, ashamed to snoop, afraid not to. He debated the wisest course, but in the end, the memory of Billy’s frozen body was the answer he needed. He leaned farther in and retrieved the bundle.

The bundle was thin, nothing more than a few pages tied with a dirty length of twine. He sat back on his heels and untied it. A child’s tattered drawing stared back at him. The paper was old and crumbling, from the sort of lined tablet he remembered using in school as a boy. There were three primitive figures cavorting across the page, a depiction, perhaps, of children at play, although these children had played their games a long time ago.

He set the drawing carefully aside and gazed at the next paper in the stack. It was a newspaper clipping, badly smudged and torn. For a moment he thought the clipping was just a scrap of one of the sheets of newspaper lining the hole, but a careful assessment indicated that the article was an old one that had been cut, not torn, from a paper, although much of it was now missing. He held it up to the light. It seemed to be a history of some event from Cleveland’s past. He could make out a name,
James Simeon,
and the words
Millionaires’ Row.
He repeated “James Simeon” out loud so he wouldn’t forget the name, and placed what was left of the article on top of the drawing.

The last item was an old snapshot. Two young girls on a sofa stared back at him, dressed in their Sunday best. One of the girls held a toddler on her lap, a little cutie with a soup bowl haircut and a mischievous grin.

But it was the older girls who captured Niccolo’s attention—or rather, one of the girls, the one fiercely clutching the child. She was a redheaded charmer with flyaway curls and a rectangular face. A face that hadn’t changed substantially in the years since the snapshot had been taken. A charmer he was just beginning to know.

Somewhere on the river just beyond him a ship signaled for the bridge to be lifted once more. Whiskey Island with its rich history, its hidden secrets, hummed just out of reach. What stories did this land have to tell? Whose lives had begun or ended here? How many people still living today owed their very existence to the people who had settled here and endured life on this godforsaken piece of earth?

The man who had taken this photograph?

Niccolo stared at the snapshot through moist eyes and wondered why he hadn’t guessed the truth about the homeless man before.

May 24, 1880

O
n the darkest night, when even the sputtering flame of the meanest candle is denied me, I will still cling to my memory of today. I have buried the dead, tended the dying, anointed and prayed with men and women clinging hopelessly to whatever shreds of life are left, and all of it has stirred my soul.

But how different it is to celebrate life at its beginnings. To hold a wailing infant in my arms and baptize it into the Holy Church, to celebrate a First Communion, or to marry the dreams of two into one dream, one life, one heart.

Such a thing I did today. Two more likely of my countrymen I have yet to see. The woman was lovely beyond description, despite a sad journey that taxes even the healthiest youth Ireland sends us. The man was strong, yet weak in ways the best men are. He loves the woman, and nothing of the troubles facing them could temper the light shining in his eyes.

And there will be troubles. They are poor, these two. Poorer than many of my poor, poor flock, with nothing more than a united dream to take them through the years together. They only see the dream, of course. They feel youth coursing through their veins and know not the vagaries of fortune. They will work and save and bring their dreams to fruition, one by one.

Today I could not find it in my heart to tell them that man’s dreams are not the same as God’s, that they must accept what fate will send their way, that there is a reward for all they will suffer and, in the end, it will be enough.

I could not find it in my heart to tell them these things. For today, my own dream is that, somehow, they will find theirs.

Tomorrow will be soon enough to comfort them.

From the journal of Father Patrick McSweeney—St. Brigid’s Church, Cleveland, Ohio.

8

Whiskey Island
May 1880

I
n County Mayo, Ireland, a good man inherited nothing of heaven. Not the land his ancestors had tended for centuries, not the tumbledown cottage where his family huddled for warmth on whistling winter nights. In Mayo, a good man inherited the regions of hell. The right to give a landlord what little he reaped. The right to watch his children or parents sicken and die as the promising green sprouts of a new potato crop blackened and shriveled into poisonous dust.

From his father, and
his
father before him, a man inherited a hatred for invaders and injustice. Or he might, as Terence Tierney had, inherit a hunger to leave windswept Mayo forever and travel to the promised land of America.

On the day he boarded a ship for Cleveland, Terence had known little about the place he was bound. His oldest brother had gone to Ohio before him. With the help of a parish priest, Darrin had twice written the family before he died, sending money each time.

The work was hard, Darrin said, but at least there
was
work. The wages were poor, but there
were
wages. He lived in a place called Whiskey Island, a place where other Irishmen from Mayo lived, too. There were churches there, and a lake so vast he sometimes dreamed that it swallowed him, the way the ocean he’d crossed had swallowed the man he used to be.

Darrin hadn’t said all those things, of course. Always the dreamer himself, Terence had absorbed them from the fiber of the paper that had carried Darrin’s dreams back to Ireland. Darrin had a house, he reported in his second letter, a house large enough for all of them. First he had saved to buy the house; now he was saving to bring the family to live in it.