Whiskey Island (41 page)

“I don’t think it works that way, Megan. Maybe when she was alive she just covered up his lapses. But mental illness isn’t a question of willpower or motivation. I doubt Rooney simply gave up.”

“Maybe it was the stress of her dying, combined with not having anyone to help him hide his problems.”

Niccolo was encouraged she’d come that far. “That’s a sound theory.”

“I don’t think he’s coming, Nick.”

The night was turning colder and darker. “Maybe we’d better go. I’ll stop back early in the morning to be sure he’s gotten the boxes.”

“Rooney?” she called. “Are you there?”

The night was still as they strained to hear an answer.

“It’s Megan. We’ve left you some things you might need.”

Niccolo waited for her to ask her father to come home, but she didn’t. He was just as glad. One step at a time.

“Okay, let’s go.” She started back the way they had come. He let her lead, since their eyes had adjusted to the gloom and she was now traveling familiar ground.

They were almost out of the woods when he saw a shape to his left that wasn’t a tree. He stopped, but Megan was too far ahead to realize it. He was afraid to call out to her. If the shape was Rooney, Niccolo knew a raised voice could frighten him away.

The shape was a man, and the man stepped just far enough forward that Niccolo could be sure he wasn’t imagining him.

“Tell them to stop digging.”

At first Niccolo wasn’t sure he’d even heard the words, but they came again.

“Tell them to stop. The stars will punish.”

Niccolo took a breath to answer, but the man was already gone, vanished back into the woods that sheltered him.

26

N
iccolo awoke to an empty house and the persistent ringing of a telephone. The house felt too empty; the ringing was definitely too loud. He wished he hadn’t repaired the line before going to bed last night.

He fumbled his way out into the hallway and picked up the receiver. A man spoke. “Nick, did I wake you?”

Niccolo shook his head to clear it. “What time is it?”

“Nine-thirty. This is Jon Kovats. Up late last night?”

He had stayed up late. Thinking about Megan. Thinking about Megan’s father. Thinking about what he’d given up and what he’d gotten. That was how he’d ended up repairing the telephone at midnight. “Too late, apparently. What’s going on?”

“I thought you might be interested in something that was discovered down at the Whiskey Island construction site early this morning.”

Niccolo was awake now. “What?”

“Just for the record, it’s unusual to find one dead body down there—”

Niccolo’s heart sank. “You found another?”

“It’s not Casey’s dad. I didn’t mean to scare you. But it’s right in the area where you saw him.
If
the man you saw was Mr. Donaghue. Wait a moment….”

Niccolo could hear noise in the background, as if Jon were calling from the office, which might explain some of the confusion.

He waited until Jon came back on the line before he launched into questions. “I’m having trouble getting this straight. You found a body, but you’re sure it’s not Rooney? Why? Is it a woman? A younger man?”

“No. Someone much, much older. It’s a skeleton. I’m on my way down there now, but I thought you might like to join me.”

“Because I’ve been there recently?” For just a moment Niccolo wondered if Jon was suspicious of his trips to the site to find Megan’s father.

“You’ve obviously got an interest in that area. But they’ve found something odd, and I thought you might find that even more interesting.”

“What?”

“I haven’t been there yet. Let’s go look together.”

Niccolo thought of the man standing at the edge of the woods last night, the man who was probably Rooney Donaghue.

Tell them to stop digging. The stars will punish.

He closed his eyes as they made arrangements to meet down at the site in half an hour. Niccolo hung up and headed right for the shower.

He arrived on time. Jon looked like the consummate prosecutor that morning, in a crisp white shirt and conservative tie, dark suit under an unbuttoned wool overcoat. He was talking to two police officers when Niccolo, in jeans and a heavy parka, approached, and Jon introduced him before the officers headed back to their car.

“We’re just waiting for the coroner,” Jon said. “There’s nothing else to do. But come see what they found.”

Niccolo wondered if in the woods behind them Rooney Donaghue was watching and waiting to see what occurred. He wondered if Rooney, unpredictable at best, might stage some sort of attack, and if he ought to tell Jon exactly what had transpired last night, to warn him.

But did he want to implicate Megan’s father when he didn’t even know what they were about to see?

Tell them to stop digging. The stars will punish.

At the construction site, two bulldozers sat silently at the edge of a shallow pit, or at least one that was shallow in comparison to the depth the excavation would be eventually. “Why are they working in this weather?” Niccolo said. “Why don’t they wait for spring?”

“They are waiting, for the most part, but we’ve had a week of warmer temperatures, and the crew thought they’d be able to make a little headway. They work whenever they can, since there’s not much else they can do in the winter.”

Niccolo guessed this unexpected activity was the reason for Rooney’s warning last night. “Well, you’ve got my curiosity up.”

“Come on.”

Niccolo followed Jon along the rim of the excavation, then down a gentle slope. Jon spoke. “We’d better go single file. It’s just ahead.”

“If bulldozers did the digging, I’m surprised there’s anything left to see.”

“One of the men had just barely scraped this spot when he saw something under the soil and got suspicious, so he did a little poking with a shovel to see. We’re lucky he was paying attention.”

Niccolo slowed as Jon did, and Jon motioned for him to join him. Niccolo looked down. The relic at his feet was definitely a skeleton, even though much of it was as yet buried. A bony arm protruded, and part of a shoulder. Threads clung to the arm, shreds, perhaps, of a shirt or coat. The hand was intact, all five fingers in place. Other parts were visible, too. The top of a hip, the side of a skull.

Jon pointed. “I’m guessing it’s a man by the height, though it could be a woman.”

Niccolo followed Jon’s finger and realized toes protruded a good distance from what was probably the top of the skull.

There was nothing grisly about viewing the skeleton. It wasn’t at all like staring at the blue-tinged body of the homeless man. Yesterday he’d been reminded of Billy, of unkept covenants and society’s failures. But this man had died a long time ago, and his secrets were hidden with him, perhaps never to be learned.

“Do you have any thoughts on how long he’s been dead?” Niccolo asked.

“The coroner should be able to make a fairly accurate guess, but if my hunch is right, we’ll be able to pinpoint his death to the very day.”

“Hunch?” Niccolo turned his gaze from the ground to the man beside him. “You already have some idea who this might be?”

“You haven’t seen everything.” Jon took a plastic evidence bag from his coat pocket and held it out.

Niccolo was careful not to react visibly, although his heart was beating faster. “What is it?” he asked, even though he already knew.

“I’m guessing a cuff link. It was still attached by threads to the wristbone. It’s a mess, but when it’s cleaned up, the initials will be easier to make out. I’m pretty sure they’re
S.S.
”

“Is someone with those initials missing?” Niccolo pulled his gaze from the cuff link that exactly matched the one at home in his dresser drawer. “Do you have a case you’ve been trying to solve?”

“All my adult life. The disappearance of James Simeon.”

Tell them to stop digging. The stars will punish.

Niccolo didn’t trust himself to probe, but Jon went on. “If this is who I think it is, we finally know what happened to him. He didn’t get here by accident. Someone buried him. Killed and buried him, most likely.”

“I don’t understand. James Simeon’s initials are
J.S.
What’s the connection?”

“Simeon Steel. Entwined
S
’s. That was Simeon’s logo, short for Simeon Iron and Steel. I remember from the research I did in school that Simeon plastered the logo on everything he owned. His carriages, his sleigh, the iron gates of his house, his mills, his ore boats. He wanted people to remember the one thing that was really important about him, not simply his given name, but what he had accomplished. After he disappeared it took years for all those entwined
S
’s to finally disappear, too. One writer said it was like an infestation of snakes that had to be exterminated before Cleveland could be safe for habitation again.”

“Obviously Simeon wasn’t well liked.” It seemed an understatement.

“Any number of people probably wanted him dead. His employees, his competitors, tradesmen he’d cheated or maligned. Maybe even his wife. She sold everything and left town soon after he was finally declared dead. Some people thought maybe she’d had him killed, although she couldn’t actually have committed the crime herself, since she was away at the time. In Europe, if I remember correctly.”

“Maybe she was afraid he’d reappear, and she’d have to resume their marriage. So she vanished herself, in case that happened.”

“If this
is
Simeon, it’s big news.”

“How will you be able to tell after all these years?”

“The coroner may have some ideas. But DNA testing’s a possibility. It can be done with bones or teeth.”

“What will you match it to?”

“That’s the hard part. We’ll have to see if anything’s available.”

Niccolo debated telling Jon he had the matching cuff link at home. But exactly where would that lead? Would Jon be forced to find Rooney and bring him in for questioning? That seemed far-fetched, since the murder itself had happened more than a century before. But would Jon be required to find out everything he could? It seemed too much of a possibility for Niccolo to act hastily.

“Why did you call me?” he said.

“You were asking about James Simeon. And I know you’ve been spending time down here looking for Casey’s dad. I thought the coincidence was interesting. Don’t you?”

Niccolo knew Jon was expecting him to say more. But what could he say? That Casey’s father had probably found the matching cuff link on one of his forays, dropped it, and now Niccolo had it? That for some reason Rooney also had an article about James Simeon in his possession?

That Rooney wanted the excavation to stop?

Tell them to stop digging. The stars will punish.

“It is an odd coincidence,” he said. “I don’t know what else to make of it.”

“Well, if you do make anything of it, let me know.”

“Will you let me know what you discover?”

“Anything I can.”

Niccolo knew they were talking around their mutual bond, the Donaghue sisters. Jon wasn’t going to probe any further out of concern for Casey. And Niccolo wasn’t going to volunteer anything more because of Megan.

They shook hands. Jon remained to wait for the coroner, and Niccolo found his way back to his car. He was so close, but he knew better than to tramp through the woods checking for the boxes he and Megan had left last night. He didn’t want to alert Jon that they’d been here. The less said at this juncture, the better.

In the car, he considered his options, but there was really only one. He started the engine and backed out of his space. Back on the road, he turned toward the historical museum.

James Simeon had not been well liked. The tone of every newspaper article that Niccolo read relating to Simeon Iron and Steel was, at best, unadorned and brusquely factual, at worst laden with sly innuendos.

Simeon was also a powerful man, a man who employed a healthy proportion of Cleveland’s working class. And even if the newspapers, particularly the
Cleveland Leader,
despised the Irish immigrants whom Simeon employed, they understood power and its effects on the economy of the city. They might be bold enough to describe Simeon as pasty faced and scowling, but they stopped short of blistering his reputation on their pages.

Simeon appeared to have had his fingers in every slice of civic pie. He had served on committees at Euclid Avenue Presbyterian, patronized the arts and the elite Union Club, worked closely—and fruitlessly—with other denizens of Millionaires’ Row to limit growth along their exclusive avenue. He and his wife, Julia—who, from blurry microfilm photographs, appeared to be a wan blonde—had attended every major charitable ball and social event, although they seemed to have given few parties themselves.

Julia was a faithful member of hospital auxiliary boards and ladies’ clubs. She attended one Avenue masquerade ball as Little Bo Peep and triumphed at croquet during afternoon tea on a different Avenue lawn. Together she and her husband summered at a second residence in Bratenahl or made visits to Saratoga Springs. But nowhere, in any of the mentions of the young couple, did Niccolo find any particular warmth. They were part of a rote recitation of “also theres.” Neither Simeon nor his wife seemed to have been chosen as officers or leaders in any organization.

Simeon’s logo, the entwined
S
’s, was as prominent as the man. Niccolo stared at microfilmed photographs of Simeon’s carriage door and the gate to his rolling mills. The cuff link in Niccolo’s drawer was a perfect match.

The weeks after Simeon’s disappearance were by far the most interesting to read about. An hour into his research, Niccolo came upon the first such article and read every subsequent mention thoroughly.

Julia had gone to Europe for an extended visit. During her absence, Simeon worked even harder than usual, only returning home for supper in the early evening hours before he left again for the office. Some who knew him said that he missed his wife dreadfully, although dissenters claimed that the Simeon marriage had never been anything more than two very different people occupying the same house.