Whiskey Island by Emilie Richards Page A

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