“I’m always discreet, Hattie.”
“Discreet like brass knuckles. You’re just like your father.”
Cork spotted Isaiah Broom coming their way. He’d already had all the conversation with the man that he wanted for the day. He leaned and kissed the old woman on her cheek and tasted the rain there. “I’ll be gentle with her, Hattie. I give you my word.” He turned, crossed the road, got back into his Land Rover, and drove away. Behind him the protest vanished into the gray curtain of the rain.
FIVE
He headed first to Sam’s Place, the burger stand he owned in Aurora.
Sam’s Place was, in a way, the vault of his heart. It held good memories, treasures that reached back over forty years. It had been bequeathed to him by the man who’d built the business, a Shinnob named Sam Winter Moon, who’d been his father’s good friend and then Cork’s. With the help of his children and their friends, Cork had managed the business by himself for years. But his older daughter, Jenny, was gone now, maybe for good. She’d graduated from the University of Iowa and had been accepted in the Writers’ Workshop, the graduate program there. In Iowa City, she’d met a young man who was both a poet and a farmer. No matter how Cork looked at Jenny’s future, coming back to Aurora didn’t seem part of it.
His second daughter, Anne, was in El Salvador, on a mission program sponsored by St. Ansgar College, where she’d just finished her sophomore year. After St. Ansgar, it was his daughter’s intention to become a preaffiliate with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur and to prepare to become a nun, a path Cork was pretty certain would not lead back to the North Country of Minnesota.
His youngest child, Stephen, who was fourteen, had gone away for the summer to work on a cattle operation, courtesy of Hugh Parmer, an exorbitantly wealthy man from West Texas whom Cork had befriended and who had, in return, befriended the O’Connors. In the infrequent communications Cork had received from his son, Stephen’s response to the world outside Aurora was nothing short of an intoxicating romance. Cork could see the writing on the wall.
His wife, Jo, had died—been murdered—a little over a year and a half earlier, and it seemed to Cork that more and more the time he’d spent as husband and father had begun to recede from him, a train departing the station, leaving him alone on the platform.
Financially, Cork was set these days. He’d sold land along the lakeshore to Hugh Parmer, who’d intended to build a tasteful condominium community surrounding Sam’s Place. But Parmer had chosen instead to donate the land to the town of Aurora, with the stipulation that the area be kept in its natural state in perpetuity. He’d done this in honor of Jo O’Connor. Cork was grateful to his friend, because every time he looked from Sam’s Place down the wild and beautiful shoreline of Iron Lake, in a way, he saw Jo.
His PI business had succeeded beyond all his expectations and took up so much of his time that he couldn’t effectively operate Sam’s Place on his own. So he’d hired a woman named Judy Madsen, a retired school administrator who knew how to handle kids, to run the business.
He parked in the gravel lot, went inside, and opened the door to the serving area. “How’s it going, Judy?”
Without turning from the prep table where she was slicing tomatoes, Madsen said, “We need change. And we’re low on chips. Driesbach”—the route man who delivered most of the packaged food items—“called and said he’s sick as a dog and won’t be by today.”
“All right. I’ll hit the IGA and pick up some chips. Anything else?”
“Yeah. When are you going to sell me this place?”
A chronic question. And not asked in jest. Judy wanted Sam’s Place, and she wanted it bad.
“It’s my legacy to my children, Judy.”
“I’m the one wearing an apron.”
“They’ll be back,” he said.
She straightened up from the prep table and gave him a level look. “If you say so.”
It wasn’t until a few minutes before noon that Cork walked into the Northern Lights Center for the Arts. The organization occupied the old Parrant estate on North Point Road, a prime piece of property situated just outside the town limits, at the end of a pine-covered peninsula that stuck like a crooked thumb into Iron Lake. The house was an enormous brick affair with two wings, mullioned windows, and dark wood framing, which gave it the look of a country place an English baron might have maintained. It was separated from the road by a tall wall constructed of the same brick as the house. The lawn was a football field of manicured grass that sloped down to the lakeshore, where a boathouse stood. A sailboat was tied to the boathouse dock, its mast a bare white cross against the deep blue of the lake.
Judge Robert Parrant was long dead. There had been other occupants before and after the judge, but because of the man’s infamy and unseemly demise, the people of Tamarack County still tied his name to the property.
Cork had an unpleasant history with the place. Ten years earlier, he’d found Judge Parrant dead in his office there, brains splattered across the wall, the victim of a murder that had been made to look like a suicide. In that same office four years later, Cork had found two more dead men, a murder-suicide committed with a shotgun. There were other deaths, and although they occurred elsewhere, they occurred somehow in the shadow cast over Tamarack County by that cursed place.
There was a word in the language of the Ojibwe.
He walked in without knocking and found himself in the foyer of what had once been a living room but was now a large common area for the artists in residence at the center. A lot of clatter came from the dining room, where Emma Crane, the cook, was setting the table for lunch. Cork went to the center’s office, which was the same room where, years before, all the blood had been spilled. The door was open, and Ophelia Stillday was at her desk. She looked up, and, like everyone else Cork had seen that day, she looked gray.
“Hey, kiddo, why the long face?” he asked.
He’d known Ophelia her whole life. She’d been raised by her grandmother Hattie after her own mother had died of a drug overdose in a crack house in L.A. Ophelia and his daughter Jenny had been best friends, and there’d been so many sleepovers at the O’Connor house that she’d become like another member of the family. She’d gone on camping trips with them and joined them for a long cross-country drive one year to Disneyland. Hattie Stillday needn’t have warned him about treating her kindly; he felt almost as much affection for her as he did for his own children.
“Business.” It was clear that was all she would say on the subject.
“Running the place alone since Lauren’s gone, that’s got to be tough.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. O.C.?”
It was what she’d always called him. O.C. for O’Connor.
Ophelia was full-blood Ojibwe, a young woman with intense eyes and graceful movements. All her life she’d been a dancer, both traditional and modern. She’d performed the Jingle Dance at powwows and knew many dances from other tribes. She’d also studied dance at the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities, and her dream had been to create original choreography that combined the elements of native dance with more modern movement. Unfortunately, her dream had been cut short by a car that had run a stoplight in Minneapolis, broadsided Ophelia’s little Vespa, and crushed her right leg. Ophelia, the doctors predicted with surety, would never dance again.
“Actually I came about Lauren.”
“She’s gone.”
“She’s not just gone, Ophelia. She’s gone missing.”
“What do you mean?”
