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one of only a few people who ever called him Corkie. She and all the others who used the name had been his mother’s good friends. There were few of them still alive. She glanced down the line of protesters, many of whom were eyeing the exchange suspiciously. “Taking a chance, aren’t you?”
    “I don’t think they’ll jump me, Hattie. But I expect they won’t be including me in their prayers tonight.”
    She reached inside her yellow rain jacket, pulled out a pack of Newports, plucked a cigarette, and fed it to the corner of her mouth, where it dangled while she struck a match.
    “Love the gray of this day,” she said. “The pall it casts. My film’s going to love it, too. Just look at that composition.”
    She pointed toward the stretch of road that led to the gate: the protesters huddled on one side, the mine fence on the other, and between them the no-man’s-land of wet asphalt. To Cork it was just a dreary scene, but to Hattie Stillday it was dramatic composition. Hers was the eye to trust. For longer than Cork had been alive, she’d been framing the nation in black-and-white stills. The main thrust of her work had been those moments when cultures collide. She’d photographed steelworkers’ strikes in Pennsylvania in the early fifties. She’d been on all three marches from Selma to Montgomery in the sixties. She’d chronicled on film the White Night gay riots in San Francisco in ’79. Every November, she was a part of the peace vigil held before the gates of Fort Benning, Georgia, to protest the training of Latin American soldiers by the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, the organization that for years had been known as the notorious School of the Americas. This was one activity that moved her to do more than snap photos. She’d been arrested a couple of times, fingerprinted, booked. Only her age and reputation had saved her from actual prosecution. Her work hung in the Guggenheim and the Getty and the Art Institute, and had been reproduced in beautifully bound volumes. Hattie Stillday was famous, but to look at her on that wet morning, an old woman with black strands of hair plastered to her cheeks and mud caking her hiking boots and a cigarette dancing in the corner of her mouth as she talked, you’d never know it.
    “So the poop is true? You’re working for the mine people?”
    “‘Fraid so, Hattie.”
    She plucked the cigarette from her mouth and flicked ash onto the wet ground. “I think your grandmother just turned in her grave, Corkie. But I suppose everybody’s got to make their buck.”
    There was a great deal more to it than that. Like the power of the composition Cork didn’t quite see, there were elements of this situation to which Hattie was undoubtedly blind. He could have tried to explain, but Corkie didn’t feel like arguing with this fine, old woman.
    “Care to pose for a famous photo?” she asked.
    “Infamous you mean. And no thanks. I’ve got business to attend to. Actually, I’m on my way to talk to your granddaughter.”
    “Ophelia?” Her eyes turned cold. “What the hell for?”
    “I can’t say.”
    “This mine business? She’s got nothing to do with it. You go dragging her name into this, Corkie, and get her into trouble, you’ll answer to me, do you understand?”
    “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
    H e 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