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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 propertysituated 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