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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. Mudjimushkeeki . It meant “bad medicine.” To Cork’s mind, that acre at the end of North Point Road, regardless of its beauty, was a place of mudjimushkeeki .
    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 overdosein 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?”
    “Mind if I sit?”
    She gestured toward a chair near her desk, a piece that looked like it had been made in the days of Louis XIV.
    “It appears that no one knows her true whereabouts,” he said, after he was seated. “When did you last see her?”
    Ophelia sat back, folded her arms across her chest in a move that Cork, as a trained observer, might have taken as unconsciously defensive. He chose to ignore it.
    “A cocktail gathering,” she said. “Sunday, a week ago yesterday. The center was empty, and we met late into the evening with some ofour volunteers in her private dining room to go over the roster of new artists and instructors coming Monday