On the Yahara Nature Center
A Sam Slater Mystery

"In idle moments, when there were no pressing matters to be dealt with, and when everybody seemed to be sleepy from the heat, she would sit under her acacia tree. It was a dusty place to sit, and the chickens would occasionally come and peck about her feet, but it was a place which seemed to encourage thought."  – Alexander McCall Smith, from The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency








Chapter One

Some of the younger ones from the neighborhood, which was one of the oldest in Madison, WI, along the river that connected two lakes, would get away with calling him the old man even though, truth be told, he wasn't all that old, and that the gray hair no doubt gave that illusion and the way he carried himself, still solid and coordinated, but slow, also fed the illusion. There was more, though, about Mr. Slater that made him particularly successful in his little neighborhood 'projects,' as they were called – Sam was quite pleasant, perhaps even showing a strong sense of flightiness, and would found, as often as not, outside of his little neighborhood nature center, fiddling around in his garden, plucking weeds, or pulling whatever vegetable or herb planted in his back courtyard and bringing them inside for long session of cooking. In other words, it seemed much that Slater was a bachelor and retiree, married to the world around him, nose in a book, or hand on a fry pan. The nature center offered many things to many people and it wasn't treated so much as a business as drop-in education center, for Old Man Slater used to teach at the college level "many classes" but was becoming something of a hermit stuck inside the dark walls of academia.  He would bring what he knew back out into the light, open his doors to neighbors, friends, and take parents and their children on short hikes waxing as poetic as he could, without losing their respect, of course, the soulful beauty of incorporating nature back into their lives, "right there out in front of you!" In other words, Sam Slater was a Quixote, he knew it, and would spend his waking hours making sure to preserve that idea that innocence, once lost, is awfully hard to recover.