When Keegan hung up, he headed out the back door to see what the commotion was about. There, on the edge of the hill, a man stood among his mother’s bedraggled Snowbird rose bushes, taking in the view, his broad back turned to Keegan. He wore linen trousers and an expansive white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. The updraft breeze stirred his mane of white hair. He stood with his arms akimbo, and his boat shoes planted a couple of feet apart—it was a pose that suggested he might just own everything he could see.

This hilltop cottage had been in Keegan’s mother’s family for three generations. First as a modest hunting lodge in the days when herds of mule deer still trampled the hills above Los Angeles. Keegan had only seen sepia-toned photographs of the original lodge in his mother’s biscuit tin of old family photos. Before he was born, his mother and her two older brothers had torn the cabin down and built a weekend cottage. His mother had only moved here permanently when she got into her eighties and no longer felt safe negotiating the stairs in the old family place down in Melrose.

In the decades since his grandfather had first cleared away the scrub brush and sumac, Hollywood had arrived down in the valley in all its key-lit glory. The empty hills of Keegan’s boyhood holidays were carved up now to make room for miniature estates that crowded these hillsides cheek by jowl. Each terraced lot down below now hosted a Tudor-or Greek-revival mansion, with a circular driveway in front and a glittering, robin’s-egg pool in back. Flowers bloomed year-round inside the cinnamon-bricked garden walls, and verdant lawns blanketed the flat lots cut into the hillside. Keegan’s mother, a pipe-fitter’s widow, had spent her final years looking down on moguls and movie stars from her modest, three-room cottage.

“Can I help you?” Keegan said.

The man turned to face him.

Keegan was caught up short. He’d lived in LA his whole life, but these disconcerting moments of almost-recognition still had a way of knocking him off balance.

The man who now faced Keegan was a character actor, the kind of man whose face everyone recognized but whose name no one looked for when the credits rolled. He’d been the hero’s sidekick in a string of Republic westerns from Keegan’s twenties. Later, he was the avuncular next-door neighbor on some short-lived sitcom. Now, older, he seemed always to be the silver-haired professor or the pompous art collector on those Sunday night made-for-TV mysteries.