She wiped her large eyes with the back of her wrist. For she noticed two things: First, the bed had been made, quickly, not in any professional manner. And, second, the pigeons were not just cooing; there was an excited mass of fluttering wings nearby. The roof.

She ascended the fire escape, which jutted over the crowning cornice. Hand over hand, step by step upward, until her watering eyes were level with the tarpaper and composite, which was beginning to warm and glitter.

The distant orange hills made a cradle behind the Club’s sparkling roof, where the caps of many airshafts made flamboyant spires, and among them were eccentric weathervanes hewn from copper gone green—ships, roosters, nude women, and witches on brooms—squawking as the wind turned them.

The pigeon coop in the center of the roof, its already faded and chipped paint a mural of bizarre abstract winged figures, was a gift from the same man who’d made the weathervanes, Pablo Picasso of Paris, France, a man in love with las palomas, fantail pigeons. In a letter sent to the Mutual Studios, he had compared how he felt when observing their motion in flight to how he felt when watching a Charlie Chaplin film.

As Edna could see, the coop was bursting with excitement, the rock doves of gray and white, the racing banded blue checks and blue bars, all crying and wings beating furiously, for there were cats everywhere.

The Athletic Club had three expert mousers, and they were here, but there were a half dozen more, orange and white and tabby, come from God-knew-where, circling a solitary half-broken Queen Anne chair before the pigeon coop. They were rubbing up against its chipped legs, clawing at the stuffing that escaped from its torn velvet arms. Sitting in the chair was Charlie.

He slouched in his orange bathrobe, hair a nest of black, slept-on curls. Two cats sat in his lap, grooming themselves, and another was taking tentative steps across his shoulders.

Edna could not speak. She climbed over the railing and trotted clumsily across the roof, and there, bathed in light already so bright that the sun and Los Angeles could see every move, her excitement scattering cats and causing a ruckus in the pigeon house, she fell on him and smothered him with kisses.

She plunked down into his lap, which jarred the chair to its limits, but it held, and she laughed, mauling his hair and pecking at his forehead. He seemed a wreck. He was holding a telegram, and even when he finally began to smile in confusion and pleasure, saying, “Now, now, you’ll turn my head, gal,” he did not let go of it.

“You’re all right?”

“Shouldn’t I be?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I heard the most remarkable thing….” She looked to the telegram.

He shrugged. “It’s nothing. What’s wrong, Lovelock?”

“I heard you drowned.”

“Pardon me?”

“At sea.”