My hands! I thought, for one panicked moment, before the doors opened, but when I brought them up to the light I was astonished to find that they were completely clean. There was nothing on them—not a spot. How could that be? But before I had a chance to take that thought any further, the elevator doors opened to reveal the lobby and a tired-looking young couple with a pair of wheeled suitcases. I stepped out to let them pass.

I was surprised to find that the lobby was deserted—just as it had been before—except for the dark-haired young man at the reception desk by the front door.

Why wasn’t anyone there? I would have thought that this would be the hour for the bar and lounge to be, if not filled to the brim, at least frequented by a few patrons. But not only were there no patrons at all, but the bar gave every sign of having been closed up for the night—the stools had disappeared, and the votive candles that had been burning when I arrived were now extinguished and stacked behind the bar. How odd, I thought. I could not have spent more than—I thought—forty minutes upstairs, at the most, and in that time the bartender had apparently come and gone, and closed up shop?

“Good evening, sir.”

The young man who’d been standing behind the reception desk materialized at my elbow.

In spite of all that I had recently experienced, I had a moment of amused surprise; it was not often that one was addressed with such formality in California.

“Can I help you with something?”

“No,” I said. “Well, I was just wondering why there isn’t anyone here at the bar.”

“It’s closed for the night,” said the young man. “Sorry to disappoint you. Were you expecting someone?”

“No,” I said. I looked over at the bar again, as if it might be able to assist, at the snuffed-out candles, arranged in orderly stacks. “I’m not expecting anyone.

“But it’s only”—and I looked at my watch, as the young man regarded me placidly—“a quarter past nine,” I said. “That seems a little early.”

The young man’s eyebrows rose, ever so slightly, like a pair of clouds moving in the sky. He pulled back his sleeve to look at his own watch. By the expression on his face, what he read there was just as he’d expected.

“Is it possible that your watch has stopped, sir?” He came close to me now, wrist-first, and I could smell the hint of his cologne, something vaguely familiar.