“Yes, I thought of that,” said the young man. “It’s an unusual name, so I was able to go through the records from the last year without too much trouble. We don’t have any record of your stay here from that time.

“I’m sorry, sir. We do have a lost-and-found closet—if you’d like to give me a description of the bag, I can check, just in case.”

A description of the bag, I thought. But of course there was no bag. Because my father had not left a bag at the hotel. Because, in fact, he had never stayed there at all.

“No, thank you,” I said. “That’s all right. I must be mistaken.”

Perhaps it just wasn’t meant to be, I thought, as I set a pot of water on the stove at home that evening. True, I had not expected my investigation of my father’s death to come to such an unceremonious end, but the more I thought about it, the more it occurred to me that it was likely that there were two kinds of people: those who exerted a force on the world, who influenced events, who shaped outcomes by the sheer power of their wills, and those who did not.

I took a packet of bacon out of the freezer and put a few pieces in a pan to fry. Was it really that surprising, I thought, to discover I was in the latter camp?

My father, he had been one of those who could set things in motion; he had that quality. If only he were investigating his own death, I thought, and then I laughed once, startling myself in the silence of the kitchen. The water was boiling now, and I added salt and then spaghetti. I poured a jar of tomato sauce into a pan. Everything had gone wrong, really, almost everything.

Then another thought wriggled its way up: Was it really so bad?

If, I thought, as I excised a sage-green crust of mold from a wedge of parmesan, the hotel had confirmed the fact that my father had stayed there, what would I have done? I was not a member of the police force, I could not have appeared on the scene to interrogate the personnel, and that was not even accounting for the fact that most likely they would not have remembered him at all. This was not television, it was real life, and deaths did not divulge clues at regular intervals. I drained the pasta in the colander, stirred the sauce, grated the cheese over it, and sat myself down in the chair facing the bay window. The sky was a familiar white gray, and I could see, just barely, that the fog had gathered, as if in anticipation, above the waterline. And was this, I thought again, really so bad? To eat a humble but well-cooked meal in the comfort of one’s home?