For a second I had been fooled into thinking the voice sounded familiar, but in the end it was just a telemarketer, employing a needlessly complicated scheme aimed at confusing people who were not yet fully awake.

“No, thank you,” I said. “There isn’t any information I need.”

Again I thought, why not just hang up now, and be done with it? But this was an ability I did not have. And never would have, come to think of it. I was not assertive. Surely the Swedish detective in my novel, for all his faults, would have hung up the phone long ago.

“Are you sure about that?” said the woman mildly. Really, I thought, these people were unbelievably dogged. Then she said, “It’s about your father.”

I must have misheard, was my first thought. When you have a hammer, I thought, everything looks like a nail. And yet when I spoke again I felt a dryness in my throat that had not been there before.

“I’m sorry,” I was finally able to say, swallowing for moisture. “What did you say?”

“You heard me correctly,” said the woman. “Meet me in the Arboretum at noon today and I will give you the information you need.”

“In the Arboretum…” I trailed off. “But how will I recognize you?”

If I’d had to guess merely from her voice I would have said my caller was anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age, and American—there could be dozens of women meeting that description in the Arboretum at any given time.

“Oh,” she said. “Don’t worry about that.”

There was the shadow of a chuckle in her voice. “You’ll recognize me. We’ve met before.”

13

It was not accurate, I saw at once, when at five minutes before noon I crossed the road and entered the Arboretum, to say that there could have been dozens of American women from thirty to fifty years of age there at any given time. As far as I could see, there were no women in the grove of trees except one, and she was watching over a group of school-age children who were hitting the ground with sticks at the base of a low-spreading oak. This woman did not seem right at all: she was too young, she was dressed in hiking clothing, accompanied by a male counterpart, and did not so much as glance in my direction as I passed by. She was not my mysterious caller, I was sure of it. And not only were there no other women in the Arboretum, there was no one else of any gender in my line of sight.