And yet, I thought, as I surveyed the horizon line of mature trees against the blue sky, it was true that the nature of a grove of trees is such that it is not really possible to see all its angles at once. I would walk around for a while, I decided, before abandoning the enterprise altogether, and for the second time that day I thought of the Swedish policeman in the novel I was reading, and how he might have handled the situation. It seemed unlikely that he would have found himself in exactly this predicament, I thought, as I set off on a dirt path that curved away from campus. I could not pinpoint exactly how, though I had the general sense that he would have found it undignified to traipse around the Arboretum in search of an anonymous female caller. The weather, for one thing, I thought a moment later, as I felt the back of my neck grow moist with perspiration, was all wrong. The Swedish detective, who was perpetually strapping on his overcoat, whose car thermometer was routinely dropping five, now ten, now fifteen degrees below zero—surely he would have been at a loss here, under these preternaturally blue skies, in this balmy breeze, on which wafted the slightly mentholated fragrance of eucalyptus.

A fat, speckled squirrel was watching me from a drainage ditch. It was a little surprising, I thought, as I stopped to return his beady stare, that I had never been compelled to walk in the Arboretum before. Really, it was very pleasant. Beside me a stand of green foxtails waved ever so slightly, and in the distance there was a shallow pond from the depths of which tall grasses emerged like the heads of spears. And there—I stopped. Because next to the shallow pond was a bench, and on the bench was, I was almost certain, the woman who had telephoned me early that morning, purporting to have news of my father. She seemed to be, as I had suspected, Caucasian and middle-aged, and beyond that I could not say anything more, because she was sitting with her back to me and wearing a wide-brimmed, cream-colored hat that completely obscured the back of her head.

Or, I thought, as I quickly covered the distance between the path and the bench, it was not news of my father that she’d claimed to have, exactly, but—what were the words she’d used?—information I needed about him.

“Excuse me,” I said, as I approached the bench. There was a slightly hysterical note in my voice, I noticed at once with some displeasure. I did my best to tamp it down.

“Excuse me,” I said again, in a lower register. I wiped a sudden moisture from my palms on the legs of my pants.