Just when I thought that the woman seemed strangely immobile, like she hadn’t heard me at all, I saw her right hand dart out and pat the bench beside her.

“Come and sit down,” I heard her say. It was the same voice I’d heard on the telephone that day: slow, calm, and now uncannily disembodied behind that large white hat. Gingerly, I walked around the side of the bench and sat down beside her. For no particular reason I kept my eyes staring straight ahead, as though I were seating myself next to a large and dangerous animal unfond of eye contact. I saw before me the little pond, and the dirt path beyond it. A very old eucalyptus was directly in our view, its bark peeling off in long strips.

I became aware that the woman beside me on the bench was wearing perfume, and in the same moment I knew that it was not the first time that I had smelled this particular perfume. I turned to look at her—and a curious sensation passed through my body, as though all the blood in my veins had been momentarily replaced with ice water, and then just as quickly restored.

Sitting beside me on the bench was the guest lecturer. The very same guest lecturer whom I’d accompanied to the Old Mission Hotel on Thursday of the previous week. The lavender suit jacket was gone now, and in its place was a cream-colored linen suit. On her feet, she was wearing a pair of sandals that appeared to be made of straw.

“You see?” she said. “I told you you’d recognize me.”

“Yes,” I said.

A silence passed in which she seemed to be waiting for me to speak. “I’m sorry,” I said eventually. “I’m not sure I understand.”

The guest lecturer smiled indifferently and gave her hat a slight adjustment. Evidently, if she planned to explain anything, she was not prepared to do it yet.

“I was under the impression that your flight home was on Friday evening.”

It was not what I had wanted to say at all, it missed the point entirely, and yet, it did not seem to matter very much in the end, because the guest lecturer showed no signs that she was going to answer. Instead, she merely sat and regarded me with a slightly smug expression.

It occurred to me just then that it might be helpful to remember what the guest lecturer’s real name was, although now, conveniently, any inkling of it had completely vanished from my mind. I had known it at one point, I was sure of that. Carol? I thought. Alicia?

“Amanda,” said the guest lecturer suddenly. “Amanda Payard was the name I gave you.” I looked at her, stunned. Was she, in addition to being a guest lecturer, an academic from Colorado, a maker of anonymous phone calls, also a reader of minds?