Now I had come to the end of the water and up through the thicket of pines on the ridge. The sunlight, filtered through their tall canopy, took on a sickly, greenish cast. Suddenly and unaccountably I was deflated; a gust of despair moved through me. Did anything I had just thought or said make any sense at all?

Was it at all plausible that “Daniel Shriver” had lost a bag and yet had no idea when, and had just now set about retrieving it, and in such a lackadaisical fashion? Surely people who left their luggage behind did not wait six months to inquire about it. The premise of luggage was that it contained items of vital importance—the bare necessities needed to sustain oneself while traveling. It was not like leaving a superfluous item, like a scarf or an umbrella.

But what ridiculous thoughts were these? A disquisition on the nature of luggage? What’s more, I admonished myself, it behooved me to remember that there was no bag. There was nothing to suggest that my father had left a bag behind; this was only a stratagem, inspired by Gerry Van Gelder and his missing bag, that I had invented in order to find out whether or not my father had in fact been a guest at the Old Mission Hotel.

And yet, doubt overcame me at every turn—was it truly the most advisable way to proceed? Suddenly the whole enterprise seemed riddled with holes. It was better to wait, I thought, until a new scheme presented itself.

I had leftover spaghetti for dinner and drank a glass of water at the sink. The sun had already set, and a thick, damp darkness had settled on the land.

There was one small thing I could do, I thought, and I walked to the counter where the telephone sat and extracted the aged phone book from the cabinet below. I saw at once that it was several years out of date. Odd, I thought, because I had the impression that they delivered the new ones relentlessly, but where those had disappeared to was anyone’s guess. I opened it up and thumbed through its thin pages until I came to the Ps—Amanda Payard was the name the guest lecturer had “given” me, whatever that meant, and once she said it I remembered seeing it printed on a name tag among her things, P-A-Y-A-R-D. But here in the listings—Pawson; Paxton; Pay-N-Save Market; and Paye, Harold—there was no such person. Well, I thought, perhaps she really did live in Colorado, with her husband and however many children she’d claimed to have. Although if that was the case, what was she still doing here, proposing assignations in the Arboretum?