I took a sip of seltzer and a bite of my sandwich, and let my mind wander. Most nights I put something on: the television, or the radio—always a talk station; human voices, even disembodied, can make a night a little easier to bear. But on that night, the night of my father’s open house, I had no need for any distractions, and I ate in silence.

Little by little, it grew dark. Dusk turned the fading daylight gray-purple, then black. The fog crept up the lawn, toward the window, reaching its long white fingers through the pines, and as it did I felt my mind slowly empty.

The closer the white fog came, the more passive I grew, and when it was pressed thickly against the windowpane, moisture beading on the inside of the glass, I felt the tightly wound coil of the day’s anticipation begin to unwind. Then I set my plate and glass to the side and took out the item I’d retrieved from the pocket of my father’s coat at the open house—a piece of notepaper, folded in half, which I put on the table and smoothed open with my palm.

I saw at once that it was a piece of stationery from a hotel, the Old Mission Hotel San Buenaventura. The name appeared at the top of the square, and above it a crude drawing of a steeple, its two long fingers meeting in a point beneath a simple cross.

Written on it, in my father’s near-illegible hand, were the words Saturday, 10 am, MC. Nothing more.

MC, I thought. MC. A person? A place? In either category, nothing came to mind. Tomorrow, I decided, I would think.

I turned the piece of paper over, but the other side was blank.

By then it had grown too dark to see, and I got up to switch on the light, and then sat back down with a feeling of satisfaction. I had been right to go to the open house, I was certain. I had the impression, somehow, that things were beginning to move. It was just as if— I checked myself. Did I want to think, again, of my horoscope? That unwelcome moment of intimacy I’d shared with Kirstie that morning in the break room? There was something unsavory about it, and yet the temptation was strong. What was it that the horoscope had said? That the path between unrelated events would soon become clear. Well. The message was impossible to ignore. I was uniquely positioned, I thought, to set things in motion. Some headway was being made in the matter of my father’s death.