Everything about the fourth floor was quiet; nothing could have looked more ordinary: it was the same thickly carpeted dark hallway I had been down before with the guest lecturer. Here I was, approaching the door to 409, key in hand. I paused. What if the room was already occupied? I raised my fist to knock.

Does this make sense? I asked myself. What was I planning to say, exactly, to the room’s occupant?

But, I admonished myself, I had been paralyzed by indecision too many times before—now was the time for action, not more thinking. I knocked on the door three times: bright, sharp noises. Inside, I felt something—some presence—respond.

“Yes?” said a muffled female voice. “Come in.”

“It’s locked,” I said, but when I looked down I saw that I was wrong. In fact, the knob was turning smoothly in my hand.

The room was quiet and, at first glance, empty. There was the bed with its tight dark coverlet, the cabinet, the night table, and the desk. Everything was exactly like it had been before, only the time of day was different—then it had been night, and now it was merely drawing dusk, so that the setting sun tongued the hem of the curtain with an orangish light.

“In here,” said the woman’s voice, and I saw that the door to the bathroom was slightly ajar, and that the sound of the voice came from within, and that it was accompanied by the quiet splashing sounds a person makes while taking a bath.

“You’re early,” she said. It was difficult to say, muffled as her voice was, but I thought I detected a hint of irritation. “I’m not ready. But you can have a drink and wait.”

A drink, I thought, and the words made a little echo in my mind. Then I saw that a bottle of gin, a bucket of ice, and two glasses were sitting on top of the cabinet, where they had not been previously. But before I could think with any meaningful result about that, a bright scrap of clothing caught my eye, and I leaned over the bed and saw that wedged between it and the wall was a lavender suit jacket, splayed out on the floor, its sleeves twisted as if it had been strangled. This turn of phrase struck me as funny: as if it had been strangled.

“Is someone dead?” Professor Pindar had asked. Yes! I thought. It is the lavender suit jacket; it has been strangled! I laughed, despite myself. And then I was interrupted by the woman in the bath—the guest lecturer, I reminded myself—because if her suit jacket was on the floor, then surely it was she.