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mystery and memory stoking my quest. Finally, I drifted off, and woke up in the morning to a decision. It was time to visit the dead.

10
    T he paper said Simon Anderson’s funeral and memorial service would be held graveside in Colma. The City of Souls. More than one million people are buried in cemeteries on a lush hillside setting just south of San Francisco. The only thing more crowded than life in the Bay Area is the afterlife.
    The obituary said the deceased was a former investment banker focusing on technology who had done well enough to take on his dream of becoming a writer. He’d published a children’s book through a vanity press.
    A crowd was gathering. A woman next to me pulled out a bottled water and a pouch of raw mixed nuts. She told her friend she’d brought her own snacks in case the funeral food wasn’t organic.
    A tent had been set up over the gravesite and a woman I took to be Anderson’s wife sat underneath, with her daughter and autistic son, who bounced excitedly, seemingly oblivious to the solemnity. Surrounding us were tombstones big and small, death’s haves and have-nots. The Silver family mausoleum was big enough to fetch $3,000 a month without renovations if rented as a one-bedroom apartment in Noe Valley.
    I had come to the funeral looking for a place to start, maybe someone who had been at the café to whom I could show the picture in my breast pocket. I pulled it out and looked at Annie.
    Our second date took place two weeks after our first. We’d had little contact because she’d been on a work trip to New York and relatively unresponsive to e-mail. But when I got to her apartment to pick her up, we immediately launched into a kiss, which threatened to get heavy, until a little girl from across the hallway opened the door.
    She told Annie that her cat had again crawled behind the stove and had been there for hours. Annie promised to help, went inside her own apartment for a second, slyly showed me a bag of catnip, and then we went over to retrieve Edmund. Annie knelt beside the stove and made a show for the girl of coaxing out the cat with a fantastical plea about how everyone involved would be better off by its appearance.
    When Edmund emerged it set off genuine joy from the girl, and also Annie, who wiped cobwebs from the cat’s face and scratched the base of its ear. Annie, the cat whisperer. I’d always been a sucker for a woman who could nurture a pet, figuring if she could love something that habitually puked on the carpet she could cope with whatever hair balls I brought up. Annie startled me by reading my thoughts.
    “If you run behind the stove, you’re on your own.” She smiled.
    “I’m not easy. I’ve had sex with only three people,” Annie said.
    “You mean at once?”
    “Pig.” She paused. “This is going to be something special.”
    She pulled me into her apartment. At a glance, not much registered. I could tell one thing, though: The place was neat. Hospital corners all around.
    “Nat, this whole thing is freaking me out,” Annie said. She lowered her voice, like she was too embarrassed to finish her thought. “Is this real?”
    I laughed. “I was wondering the same thing.”
    She led me to the bedroom. I noticed that tacked neatly around the edges of the ceiling were Christmas lights—blue, red, yellow, and green—but unlit.
    “I should have removed them six months ago,” Annie said. “I’m better at putting things up than taking them down.”
    “Sure, putting things up is exciting—it means holidays and vacation and presents are coming. Taking things down means it’s over. Hibernation.”
    “Very deep,” she said. “I don’t know where their box is.”
    She giggled and her eyes shone joy, and desire. I dove into them.
    Afterward, I looked at her bedside table. It was bare, except for a tick-tock clock with metallic black hands, and two hardbacks:
Heart of Darkness
and
Horton Hears a Who.
    “Nat, have you ever saved a life?” Annie