And, if the recording was to be believed, these people would have to provide a valid photo ID before anything would be released to them. Which proved Bonilla’s documents were forgeries. Except… he was a detective. And from what Duran had seen on television, and read in books, private eyes seemed to make their living through “contacts” and pretexts. That a P.I. should finesse a death certificate out of the Office of Vital Records was not beyond the realm of possibility.

On the other hand, Duran thought, you’d think I’d know who I am—and whether I’m dead or not. The predicament would have been amusing, if it weren’t for the fact that his client had committed suicide, and now he was being sued for millions.

But there was something else, something that Bonilla had said. It took a moment—then Duran remembered: the Social Security Death Index. The detective had gone to the Office of Vital Records after accessing the Social Security Internet site.

And maybe that explains things, Duran thought. Maybe the private eye found someone with a similar name—or even the same name—and confused it with me and mine.

Sitting down at the computer, Duran logged onto AOL and searched for the site that lists the names of Social Security recipients who have died. It only took a moment, and then he found it. The page was a link on half a dozen URLs devoted to genealogy. He tried Ancestry.com, and was soon connected.

There were three fields of entry in the search engine: first name, last name, and state. Duran typed his names in the appropriate fields, and clicked on the District of Columbia. A few seconds later, the results materialized on the monitor. There was a single entry:

Name: Jeffrey Duran

Born: Aug. 25, 1968

Died: April 4, 1970

Residence: 20010 (WDC)

SSN: 520-92-0668

It was him.

He almost fainted.

The cabdriver had no idea how to get to Rock Creek Cemetery, even though both of them could see it on the hillside as they cruised along the parkway, gravestones, statues, and vaults stepping down the hill. They tried three exits: Calvert, Cathedral, and Massachusetts Avenue, but as soon as they left the parkway, the cemetery disappeared.

“I’m gon’ try P Street,” the driver said, heading downtown again. “You got kin buried here?”

Duran nodded. “Yeah.”

“Not my biz-ness,” the cabbie said, scolding himself. “Myself—I lost my mother eight years ago, and I ain’t seen her stone for quite a while.” He shook his head, and made a clucking sound as he leaned forward. Then he turned on the windshield wipers.

Eight years ago… , Duran thought. That was about when his own parents had died—in the summer of ‘93, when he’d been in grad school.

The driver swung onto the P Street exit ramp, but, once again, there was no sign of the cemetery. Soon, they were back on the parkway.

“Have to be here someplace,” the driver said, “you can see it, from time to time.” Finally, he pulled into the tiny Exxon station that stood on the corner near the Watergate Hotel. Leaving the car, he went up to the jumpsuited attendant, and clapped him on the shoulder. “Mah man… ,” he said.

The two of them disappeared into the gas station’s office. After a while, the driver emerged with a Post-it in his hand. Sliding behind the wheel, he clapped the yellow slip of paper to the dashboard, and declared, “Now we in bizness.”

And so they were. The cemetery’s entrance was barely a mile away, though by the time they pulled up to the little building that served as its office, the rain was falling steadily.

“Say, man,” the driver asked as Duran paid him. “You want an umbrella?”

“Sorry?”

“No charge or nothin’. Every rainy day, two or three people leave they umbrella in the cab. So what I do, I try to redistribute things, know what I mean?”

Duran was so taken aback by the man’s spontaneous kindness that he felt a jolt of sadness when the taxi drove away, as if he were bidding farewell to a friend.

The shuffling cemetery attendant looked, to Duran’s eye, close to joining the ranks that he himself oversaw. His skin was papery white, his eyes red-rimmed and crusty. He was dressed in work clothes—a dark blue shirt, matching pants, and boots.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

“I’m looking for a grave.”

“Well, you came to the right place. What’s the name?”

“Duran,” he replied, sounding foolish to himself. “Jeffrey Duran.” At the man’s request, he spelled it.

The man listlessly punched the information onto a computer keyboard. After a moment, he withdrew a printed map of the cemetery from a shelf, circled an area marked P-3, and handed the sheet to Duran without a word.

The umbrella was nice and big, with a bulbous wooden handle. When he stepped outside and opened it, the rain came down harder, as if on signal, peppering the fabric as he checked the landmarks on the map. He didn’t mind that it was raining—if anything, the diminished visibility softened the agoraphobia that was stirring in his gut.

Standing within the umbrella’s drip line, studying the map, he could see that finding the grave was not going to be easy. And it wasn’t. Even with the map, it took him nearly twenty minutes. And despite the umbrella, his shoes and socks and pant legs were soaked when he finally found it.

Jeffrey Aaron Duran’s gravestone sat on a small knoll under a towering Norway spruce. The ground around it was spongy with rain and covered with russet-colored needles that smelled like Christmas. Duran stared:

The sight of the gravestone was like a body blow. It took his breath away and, for a moment, he was afraid to look around, afraid there would be emptiness on either side of him—that if he looked, he’d find himself stranded in a void with nothing to hang onto but the certainty that the world as he knew it was a mere hallucination, an artifact of his own disordered mind. Destabilized to the core, Duran was helpless as a gust of wind grabbed at the umbrella in his hand, and snatched it away. Reflexively, he turned and watched as the umbrella cartwheeled down the hill, grateful that there was a hill, an umbrella, a cemetery.

By then, he was beyond surprise, or thought he was, until he realized what ought to have been obvious in the first place—that he was standing in a family plot, surrounded by the graves of several Durans. For the second time in a minute, the world lurched as his eyes fell upon a granite plinth from which an angel rose, wings folded, eyes downcast. Beneath the angel, the names of his parents were etched in the stone—and like him, they’d died in 1970.

The words on the death certificate ran through his mind: Massive trauma (auto). Not carbon monoxide, then. And not Nantucket, but Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

Turning, he walked slowly through the rain until he arrived, drenched, at the cemetery office, where he asked the attendant if he’d call him a cab. The man looked up from his desk in a slow, reptilian way and, seeing the look on Duran’s face, broke into a toxic grin, ripe with schadenfreude. “What’s a matter? Seen a ghost?”