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south on Clinton there was a run-down playground: basketball hoops without nets, a baseball field without bases. A sign by the street read CYPRESS PARK .
    A few young kids were playing on a rusty swing set. Their mothers talked nearby. I cut across the ball field to the edge of the woods and walked along until I found the beginning of a trail. It wound aimlessly through a floor of wet leaves left over from the fall. Every now and then I saw a candy wrapper or a crushed can—the flotsam left behind by careless teenagers.
    The ground began to rise and the trail smoothed out, heading west and north. It came to a ravine with a sharp drop, twenty feet down. The only way across was a narrow footbridge that might have had a railing once but didn’t have one now. I crossed it slowly, listening to every pop and creak of the wooden planks.
    After the bridge I left the trail and came to the northern border of the woods. I found a spot that overlooked the lawn behind Jana’s apartment and saw a bent figure toiling with a rake—the landlady working in her garden. I kept within the cover of the trees so she wouldn’t see me. A dozen feet in from the wood’s edge I found a fallen trunk with the bark peeling off, a perfect place for someone to sit and watch Jana in the moonlight.
    I would have given a lot for a bare patch of mud, a clear set of footprints. But the ground here was covered with the same carpet of leaves, not quite dried by the sun. If there were prints, they were indistinct. Yet there was one plain sign that someone had been here: a broken popsicle stick lying on the ground by the tree trunk. No way to tell how long it had been there or who had left it. Maybe a watcher in the night, or maybe one of the same teenagers who had been careless with soda cans and candy wrappers.
    I walked back through the woods the way I’d come. Crossed the bridge. Followed the trail to Cypress Park. The kids had abandoned the swings and were taking turns on a slide. Their mothers supervised. I left the woods and marched through the ball field. None of them paid me any mind. On Clinton Drive a chipmunk scrambled along the top of a hedge, froze when it saw me, watched me go by. When I got back to Jana’s duplex I saw a guy in a long tan coat sitting on her landlady’s stoop, smoking a cigarette. He stared at me as I walked up the driveway, and when I approached Jana’s door he crushed out the cigarette and got up.
    â€œHey,
kámoš
. You and me, we talk.”
    I paused with Jana’s key in the lock. “Do I know you?”
    â€œYou don’t know me, I don’t know you. That’s what we talk about.”
    He wore a silk shirt under the coat and what looked for all the world like leather pants.
    â€œYou’re not a tenant,” he said, wagging a finger at me. Like I’d done something naughty.
    â€œThat’s true,” I said, “but I know the woman who lives here.”
    â€œYou shouldn’t have a key.”
    â€œShe let me borrow her spare.”
    â€œMaybe you think you live here now, huh?”
    â€œNo. I’m visiting.”
    â€œYou don’t live here. She pays rent for one. If there’s two, it’s more.”
    â€œI’m visiting.”
    â€œI can’t have it. She’s already behind.”
    He had acne scars and greased-back hair, and he spoke with an accent but it seemed to come and go. I thought it might be Eastern European. Czech or Polish.
    â€œYou got a key,” he said. “Maybe you pay what she owes.”
    â€œWho are you?” I said.
    He smiled and his teeth were definitely Eastern European. “I’m the landlord,
kámoš
.”
    I shook my head. “The landlord’s a nice old lady. Lives next door.”
    â€œThat’s my grandma. She owns the house, I collect the rent.”
    He reached into the pocket of his coat and handed me a grubby business card: LANIK RENTALS. SIMON LANIK, LEASING