Chapter 5 Summary

Si narrates how after one of his dates with Katie, she told him a story from her past - how she was adopted, how her adoptive father's father Andrew Carmody was a minor official in the administration of American President Grover Cleveland, and how Carmody killed himself under mysterious circumstances. She also shows him a photograph of Carmody's grave, which has no date or any other inscription other than a pattern of a star in a circle made by a series of small holes or dots. She then shows him a letter sent to Carmody, bearing the postmark of a particular date and time in January, in which the sender asks him to meet at a certain place and time to discuss a particular issue. She tells how, several years later, Carmody scrawled a mysterious suicide note on the same letter and then...