“Have you read this book? It’s wonderful!”

            The deep voice made me jump. I had been staring into my coffee, stirring it round in circles with one of those silly little black straws that are so inefficient for actually incorporating the sugar I hadn’t put in it anyway. I looked up at the complete stranger standing by my table and wondered why on earth he was talking to me, what he really wanted, and how I could get rid of him without being rude. He was probably a reporter. Maybe I would be rude anyway.

            “What?”

            “This book? Have you read it? I just read it twice. Now I’d like to give it away.”

            A reporter giving something instead of demanding something? That was new. Automatically I reached out for the thick paperback. Little Dorrit. Without warning the tears welled up and spilled over my cheeks. Just what I needed. A perfect photo op. I fumbled in my purse for the tissues I knew weren’t there and found napkins pressed into my hand.

            “Here.”

            When I could see again, I found that the giver-away of Dickens books had pulled up a chair and sat down on my left. I saw a very tall man, with long, lean limbs, spiky, short dark hair, and deep, dark eyes set in a long, gentle face. His elbows were on his knees, and he was leaning forward and watching me with a strange expression. It was that expression that did me in. His brows were lowered a little, his lips drawn into a tight line, and his eyes—his eyes reflected my pain, as if he had been inside my heart and become me when I looked at the book he gave me.

            “I’m sorry,” he said, like he really was, and for more than making me cry.

            “It’s not your fault—you couldn’t have known.”

            “Known what?”

            “That my father calls me his Little Dorrit.” This time I managed to keep the tears back.

            “Then your name must be Amy.”

            I managed a watery smile. “There aren’t many people who would be able to guess that, even my father’s literature students.”

            “You’re Nathaniel Doran’s daughter?”

            “You didn’t know? Then you’re not a reporter.”

            He chuckled, a deep sound that matched his dark good looks. “No, I’m not. Actually…I’m your father’s replacement. Temporary replacement.”

            I wanted to loathe him, but I couldn’t. “Oh.”

            “My name is Jarod. Jarod Clennam.”

            I stared at him. “You’re kidding.”

            “Well, I could say I opened up Little Dorrit and stole the name of the nicest character…but then I would have to call myself Jarod Pancks.”

            I snorted into my coffee and spilled it in helpless laughter. This man was more like a yacht or a swift, elegant speedboat than the puffing little tugboat Dickens describes Mr. Pancks as. Grinning he helped me mop up my mess.

            “Let me get you some more. What are you having?”

            “The dark Sumatra, black.”

            He went inside the coffee shop and returned with two white mugs and a handful of sugar and creamer packets. I watched in horror as he dumped about three creamers and four sugars into what once had been one of the best cups of coffee in town. He noticed my wide eyes and raised eyebrows.

            “What?”

            “Why don’t you just go to a drainage ditch and scoop up some muddy water to carry your creamer and sugar?”

            “What?”

            “Why even drink coffee if you’re just going to destroy it? Or better yet, go to a gas station and buy some of the damaged water they call coffee?”

            I wasn’t sure what had gotten in to me. I never talk to strangers like that, and I’ve learned to restrain myself when it comes to criticizing other people’s coffee habits. It was just that I felt I had known him my entire life. He was gaping at me as if I had suddenly sprouted ears like Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

            “Sorry,” I muttered.

            “No—please. Explain to me what you mean. Is there a difference between this coffee and a gas station’s coffee?”

            “Is there a difference?” I almost screamed. I took a deep breath. “Bless me, what do they teach them in these schools? Look, Mr. Pancks—”

            “Jarod,” he laughed.

            “Look, Jarod. There are two basic kinds of coffee. Robusta and Arabica. The difference between them is like the difference between a Harlequin romance writer and Dickens.”

            He looked blank. A literature professor? Really?

            I tried again. “Between a Neon and a Rolls Royce.” That registered. “Robusta is cheap, easily produced, and about as worthy to be called coffee as a cup of muddy drain water. Your basic gas station coffee or what you get in a can of Folgers. Its only value is in its caffeine, and you can get that from tea. Arabica has its various grades, but the coffee sold by Zara’s here is about as good as I’ve had anywhere. They roast it themselves, weekly. They buy it direct from farmers for fair prices. They buy the best they can get. They train their baristas the way people train restaurant sommeliers. Their coffee is sheer quality and unmatched flavor, and you don’t even bother to taste it before you adulterate it? You must treat your coffee with respect. They have real half-and-half, if you must weaken it.”

            “Half of what?”

            “What? Half-and-half?” He looked blank again. “Half cream, half milk? Comes in little pink cartons from the grocery store? How can you not know half-and-half?”

            “I have never heard of any of this coffee lore. My first experience with coffee was at a police station.”

            “Well, that explains it. Look, try this.” I pushed my untouched cup of strong black Sumatra at him.

            He picked it up and took a sip. His eyes went wide, and he took another drink. “That is wonderful. It never occurred to me—I like things sweet. I didn’t know coffee could be like this. But now you’ve lost your coffee again.”

            “Don’t bother. I’m actually awash with it.”

            “And with sadness,” he said softly.

            I clenched my jaw. I was not about to start crying in public again.

            “Why does your father call you Little Dorrit?”

            “Because I’ve taken care of him since my mother died. He says he hopes he isn’t as troublesome as Mr. Dorrit. He’s not. He’s like what Mr. Dorrit might be like if he weren’t a thorough and complete selfish idiot. Actually, Mr. Dorrit has no character at all beyond being a thorough and complete selfish idiot, but that’s beside the point. Maybe he’s a little more like Mr. Clennam, with strong flavors of Mr. Brownlow, Mr. Jarndyce, and Bob Cratchitt. I’m not really very much like Amy Dorrit, either, but between ourselves we call the school the Marshalsea sometimes.”

            Jarod chuckled. “That bad?”

            “No, it’s a lovely place. Or was—” I hurried over that. “We used to find people who reminded us of Dickens’ characters and call them by their Dickens names in private. We’ve even got a Young John.”

            Jarod’s eyes crinkled with amusement. “Let me guess. A young son of someone who works at the school who is violently in love with you.”

            “You’ve got it. It’s annoying but cute. He’s six years younger than I am! One of the students is a Nicholas Nickleby to the life—and he’s even found a Madeline to rescue from penury and marry, and there’s a girl I think would make a perfect Esther Summerson—before the smallpox—though I don’t really know anything about her.”

            “What about Sydney Carton?”

            “Oh, if there were a Sydney Carton, I’d marry him. No Charles Darnay for this Lucie Manette.”

            “What, a scoundrel and wastrel?”

            “No,” I said softly, “a man beaten down by life who, when it matters most, makes the ultimate sacrifice.”

            His face went strange, took on a pinched look, his eyes suddenly the eyes of a child who has been badly hurt. I stared at him, and after a moment the look faded, as if he hadn’t known it had been there.

            “Little Dorrit, why don’t you tell me about your father?”

            I took a deep breath. “You can read about it in the newspapers.”

            “I already have. I want to hear your side of the story.”

            “He didn’t do it!” I burst out.

            “I believe you.”

            I looked at him skeptically, but his eyes were steady and grave. A yellow leaf fell out of the tree over us and landed on the book.

            “Fine. I’ll tell you. But not here. I’m likely to start crying all over again.”

            “Alright. Will you walk me to the Marshalsea?”

            He managed to make me smile again. “Certainly, Mr. Clennam.”

            He collected our mugs. “Just remember it’s Jarod, not Arthur,” he said over his shoulder as he took them inside.

            I picked up Little Dorrit, slightly the worse for wear for having coffee spilled on it, and tucked the yellow leaf inside for a bookmark. “What are you, Arthur’s long-lost brother?” I asked when he returned.

            That strange, pinched look came over his face again but was quickly gone. “Maybe. You never know who I’ll turn out to be.”

            We set off down the tree-lined road. Morrison is a beautiful little town, like many of the towns on the East Coast, full of lovely old brick and stone buildings. The trees were just starting to change colors. I sighed.

            “My father loves this time of year.”

            “So do I. The colors in the trees…” He shook his head, his eyes wide, like someone seeing something new and wonderful.

            “That’s one of the reasons why he’d never do something like this. It sounds silly, but if he were going to kill someone, it wouldn’t be in the fall. Of course the police wouldn’t accept an explanation like that.”

            “I would. Psychological explanations are very apt. For instance, knowing your father as you do, can you think of any situations under which he might kill someone?”

            “Only if they were going to hurt me. But he wouldn’t stalk them and torture them with drugs. He would finish them off neatly and humanely. He would die—or kill, which is harder—to protect me, but he wouldn’t torture. It’s ridiculous. Especially not one of his students. He always says the teacher has a responsibility to the students as an authority figure. Whoever did this knew a lot about my dad but didn’t understand how he thinks.”

            “That is a very good observation.”

            I flushed. “Thanks. I’m interested in psychology.”

            “So tell me about what happened from your point of view.”

            I drew in a deep breath, willing calmness. “A student didn’t show up for class two days in a row. That was no surprise. Students cut class all the time. I did it myself a time or two—didn’t you?”

            “No,” he said, “but it wasn’t for lack of trying.”

            I quirked an eyebrow at him. “Strict school?”

            “Very,” he said, oddly grim. Visions of Nicholas Nickleby floated through my head.

            “Well, this student had a bad habit of skipping class, usually managing to pass most of his classes because he was actually brilliant. His name was Tim Morone.”

            “The young man your father is accused of killing.”

            “Yes,” I said with a sigh. “They didn’t get along. Tim was arrogant, and he made it a habit to oppose all my father’s theories about English literature. He claimed to believe that Marlowe wrote Shakespeare—stuff like that, you know? My father doesn’t like confrontation, and it was actually a relief when Tim wasn’t in class. That was why he noticed. He’d flunked Tim in a class last year, and Tim took it up with the administration, saying it was because he didn’t want him going out with me—”

            “You were going out with him?”

            “Me? Never! But he wanted me to, and he was very unpleasant when I wouldn’t. That’s something the police have tried to put a spotlight on, believe me. Father kills daughter’s stalker. But Tim wasn’t a stalker. He was just an arrogant twit who believed he was God’s gift to women.”

            Jarod gave a quiet snort, and I realized it had been a laugh. “That’s a brilliant description.”

            “What? God’s gift to women? How can you never have heard that before?”

            He shrugged. “So he didn’t fit the profile of a stalker.”

            “No, thank goodness. But it was all a mess. The administration backed my father, and Tim was furious, but he kept taking his classes because even he had to admit my father’s the greatest authority on English literature in the state, and that was Tim’s degree. Plus Tim liked harassing him. My father’s a patient man. He can take a lot of harassment quietly and go on with life. People who don’t know him very well think he’s unusually unemotional.”

            “I know someone like that,” Jarod muttered.

            “Well, he’s not, really. He’s just reserved and introverted. It’s actually easier not to show some emotions than to show them. That tells against him, too, in the eyes of the police, because they can say he was like a volcano getting ready to blow. Passive-aggressive, you know. But it wasn’t like that. Tim only had one year left. My father is good at waiting for things to blow over and then getting on with life. It’s easier emotionally than blowing up about it.”

            “Is that how it works?” he murmured, and I had a feeling he wasn’t talking about my situation at all.

            “It is with my father. Well, last weekend we were just getting up on Sunday morning when the police stormed into our house and arrested him without the slightest warning.” I was cold suddenly, though the fall day was quite fine. “I never imagined what that would be like. Even good friends knock before they go into your house around here. There was no knock—suddenly the door just crashed open as if—as if it wasn’t even our house anymore. Have you ever had a gun pointed in your face?”

            “Yes.” It was said very quietly, with a darkness in the undertone.

            “It’s awful. Paralyzing. Them all just coming in, violently, when we’d been so quiet. It was—it was—”

            “Intrusive…terrifying. Like a violation.” Unconsciously we’d stopped walking, and I stared up at him with the feeling that inside his mind he was there in our house, in a bathrobe, getting breakfast ready, feeling all the shock and fear, spilling the orange juice I had spilled.

            “And then—the handcuffs,” I whispered. “All those words they say—I didn’t understand a word they were saying—it felt like he was being kidnapped. Taking him away, shoving him in a car, and a woman asking me questions, and all I could think was that he hadn’t had his coffee yet.” I chuckled weakly, and some spell seemed to break. He was back in his own eyes, Jarod Clennam again instead of me.

            “You’re cold.” He reached out his hands to my arms and rubbed them warmingly. “It’s alright. It’s over now.”

            I sighed. “No. It’s just begun.” We walked again. “Some students had found Tim—tied up and dead—near the river. It must have been awful. It’s so awful to think—someone I have known has been murdered. There’s a strange hole in the world, even if I couldn’t stand him. It’s just all the more grotesque and frightening that they’re accusing my father of it.”

            “Tell me why they’re accusing your father.”

            “It’s all so strange. They found letters in my father’s office—blackmail letters from Tim, threatening to expose him for something to the school administration if he didn’t pay something—but there were no specifics.”

            “So Tim was blackmailing your father.”

            “But he wasn’t!”

            He stared at me. “He wasn’t?”

            “Don’t you think I would know if my father was being blackmailed? Even if he hid it from me—he has these nervous habits when he’s trying to hide something upsetting. Like the time he found his secretary was stealing from him. She was a good friend of mine, and he didn’t want me to know. He’s really good at it, but I can tell. I would have known if he was hiding something from me, especially something as awful as blackmail!”

            “The police seem to have overlooked an extremely important resource.”

            “What?”

            “You.”

            I blushed again. “None of this is evidence.”

            “Perhaps not, but they might not have been so ready to arrest him. So then the letters were planted.”

            “I suppose they must have been. They only have his word to say they weren’t there before. But why?”

            “To implicate your father in the crime. But the question is, did the real murderer do so because your father was handy or because the true purpose of the crime was to discredit him? Why would someone want to do that to an inoffensive literature professor in a small-town liberal arts school?”

            I stared at him, something tickling my mind. “I’m so stupid! I can’t believe I didn’t think of it—my brain has been completely frozen for a week, but—”

            “But nothing. You’ve probably been operating under a certain amount of traumatic shock. What have you just thought of?”

            “A while ago—maybe a month—Dad told me he’d discovered something about someone at the school. Something that appeared pretty bad. He wouldn’t tell me what or who. It really disturbed him. He was the only one who knew about it, which meant he had to do something about it, and, like I said, he hates confrontation, so it would have taken him some time to work up the nerve. I thought maybe it turned out to be not as bad as he thought, because he never said anything about it again. But what if he did do something—mention it to the person, maybe? That would be his old-fashioned, honorable way of doing it, to let the other fellow turn himself in like a gentleman, and what if the other fellow turned out to be a Sir Mulberry Hawk instead of a Lord Verisopht?”

            “Refused to do the honorable thing, you mean, when fairly caught and instead took an underhanded way of dealing with it?”

            “Yes. I don’t know that my father has ever completely understood that the world doesn’t work like a Dickens novel.”

            “But it does. Dickens wrote about the world the way it is. He captured the essence of the evil and the goodness, the sheer silliness and the grandeur that is human nature. The world still has its Sir Mulberry Hawks, who will resort to despicable methods to get out of the consequences of their own crimes, and its Lord Verisophts—and Sydney Cartons, too, I daresay—who will follow the winds wherever they lead until it’s time to make a stand and pay for it with their lives, and its Newman Noggses, who work for the bad guy and are afraid to stand up and fight the evil they see but still—sometimes—show their sympathy for the good, give the hero a little moral support—”

            That look was back again for the third time, the one that said something was eating him inside. And clearly it wasn’t something he wanted to share, so I put a teasing note in my voice when I said, “And its Mr. Clennams?”

            “I only hope I can be as good a man as Arthur Clennam,” he said soberly.

            “But maybe not so much of an idiot when it comes to finances and women? Don’t worry, Mr. Clennam. I’m not laying claim to you because of our shared literary identities.”

            “Thank you,” he said dryly. “I’m sorry—I didn’t mean to lecture. I should save it for my classes.”

            “I’m going to sit in on your classes. But I’ve just thought of something else, Jarod. If the sole purpose was to discredit my father so his accusations would mean nothing, why hurt Tim before killing him? It would work to simply kill him. It takes a certain kind of mind to want to fill a young man full of some kind of chemical that causes such pain as that stuff used on poor Tim.”

            “You’re right. Maybe someone with a vendetta against Tim Morone as well. A dual purpose. Amy, what do you do?”
            I blinked at the sudden change of topic. “I work at a day care. Well, they gave me a couple weeks off—I’m not sure if it’s because they’re sympathetic or because they’re afraid I’ll start murdering the children. It’s not what I want to do forever. I’m not sure what is.”

            “Have you ever considered criminal psychology?”

            My eyebrows shot up. “No, I haven’t.”

            “You should think about it. Later, when we’ve cleared your father.”

            “We? Isn’t that the police’s job?”

            “If they manage to do it, I applaud them. I’ve worked with the police, and I know what a hard, thankless task it often is. But I’ve often seen justice wildly miscarried, and I won’t let that happen to your father.”

            “Are you sure you’re just a literature professor?”

            He gave me a raised eyebrow, and that was all.

            “Jarod, what kind of a literature professor only just became acquainted with Little Dorrit?”

            Another raised eyebrow, asking for an explanation.

            “When you first came up to me, you said you’d just read it twice. I gleaned for the first time out of that. Right or wrong?”

            “Right.”

            “And what was that giving it away about? Stealth professorial tactics?”

            He laughed, a very nice laugh. “I recently bought all of Dickens’ books, and as I’ve finished reading them, I’ve been giving them away. People know about so few of his books. They should read them. And you’re right. I only just discovered Little Dorrit. In fact, it was the first Dickens book I ever read. I picked it up on a bus, and I saved it to read again last.”

            “You’ve never read a book by Dickens before? Not even A Christmas Carol?”

            “Afraid not.”

            “And what kind of a literature professor are you?”

            “A Russian literature professor. Crime and Punishment, The Gulag Archipelago, that sort of thing. They needed someone to fulfill this position quickly, I needed a position quickly, and I made sure I got it. I am now having a crash course in English literature. It would help if I could look over your father’s notes.”

            “You’re insane. You can’t teach three advanced literature courses in a subject you know nothing about!”

            “Actually, I can, Little Dorrit. Do I get to see your father’s notes?”

            “Yes,” I sighed. “You may satisfy your curiosity as to his blackmailing habits all you like.” That earned me another eyebrow. “Here is the Marshalsea Prison, Mr. Clennam.”

            Well might the small Morrison College of Liberal Arts be named after a debtors’ prison, according to some of the students and their parents footing the bill for a private and excellent education, but I had always loved it. The stone buildings were old and designed like a European university, the quad was full of tall old trees just taking on their yellow and orange, and the place smelled of history. That its history was exceedingly tame was beside the point.

            As we entered under the ironwork gate, a figure peeled itself away from the ivy-covered outer wall and hurried after us. “Amy!”

            I sighed. “What, David?”

            “You alright today?”

            “Yes, thank you, David. This is Professor Clennam. He’s filling my father’s position for a little while.”

            The teenager gave him a decidedly unfriendly look. Jarod grinned at him. “Call me Jarod,” he offered. “Nice to meet you.” As we went on, he murmured amusedly, “Young John?”

            “Young John,” I sighed. “Honestly, doesn’t a seventeen-year old have anything better to do than hanging around waiting for me? Shouldn’t he be out getting arrested for buying alcohol with a fake I.D. or something?”

            Jarod chuckled. “He looks very nice. What sort of epitaphs does he write himself over your cruel behavior?”

            “I don’t know, but the day he proposes to me like Young John tried to do to Amy Dorrit is the day I throw him in the great, grey-green, greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees.”

            Now he laughed. “Kipling I do know. I’m a bit of an elephant’s child myself.”

            “I’ve noticed. Well, this is the college. I suppose you’ve been shown around.”

            “I have. I was given a small, temporary office near your father’s but not allowed into his.”

            I pulled my keys from my purse and rattled them at him. “And I am one of the few people on campus who have the right to let you in there.”

            We were just going up the steps to Clauser Hall when the door opened and a woman barreled out, stopped short when she saw us. I suppressed another sigh. I hadn’t really wanted to see her, either. Short, stout, and red-haired, she was a kind, generous woman whom I normally rather liked, but this last week her kindness had become oppressive.

            “Oh, Amy! I was hoping to see you, dear.” She stopped and gave Jarod a bright, inquisitive look.

            “Jan, this is Professor Jarod Clennam. He’s covering Dad’s classes. Professor Clennam, this is Professor Janet Bezic. She’s in the mathematics department.”

            They shook hands.

            “It’s so good they were able to find someone on such an uncertain basis,” Jan said.

            “My own plans are uncertain, so it worked perfectly,” Jarod smiled.

            “Well, I’m glad to meet you, Professor. I’m in a hurry, I’m afraid. Late for class. Amy, I just wanted to ask you if you wanted to come for dinner again this evening.”

            “Oh—well,” I said awkwardly, “I’m afraid—”

            “Miss Doran has promised to go over her father’s teaching notes with me,” Jarod said smoothly. “I have a lot to catch up on before class on Monday. But don’t you worry, Professor Bezic. I’ll make sure she gets a good dinner.”

            “But thank you,” I said. “Jan, there’s the bell.”

            She smiled at us and ran. We both laughed as we went into the building.

            “No math student is ever late for class more often than Professor Jan,” I said. “Thank you, Jarod. She’s sweet, like Miss La Creevy, but I really didn’t want to go over there again.”

            “I could tell.”

            “They’re very kind—they’re all very kind. They all protest that they know my father is innocent, and deep down they’re all wondering if he really did it and who might have been next if he hadn’t been caught. They give me so much sympathy it’s like being smothered in cotton candy.”

            “Cotton—candy? Candy made of cotton?”

            I stared at him with an open mouth. “Please tell me you’re joking.”

            “I could, but it wouldn’t be true.”

            “Jarod, cotton candy is part of the American experience!”

            “My experience has not been very American.”

            “Oh. That would explain it. Raised abroad?”

            “Raised by a European, at least. What is cotton candy?”

            “Well, it’s not made out of cotton. You know how cotton grows in fluffy bolls on the plant?”

            “Yes.”

            “Cotton candy is made to resemble that. They take sugar, mix it with a flavor and a color, and pour it into a hot, spinning drum. The drum melts it and pulls it into fine strands at the same time. They collect the strands into a ball as light as a cloud, and you eat it. It looks like it has mass, but when you bite into it, it disappears like nothing in your mouth. It’s pure magic, really.”

            “Pure spun sugar,” Jarod said. His eyes were as wide and full of delighted wonder as a child’s.

            “I so have to get you some cotton candy,” I muttered, “if only for the fun of watching you eat it.”

            “I love sugar.” He fished inside his black leather jacket and pulled out the last thing I’d expect from a Russian literature professor: a PEZ dispenser. “PEZ?”

            I shook my head and watched as he ate one with a grin. He had a strange way of eating them, pulling back the head with his thumb and pulling the candy out with his teeth. The head looked familiar, and I held out my hand to look at it.

            “Shakespeare?”

            “No Dostoevsky available. It’s a sad state affairs when the greatest figures in Russian literature aren’t available on PEZ dispensers.”

            We laughed again. It felt so good to laugh. This Jarod Clennam had already made me laugh about five times in the last hour.

            “Here’s my father’s office.” I unlocked the door. “We’re still trying to put things back in order after the police finished ransacking the place. Only his secretary and I actually know where everything goes. My father is a packrat, and his office sometimes looks like a tornado went through, but it’s very organized.”

            “I can see that.”

            And he could, too, I didn’t doubt. My father’s office was fairly large with a big bay window which he usually kept curtained to prevent light damage to his old books. Old wood-paneled walls were mostly hidden by bookshelves and framed portraits of all his favorite authors, mostly British but accompanied by Twain, Leroux, Chekhov, and others. The bookshelves were lined with the small knickknacks displaying his eclectic interests, small tables held piles of papers and books, and the floor was stacked with more in his cluttered but neat way. It was strange to come in without him being there.

            I showed Jarod the files where my father kept his semester’s-worth of teaching notes. “Go ahead and take what you want. Anything else you want to see?”

            “May I satisfy my curiosity as to his blackmailing habits?”

            I raised my eyebrow. “I said you could. After all, you’re not just here to teach a couple classes, are you?”

            He frowned. “What do you mean?”

            “Psychology. Criminal psychology.” He started when I said that. “Criminal psychology is about why people do things, isn’t it? Your why involves a lot more than literature. I mean, come on, you’ve been grilling me about this whole mess since we met—not like a reporter, not quite like police—my guess is private detective.”

            A very worried look in his eyes disappeared, and I realized, as I had been realizing for the last very strange hour, that there was much, much more going on with him than was readily apparent even to me. I was not, however, going to tell him what I was realizing. His grin had relief in it.

            “Criminal psychology is your field alright. Yes, I’m here to make sure both your father and the real murderer get justice, and you can’t tell anyone that.”

            “Of course not! What do you take me for? Go ahead and look through everything you want, though I warn you that the police have been through everything and have turned it all upside down and taken away many things of no value at all.”

            He sat down at my father’s desk and began going through it in a very practiced away. “You don’t have much of an opinion of the police, do you?”

            “Not recently,” I muttered.

            “They’re not the bad guys, you know. They’re a bunch of people who work too hard for too little pay, and most of them joined up because they wanted to make a difference. It’s an easy job for swaggering bullies to exploit, but the swaggering bullies are actually the minority. Most of them are just people trying to make our world safer.”

            “I know,” I sighed. “But that doesn’t change what they’ve done to us.”

            “No, it doesn’t.” He gave me a smile, sympathetic but more comforting than most anyone had been all week. I closed my eyes against my tears.

            Heavy footsteps came down the hall. Jarod quietly got up from the desk and pulled some files of notes from the cabinet. He was leafing through them when Samuel Leland came in.

            “Amy? I was wondering who was in here. Oh, Clennam! Didn’t see you there.”

            “Miss Doran is kindly letting me look through her father’s teaching notes. Only a week’s worth of class doesn’t give me much to build on.”

            The big, white-haired bursar nodded. “You’ll do fine, Clennam, just fine. We have faith that you’ll give our students their money’s worth.” He came over to me and took my hand, patted it in a benign, avuncular fashion. “How are you, Amy?”

            “Quite well, thank you.” I quietly withdrew my hand.

            “What about dinner at our place tonight?”

            “Thank you, but I’ve promised to help Professor Clennam decipher my father’s notes. He’s got a lot to catch up on before Monday.”

            “Very well, my dear. Don’t work too hard.” Leaning down, he whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry. He’s just temporary, until they release your father.”

            I pressed my lips together tightly, not out of the emotion he imagined but in an attempt to keep from giggling. He beamed at us and took his girth out of the office.

            “And who’s he in Dickens?” Jarod asked.

            “The Patriarch, of course. Mr. Casby. Isn’t he very Patriarchal? Isn’t he the kind and benevolent master of all he surveys? And doesn’t he have a cashbox for a soul? Oh, yes. That’s our Mr. Casby.”

            “You don’t like him.”

            “He doesn’t see a school as a place to educate and improve young minds. It’s a business, all about making money off the lives of young people. And since he’s the head of the business office, his views fit in very well with his work, but my father always says he doesn’t want them in his office. Not to his face, of course. He’s never thrown anyone out of his office in his life.”

            “Does he have a daughter?”

            “My father? Oh, Mr. Leland. No, he doesn’t, thank goodness.” I laughed. “Poor Flora did add quite a flavor to Little Dorrit, didn’t she?”

            “I am still astonished at Dickens’ ability to write such wonderfully ridiculous characters. He had such pathos in his themes and such a comedic ability. Flora’s lines had me falling out of my chair laughing.”

            “Yes, and the Jerry Cruncher home scenes in A Tale of Two Cities!” I cried.

            “And Mr. Lorry in brown,” he laughed. “One single man who could write about the depravity of human nature, and with the next sentence create one of literature’s funniest characters, and then raise the tone of the story to the sublime—”

            “I know. He can write both A Tale of Two Cities, one of his most serious books, and A Christmas Carol, one of his most delightful. That was my first Dickens. Dad read it to me every Christmas.”

            “Really?”

            “Yeah. I can’t believe you grew up without Scrooge and the Ghosts and Tiny Tim.”

            A bitter look slipped across his face. “We didn’t celebrate Christmas.”

            “Really? Jarod, what— Never mind. I won’t ask you about your childhood. It seems to be a painful subject.”

            “Thank you,” he said softly. “Well, I don’t think there’s anything here that will tell me much, except that I like your father.”

            “He’d like you, too. Anyone who can talk about Dickens like you do would be welcomed like family.”

            His mouth tightened. “As to Dickens, I’d better find out what your father was planning on teaching in the next few weeks, as well as the missing last week.”

            We were mostly quiet for an hour or so, he reading my father’s notes faster than anyone I have ever seen read and I organizing more things put out of order by the police. I confess I couldn’t help watching him. Yes, the man was handsome—let’s just get that out of the way. Not the kind of handsome that tends to attract me but undeniably handsome. I was rather more interested in the expressiveness of his face. His emotions showed themselves clearly in his dark eyes, shifting like a kaleidoscope between child-like joy, radiant humor, and dark, haunting pain. He awakened all my psychology-loving, naturally investigative instincts. I wanted to find out about him, just for the fun of knowing.

            I should state here and now that there was never anything remotely romantic between Jarod Clennam and me, despite how Little Dorrit ends, with the wedding of Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit. If this were a book, maybe, but this is real life, which isn’t quite so predictable. In the first place, the man was nearly twenty years older than I. In the second place, I hardly think I was his type (not that I know what that is). The one thing Amy Dorrit and I do share is a certain nondescriptness of person. At least that’s how I’ve always thought of her. Though I’m taller than she was, we share the virtue of looking younger than our years. I have fair skin with a smattering of freckles across my nose, hair that refuses to decide if it’s blond, brown, or red nor whether it’s wavy or straight, and hazel eyes that are more green than brown but too brown to be called green. Which all sounds very charming but in person is completely undistinguished. I take after my father. In the third place, for something romantic to happen between two people, something romantic has to happen. It didn’t. No sparks, chemistry, attraction, or whatever else they call it in novels and movies. We could have been very good friends, I think, had time permitted, but most likely never anything m more. It’s nice to have relationships like that. No pressure.

            I don’t doubt plenty of women fell in love with Jarod. The way he had of getting inside your situation and feeling your pain could be very attractive. Plenty of people fall in love with their therapists for the same reason. The intimacy of being understood can be very seductive. I can see other women being attracted by his vulnerability. What is it about us women that makes so many of us long to fix and heal? Maybe it’s what makes us mothers. And then there was his strength and intelligence, his mystery and complexity. So many inducements to fall in love. I was in an emotionally vulnerable situation, and he came in to both rescue and fascinate me. Like Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit, minus the rescuing bit (Arthur got himself into his own mess instead and ended up being rescued by a very peculiar assortment of people). Why didn’t I fall in love? Maybe I was just lucky. Maybe something was looking after me.

            Descriptive excursus ended. Jarod and I had met in the afternoon and by early evening he was finished in my father’s office. We each took a large armful of files of teaching notes and left the building. Most people had left, the students to the cafeteria and the teachers and staff to their homes for dinner.

            “You’ll be wanting to look over our house, won’t you?” I asked.

            “It will help me to know your father better.”

            “Why do you need to know my father to find the real murderer?”

            “It will help me figure out what he knew and who he knew it about. If we’re right and he was purposefully framed, knowing him is of primary importance.”

            “Very well. Come along, and I’ll feed you some dinner.”

            “I thought I promised Professor Bezic to give you some dinner.”

            “How long have you been in town?”

            “A few hours.”

            “Do you actually have food in your house?”

            He grinned. “I have an entire case of macaroni and cheese.”

            “Ugg, are you kidding?”

            “I love macaroni and cheese.”

            “Macaroni and cheese is great, but are you planning on eating nothing but for the next month?”

            “Why not?”

            “Have you ever heard of a balanced meal?”

            There it was again, that look, like I’d just prodded some bruise.

            “Never mind,” I said. “I went to the farmer’s market a couple days ago and automatically brought enough vegetables for two instead of one.” The look turned from personal pain to vicarious pain. I added quickly, “I’ll make you some stir-fry while you play detective.”

            “Stir-fry?”

            I winced. “You don’t know stir-fry, either? Well, I hope a man who loves macaroni and cheese also loves a vegetable-based meal, because that’s the basis of Chinese food.”

            We had come to the faculty parking lot, and Jarod stopped at a teal Mustang, late 1960s, in exquisite condition. I gazed at it with wide eyes. “This is yours? How does a small-college literature professor afford something like this?”

            He put his files neatly in the back seat. “I don’t teach because I need the money. You like it?”

            “Mustangs aren’t my favorite, but I do have an appreciation for them.”

            He drove well, but then, I was beginning to think he might do anything well he set his mind to do. My house was not far from the school, an old, two-story Victorian in white and green with hints of yellow, complete with gingerbread and garden. Gardening was a minor hobby of my father’s, enough that he liked to potter about outside for a few hours on a Saturday or Sunday, setting new plants or weeding old ones. I preferred to give my attention to the indoors, which suited us both quite well. I restrained my father’s clutter and kept hanging new pictures; he often complained that he never knew what house he was going to come home to.

            “You know, I’m just around the block from here,” Jarod said as he parked in front of the house. “I’m renting a house from someone who’s in Europe.”

            “Oh, Professor Skarsgard and his wife. Well, that was an apt choice. Professor Skarsgard is our expert on Russian literature.”

            “I noticed. A pity he’s gone.”

            “Isn’t it?” I unlocked the door and deposited my armload of files on the dining room table. “I’ll start dinner. My father’s study is at the end of the hall.”

            When silence was the answer, I looked out into the living room and found Jarod examining the Japanese prints I’d hung a few weeks ago.

            “Do you like Japanese art?”

            “I am familiar with it, especially this one.” He pointed to a brush-and-ink painting of what looked like a very sad, bearded dragon floating in some waves.

            “Why especially that one?”

            “I studied it once. You said your father’s study is back here?”

            I pointed down the hallway and watched him speculatively. Half an hour later when he returned I was sautéing the early-autumn squashes, carrots, and peppers with onions, garlic, and ginger in sesame oil, chicken waiting to be added, rice at work in the rice cooker, and the tea kettle was shrieking at me. Over the din I said, “Will you pour the water into the French press?” At his questioning look, I nodded at the glass cylinder with freshly-ground coffee beans in its metal holder on the counter. “Coffee maker. Now set the plunger on top, but don’t press it down. Green tea would be much more appropriate with stir-fry, but I figured you could use some coffee with all the studying you’ve got to do.”

            Squatting down, Jarod rested his arms on the counter and his chin on his arms, staring at the French press. “So you simply mix the coffee grounds and water together?”

            “Not simply. The plunger has a wire filter in it. Once it has steeped for a few minutes, you press down the plunger, and the wire screen pushes all the grounds to the bottom. At the same time, the pressure forces more substance out of the beans. It’s the same basic concept as espresso.”

            “Espresso. From the Italian word for pressure.”

            “Exactly.”

            “Intriguing. It smells wonderful in here.”

            “Garlic, onions, and ginger. Time to add the soy sauce and my favorite Chinese spice powder.”

            “Soy sauce.” He picked up the bottle when I set it down. “Fermented soy beans, made into a sauce. Incredibly nutritious.”

            “Most stuff with soy in it is, they say. There’s a reason the Japanese and Chinese are so healthy. Will you stir while I set the table?”

            When I came back from the dining room for silverware, he was flipping the vegetables and chicken with practiced motions of the wok as if he’d been born in a Chinese kitchen. He grinned at my wide eyes. “I worked in a diner once. This pan has a much better shape for this than a frying pan.”

            “I think the Chinese invented that technique.”

            A few minutes later we were sitting down to eat. It was nice not being alone there for a meal. I was used to eating with my father. Jarod accepted coffee and massive helpings of rice, vegetables, and chicken. He kept saying, “This is good!” as if completely astonished. Then he added mischievously, “But so is macaroni and cheese.”

            I rolled my eyes. “So tell me, Mr. Clennam. Did it surprise you to encounter your name in Little Dorrit? I don’t think it’s a very common name?”

            “No, it’s not. The name did not surprise me so much as discovering myself in the book.”

            “You find yourself in Dickens?”

            “On every page,” he said softly, almost absently.

            “And how do you see yourself in Arthur Clennam?”

            He stabbed a carrot viciously. “In our childhoods,” he muttered.

            I drew in a sharp breath. Arthur Clennam hadn’t had a childhood. His existence had been treated as a penance for another’s sins, and he had rarely, if ever, experienced warmth and love from the woman who called herself his mother. He had had a cold, harsh childhood. If the same was true of Jarod, no wonder he took delight in macaroni and cheese and sometimes seemed to be experiencing the emotions of a child.

            He jumped when I put my hand on his arm. “Jarod, I said I wouldn’t ask about your childhood, but I’ll listen, if you want.”

            He managed a half-smile. “Thank you.” The “thank you” closed a door in his soul quite firmly and locked it, too.

            I know someone who needs a therapist, I thought. I said, “How do you think you’re set up for class on Monday?”

            With a brighter look, he reached out a long arm for the files and pulled them toward them. For the rest of the meal we talked English literature, mostly leaving Dickens alone. Later, when I offered him some ice cream, his face lit up like a child’s on Christmas morning.

            “I love ice cream. It’s my favorite thing to eat. I could eat it for breakfast—sometimes I do.”

            I shook my head. “ I can’t believe you don’t weigh three hundred pounds.”

            “I get a lot of exercise,” he laughed.

            I got out the ice cream and bowls. He examined the carton.

            “Moose Tracks? I thought I had tried every kind of ice cream there was to try, but while I have tracked a moose, I have never eaten its tracks.”

            “You tracked a moose?”

            “In Alaska, about a year ago. Wonderful place, Alaska. I saw my first mountain there. And my first oil tanker.”

            He dished out a mountain’s worth of ice cream and seemed disappointed when I would only accept a molehill. We shared the last of the coffee.

            “Did you find anything in my father’s study?

            “Plenty. I found out he misses his wife, he loves teaching, and you are the most important thing in his life.”

            I found myself blinking rapidly. He gave me a smile that seemed to hold my own pain in it.

            “Is that why you work at a daycare and still live at home at age twenty-three, Little Dorrit?”

            “Don’t knock working at daycares,” I muttered. “You can do a lot good taking care of little kids.”

            “I know. Children are our greatest treasure. But it’s not your calling.”

            “I take care of my father. I always have. He did name me after Amy Dorrit, after all.”

            “If there’s anything I learned about your father, it’s that he’s not helpless, and he’s not stupid, like Mr. Dorrit. I don’t think he wants to keep you tied to the Marshalsea all your life.”

            I stirred my ice cream into a soft little mass. “Now is not exactly the best time to think about things like that.”

            “No, it’s not. I’m sorry.”

            “And what is your calling in life, Jarod? Russian literature?”

            “No,” he said. “Helping people. Hurt people.”

            Like me, I thought. “Is that why you like Dickens so much?”

            “Yes. He’s all about justice. So am I.”

            I wondered if he knew how much he revealed about himself in his eyes.

            “I found something else in your father’s office,” he announced, changing the subject. “A locked filing cabinet.”

            “Financial records. The police cleaned most of that out. I pity the person who has to go through them.”

            “Do you have an extra key?”

            “No.”

            “How about a couple hairpins?”

            A few minutes later I was watching him stick my bobby pins in the lock and wriggle them around. The thing popped open.

            “What were you in your last life, a safecracker?”

            “Something like that.”

            There wasn’t much left in the cabinet. Jarod scooped out what was left and glanced through it.

            “What I really need is to look through the police files.”

            “Oh, good luck.”

            He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Well, I’ll take the rest of those and the teaching notes and go home. And books. Can I borrow books? I have to teach on Donne on Monday, and I’ve never read him.”

            I shook my head. “I swear you’re insane. Take what you want. You’ll share your findings with me?”

            “Yes.”

            When he was done carrying armloads of books out to his car, I had the stir-fry leftovers packed up in containers. “Here,” I said. “I don’t want to have to hear about you eating nothing but macaroni and cheese. Come on now, take them! I’m Little Dorrit, remember? It’s my job to take care of people, and I won’t have your nutrition on my conscience.”

            Impulsively he wrapped me and my containers up in a hug that left me blinking against tears again. Then with an impish grin, he took the containers and left. I followed him out onto the porch and called, “Good night, Professor. I hope my father’s notes help,” for the benefit of the neighbors.

            “Thank you, Miss Doran,” he called back solemnly.

            And that was my first encounter with the man called Jarod.

I had strange dreams about my father, Jarod Clennam, and Little Dorrit all night. Our lives and the book all melded and swirled together. Sometimes my father was Arthur Clennam, a good man locked up in prison; sometimes I was, struggling to help people in prison; sometimes Jarod was, growing up in Mrs. Clennam’s cold, decay-riddled house. Sometimes I was Little Dorrit, but, oddly, more often it was Jarod who was the Child of the Marshalsea, spending his youth in a prison, giving his life for others with no knowledge of anything else, then abruptly thrust out into the wide world, experiencing wonders but always tied emotionally to the old prison. I woke up crying once, but, thankfully, I eventually dreamed that Jarod was the wonderfully absurd Mr. Pancks, secretly trying to help Little Dorrit and Arthur Clennam with the help of his peculiar little landlord and Young John Chivery. When morning came I found myself grinning as I woke.

Jarod had mentioned that he would be gone that morning. I spent the morning doing some unnecessary cleaning—cleaning is such a good thing to do when you’re stressed—and even weeded my father’s flower beds. I kept thinking about criminal psychology. What did I want to do with my life? When I was just about the age when a child begins thinking about such things, twelve for me, my mother had gotten sick. Cancer. She died a year later, after long rounds of chemotherapy that kept her sicker than the cancer alone might have. I turned from the somewhat-spoiled, only child of loving parents into the Little Dorrit who got meals, made sure my father ate and my mother was as comfortable as she could be, and kept things organized. My mother cried more over my new, heavy responsibilities than she did over her own pain, but she was proud of me. I always kept that knowledge, that I had made her proud of me. Perhaps unconsciously I continued to try to make her proud of me, because I kept taking care of everything in our lives. Her death nearly destroyed my father, but in time he recovered, took an interest in life again, and neither of us noticed we had worked ourselves into a sort of rut. Maybe if all this had never happened and Jarod had never come along, we would have continued as we were until Dad died of old age and I was too set in my ways to ever do anything different than I had always done.

But it did happen, disrupting our peaceful coexistence, and Jarod did come along, asking questions that set my mind racing with the fear and the possibilities of the future. What did I want to do, be? What did I love? I liked the feeling that came with taking care of someone, helping someone. I could see myself being a teacher. But there was that criminal psychology niggling at my brain. I loved finding out about people. I could almost picture myself being part of a team of investigators, tracking down a killer not by following physical clues but by following his mind. Not that I knew anything about how criminal psychology actually worked in the real world outside books and movies.

But it was all ridiculous, surely. What would my father do without me?

In the early afternoon I ground some coffee beans, took my French press, and walked down the alley that ran behind my house. Who knew what sort of coffee Jarod might have found for himself? I was on an errand of mercy.

The alley came out between the Skarsgards’ house and another around the block from mine. There was no answer to my tap at the back door, so I walked along the side of the house, where he dining room windows looked out onto the uninspiring vista of the neighbors’ high wooden fence. When the old houses had been built, they hadn’t put up fences. I glanced in the windows, wondering if Jarod was even at home. I saw him and was about to wave cheerily, but his back was to me, so I raised my hand to tap at the window and then stopped.

He was sitting at the kitchen table with a silver case open before him, one of those really expensive briefcases, but it wasn’t like any briefcase I had ever seen. It had what seemed to be a television screen in it, and he was watching something in black and white. A home video? It showed a little boy, about ten or twelve years old, staring at a picture projected on a wall, while a man stood near him. Something about the man was familiar, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen him before. The recording looked twenty or thirty years old. The picture on the wall, however, was very familiar. Jarod had been staring at a print of it in my house the night before, the sad-looking dragon that had caught my fancy when I bought the prints. I could faintly hear sound, and instinctively I edged toward the window.

“…is very valuable to our clients, so please concentrate!” the man was saying. He had an insistent voice with an intriguing accent.

The little boy stared at the painting. “I don’t think it’s about money, Sydney.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. It’s just—everything about the way this theft was carried out tells me it didn’t have anything to do with money. This painting—I think it has sentimental value to the thief. He doesn’t want it in the hands of the people who own it. The police should look at people who know the owners—a former owner, maybe.”

Sydney’s voice became warm. “I’ll pass your recommendations along, Jarod.”

I started. Jarod? The little boy was Jarod? My movement gave me a better view of the screen, and I saw in white capital letters the words JAROD FOR CENTRE USE ONLY. Centre? What did that mean?

Jarod moved, and I ducked down guiltily under the sill, but he was only reaching for his mobile phone.

“Sydney, you’re a psychiatrist. Tell me what you think about the effect on a child of having a parent in prison.” He listened in silence for a few moments. “And what about the effect on a child living in a prison?” His voice took on a sardonic note. “Oh, just doing some research for a project. I thought a professional opinion might be worth more than a personal experience. What happens to a child whose whole life is a sacrifice for others? No personal goals, no future; just living day in and day out for someone else’s good?”

Was he talking about Little Dorrit, I wondered—or me—or himself? I walked away from the window and out to the street, leaned against a tree hugging my coffee press close to myself. The little boy had been Jarod, and he had been solving a crime. He was recorded solving a crime. I tried to put together all the disparate things I had learned about Jarod yesterday.

He had had a childhood like Arthur Clennam’s, harsh and without affection. He had been so isolated from American society that he never celebrated Christmas, had never had cotton candy, and didn’t know what half-and-half was. He was raised by a European—the man with the accent? He was obviously brilliant, solving art thefts at about age ten, for something called Centre (why the British spelling? Was he British? He didn’t have the accent), for clients. I was starting to get a bad feeling about it all. Too many things caused pain to leap up into his eyes—too many chance comments about childhood or family. Something really terrible had happened to him in his childhood, some secret that still colored everything he did. Living in a prison. Arthur Clennam had lived in a kind of prison, but he had escaped, been rescued from it by his father and raised abroad, where his good nature was allowed its freedom. What prison have you escaped from, Jarod? I wondered.

“What secret hath held you here, that you followed not to Professor Skarsgard’s?”

I jumped wildly and almost lost my coffee press. Jarod caught it just as I did.

“Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

“No—I was just—I was just—thinking. It’s not every day you get scared out of your wits with a quote from Shakespeare.”

“Yes, I’ve noticed. You come bearing gifts?”

“Coffee.”

“You’re a lifesaver. The Skarsgards don’t seem to be coffee drinkers. No coffee pot to be seen.”

“And they’re even Swedish. For shame. You look like you could use some coffee.”

“I could. Long night.”

“I can see that. Did you sleep at all?”

He looked slightly abashed—only slightly. “I’m good at going without sleep.”

I’ll bet you are, I thought and then wondered why I’d thought that.

As we went inside, he said, “You seemed upset back there, and I’m guessing it wasn’t about the coffee.”

I ducked into the kitchen to hide my guiltily red face. “I was thinking about prison. I should think I’d be upset.”

“Yes. So was I, as a matter of fact.”

“You know, the first time I went to see my father in jail—just last weekend—it seems a thousand years ago—he said, ‘Well, now I really am in the Marshalsea, Little Dorrit.’ Except it’s more like Newgate—”

I sloshed water in the Skarsgards’ teakettle and set it down rather harder than necessary on their flat-topped stove, fumbled with the knobs for a moment, unable to see which one I needed. A long olive hand came down over mine and turned the right knob, and then Jarod gathered me up against his chest and cradled my head while I sobbed into his shirt. A week ago it had been Jan Bezic and Emma Christoferson, the head of the English and Literature Department, who held me when I fled to someone to cry on, but those dear ladies I had known for years didn’t give me as much comfort as this man I had known for barely a full day. The difference was that they loved me but he seemed like he could be me, inside my head as no one else could. The water was boiling by the time I was able to stop.

“I’m sorry,” I said and poured the water into the press.

“No. It’s okay to cry. Don’t be ashamed of a healthy release of emotion.”

“What are you now, a psychologist?”

“I can be, if I need to be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I like learning things, that’s all.”

He was leaning against the counter watching me find cups, sugar, and the half-and-half I’d brought (French-pressed coffee does need lightened a little, I do admit), and I realized that something about his stance was jogging my memory. He had one arm around his waist, his other elbow supported on his wrist, his hand holding his chin thoughtfully. I had seen him stand like this before, but that wasn’t why my memory was being jogged. I had just seen someone else standing exactly like that. Who?

I didn’t realize I was standing still, holding the half-and-half in my hand, until he said, “Amy?”

I jumped. Sydney! That man in his little home movie had been standing just like that and had seemed familiar to me precisely because of it. He must have been the European who had raised him, to give him the same mannerisms.

“Sorry. I was just…thinking. Psychology and childhood influences. Coffee?”

“Of course.” His eyes said he didn’t quite believe me.

We took it into the dining room. The silver briefcase was gone, but there was a laptop computer on the table and papers spread out all over. Not my father’s notes. I glanced at them and then stared at Jarod with my mouth open.

“You did get the police files! How on earth did you manage that?”

“I broke in last night with my housebreaking skills from my previous life.”

“Haha. Funny. Is it legal for me to see these?”

“Probably not.”

“Right.” I poured a cup of coffee and picked up a stack of papers. “You’ll probably have to tell me what most of this means.”

Jarod chuckled and helped himself to coffee, and for a couple of hours we went over the files. It all made my head swirl. Clearly I was better at figuring out people than at figuring out clues. Jarod seemed to know what it all meant, though he agreed that it could be difficult to figure out what was evidence and what extraneous information. What I could see was that there was more evidence against my father than I had thought, enough that they were justified in holding him without bail. I put my head down on the table.

“Are you sure you don’t want to withdraw your statement of his innocence?”

“Yes, I’m sure.”

I looked up at him. “Why do you believe he’s innocent? You’ve never even met him.”

“Ah, but I have.” He tapped his head. “In here. And through you. I can see him through your eyes.”

“Well,” I said after a moment, “I’ll leave the physical evidence to you and concentrate on what I know: my father and the people at school. I suppose it really must have been someone there, a teacher or a student, but I can’t believe it of any of them.”

Jarod picked up one of the files, the autopsy report. I hadn’t had the heart to look at it. “Someone gave Tim Morone a combination of two drugs, Cyclamenaline and Paranethol. Combined they proved very painful and very lethal. Someone wanted him to suffer before he died. Someone vindictive.”

I shuddered. “Someone I know. And someone who knows something about chemistry, don’t you think?”

“Yes, I do. Who might that be?”

“Well, anyone in the chemistry department, of course. But not my father. He doesn’t know anything about chemistry.”

“But he does.”

“What?”

“Don’t you know?” He picked up another file. “He had two minors in his undergraduate degree. Only one is on his diploma, the minor in English history. His other minor was chemistry. According to the statement he gave the police, he had dated a chemistry major for two years and wanted to impress her; after they broke up, he was interested enough to finish the minor.”

I stared at him with my mouth open. “But I never knew! He never told me!”

“It probably faded into the background of his life as he pursued literature and history. But someone knew. My guess is someone administrative. Possibly a close friend, but I’d say that if he never thought to mention it to you, he probably wouldn’t have thought to mention it to a friend. But an administrator—”

“—would have access to his educational history readily available.”

“Exactly. Over the next few weeks I will get to know them and the teachers he worked with. I would be interested to hear your opinions of them when I do.”

I nodded. “At least we know it wasn’t Professor Skarsgard, unless he snuck back from Europe. It’s kind of strange being in his house without him here.” I got up and wandered into the living room. There was the silver briefcase, along with piles and piles of books, my father’s among others. English literature, Russian literature—the Russian ones were actually in Russian.

“You know Russian?”

He gave me a strange look. “How else is one supposed to study Russian literature?”

“In translation? Like the rest of the world.”

“It’s hardly the same.”

“Yes, but how many people outside Russia know Russian?” I picked up one of the books and leafed through it but couldn’t make head or tail of the Cyrillic alphabet. “You know, it shouldn’t really surprise me that Dad knew chemistry. He’s good at complicated things that involve numbers. You wouldn’t expect it of a literature professor—”

“Like you wouldn’t expect an engineer to know anything about business?” he put in dryly.

“Yes,” I grinned, “exactly like Arthur Clennam’s friend Daniel Doyce. There’s a good deal of Daniel in my father. And we even have a Mr. Meagles, a terribly nice man in the math department who refused to believe that Dad could find his way without help as the head of the Financial Oversight Committee—”

“Your father was on the Financial Oversight Committee?”

“Yes, as chairman, last year, and Mr. Meagles—that is, Professor Ted Fournier—was secretary and was firmly convinced he was running the whole show. It might have been frustrating, if Dad didn’t like Mr. Meagles so much. Anyway, like Doyce, Dad ‘is the most exasperating man in the world—’”

“’—he never complains!’” Jarod finished the quote with a laugh. He must have had an amazing memory, if he could remember that after reading Little Dorrit only twice. “So your father is good with numbers, and he chaired an oversight committee. Sort of an internal auditing body?”

“Exactly.”

“Did they ever find anything wrong with the books?”

“Well, he never told me much about it. Finance is not my thing. But let me think. He was worried once—he said they couldn’t get something to line up properly. But later it straightened itself out. Do you think it might have something to do with it?”

“I don’t know. We need to know what he had found out about whom.”

“I’m going to see him tomorrow. I’ll ask. Anything else?” I met his eyes. “I’ll be alright, Jarod. The drive will do me good. It’s only an hour to the county lockup. He made me promise not to visit more than twice a week—he’s afraid I’ll turn into Little Dorrit for real. I only wish I could be so selfless.”

“I think you do a pretty good job,” he said softly.

I wanted to blush and cry at the same time. I did my best to do neither. “Speaking of which, I think I’m going to go to church tomorrow, before I visit Dad. You want to go?”

He gave a shrug and a nod. “Sure. I like churches. What kind do you go to?”

“Actually, I usually don’t. But I figure I can use all the moral support I can get.”

“It’s true. I’ve discovered that some churches are very good at moral support. Those are the kind I like. Others aren’t so much.”

“Yeah. Maybe instead of being grouped by name, like Catholic or Baptist, they should be grouped by whether they like outsiders or not.”

“I suppose every small community struggles with its attitude toward outsiders. So then, what do you think about the God question?”

“The God question?”

“Whether he exists.”

“Oh, that question. I suppose I assume he does. Does he pay much attention to us? I have no idea. What about you?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I think so. Other times I don’t.” The painful look was back on his face. “I can’t decide if I want him to or not. If he does, why…?”

“Why did he let you have a childhood like Arthur Clennam’s?”

“Yes… But if he doesn’t, how alone we are. How horribly alone.”

“Do you suppose you’d take a God who lets things happen to people over no God at all?”

“I don’t know. I don’t suppose we really get a choice, do we? But if he does exist, is he the sort of God who forgives us for the things we can’t forgive ourselves for?”

I didn’t answer. He didn’t want me to, and I didn’t know the answer anyway. I hoped suddenly it was true, though, because of the look in his eyes. He needed it to be true. But I wondered, What can you possibly have done that you can’t forgive yourself for? You’re the kindest person I know.

We went our separate ways in the early evening. Jarod had been invited to Emma Christoferson and her family’s house for dinner. He warned me he was going to get them to talk all he could about my father’s predicament, displaying a natural curiosity about his predecessor.

“Don’t pretend to believe he’s guilty,” I said. “By now the whole school knows that I’m helping you with his teaching notes, and they know I would never do that if you thought my father was guilty.”

“I will be completely agnostic,” he promised with a quirk in the corners of his mouth.

“And prepare for a motherly lecture from Emma about how you’d better not take emotional advantage of me or she’ll tear you limb from limb.”

Jarod laughed. “Motherly?”

“They all think they’re my mother. Consider all the female faculty and staff as the turnkeys of the Marshalsea. Emma has Norwegian Viking ancestry, and she is capable of tearing you limb from limb, no matter how elegant she looks. She’s one of the few people in this town who know Little Dorrit and that that’s what Dad calls me. Given your auspicious last name, I presume she will jump to the conclusion that I’m going to pull a Little Dorrit and fall madly in love with someone old enough to be my father.”

“Am I really that old?” He actually looked astonished. “Well, I will pull an Arthur Clennam and be perfectly gentlemanly and perfectly oblivious. I will call you ‘my child’ and pat your hair.”

“Oh, just you try it. And if Emma Christoferson was the one who framed my father, I will eat your Russian books.”

He grinned but quickly sobered. “Be careful. It is easy to see only what you want to see in another person. The bad guy doesn’t usually look bad. Trust your instincts, but don’t let them override your brain.”

I sighed and nodded, and we went our separate ways. Before I went to bed that night, I took the picture of the sad dragon off the wall and replaced it with one I’d hung in my room. My father hadn’t much liked it anyway.

            In the morning we walked to the church I had chosen, a Methodist church. It had the double advantage of being close to my house and of not having any members who worked at the college. Just maybe no one would recognize me, though the wish was a stretch, given how many newspapers my picture had been in. “Daughter Insists Father Is Innocent” and so on. I had also purposefully made us just a tiny bit late, so that when we arrived everyone was just taking their seats, and there was no one to notice our entrance but the smiling man at the door who shook our hands heartily and gave us programs—bulletins, as they call them in church.

            I had never been to a Methodist church before. I’d been to a Catholic mass, and while visiting a cousin I’d gone to an exuberant Pentecostal church service. This was somewhere in between them, more restrained than the latter but not so sober as the former. There was a good deal of standing up and sitting down again, songs from the hymn book interspersed with readings from another book. It all seemed to be on a theme, the goodness of God, which was interesting, given our conversation of the day before.

            I wondered if the minister was going to preach on the same subject, but I never got to find out. Just before the last song, and after the offering (for which I awkwardly fished out a couple dollars and then watched with wide eyes as Jarod dropped a hundred-dollar bill in the plate, as unconcernedly as if it were a fiver), the minister, a short man in a grey suit and restrained purple tie, stood up and asked for prayer requests. Jarod listened with a broad grin as people all across the little church started calling things out to him—“My niece is in the hospital.” “Sister Norma’s home with bronchitis again.” “Let’s pray for our brothers and sisters in Yugoslavia.” The minister noted them down on a piece of paper and read out a few more, and then he concluded with, “And don’t let’s forget the awful situation happening on campus, for the family of the poor boy who was killed, for the man in jail, and for his daughter at home worrying about him.” Everyone nodded and murmured agreement, and no one turned to stare at me.

            Then everyone closed their eyes, and the pastor began to pray, and I got up, stepped over Jarod’s long legs, and ran out of the church. People must have stared after me then. Jarod and his long legs easily caught up with me. I stopped in the park a block away from the church and leaned against a tree, trying to control my sobbing.

            “I am—so tired—of crying over this,” I hiccupped.

            Jarod put his arm lightly about my shoulders (some part of me was grateful he was not tenderly embracing me in a public park).

            “You have to cry. It’s healthy. Think of it as a pressure valve.”

            “I never—I never expected those people to pray for us. Why did they do that? Why were you grinning like that when they were doing all those prayer requests?”

            “The wonder of humanity. These people care for each other. They care for the family of Tim Morone and for you. I love to see that. I will never tire of seeing it.”

            “’What a piece of work is man,’” I murmured.

            “’How noble in reason!’” Jarod continued the quote. “’How infinite in faculty! In form and moving how express and admirable! In action how like an angel! In apprehension how like a god! The beauty of the world! The paragon of animals!’ Shakespeare was another man who knew humanity. Do you think Hamlet was being sarcastic when he said all that about humans?”

            “I don’t think so,” I answered, wiping my face on my sleeve, thankful for something else to think about. “You can certainly play it sarcastic, but his point is too good. Humans are incredible creatures who do have a great capacity for good. It’s amazing, really.”

            “I know. Do you want to go back to church?”

            “Not really.”

            “Then I’ll treat you to some coffee at Zara’s. Ah, there’s your smile again. Coffee. Coffee.”

            “What are you doing?” I giggled.

            “Trying to see if I can make you smile every time coffee is mentioned.”

            I shoved him off the curb. He charged back, and I shrieked as he tackled me. “Coffee,” he murmured in my ear and didn’t stop until I was gasping helplessly for breath, laughing as hard as I’d just been crying. I’d always wondered what it was like to have a tormenting older brother.

            “Now you really owe me coffee,” I gasped.

            We walked to Zara’s, and along the way I said, “Jarod, have I really only known you for three days? I think in another life we must have been siblings.”

            His eyes went all bright, as if pain warred with joy. “I though you said I was old enough to be your father.”

            “Well, not quite, but almost. I’ll settle for exceedingly older brother.”

            Half of him seemed to want to laugh, another half to want to cry. I ventured, “Did you have any siblings?” though I doubted it.

            The joy went away, and it was all pain. “I had—a younger brother. Kyle. He—died—a couple months ago. And I have a sister—Emily—whom I’ve never met.”

            How can you never have met your sister? Maybe she had been given up for adoption. But—no—Jarod had been raised by a European whom he called Sydney rather than Dad—maybe he was the one who was adopted. I didn’t know why, but I was prepared to swear he had not been raised with other children. “No wonder,” I said softly.

            “No wonder what?”

            “No wonder the mention of family causes you such pain.”

            I had never met a man who allowed his emotions to be so raw in his eyes. It made me think of the little Oliver Twist and his responses to mentions of his mother, or young Esther Summerson. Dickens is replete with family-less characters, who always find their families, or a surrogate family. I touched his arm.

            “Come on, Jarod. Coffee is in order for both of us.”

            Zara’s is the best coffee shop in Morrison. The owner named it after his cat, who, I am given to understand, is a discerning coffee critic. It’s in an old, refurbished brick building in the historic downtown area, where huge, old trees line the streets and you can hear the bells from the Catholic church, St. Catherine’s, in the distance. Small tables are always set up on the sidewalk outside, which was where I had been sitting when I first met Jarod. Inside was an eclectic combination of old brick walls and hammered copper ceiling with authentic American coffeehouse ambiance (at that point still in the process of developing its authenticity, of course). I marched up to the high counter. If the tattooed young man at the espresso machine noticed the effects of crying on my face, he kindly didn’t mention it.

            “Good morning, Phil. Two espresso shot blasts, please.”

            “That sort of day, is it? Three shots or four?”

            “Three. I think the professor here is unacquainted with the ritual.”

            “New guy?”

            “Yes. Jarod Clennam, this is Phil Dockery, the best barista in town.”

            “I am pleased to meet you,” Jarod said in his deep voice. “I must say I am quite intrigued by your tattoos.”

            “Good intrigued or bad intrigued?” Phil said, taking his money with a hand that had a snake coiled around its wrist.

            “Good. I find it very interesting that people choose to use their bodies as living works of art.”

            “People have been doing it as long as there has been art. In some cultures it’s mandatory.”

            “Don’t get him started,” I smiled. “He’ll give you a whole lecture on the history of tattooing.”

            “I would be interested to hear it sometime,” Jarod said.

            Phil grinned at him and began making espresso. Jarod leaned on the counter and watched him.

            “I understand espresso is created by pressure, correct? What kind of pressure?”

            “Steam and hot water,” Phil answered. “It gets forced through the grounds and comes out as liquid espresso.”

            “Such extreme pressure combined with the large proportion of coffee grounds to water must result in a very strong cup of coffee.”

            Phil stared at him. “Dude—it’s espresso.”

            I put my hand to my forehead. “Jarod, please don’t tell me you’ve never had espresso.”

            “Very well. I won’t.”

            “Jarod, have you ever had espresso?”

            “No.”

            “Dude, where have you been living?” Phil demanded.

            “In a hole in the ground!” Jarod retorted.

            “And you ordered him the espresso shot blast, Amy? Do you want to try something less…explosive?”

            “I like explosions.”

            “Alright, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

            He came around the counter with his tray and followed us to a small table, where he set three shot glasses of espresso in front of each of us, each topped with its perfect layer of crema. “This I have to watch.”

            “The ritual is to down each shot of espresso in quick succession without stopping,” I said. “Some people can do it easily; others gag halfway through their first shot.”

            “So it’s a drinking game.”

            “Basically. If you can do it, you get your next coffee free.”

            Jarod picked up one of the shot glasses and examined the lovely colors of espresso and crema inside. He set it back down. “Alright. I’m ready.”

            “Go!” Phil said.

            As the espresso first hit his tongue, Jarod’s eyes popped open, but he didn’t stop, tossing back the shots as quickly as I did. At the end he made the shuddering, gasping sounds of most newcomers to straight, American-style espresso. I shuddered a couple times myself. I don’t usually drink it straight. Phil plunked glasses of water down in front of us, and we both drank.

            “Bravo! I’m impressed, Professor.”

            Jarod grinned at Phil, still blinking a little. “Good stuff.”

            “Well, you win. Your next drink is on the house.”

            “Bring it on.”

            “What, now?” I exclaimed. “You’ll be so wired you’ll—wait, that might be fun. Phil, go with a latte this time. Single shot, and make it sweet. A mocha.”

            Phil shook his head. “You got it. What about you?”

            “I’ll take one of your lovely cappuccinos—but, Phil, make it decaf.”

            “His, too?”

            “No. I want to see him wired.”

            As Phil took the shot glasses away, Jarod leaned over the table. “’Wired’?”

            I grinned. “Just you wait.”

            Phil brought back the mocha and cappuccino. I stirred a little sugar into mine while Jarod, remembering the espressos, took an experimental sip of his.

            “Oh! This is good! Very good! Chocolate?”

            “Basically a latte with chocolate.”

            “And a latte is…espresso with milk. From the Italian for milk.”

            “So it is. Do you speak Italian, too?”

            “Yes.”

            “Jarod, is there anything you don’t do?”

            “Not yet,” he grinned. “Maybe I’ll find something someday I could do, and I’ll realize, No, I don’t want to do that today. But I haven’t found it yet. There’s this whole wonderful world full of things to do and be and experience, and I want to do and be and experience them all.”

            “That would take scores of lifetimes.”

            “With each lifetime a few weeks or months long, I have scores of lifetimes to spare. That’s all I need, really.”

            “That’s not very conducive to holding down a job.”

            “Which is why I take short-term jobs, like this. I’ve never been one to stay with any one thing for very long. I learn all about it and…move on.”

            I wondered if it was the caffeine making him so inclined to self-disclose. His emotions might ride on the surface of his face, but he had been very reluctant to give up many facts.

            “Doesn’t that get lonely?”

            He stared down into his cup, stirring it as I had been stirring mine when he first walked up to disturb my solitude with Little Dorrit.

            “Yes. I didn’t realize how much until…recently. Several events recently. But it is…necessary. There is purpose to it.”

            “What purpose?”

            “Finding them.”

            “Them? Your sister? Your—family?”

            “My sister, my mother, my father—”

            What makes you think they want you? I wondered. If they gave you up for adoption, why do you even want to find them? Was it only the idea of being given up by a family he didn’t know that rippled such pain through his eyes? If he had been adopted by a loving family, much of that pain would have been assuaged. But he clearly hadn’t been. Do they let corporations or organizations adopt children? Maybe Centre was only a school or an orphanage where they honed the talents of brilliant children like Jarod. And exploited them—for clients. For money. And there was Nicholas Nickleby in my head again, with its horrible, abusive school for boys.

            “Jarod,” I said involuntarily, “are you Smike?”

            His hand jerked, and it was only then that I realized I had been holding it, as naturally as I might have held the hand of one of my daycare children.

            “Yes,” he answered as involuntarily as I had asked. He was gripping my hand tight, until it hurt.

            Smike. The child hidden away from the world, denied his parentage, shuffled off to an abusive school, crippled physically and emotionally by cruelty and deprivation, clinging to the one person who showed him kindness.

            “But you’re Nicholas Nickleby, too, aren’t you? Swooping in to save the day. Never content to sit by and watch injustice happen. You’ve got to thrash the wicked schoolmasters and the Sir Mulberry Hawks of this world, haven’t you?”

            His grip relaxed. His pale face took color again. He laughed softly. “Yes.” He leaned forward and said intently, “And believe me, Little Dorrit, when I discover your Sir Mulberry Hawk, I will give him a thrashing he will never forget.”

            “You’re mixing your books,” I said feebly.

            “It’s all Dickens.” He raised his hand and looked at it, shaking faintly. “I believe I understand ‘wired’ now. My heart rate has accelerated, I can feel all my blood racing through my veins, and my hands are shaking. I have felt this before, the first time I ever had coffee. It is…stimulating.”

            “Caffeine is a stimulant.”

            “I feel very energized. Do you want to take a walk?” He swallowed the rest of his mocha.

            “I have a feeling that if I took a walk with you right now I’d be running the whole time to keep up with you. Anyway, it’s time for me to go see my father. Don’t you have studying to do?”

            “John Donne, yes. I’ll have all his works memorized by the time you get back.”

            “I actually believe you.” I got up. “See you later, Nicholas.”

            Jarod stopped me with a hand on my wrist. “You see too much, Little Dorrit. Be careful. Some things you don’t want to see.”

            “Yes, I do.”

            “Are you sure? Your father saw something, and he’s in jail for it.”

            “The truth will set you free.” I’d heard that in church once.

            He smiled, an unexpected burst of joy in his eyes. “Yes, it will. But—” His fingers tightened. “There are people who will do anything—anything—to keep the truth from being known. Ralph Nicklebys and Mrs Clennams and Jeremiah Flintwinches, who don’t care what innocent people they hurt along the way.”

            “And there are Nicholas Nicklebys and Mr. Brownlows and even Lord Verisophts who are willing to oppose them. See you later, Nicholas,” I repeated. I left, wondering, again, just how much he had been talking about my situation and how much his own.

            I returned to Morrison in the early evening, rather depressed. It was unpleasantly surreal to see my father in prison clothes. They made him look like a different person.

            There was a piece of paper taped to my door. It said, “Come over for dinner. Jarod.” I wondered, with a wince, just what he might be having, but I went. Even macaroni and cheese sounded good at the moment.

            A very familiar smell met me when I went into the Skarsgards’ house. I set my bag on the table and went into the kitchen, where Jarod was flipping vegetables again.

            “Stir-fry again? You have a one-track mind. But you do learn quickly.”

            “I like stir-fry, and when I find something I like, I can eat it for every meal. I did find green tea, though, with Phil Dockery’s help. It is very green. Tastes like grass. It’s very good.”

            “Grass or green tea?”

            “Both. Though I do prefer lying in grass to eating it.”

            “Remind me to find you a few more recipes.”

            “For grass?”

            “Yes, of course. You do know how to follow a recipe, don’t you?”

            He laughed, as if at a secret joke. “Yes, I do. I made fruitcake last Christmas. Fruitcake is delicious. A word of warning, though: don’t clean fugu on the same surface you’re using to make your fruitcake.”

            “Puffer fish? Don’t you have to be specially licensed for that?”

            He shrugged. “A Japanese friend taught me how to do it. With her knife skills, I’m sure she became an excellent coroner.”

            I winced. “This is one thing I think I don’t want to know more about, especially not when we’re about to eat.”

            As we ate, Jarod asked, “Did you ask your father about what he found out a month ago?”

            I sighed. “Yes, I did. And he wouldn’t tell me! He said it was nothing—not important. I know he was lying. He was frightened.”

            “He was frightened for you. What he knows got a student killed and him in jail. He doesn’t want anything to happen to you.”

            “I’m not a child anymore.”

            “You’re his daughter. He’ll still want to protect you when you’re fifty. We’ll just have to go at it a different way.”

            “How?”

            He quirked an eyebrow at me. “Leave it to me.”

            “Fine. What did you think of the Christofersons last night?”

            “Wonderful people. Did you know Emma’s real name is Ingeborg?

            “Yes. It’s a Norwegian-American tradition, to name girls Ingeborg and call them Emma.”

            “I think I’d like to learn Norwegian. Well, I’m inclined to agree with you about her, and not just because they’re wonderful people. I can see Emma Christoferson killing someone out of desperation or anger but not cold-bloodedly torturing them.”

            “How can you tell? You just met her.”

            “I am very good at figuring out what people do and why.”

            I remembered the recording he had watched of himself. That sweet-faced, little-boy Jarod had looked at a painting and known why someone would steal it. “Yes, I suppose you are.” I quirked my own eyebrow at him when he gave me a quick glance. “I brought dessert.” I picked up the plastic bag I’d brought.

            “My favorite part of the meal,” he grinned. “I take it it’s not ice cream.”

            “No. I found this at a gas station. Not the sort of place I normally pick up dessert, and it’s not fresh, but it’ll do for a first experience.”

            I pulled my find out of the bag: a cloud of pink and a cloud of blue neatly sealed in a plastic bag by some unromantic company in Illinois or somewhere.

            “What is it?”

            “Cotton candy, of course.”

            “Oh!” His face lit up. “Wonderful!”

            “Just bear in mind this is no substitute for getting it fresh from a person who isn’t a factory.”

            I opened the bag and gave him half of the pink cloud. He tried first to bite it, and his face went bewildered and amused as it scrunched under his teeth and disappeared into nothingness. I pulled mine part with my fingers and watched his eyes laugh and his fingers get sticky. He was such a child. Man-child, flitted through my mind. I gave him half of the blue.

            “It’ll turn your tongue blue.”

            “Oh, good. Magic, you said. This is magic.”

            “I knew you’d like it. I brought you another bag.” I gave it to him. “Don’t make yourself sick.”

            “I’ll save it for lunch.”

            “Make sure you eat some real food first. Listen to me! I sound like your mother.” I watched the light fade from his face and wanted to kick myself. Instead I reached over and snagged a pinch of his blue cotton candy with a grin.

            “Hey!” He stole some of mine, rather more than I had taken of his.

            “Hey!”

            “You did it first.”

            “You took more!”

            He was laughing again, I congratulated myself. I licked my sticky fingers. “Time to go home and leave you with the mess.”

            “Don’t worry. I like washing dishes. Cleaning up messes is a hobby of mine.”

            “I believe you. Good night, Jarod.”

            I went out the back door. I got as far as my house and had to turn around and come back because I’d left my purse with my keys in Jarod’s dining room. Coming in the back door again, I was halfway through the living room when I heard, amid the sounds of dishwashing, Jarod’s voice.

            “Hello, Miss Parker.”

            Miss Parker? That’s not a Dickens character. Then I realized he must be on the phone. His voice was different. Darker, more sardonic.

            “Have you ever had cotton candy, Miss Parker? I understand it’s part of the normal American childhood. Not that either of us would know anything about that, would we?” He stopped and listened. “Did you really? Did you like it? Yeah. Magic. Do you remember the Cracker Jacks? You gave them to Angelo and me. My first taste of something sweet. And my last for twenty years. Where did you first have cotton candy, Miss Parker? A circus? Really? I should try out a circus sometime. Are they anything like the Centre and all its trained monkeys and guard dogs? No, Miss Parker. This trained monkey doesn’t belong in the circus. And neither do you.”

            I suddenly realized I was listening to a private conversation, or half of it, at least. Was I destined to always be eavesdropping on Jarod’s peculiar conversations? Silently I grabbed my purse and ran home.

            Monday was Jarod’s first day of class. I wavered between wondering how a man who had spent a weekend cramming with someone else’s notes could possibly teach college classes and pondering all the strange things I had already seen him doing so well.

            The first class of the day had barely started when I snuck in and sat down in the back row. This one was the basic literature course everyone was required to take, and the small lecture hall was full. Normally the students all would have been slouched in their seats and looking bored, except those few in the literature program who actually liked literature, but today everyone was interested in the new professor who was taking Professor Doran’s place. Having a prof who murdered (allegedly) a student was definitely cool. I wondered how many parents had pulled their children out of the school in the last week.

            The new professor was sporting a considerably different look than he had all weekend. He had been fairly casual in dark turtlenecks and a very nice, long, black leather coat. Now he looked like he thought he was Tolkien, or some other Oxford don, in a dark brown suit that looked faintly British, a dark green waistcoat, and a matching tie. He also wore square-rimmed glasses, and his dark hair was very neatly spiked, almost, but not quite, like a crewcut. He looked splendid. Very professorial.

            He had four fat books in his hands, and he thunked them down on the table in front of him. “This semester, one of your projects will be to read one of these books and report on it. The books are Oliver Twist, Nicholas Nickleby, Bleak House, and Little Dorrit. They are all by Charles Dickens, one of the greatest writers in all of history. A great writer doesn’t just write a story. He says something. Shakespeare brought history to life for his audiences and made great contributions to the English language. Austen highlighted the cares and concerns of the women in her class and made them significant. And Dickens—Dickens was a muckraker. He was a tabloid writer. He was an indie filmmaker. Dickens was a man with a mission and a soapbox, and he made people listen by turning what could have been a harangue into a series of books with exciting, page-turning plots, side-splitting characters, and absolutely ridiculous situations. Dickens was funny, and he was romantic, and he was exciting, and he was passionate.

            “Now, I know what many of you are thinking. What does all this have to do with me? You live in this fast-paced modern world with your televisions and cars and fast food and your own, personal concerns, and these four books are relics from a hundred and fifty years ago, a world long dead. Right?”

            Some brave souls nodded with him. He smiled.

            “Wrong. Let me tell you something. These books are about you. Dickens wrote about your world. He didn’t write about televisions and cars and fast food, but he wrote about what’s inside you. He wrote about your hearts and about what people do to each other. How many of you have ever been involved in a lawsuit that dragged on forever?”

            A couple hands went up.

            “That’s in here.” He thumped Bleak House. “How many of you know someone in prison? All of you—your professor. That’s in here.” He thumped Little Dorrit. “How many of you have ever tried to make something right and just happen and been blocked on every side by bureaucracy? That’s in here.” Bleak House. “How many of you have felt victimized by someone in authority? That’s in here.” Nicholas Nickleby. “How many of you have seen an abusive man beat up a woman? That’s in here.” Oliver Twist. How many of you have been adopted and have longed to know who your real family is? That’s in here.” Bleak House. “And here.” Oliver Twist. “How many of you have seen injustice and been afraid to do anything about it? That’s in here.” Nicholas Nickleby.

            “You just might find your own lives and situations in these books. And if you don’t, you’ll find someone you know, or some situation or social structure you recognize. Dickens is all about what we call social justice. You’ll learn about that this semester. This semester this class isn’t going to be about learning the dry bones of the historical use of literature. It’s going to be about learning to see. You’re going to learn to read all over again, so that if you ever pick up an old classic again, you’ll find more than a good story. You’ll find what the author is trying to get you to see about yourself or your world. This is what education is about: widening your eyes to really see the world around you.

            “That will be your primary project this semester. You will analyze what your book is saying about your world. Look at it through the lens of your own experience and your career goals. Look at it historically and psychologically and through all the realms it deals with. Let it force you to look at your world.

            “Now, because I know you already bought all the books for this course, I have bought your books for you.” He leaned down under the table and lifted up onto it four heavy boxes. Somebody spontaneously applauded and others joined in. Jarod grinned. “Social justice. I haven’t taken roll yet. When I call your name, come down here, tell me your major, and I will give you your book.” He looked at his roll sheet. “Sonja Adams.”

            A girl got up and went down to him. “My major is Politics, Professor Clennam.”

            “Then it’s Little Dorrit for you. Midori Arakawa.”

            “I want to be a social worker, Professor, when I’m done with my philosophy degree.”

            “Then you get Oliver Twist. Though I strongly recommend Bleak House as well. Jason Aronson.”

            “Languages, Professor.”

            “Nicholas Nickleby for you. William Bates.”

            “It’s Bill, Professor, and I’m going to study law.”

            “Then why are you here?”

            The chubby boy shrugged. “It’s family tradition for the first year.”

            “Well, here’s Bleak House for you.”

            He continued through the whole roll, and the class period was nearly done by the time he was, so he dismissed them early. As everyone was getting up and leaving, he called quietly, “Amy Doran.”

            I got up and went down to his table.

            “And what’s your field of study, Miss Doran?”

            “I don’t know,” I said.

            He picked up one of his four books still on the table. “Try this one.”

            It was not, as I had thought, Little Dorrit.

            “I might have given you Sense and Sensibility, a book about a young woman quietly waiting for life to happen to her. But here’s Nicholas Nickleby. It’s about a young man who loses his father and his home and his stability and is shoved out into a harsh world, his head spinning, and eventually he has to decide what he’s going to do in it.”

            “Defend the weak and abused,” I said. “Rescue the Smikes, thrash the Mr. Squeers and Sir Mulberry Hawks, expose the Ralph Nicklebys. Is that it?”

            “That’s it.”

            “Tell me—do you think I’m going to lose my father?”

            “No. But I think you’ll both be different after this.”

            “I know.” I purposefully changed the subject. “Jarod, I take it all back. You’re a magnificent teacher! You had those students eating out of your hand!”

            “Eating out of my hand? What—like pets? That’s not very flattering.”

            “It’s generally considered a compliment. They might actually end up liking Dickens.”

            “I hope so. Now, help me with a small point. Do you think Nicholas Nickleby was wish-fulfillment for Dickens?”

            “Oh, that’s a new one.” I sat down on his table  and thought about it. “I’d call that an excellent hypothesis. You could write a paper on it. As a child Dickens was in such a school as they sent Nicholas to teach in. Like David says in David Copperfield, his most autobiographical book, ‘I had no advice, no counsel, no encouragement, no consolation, no assistance, no support of any kind, from anyone, that I can call to mind, as I hope to go to heaven.’ He and the other children must have longed for just such a person as Nicholas to come along. A father- or older-brother-figure, who sees their terrible situation and sets them all free. Doesn’t everyone want a hero to come along and rescue them? A knight-errant, a superhero…”

            “A father-figure,” Jarod murmured. His eyes were seeing something far away, something painfully bewildering.

            You never got your Nicholas Nickleby, did you? Was there someone who should have been—and wasn’t? You grew up in a circus as a trained monkey, and no one rescued you.

            “Stop.”

            “What? Stop what?”

            “Every once in a while you look at me as if you’re reading my mind.”

            “Oh. Sorry. Just…”

            “Thinking. About what?”

            “Circuses.” Something in his eyes went suspicious, and I went on hurriedly. “Cotton candy, you know. I was trying to think of somewhere where we could get some proper cotton candy, but there are no circuses or carnivals around here this time of year.”

            His suspicious eyes asked, How did you get from father-figure to circuses? He said, “Oh. Well, I have Donne to teach on in fifteen minutes. I’ll leave it to you to write the paper.”

            “Paper?”

            “On Nicholas Nickleby.”

            “Alright, then. I will.”

            “Are you going to come eavesdrop on my Donne class?”

            “Probably.”

            I did, and when it was over I was even more impressed than ever. It’s one thing to teach on Dickens to a basic English literature class, quite another to teach on John Donne to an advanced literature class. Dickens was all story, history, and society, Donne all metaphysics and philosophy. But he taught him beautifully, if not with as much passion as Dickens, at least with as much intelligence and wit, as if he had been doing it all his life. The man astonished me. Why was a man with such genius (I don’t use the word lightly) wandering his way through life and teaching English and Russian literature? He was a problem-solver—why didn’t he take his talents and passion to the police or the FBI or the military or medicine?

            “You’re staring at me like that again.”

            The lecture hall was empty, and I was still sitting in my seat in the back row.

            “Jarod, why are you here?”

            “What do you mean? I’m teaching John Donne.”

            “Why? You can do anything you want to, can’t you? Anything.”

            “I can be anything I want to be. I can learn anything I want to learn.”

            “Anything at all. Quantum physics, Finnish, John Donne, brain surgery—”

            “Yes.”

            “So why are you doing this?”

            With a sigh he lowered himself next to my chair, one knee on the floor. “Justice. You said it yourself. Your father is innocent. I want to make sure he gets justice.”

            “Is that what you do? You go around and find people who need justice, and you get it for them? And you become whatever you need to be to do so.”

            “I told you you see too much.”

            “What have you been? A safecracker—a policeman—a psychiatrist—a cook in a diner?”

            “All of the above. An oil tanker captain, a doctor, a toxic waste engineer—”

            “A coroner?”

            “Yes. I help people. It’s what I do. It’s what I live to do.”

            “Why?”

            “How can anyone live in this world and see all the injustice and not want to do something about it? I see someone hurt, and I have to help, in any way I can. Maybe, someday, I’ll be able to atone—”

            “For what?” I whispered.

            His eyes darkened. “Don’t ask, Little Dorrit. You can’t know the things I’ve done.”

            But I can, and I will. I put my hand on his arm. “Thank you.”

            “For what?”

            “For being who you are.” Whoever that is. “For being my and my father’s Arthur Clennam and Nicholas Nickleby.”

            “It is…my privilege.”

            I went home that afternoon, and Jarod did…whatever he did. He met people at the college and learned about them, somehow insinuating himself into Tim Morone’s group of friends and getting them to talk about him. He studied more English literature and more police files, searching for some real clue amid all the plethora of evidence against my father. All that to say I don’t have much of an idea what he really did. I drew up a few character studies of people at the Marshalsea, the people closely connected to my father through friendship, work, or both.

            I had a very unexpected visitor that afternoon, a short man with grey hair and a round face, dressed casually in slacks and a button-up shirt. The last time I had seen him, he’d been in grey suit and restrained purple tie. He smiled at me as he stood on my front porch. He had a warm smile, like he meant it.

            “Amy Doran? I’m Pastor Albert Wojciechowski, from—”

            “I know who you are. I had hoped you didn’t know who I was.”

            “I didn’t. Not until you left.”

            “Why did you— Bother. Why don’t you come in, Pastor W—er—”

            He laughed. “Don’t worry. No one can pronounce my last name. It’s Polish. Call me Pastor Bert.”

            “That’s not Polish,” I said with a smile as I led him into the living room.

            “No, good old English.”

            “I was just about to have some tea. Green. Would you like some?”

            “Why, yes, I would.”

            I collected the things from the kitchen and set them on the living room coffee table. He was looking at my Japanese prints.

            “I like your artwork, Ms Doran.”

            “Call me Amy. Do you like Japanese art?”

            “Yes, I do. It’s a bit of a hobby of mine.”

            “Oh! Then maybe you can answer a question I have— Never mind. You didn’t come here for an art history consultation.” I poured us each a cup of green tea.

            “Thank you. I’d be glad to answer any question I can. But you’re right. I didn’t. I try to visit all our visitors, when they’re in town. Usually they fill out a little card, and I don’t have to do detective work.” He smiled, lines around his eyes crinkling.

            “I’m sorry,” I said uncomfortably. “I hope I didn’t disrupt anything.”

            “Maybe I should be sorry. I obviously disrupted you, though it was completely unintentional.”

            “I know. But why—?”

            “Why were we praying for you? Well, we know this has to be a very difficult time for you, Amy. We’d like to be any help and support we can to you.”

            “Even if my father’s guilty?” I said bluntly.

            “Especially if he’s guilty. We’re not a social club for the pure and innocent. If we were, I wouldn’t be allowed in.” His eyes crinkled again. “We’re people who know we all need help and look to God to give it to us.”

            “I’ve got help.” I didn’t mean to say it as abruptly as I did. But then I wanted to smile. I’ve got my own guardian angel. I don’t suppose God had anything to do with that, did he?

            “I’m glad. I’d just like you to know that we’re available any time you need us. You can come into my office and talk any time, or if you’d be more comfortable with a woman, I know a couple who would love to know you. And we’ll keep praying for you and your father, if you don’t mind.”

            I smiled. “Would you stop if I did?”

            “Well, I’d stop announcing it in church, at least. Would you prefer that?”

            “Pastor Bert, my situation has been splashed all over the newspapers all over the country for the consumption of people who hope my father is guilty because it makes such a good story. If I can’t stop a bunch of nosy reporters, I certainly can’t stop people who actually want to do something nice for me, in their own way, and I don’t know that I want to. Just don’t start laying hands on me in public.”

            He laughed. “We won’t, I promise. Do you think your father would mind if I visited him?”

            I stared. “You’d do that?”

            “Oh, yes.”

            “I don’t think he’d mind. It’s really boring where he is. They let me bring him books, but awaiting trial for murder is hardly conducive to a cozy little read. The question is whether they’ll let you visit.”

            “They should. I’m clergy. Well, I’ve taken up too much of your time, Amy. You’re welcome to come back to our church next Sunday, you and your friend.”

            “Thank you,” I said automatically as we stood up.

            “Oh—what was the question you wanted to ask me? The art history question?”

            “Well—the picture is upstairs in my room—”

            “I’ll wait.”

            I ran upstairs and took the sad dragon down from where I had hung him on my wall. “This picture,” I said when I showed it to Pastor Bert.

            “Oh, I know that one. ‘Dragon and Waves.’ The original is a long screen. Mid-eighteenth century, I think.”

            “That’s what the back of the print says. I was just wondering if it was ever stolen. About twenty years ago.”

            His brow wrinkled. “Let me think. ‘Dragon and Waves.’ Stolen… Wait—wait. Yes, I think it was. Sometime in the early ‘70s. I remember now. It was a big mess. A family who felt they had moral rights to it because it had been in their family for a generation or two stole it from someone who had recently bought it legally.”

            “Did they ever get it back?”

            “Yes. It was recovered with the help of an expert in criminal behaviors or something like that. It’s the Los Angeles County Museum of Art now, I think.”

            An expert in criminal behaviors? My head spun. Or something like that. Definitely something like that. A little boy!

            “Amy, are you alright?”

            “Oh, yes. Thank you for telling me. I heard something about it in passing and was curious. I like this painting. I don’t know why.”

            “You’ve got to wonder what makes the dragon look so depressed.”

            “Yes, you really do. Thank you, Pastor Bert.”

            He crinkled at me. “Anytime.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

            “The pastor from the Methodist church visited me this afternoon,” I told Jarod later that evening. We were having a brief consultation after meals at other people’s houses. I hadn’t been able to say no to Jan Bezic again, and he’d been with Donald Douglas, head of the sciences department. “He was very nice. I’m trying to decide if I should go back next Sunday.

            “I think you should.”

            “Why?”

            “They’re good people. We all need good people around us. It’s too easy to find bad people. You have to hold on to the good ones when you find them.”

            “Have you been able to sort out the good from the bad at school?”

            “After one day?”

            I shrugged. “You’re good at reading people, aren’t you?”

            “Give me a few more days. Tell me what you think of Donald Douglas.”

            “Scottish. Acts more Scottish than he really is. Goes around in a kilt on Halloween and scares the little kids with his claymore and blue paint.”

            “Blue?”

            “According to tradition, it’s an old Pict tradition. Scottish history. They used to go into battle wearing nothing but blue paint. I don’t know if it’s true, but happily, Don wears a kilt.”

            “Does he go into battle?” Jarod chuckled.

            “He meets with the state Scottish Society and goes into battle with them. Thank goodness he doesn’t play bagpipes.”

            “Hey, bagpipes are wonderful!”

            “You must be Scottish. Anyway, Don is our Mr. Boythorn.”

            Jarod chuckled. “Is he? Does he have a canary?”

            “No, sadly. He’s a genuinely nice, if noisy, man who just enjoys scaring the kids on Halloween just a little too much.”

            “Hmm. Interesting.”

            “It’s a very long step from scaring kids on a day they expect to be scared to torturing a student.”

            “Yes, it is.”

            “What about Tim’s friends? Did they tell you anything about him?”

            “They mentioned he was flush with cash this semester, more so than his work-study job warranted. He boasted that he’d had a windfall but wouldn’t tell them its source. There’s something one of them isn’t telling me. Do you know Maggie Chen?”

            “Vaguely. She’s in Philosophy. Brilliant. Tim was in the brilliant-but-arrogant crowd.”

            “Well, now she’s brilliant-but-scared. Tim might have told her something, and now she’s scared.”

            “You think the money was from blackmail?”

            “It’s very likely. I think I’d like to see his bank account.”

            “Have fun trying to get the bank to give you access.”

            He grinned. I stared at him suspiciously. He had managed to get the police files.

            “Okay, Jarod, show me.”

            “Show you what?”

            “How you intend to get into Tim’s bank account.”

            He gave me a long look. “Do you care if it’s illegal?”

            I pressed my lips together and gave him a hard stare back.

            “Fine. Have a seat.”

            We sat at his kitchen table, and he connected his computer to the Internet. He did things I had never seen anyone do on a computer before, and in about fifteen minutes we were looking at a bank account with Tim’s name on it.

            “I would never have imagined that was possible,” I murmured. “You got into the bank’s records through the Internet?”

            “It’s called hacking.”

            “Virtual housebreaking. I don’t know anyone who can do something like that. How do you learn this?”

            “Illegally,” he said shortly. “Look at this. Three regular deposits of five hundred dollars each over the course of a month. That’s considerably more than he got from his work study, which is reflected in these two payments here. He was here for three weeks before school started?”

            “Yes, unfortunately. He was secretary to Don Douglas, and a good one, too, I understand. Don was putting together a video lecture series, and Tim was helping him. When he wasn’t being a complete pill, Tim really knew what he was doing. Why would he go and do something as stupid as blackmailing someone?”

            “He didn’t earn much through work study. Maybe he needed the money.”

            “Maybe. But I’m wondering if it wasn’t about his arrogance.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “He liked having the advantage over someone. In class he would try to fluster the teacher by bringing up theories no one had ever heard of—you know you sound somewhat stupid if your student knows something you don’t. If he had information that gave him power over someone, maybe extorting money only made it all the better.”

            Jarod was nodded. “Once again, I’m impressed. Your psychological analysis is excellent—as long as it’s accurate. Now, I wonder if the information Tim knew was the same information your father knows or something different.”

            “Two different pieces of dirty laundry on the same person? That’s careless. Tim finds out one thing, blackmails the person; my father finds out another thing, starts doing some quiet investigating. The person discovers my father doing the investigating, kills the blackmailer and frames the truth-seeker. But what does my father know and about whom?”

            On Tuesday, Jarod taught one English poetry class in the morning and then was mysteriously gone the rest of the day. On Wednesday morning I went to see my father and came back rather furious—somewhat unreasonably, but who is ever reasonable when they’re angry? I drove straight to school, knowing Jarod would be there after his Dickens and Donne classes. Lunch was over, so I went in the back door of Clauser Hall and up to his office, but no one was there, nor in my father’s. There was, however, an unusual amount of noise coming from the quad. I pulled aside the curtain from the window in my father’s office that overlooked the small quad and looked out.

            Students were milling around the opposite side of the quad. They seemed to be grouped around a central figure, a tall, dark-haired one who was doing something with a cylindrical structure. Was that—? He was not—

            I twitched the curtain closed, locked the office, and ran down the stairs. The smell of caramelized sugar met me outside. As I pushed my way through laughing, talking, sticky students, Jarod gave me a bright grin. Beside him Young John—I mean David Rothmayer—was pouring pink sugar into the hot, spinning silver drum. Jarod took a long paper cone and stuck it into the drum, twisting it, and as if by magic it collected a cloud of pink cotton candy. He handed it to me. How could you stay angry over fresh cotton candy?

            “You did not go and buy a cotton candy maker yesterday!”

            “You’re right. I rented it.” He handed a cone to a student. “Look at them! They’re transported back to their childhoods. Circuses.”

            “Fairs. You get cotton candy at fairs, too. That’s where I first had it. How did you know how to make it? I suppose that’s a stupid question.”

            “I had a demonstration from the man I rented it from.”

            Young John shouted at me, “I’ve never made cotton candy before!”

            “It’s always good to learn something new,” I shouted back. Someone had set up a boombox nearby, and it was suddenly difficult to hear anything. “I hope you like parties, Jarod! It looks like you’ve started one.”

            “There are worse things to start parties with than cotton candy!”

            “Oh, no.”

            “What?”

            “The Patriarch is coming. The school’s not making money off this, so it can’t be good for business.”

            The large, benevolent form of Mr. Leland was making its way through the crowd, smiling at the students eating their cotton candy. He stopped in front of Jarod.

            “Interesting thing you’ve got going here, Clennam.”

            “I certainly hope so!”

            “This is a fire hazard, you know.”

            “Actually, it’s not, sir. I’ve had it thoroughly researched.”

            “Ah, good for you. That’s a good job, Clennam. I’m afraid it’s illegal to distribute food here without a license.”

            “Actually, sir, as I’m not making money off it, it doesn’t violate any small-business laws, and the apparatus itself is perfectly legal to operate without a license.”

            “Well, good. That’s a relief. Wouldn’t what the FDA cracking down on us, would we?”

            “No, sir, we wouldn’t. Here you go.”

            He thrust a cone at him with a smile, and as Mr. Leland found himself the recipient of what he was protesting, he found it expedient to stop protesting. He took a bite instead and smiled.

            “I haven’t had this stuff in years.”

            “Takes you back to a more innocent time, doesn’t it?” Jarod smiled.

            The bell rang before Mr. Leland could answer. Students scattered, a few reaching out for the last cones Jarod was handing out.

            “Next time you really should get permission, Clennam,” Mr. Leland said before drifting away across the quad.

            “I’ll bear that in mind,” Jarod called after him.

            “Yeah, right you will,” I said quietly. “You’re not the sort of person to ask permission for anything you do, are you?”

            His eyes narrowed. “No, I’m not. Not anymore. Jan!” He gathered up the last of the cotton candy in the drum onto a cone and ran across the quad to Jan Bezic, late to her class as usual. I met him halfway as he came back toward the cooling cotton candy maker and stopped him, waving my cotton candy in his face.

            “I have a bone to pick with you, Jarod!”

            “A—what? That’s cotton candy on a cone, not a bone.”

            “Would you stop with the bewilderment over normal, everyday expressions for a minute? You went to see my father yesterday, didn’t you, Jarod Nicholas?”

            He folded his arms and looked down at me from his height.

            “You pretended like you were an investigator from the police department, and you called yourself Jarod Nicholas. My father described you completely, but I already knew it was you when he told me the name you gave him. What game are you playing here?”

            “Monopoly,” Jarod said. “I’m trying to win the ‘Get out of jail free’ card.”

            “How about the ‘Go straight to jail for impersonating a police officer, do not pass Go, do not collect $200’ card?”

            “I will not be going to jail. Believe me. I’m all about staying out of the place. Amy, listen to me. Your father is afraid for your safety if he tells you what he knows. The only person he was going to tell was someone who already knew enough that it wouldn’t hurt him to know more, and it had to be someone with authority to do something about it and not get hurt by it. He’s afraid of what he knows. He’s already seen it hurt too many people.”

            “Did he tell you?”

            “Yes. Did you tell him about me?”

            “No, I didn’t. I didn’t want him to worry about me. Now, tell me what he told you!”

            “Not now. Young John is getting curious about our extended conversation, and anyway, I need his help.”

            He and David, who, like the Young John of Little Dorrit, seemed to have lost his animosity and become magnanimous, packed away the cotton candy things and put them in his car. Then he explained what he needed help with, leaning against the blue Mustang, which Dave admired immensely.

            “Amy, the police checked out your basement and attic, didn’t they?”

            “Completely. They still haven’t found where Tim was killed. He was just dumped by the river, but he wasn’t killed there.”

            “And they decided it wasn’t at your house. It’s one of their still-open lines of investigation. They looked into basement areas of school and concluded he wasn’t killed here, either. Now they’re interrogating your father and examining all his financial records to see if he has a summer home, hunting cabin, warehouse, storage shed, or anywhere else he might have done it.”

            “Gosh!” Young John said. “Where do you think he did it?” He glanced at me quickly. “The real murderer, I mean.”

            Jarod answered, “I think he—we’ll say he for convenience—I think he did it on campus. I don’t believe he would have been foolish enough to do it in his own home, if he planned to frame Professor Doran. I looked around in all the basement areas and agreed with the police that they’re clean, so I need your expertise, Dave. Your father is the head of maintenance, right?”

            “Yeah, pretty much all my life.”

            “So you know the buildings well. As a child you probably played games and explored them all?”

            “Yeah, I did. Got in trouble sometimes for it, too.”

            “These are old buildings. Do you know of any hidden or forgotten-about rooms, anything boarded up that everyone would have forgotten about?”

            His eyes widened. “Yeah! I do! I forgot about that! It’s in the Bailey Building.”

            Jarod grabbed a flashlight out of his car. “Show me.”

            We followed Dave down into the basement of the Bailey Building, which housed the Sciences and Mathematics Departments. Dave was having way too much fun in his new role, peering around corners and waving us after him as he sprinted down corridors. Jarod and I shared a grin.

            A lot of stuff was stored in the basement of the Bailey Building, little-used science equipment, locked chemical storage cabinets, neatly labeled boxes. Dave led us to the far wall of one ill-lighted room. Boxes were stacked up against it.

            “They have all these boxes here now, but it used to be a lot of old equipment. I was hiding down here once so I didn’t have to do my chores, and I knocked something over, and it went through some old boards in the wall. Scared me out of my wits, but it was a neat hiding place. We can move these old boxes—”

            “Wait,” Jarod said. He played his flashlight around. “The dust has been disturbed. These boxes have been moved recently. Would he have been so foolish as to leave fingerprints? Probably not, but don’t touch anything, just in case. Dave, where do they keep latex gloves around here?”

            “I’ll get some! Just don’t go in there while I’m gone.”

            Jarod grinned at me. “He’s enjoying this.”

            “He’s a good kid.”

            Dave came back with a box. Jarod handed out gloves; Dave took joy in pulling his on with his best imitation of a police investigator on TV. We moved the boxes carefully along the same paths they had been moved before, and Dave and I followed gingerly in Jarod’s footsteps as he ducked into the darkness behind them, barely more than a cramped little hole.

            “Stand there,” he said. “Don’t move, and don’t touch anything.” He shone the flashlight around. “This was nothing more than a closet under some stairs, but they remodeled the building thirty or forty years ago.” His light fell on something. A chair against the wall. He examined the floor for footprints in the dust and found something that made his mouth go grimly flat. Avoiding whatever it was, he went over to the chair and examined it completely, picked up something on the floor under it. “Duct tape. And—look at this.” He held up a tiny bottle. “Cyclamenaline.” He put it carefully back down.

            “And what are the marks you found on the floor?” Dave asked.

            “Heel marks, from a body being dragged. The murderer took him around the upper body and dragged him out, walking backward. Tim was a tall young man. It was a fairly powerful person, not likely to be a woman, though it doesn’t rule that out completely. And this part of the building is very convenient to the faculty parking lot. So he held him down here for about twenty-four hours. He probably lured him down here late one night with promises of more money, knocked him on the head (the autopsy report mentions a minor blunt-weapon trauma on his head), duct taped him to the chair (the report also mentions duct tape residue on his skin), and waited for him to wake up.”

            “Oh, don’t!” I cried and pushed past Dave out of the tiny room.

            They followed me out, concerned.

            “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t like Tim, but he was so young—and someone just kidnapped him—and left him in there in fear and pain while he went about his everyday Friday activities—teaching or doing paperwork—while all along Tim was down here, probably trying to scream to get help—and no one ever came— Can you imagine the last thing you ever see is the person who’s killing you?”

            “Yes,” Jarod said quietly.

            We stared at him.

            “I can imagine it. I’m sorry. You didn’t need to see this. Help me put the boxes back, and we’ll go.”

            As we were walking through the maze of basement rooms, Jarod stopped at one of the chemical cupboards. He eyed the lock speculatively for a moment and then went on. Dave and I gave each other a puzzled glance.

            Outside Jarod said, “Thank you for your help, Dave.”

            “Anytime. So are you really a private detective or an undercover cop or something?”

            “Or something,” Jarod smiled. “This stays between us, you understand?”

            “I promise, as long as you let me help when you bust the case open.”

            “It’s a deal.” They shook hands on it, and Jarod laughed as Dave went away. “Too many cop shows. I like your Young John, Little Dorrit.”

            “He’s not my Young John,” I muttered. “I think I’ll go for a walk.”

            He put a hand on my shoulder. “Are you going to be alright?”

            “Yes.”

            The walk in the cool autumn air did me good. As I was coming back, I remembered that Jarod hadn’t told me what my father told him. Figuring he would probably be in his office or my father’s, I went in a side door of Clauser Hall and tried my father’s office first. The door was unlocked. As I pushed it open, I saw Jarod by the windows looking down into the quad, pulling aside the curtain a little, his head against the window sill. He was on his mobile phone again.

            “I’ve decided I really can thank you for a few things, Sydney. You might have stolen my life, but at least you developed my talents.” He gave a short, hard laugh. “Thanks to you I can now go into a room where a murder took place and watch the murderer doing his dirty work. That’s quite an exchange for a stolen childhood, isn’t it? It’s helping me now. It’s helping me help the innocent, instead of hurting them like it used to. I don’t know that I would have been able to use it like this if you hadn’t taught me to. It’s strange, isn’t it? That when someone does something evil, it can be turned into good. I wonder why that is.”

            Yes, obviously I was destined to inadvertently eavesdrop on all of Jarod’s phone conversations. I quietly retreated. Sydney. What was up with this Sydney? Jarod held bitterness toward him; I could hear it in his voice. Bitterness for his stolen childhood. His orphanage, or whatever it was, had put his extraordinary brain to work instead of letting him be a child, and Sydney was the one who had trained him. But Jarod couldn’t just leave his past behind. He kept calling Sydney. There was more in his voice than bitterness. What was it? A need to be connected? A man all alone in the world, trying to find his biological family, kept calling the man who had raised him, reaching out. That was natural, I supposed. You’ve got to have someone. Childhood influences are very strong. Look at Arthur Clennam. He kept trying to reach out to the woman who had raised him without an ounce of kindness.

            Mrs. Clennam had raised Arthur, her husband’s illegitimate child, as her own child, having taken him by force from his real mother, and he never knew she was not his mother. She raised him in punitive coldness, forcing him to atone for his parents’ sins. She told Little Dorrit later, with not the slightest remorse for her blighting of Arthur’s childhood, “I kept over him as a child, in the days of his first remembrance, my restraining and correcting hand. I was stern with him, knowing that the transgressions of the parents are visited on their offspring, and that there was an angry mark upon him at his birth. I have sat with him and his father, seeing the weakness of his father yearning to unbend him; and forcing it back, that the child might work out his release in bondage and hardship. I have seen him, with his mother’s face, looking up at him in awe from his little books, and trying to soften me with his mother’s ways that hardened me.” And about Arthur she said, “He never loved me, but he always respected me and ordered himself dutifully to me. He does to this hour. With an empty place in his heart that he has never known the meaning of, he has turned away from me and gone his separate road; but even that he has done considerately and with deference.” Did Jarod love Sydney? I thought perhaps he might, unlike Arthur. Less deference, more love, all for someone who had stolen his childhood. Was I missing something?

            I went slowly back to my father’s office after about ten minutes of walking around and thinking. This time it was locked and unoccupied. But Jarod had left his phone on the windowsill. I found it when I went to close the curtain he had left open a crack.

            I don’t know why I did it, but I found my thumb pressing redial. In a moment a man’s voice answered, accented, familiar.

            “This is Sydney.”

            “Sydney?”

            “Yes?”

            A thousand questions flew through my head to ask. Instead I found myself asking, “Are you Mrs. Clennam?” Are you Mrs. Clennam? What kind of a question is that? I said quickly, “Sorry, wrong number,” and hung up.

            Sydney stood staring at his telephone. He was still staring at it when Miss Parker came in.

            “What’s wrong, Sydney? Your telephone bite you again?”

            “Oh, hello, Miss Parker,” he said absently. “Do you know anyone named Mrs. Clennam?”

            “No, I don’t. Why?”

            “It’s not important. Just a wrong number.”

            Miss Parker took the phone from his hand and hung it up. “Jarod has called you twice in less than a week, Syd, and you’ve gotten nothing form him but idle chitchat.”

            “Not idle, Parker. Nothing Jarod does is idle. I did not raise him to be idle. We know he’s working on a murder investigation. Since he was asking about children with parents in prison, it makes me wonder if he’s trying to clear another innocent person.”

            “But there are no breadcrumbs, Sydney! We’ve already checked into murders involving places where they sell cotton candy, and nothing.”

            “Patience, Parker. Patience.”

            Clennam, he thought when Miss Parker had stormed out. Are there ever really any wrong numbers at the Centre?

            I dumped my stuff off at my house and took the alley to Jarod’s. There was no answer to my knock at the back door. I decided to just go in. If Jarod wasn’t there, I’d leave his phone and go back home. But there he was, sitting at his dining room table with his back to me, and his silver briefcase was open before him, a pile of silvery disks beside it. Blame the Skarsgards for having such thick carpets that my footsteps were perfectly silent as I came up behind him. I wasn’t hiding or running away again.

            The little boy and the man were on the black-and-white screen again, except he wasn’t so little, maybe fourteen years old. The boy was standing in front of a dummy lying on the floor.

            “I feel triumph at defeating my enemy. What a fool, to think he could get away with blackmailing me! Killing him was a pleasure. The world is well rid of such an insect!” The boy broke off and turned to the man. “I hate this, Sydney! I hate doing murderers, when they do it with their own hands and enjoy it. It makes me feel—sick.”

            Sydney said gently, “I know it does, Jarod, but you have to do it. It’s the only way to catch the murderer. You want to catch him, don’t you?”

            “Yes,” young Jarod said resignedly. “Someone has to stop him, or he’ll kill again. Sydney! He’s going to kill again!”

            “No,” Jarod said to his young self, making me jump. “I can’t let that happen.”

            I put my hand out onto his shoulder, and he jumped higher than I had. He wheeled out of his chair and stared at me, ashen-faced. The recording went on in the background. He snapped it off.

            “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to eavesdrop. You left your phone in my father’s office.”

            He took it, saying nothing, his dark eyes watching me, tumultuous with emotion.

            “So, do you want to tell me about it, or shall I tell you?”

            “You tell me?”

            “What I’ve guessed, pieced together, detected. Your psychological profile.” When he didn’t answer, I said, “Come on,” and went into the living room, sat down on the couch.

            Jarod sat down, purposefully across the coffee table in an armchair, crossing his arms, his face dark. “Tell me my fortune, Little Dorrit,” he said sardonically.

            “Don’t you mean Mr. Pancks? He’s the fortune-teller. Well, Jarod, here’s what I think I know of your story. You were adopted very young.” Something in his posture relaxed, and I thought, Not adopted? Am I wrong? I hoped I wasn’t making an idiot out of myself. I continued anyway. “Somehow you were adopted by an organization called the Centre. Or maybe it was an orphanage or a school. Whatever it was, it was not a place where children were cherished. It was a place where they were used. They learned you have an extraordinary ability to find out things, solve crimes, understand how people work. They taught you to do the work of adults, and they never let you be a child. You never celebrated Christmas, never went to a circus, never traveled and saw a mountain. You probably never watched TV, so you never learned most of the expressions people all across the country learn. You never had parents or anyone who even acted like a parent. A European man named Sydney raised you and trained you and made you do all this work. You should hate him, but you don’t. And then one day you realized you were a grown man and had never seen what the world was like, so you left. That was fairly recently. And you’re still doing what the Centre taught you to do, solving crimes, while you’re looking for the family who gave you up for adoption. Am I right, or am I completely wrong?”

            “You are more right than you have any business being, but you’re very, very wrong. You don’t know half the story.”

            “So tell me.”

            He stared at me, his face still dark. Then slowly, almost imperceptibly, he relaxed, or, rather, seemed to lose his cohesion and collapse in on himself.

            “It’s worse than you think. Far worse. Even you can’t imagine the evil these people are capable of. The Centre isn’t an orphanage or a school—it’s a corporation that solves problems for the highest bidder. And I wasn’t adopted in a neat little legal proceeding. I was kidnapped.”

            “What?” I gasped.

            His eyes showed raw pain like I’d never seen before. “I don’t remember it. I barely remember my parents—she had red hair—he loved airplanes. I must have been four or five, and all I remember is the Centre—a grey, dark place where I learned the things that give me nightmares. I have seen what a normal childhood should be like, but I don’t know what it feels like. They never let me out. I escaped once, just to see what snow was like, and they sent people after me—like I was doing something horrible. I was locked up every night and brought out in the day to perform my tasks. And I—I thought it was normal. I sometimes rebelled against it because I didn’t like it, but I thought it was just the way things were. Some children live with their parents, and experience snow, and some are locked up underground and forced to use their talents for the good of humanity.

            “That’s what I thought it was—and maybe that’s what it was at first. I helped get some astronauts home in safety once, and it was good to know I had helped them, that because of me they came back home to their families instead of dying out there between the Earth and the moon—”

            “Wait. Apollo 13? You got Apollo 13 back? The slingshot around the moon?”

            “You know about that?”

            “Everybody knows about that! They made a movie out of it a year or two ago! How old were you? It was in the late ‘60s, I think—”

            “1970. I don’t know how old I was. I’ll show you.”

            He got up and looked among the silvery discs on the table. I followed him and stood watching as he slipped one in its slot and the picture came onto the small screen. A little boy in a clear bubble, electrodes attached to his head, arguing with the man called Sydney about oxygen and fuel and then, eyes widening, realizing that oh, so simple solution. April 14, 1970, the screen said. JAROD. FOR CENTRE USE ONLY. I stood staring at it.

            “You didn’t like doing it—having all that weight on you, people’s lives depending on you, having to experience all those things—you were a child! No child should have to have that pressure!”

            “I know that now. At that point I thought of it as a necessary evil, part of the great responsibility of having a mind like mine. That was what I was taught. I didn’t know—I didn’t know—”

            “What?” I said softly.

            “That the Centre wasn’t about helping people. It was about money and power, and there’s often more money and power in hurting people than in helping them. The simulations changed after a while. I began doing less solving and more projecting, more research. I would find out the best way to bring a plane down—and they told me the results would be used to enhance security on the planes. Or I would figure out a delivery system for a pathogen, and they said it was so they could be prepared in the case of epidemics. But it wasn’t true. They were selling my results to governments, and the governments were using them in war or to tyrannize people. They were using them to oppress innocent people! People died because of what I thought up. Hundreds—maybe thousands—” He sank down into a chair and put his head into his hands.

            “Jarod! It wasn’t your fault! You were a child!”

            “Tell that to the people I killed.”

            I put my hands on his shoulders and made him look at me. “Jarod, nobody blames children when people force them to do things. They are not responsible, legally, psychologically, or morally. And as far as I know they don’t blame hostages for what they do under duress, either. You’re not to blame any more than—oh, than Oliver Twist was when Sikes forced him to break into that house! Don’t you get it?”

            After staring at me a moment, he leaned forward against me, and I put my arms around his shoulders. Always the Little Dorrit, though maybe this time I was the kind Rose Maylie to his injured Oliver Twist. No wonder he had seen himself on every page of Dickens. How could someone do such things to a little boy?

            “Your Sydney has much to answer for,” I said grimly.

            His head came up. “Don’t blame Sydney.”

            Was that a protective instinct? “Don’t blame Sydney? He keeps a little kid locked up and exploits his talents for money, and you want to blame yourself rather than him? You’re the one who can be a psychiatrist if you want to be. Tell me that’s not pathological!”

            He gave a weak chuckle. “Maybe it is. But that’s not what I meant.”

            I sat down in the other dining room chair. “What did you mean? I want to know about this Sydney. He perplexes me.”

            “He perplexes me, too, and I’ve know him all my life. When I first found out what they were doing with my results, I blamed him. I thought he knew, but he didn’t. His role is that of scientist or researcher; he doesn’t do any administration. He thought, as I did, that our work was being used for good.”

            “And that’s a good reason to keep a little kid locked up? You said he raised you. What kind of monster does to a child what was done to you?”

            “He’s not a monster!”

            I stared at him. He stared back, as surprised by his outburst as I was. He sighed.

            “Sydney is…difficult. I can’t even figure him out, and figuring out people is what I do. He’s all about the science and rarely thinks about the morality. And yet he is kind. He was kind to me, Little Dorrit. He feels something for me—I don’t know what. Some affection, at least. He spent his life teaching me. Don’t look at me like that! I know what he did was wrong. I have been angry and blamed him often enough. But I’m connected to him, and I can’t help it. He’s—he’s the only family I have…for now.”

            “Until you find your real family.”

            “Yes. They’re out there, and they’re looking for me. Would you like to see a picture of my mother?”

            “Yes.”

            From the inside pocket of his jacket he took out a photograph and handed it to me. It was a young woman with red hair and a strong, slender face.

            “She’s beautiful. You look like her. Your bones.” I gave it back.

            “Do you think so? Her name is Margaret. I don’t know the rest.”

            “Not Clennam?”

            “No. Clennam isn’t my name.”

            I stared again. He raised his eyebrows.

            “You didn’t guess?”

            I choked, suddenly giggling. “You opened up Little Dorrit and chose the name of the nicest character!”

            Jarod couldn’t help himself. He laughed, too. “I really did. It was appropriate.”

            “Oh—” I groaned. “You’re not even a Russian literature professor, are you?”

            “No.”

            I shook my head. “But why?”

            The merriment dissolved into the pain in his eyes. “I don’t know my name. I don’t know who I am. All I have is Jarod, and the first names of my parents, Margaret and Charles, and my sister Emily and my brother Kyle. Nothing else. The Centre hid it from me my entire life, and they still won’t let me know. They told me that my parents died in a plane crash. It was only after I escaped that I learned they had just chosen two unrelated dead people to make me stop asking questions. I blamed that on Sydney, too, but he hadn’t known.”

            One word leapt out at me. “Wait—escaped?”

            “Yes, escaped. That’s another thing you weren’t able to see. The Centre is evil. They kidnapped me. They kidnapped other children. In their eyes, they owned us. They think they own me still. I’m property. When I realized that and what they were doing with my results, I decided that was enough, and I escaped. It was like a prison, and I escaped from it like a prisoner, and now they are hunting me like the law hunts an escaped prisoner. Haven’t you wondered why I go from place to place instead of settling down? It’s not because I want to. It’s because my freedom is continually in danger. Sometimes my life. They want me alive, but they’ll take me dead rather than let me be out free in this world. They own me,” he repeated, his face dark, his eyes stony.

            “Jarod. For Centre use only,” I whispered. “This is so illegal.”

            “Legal and illegal mean nothing to the Centre. They act like the CIA, with more autonomy because they’re independent of the government. The government doesn’t know the full extent of what they do, possibly because it doesn’t choose to because what the Centre does for it is very profitable. On the face of it it seems to be a fairly normal research corporation, but underneath it’s a crooked criminal organization.”

            “And you’re in danger wherever you go.”

            “Yes. I have to keep my ties to the Centre because they are the only ones who know who I really am, so they are always able to find me. Every once in a while I’m able to manipulate them into giving me some information.”

            “Is that why you call Sydney?”

            He started and stared at me. I went red.

            “I heard you on the phone in my father’s office today. You don’t just call him because you need him—what he can do for you. You call him because…well, you need him. Emotionally. Is he one of the ones trying to get you back?”

            “Yes,” he murmured. “He helps me and he hinders me. He tells me to come back, and he fights for my well-being.”

            “He’s confused.”

            “I think everyone associated with the Centre is. There are some people who were once my friends who are now tracking me down.”

            “Miss Parker?” I asked quietly.

            He gaped, and his eyes went dark and suspicious.

            “I heard that conversation, too. I didn’t mean to! I swear I didn’t.”

            Jarod sighed. “Yes, Miss Parker is leading the search for me. She’s…she’s like a combination of Mr. Bucket and Mr. Monks.”

            I blinked at that and tried to comprehend that combination. Mr. Bucket, from Bleak House, was a good man doing a bad job for an unjust system. Mr. Monks, from Oliver Twist, was a bad man who existed to deprive an innocent child of his life, family, and inheritance.

            “Confused,” I said.

            “Deceived. There’s as much deception surrounding her as me. Little Dorrit, I should not be telling you all this. The Centre does not hesitate to kill whoever knows too much.”

            I shivered. It was a little like a spy thriller, or a book by Tom Clancy. “No one will ever know I know anything. I’m just a small-town girl, remember? No one would ever look at me and think I’m the sort of person who knows things.”

            He looked like a small and forlorn child huddled up in his chair. He said slowly, “When I meet my sister Emily, I hope she is a little like you. You’re someone I would have liked to have had for a sister in another life.”

            I blinked swiftly against tears. “Jarod, you can be Nicholas to my Kate Nickleby anytime. Haven’t you already promised to thrash my Sir Mulberry Hawk?”

            He smiled a little. “Yes. Yes, I have, Kate.”

            I stood up. “Well, then, Nicholas, don’t we have work to do?”

            “Yes, we do. But first, Kate—” He rose and put his arms around me. I put my head on his chest and blinked against tears again. In a world where it seemed like my family was in danger of shrinking even more and where he didn’t know who or where his was, we’d both take whatever family we could get. If the unsteadiness of his chest was any indication, he felt our pact even more than I did, and for a moment I held him tighter, as if I were the older and he the younger, I Rose Maylie and he Oliver Twist, I Nicholas Nickleby and he the crippled, abused Smike. How often, I wondered, had anyone touched him kindly? Had Sydney ever held him when he was little? Or even given him a friendly pat on the shoulder? In his wandering life without family, how often did he get something as simple and meaningful as a hug? Did he ever dream of a father’s embrace, a mother’s tenderness? He must. He couldn’t cling so desperately to someone who dared offer herself as a stop-gap sister if he didn’t.

            Nor was he ashamed to show that he had been crying, when he released me. He wiped his eyes and said with a broken laugh, “Do you want some tea?”

            “Yes,” I said fervently.

            We went into the kitchen, and while we were waiting for the water to boil, I said, “I never did learn what my father told you.”

            He sighed, crossed his arms, leaned against the counter. “Plenty, and not enough. He doesn’t know who killed Tim Morone and framed him.”

            “Oh, no,” I groaned.

            “Don’t you worry. I’ll find it out before very long. I do believe that what Tim and your father knew about the murderer is the same thing. A month ago, Tim came to school early to work with Don Douglas, as you told me. He knew something about our murderer then. He had learned that someone on the finance committee was cooking the books. Embezzling from the school, in short.”

            I gasped, “From Morrison?”

            “From Morrison. Your Marshalsea. How he knew it is still a mystery to me. We may never know. It’s not something a student would have access to. And he had a confrontation with the person. In an empty classroom underneath your father’s office.”

            “Oh my goodness. The air vents. Dad can sometimes hear what’s going on in the classroom when the teacher’s being especially enthusiastic.”

            “That’s what he said. It was a Sunday afternoon, and he wasn’t usually there, but he’d had some new ideas for one of his classes, and he had to do some research.”

            “I remember that day.” The water was boiling, and I watched as he poured it into our cups. “He was gone most of the afternoon, and when he came back, he was very…abstracted. I thought he was thinking about his new ideas, but later he told me about learning some bad news about someone. He wouldn’t say who.”

            “He didn’t know who. He couldn’t hear the voices from the classroom very well, but he did hear the younger man—he quickly realized it had to be Tim Morone—tell the older man that he knew about the embezzlement and was going to go to the police, and he heard the older man offer him money not to. He remembered the time during his tenure as chairman of the oversight committee when they thought they had discovered discrepancies in the books, but they had later been resolved. He quietly started looking into it, as you said he might. He actually took financial information to go through, which the police unfortunately found among his paperwork and see as evidence against him. Tell me who was on that committee with him.”

            “Let me think. I hardly remember. Jan Bezic, Don Douglas, Sam Leland, Ted Fournier, and a few others in the business office.”

            “Hmm,” he mused over his tea. “Well, I know two things I need to do: hack into the school financial records and the personal financial records of each of those men (it’s definitely a man) and go back to the room we found in the basement.”

            “Why?” I asked with a shudder.

            He set down his tea on the counter. “I’ll never find this man if I don’t become him. And that’s best done in the place where he went through the emotions involved in killing Tim Morone.”

            “It sounds…horrible.”

            “It is,” he said grimly. “I’ll go later, when we’re done here and you’ve gone home.”

            “No. I’m going with you.”

            “After the way that room made you feel earlier? No.”

            “Yes. I’m not going to let you do that alone!”

            “I do it alone all the time.”

            “That’s why I’m not letting you do it alone this time. You do too many things alone too often.”

            His hand curled around his teacup as his mouth flatted out and his eyes went dark with the by-now too-familiar expression of the ache inside him.

            “How long has it been since you escaped?” I asked softly.

            “A year. Almost a year.”

            “So before that you were locked up in that place, but you had Sydney. And now you’re free, experiencing everything you never got to experience, but you’re alone.”

            He drew in an audible breath, like a gasp. “Yes.”

            “Would you go back?”

            “No. There’s hope out here. There’s no hope in the Centre. None for Sydney, either. He’s beginning to understand that. My escape shook him up in ways he’d never experienced before. He asked my forgiveness once. I couldn’t give it to him.”

            “Maybe…someday?”

            “If I ever find it for myself.” He pushed himself away from the counter. “Time to go to work.”

            He opened his computer and got on the Internet, soon accessing more financial files. I couldn’t make head or tail of them and didn’t want to, so I made dinner instead. Stir-fry again. Jarod had nothing in his refrigerator or cupboards but stir-fry ingredients, macaroni and cheese, coffee, and green tea. And four different kinds of ice cream in the freezer, as well as a large box of PEZ refills on top of it. It was true. The man was still a child. He had never had a chance to grow up. He was sitting there eating PEZ from his Shakespeare PEZ dispenser and hacking illegally into college financial records, and I, obviously the only adult in the situation, was just letting him. I shook my head and made stir-fry. Which I was getting heartily sick of. I made macaroni and cheese, too. He grinned when I brought out the odd combination of food.

            “You do realize how unhealthy junk food is, right?”

            “I don’t care. I lived for thirty years on optimized nutritional supplements. I’m probably the healthiest person on the planet.”

            “You lived on what?”

            “Healthy, tasteless glop. I didn’t know you could enjoy eating until I escaped. The first time I tasted ice cream…” He closed his eyes with a blissful smile.

            “You tasted ice cream for the first time a year ago?”

            “It was very good. But PEZ was the first sweet thing I ate when I escaped. I didn’t understand the mouse head on it, but it sure was fun.”

            “Where did you go first?”

            “Alaska. It was as far away from the Centre as I could imagine, and I had always wanted to go there and see mountains and snow. I got rides with truckers—I like truckers. When I got there, it was as wonderful as I had imagined. Have you ever been so happy that you thought your heart would break?”

            “I don’t know.”

            “Well, I was. And then I discovered this village where kids were getting sick. Watching kids play for the first time was…indescribable. But I found out that they were getting sick because of some toxic waste being dumped in their water supply, so I went to work for the tanker company, on one of the ships, and exposed them.” He smiled a smile full of sweetness and memory. “And while I was there, I read a newspaper article from the lower 48—”

            “The what?”

            “Now who doesn’t know common, everyday terms?” he mocked me gently. “That’s what Alaskans call the forty-eight contiguous states.”

            “Oh, brother. Anyway?”

            “The article was about a little boy who was in a wheelchair after a surgery, and something about it didn’t sit right with me. So I studied surgical techniques, and after I was done with the tanker company, I went back down to the lower 48 and found out that a drunk surgeon had put that little boy in his wheelchair. I exposed them, too, and got a large settlement for the boy. And it just went on from there. It’s fun.”

            “I’ll bet it is. The dream job, never having to be bored, being able to learn and do whatever you want. But the Centre puts a cramp in your style, doesn’t it?”

            “Actually, the Centre’s half the fun. Stringing Miss Parker along is half the fun.”

            “Oh, I see. You’re the annoying little brother.”

            “I can be, if I want to be,” he chuckled. “But actually I don’t know who’s older, she or I.”

            “Jarod, how do you afford all this? This house can’t have been cheap to rent, for one thing, and you told me you’re not a literature professor because you need the money.”

            His eyes laughed. “I stole $5 million from the Centre.”

            “What?”

            “I did a Wall Street simulation for a client of the Centre once, and I built into my results a backdoor into Centre finances. When the client ran my results, I was in New York. On Wall Street, at the Stock Exchange. I could have taken everything. Instead I took five million. I gave it back, most of it, in exchange for information about my family. Sydney found the picture of my mom and sent it to me. That’s a fair exchange for $4 million, don’t you think? He was going to get me more information, but Miss Parker put a stop to it. I thought at first he betrayed me, but he didn’t. I see the million I kept as a small payment for thirty years of work.”

            “I’ll say,” I muttered. “Speaking of which, did you get anything out of the school’s finances?”

            “Not yet. Whoever this person is, he’s good. I’ll keep at it a couple more hours. Then when no one’s likely to be in the Bailey Building, we can go to the Marshalsea. You’re sure you want to come?”

            “Yes.”

            He smiled. “Alright, Little Dorrit.”

            At about 9:30 that evening, we took latex gloves and flashlights and walked to the college. After a great deal of financial analysis, which he very kindly did not explain to me, Jarod had found what he wanted. Not who yet, just what, proof of the embezzlement my father had discovered. It had taken him one evening to find and analyze documents my father had taken weeks over. Once again I realized what a powerful brain there was behind the pain-filled eyes and silly grin.

            We walked through the faculty parking lot to the Bailey Building. No lights were on, and the back door was locked.

            “We should have gotten keys from Young John,” I grumbled.

            “No need.” With a smirk he pulled out of his pocket some long things on a keychain (not keys) and stuck a couple in the keyhole.

            “Those are illegal, aren’t they?”

            “Yes, they are.”

            The door was open, and we went in, went down quietly to the basement. The main door there was locked, too, but Jarod had it open as quickly as I could have done with a key. It was a bit creepier in the darkness barely relieved by the bluish beams of our flashlights.

            Jarod went first to the chemical supply cabinets. He unlocked them neatly and played his flashlight over the rows of bottles and things.

            “I suppose you know what they all are.”

            “Mostly.” He shut it up again. “How often do they do inventory of these cabinets?”

            “I have no idea. Why? Are you going to steal some?”

            “If I do, I’ll pay for them.”

            When we came to the room with the boxes hiding the secret room, he looked all around for signs that anyone had been there and found none. We moved the boxes again.

            “Stand in the doorway,” Jarod told me. “Aim your flashlight over at the chair. And if you need to, just leave, but I’m not stopping this time until I have what I need to know.”

            I nodded. I didn’t like that dark, tiny room with its ghastly history, but I was frankly curious about exactly what Jarod was planning to do.

            He stood in the little room and took a few deep breaths. He shone his flashlight all around the room.

            “I have embezzled money from the college and its students. Now one of the students is blackmailing me. I thought at first I could buy his silence with a one-time payment, but he kept coming back. And then I caught Doran snooping around. If he finds anything out, I’ll be ruined. I’m desperate—and angry. How dare some little know-it-all kid try to blackmail me? He thinks he has power over me? I’ll show him power. He wants to see me beg for his mercy. I’ll make him beg for mine. And Doran—he has to be got out of the way, made so that no one will listen to him. A pity about him, but he should have kept his nose out of other people’s business.

            “I ask Tim Morone to meet me down here, late on Thursday night. I tell him no one will hear us talk here. I have everything ready. Everything is planned, every detail. I’m a planner, detail-oriented. No detail escapes my notice, which was how I hid my financial dealings so well.

            “Now Morone is coming. He doesn’t know about this hidden room, until I tell him I have something to show him. He’s suspicious, but he precedes me in. I lift my weapon and swing it at him—not too hard. I don’t want to kill him, yet. I catch him as he falls, drag him to the chair, duct tape his wrists to the arms, his ankles to the legs, and his mouth closed. Then I wait for him to wake up.”

            He paused, breathing quickly, not the calming breaths he had taken earlier but excitedly, somewhat shallowly. I watched, fascinated and horrified. He wasn’t Jarod anymore.

            “He wakes up and looks at me. What a rush of triumph there is when I see his terror! He is in my power now. I own him, and I will squeeze him to get every drop of this delicious sensation. I tell him what’s in store for him and watch as he tries to beg through the duct tape. To give him a little taste of it, I take the syringe I have prepared, slip it under the skin of his arm, and give him just enough of my concoction to make him cry. Watching it is joy to me. Why haven’t I done this sooner? I thought my work and my financial games were enough, but they’re not.”

            I could see that Jarod was fighting it even as he spoke. Part of him was—somehow—slipping deeper and deeper into the killer’s mind, but part of him was fighting to stay separate. I didn’t know whether I should try to snap him out of it or not.

            “I watch until his crying has stopped, and then I give him something to knock him out for a good, long time. Then I go home and go to bed. The next morning I go about my business. I go to see Morone once and make sure he stays unconscious. I make it a point to go and see Professor Doran in his office as well. I ask him to look over something I’ve written; I give it to him in a file folder with several blank pages on top which he has to leaf through to get to the drivel I’ve written. His fingerprints are on those pages now.

            “Late in the evening I go back down to my victim, the little fly I’ve caught in my web. He’s not even Tim anymore, just a pathetic little animal in my power. He’s been trying to get free, but he’s failed. I give him a little more of my drug, and then I free one of his hands and tell him I won’t give him any more if he writes what I tell him to write. He writes the blackmail notes to Doran on the papers Doran left his fingerprints on—his handwriting is shaky, but it always was abominable. I take them in gloved fingers and fold them carefully. They’ll go buried in one of Doran’s desk drawers.

            “And then I give my victim more of my drug. He tries to scream, but the duct tape blocks the sound, and I—I love this feeling of—of power—”

            He was trembling where he stood, his fists clenched at his sides, trying to force words out, fighting himself desperately.

            “Jarod—Jarod—stop.” I didn’t know if he’d even heard me. I left my place and grabbed his arm. “Stop, Jarod!”

            I dragged him out of the room, shoved the boxes back into place, and pulled him out of the building, locking all the doors behind us. Outside in the cool air, he sank down on the steps with his head in his hands.

            “I hate getting into a sadist’s mind. I hate it—I hate it. I always have.”

            I gave him a little tug, and he sank his head down on my shoulder.

            “I only had to do it a couple times—and there was always a point past which I couldn’t go—”

            “It’s called survival,” I said. “Your own personality won’t let itself be subsumed in something so horrible. It means you’re strong.”

            “But I needed to go as far as the killing, planting the evidence—”

            “No, you didn’t. I know who you were describing.”

            He sat up and stared at me in the pale moonlight. “You do?”

            “Don’t you?”

            He said slowly, “I suppose I do.”

            “Sydney, why are you always reading all of a sudden?”

            Sydney looked up from his fat book. “I have been reading this book since Wednesday, Miss Parker. That is two days and does not constitute always.”

            “You’ve gotten through that much in two days?” Broots said, impressed. “You read fast.”

            “What is it this time? Psychotherapy For Geniuses?”

            “Nothing so esoteric,” Sydney chuckled. “Dickens.”

            “Dickens?” she echoed. “I’ve never known you to read fiction, Syd.”

            “It’s good to get back to the classics every now and then. Clear your mind of everyday concerns and get into a good story. Though this—” he held up the book “—has done quite the opposite. The more I read it, the more everyday concerns crowd around me. I think Dickens intended it that way.”

            “Sydney, does this have anything to do with Jarod?”

            “Doesn’t everything? Do we ever do anything that doesn’t have to do with Jarod?”

            “You certainly don’t. And me—” She sighed. “I guess I don’t either. He even pursues me home.”

            “Jarod pursues you? That’s funny,” Broots chuckled, then withered under her glare.

            “So what is it, Syd? Jarod’s trail has gone cold, unless he told you to read Dickens.”

            “He didn’t. It was that wrong number, someone looking for a Mrs. Clennam. The name was familiar, and I found it in this book.”

            Broots seemed to be about to say something, but he caught Sydney’s eye and closed his mouth.

            “I don’t know if it’s a coincidence, Parker, but this book is all about Jarod.”

            She took it, losing his place. “Little Dorrit? What’s a little dorrit?”

            “It’s a person, a certain child whose father is in debtor’s prison. Because the children have nowhere else to live, they live in the prison with him. Little Dorrit has spent her entire life in prison, taking care of others. When her father is freed and takes her on a tour of Europe, she is unable emotionally to leave the prison behind her. I wonder if Jarod is reading this book, too. He has been asking questions about children in prison.”

            “Yes, and our search of juvenile facilities turned up nothing.” She dumped it back on his desk.

            “I think he’s talking about himself.”

            “But where does Clennam come in?” Broots asked.

            “Arthur Clennam is another primary character. After a cold and lonely childhood, he goes about trying to help people.” He picked up the book and found a passage. “Listen. This is a description of Arthur Clennam, and it’s a description of Jarod.

            “’He was a dreamer in such wise, because he was a man who had, deep-rooted in his nature, a belief in all the gentle and good things his life had been without. Bred in meanness and hard dealing, this had rescued him to be a man of honourable mind and open hand. Bred in coldness and severity, this had rescued him to have a warm and sympathetic heart.

            “’And this saved him still from the whimpering weakness and cruel selfishness of holding that because such a happiness or such a virtue had not come into his little path, or worked well for him, therefore it was not in the great scheme, but was reducible, when found in appearance, to the basest elements. A disappointed mind he had, but a mind too firm and healthy for such unwholesome air. Leaving himself in the dark, it could rise into the light, seeing it shine on others and hailing it.’”

            Broots and Parker were staring at him as he read in his gentle, accented voice. “Have you ever thought about doing audiobooks?” Broots asked.

            “No, I haven’t,” Sydney answered solemnly.

            “Is Jarod every character in that book?” Miss Parker demanded.

            “No,” Sydney smiled. “There are far too many characters. But now that I think about it, Charles Dickens wrote about many situations which Jarod knows intimately.”

            “Does this get us any closer to finding him?”

            “I don’t think so. But if he’s reading these books, it’s getting me into what’s going on in his head.”

            “Horrors,” she muttered and stalked out.

            “Sydney,” Broots whispered, “about that telephone call. There are no wrong numbers at the Centre. People don’t just accidentally call us up. Unauthorized calls are routed elsewhere—except Jarod’s, of course, because he can always get around the system.”

            “I know.”

            “Do you think it was Jarod?”

            “No. It was a young woman.”

            “Why didn’t you tell Miss Parker?”

            “Because Miss Parker is far too ready to hold her gun on innocent people and entirely likely to shoot them.”

            “Yeah. Do you want me to look into it?”

            “Yes, but don’t tell Miss Parker why.”

            When Broots was gone, Sydney sat staring at the cover of the book. One thing he hadn’t told Broots about why he kept the importance of the telephone call from Miss Parker was how the girl’s question kept playing over and over in his head. Are you Mrs. Clennam? Whether or not she had meant it as a reference to Little Dorrit, he kept thinking of it as one, and it disturbed him.

            Are you Mrs. Clennam? A repellent but fascinating character, Mrs. Clennam. She refused to love Arthur but condemned him when he decided to have nothing to do with her cold, failing business, and she rebuffed his many advances and the chances he gave her to love him. Are you Mrs. Clennam? He was very much afraid he might be.

            We spent the last days of the week in preparation. That is, Jarod prepared. I wasn’t exactly sure what he was preparing for, except that he was going to catch our murderer in some kind of sting operation. He hacked into more bank accounts and confirmed three $500 withdrawals at the same time that $500 deposits were made into Tim’s account, and then he did an even more incredible feat of electronic tracking and traced the trail of money from the Morrison College of Liberal Arts to a numbered account in the Cayman Islands. I felt exactly as if I had stepped into a John Grisham novel. His criminals were always hiding their money in Cayman. Don’t ask me why. I’d put mine in a Swiss account, if I had any to put there.

            On Friday evening I came to his house and found a chemistry laboratory on his kitchen table, two of them, really. In one he was distilling some kind of chemical he wouldn’t explain. In the other he was trying to make espresso. “The old-fashioned way,” he said. The coffee was some of the most excellent I’d ever had (beans from Zara’s, naturally), but it wasn’t espresso. He also taught his classes on Thursday and Friday, of course. On Friday his face was wistful as he dismissed the last class and we went up to my father’s office.

            “I would have liked to teach the whole semester,” he told me. “Especially the Dickens class. I like teaching. There’s really something about starting with a class of bored young people and bringing them to an enthusiasm about the subject.”

            “You already have done that, and you’ll continue to do it.”

            “Not here.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Your father will be home by Sunday and teaching on Monday, if he’s up to it.”

            I’m not very ashamed to say that amidst the joy that welled up in me there was also dismay. My father needed to be home where he belonged, but I knew that meant Jarod would be gone, off on another Pretend, as he called them. He read my emotions, as always.

            “I have to go,” he said gently. “I can’t stay in any one place for more than a few weeks.”

            “You’ve only been here a week.” I knew I sounded like a petulant child and hated it.

            “I can’t stay once I expose someone, because I invariable expose myself as well. I have to keep this man from killing again, as he will, and your father needs to come home. For that to happen, I have to go. That’s just the way it is.”

            “I know. What an awful way to live. I’m sorry—I know it’s your life—but how can you ever really get attached to someone when you always have to leave—for your safety or theirs?” I watched his agony fill his face and said miserably, “I’m sorry.”

            “At least you understand what it’s like. Most people just take me at face value. Some day, Little Dorrit, I’ll find my family, and the Centre will stop chasing me, and I’ll live somewhere and just be. Me. Whoever I am. Meanwhile—I get attached. I can’t help it. I’ve never been able to help it. As much as it hurts to leave, it would hurt more never being attached.”

            He was sitting at my father’s desk. I went over to him and gave him a fierce hug. He said quietly, “Thank you, Kate.”

            On Saturday Young John, Jarod, and I met at Zara’s to plan our attack. In reality, Jarod had everything planned out to a nicety. He was a man who prepared. I shudder to think of what would happen if he ever decided to work against the law instead of for it. It was rather exciting to watch him hack into computer records and pick locks, but I’m no iconoclast. Despite its recent failures on my father’s behalf, I’d rather live within the law than without it. Jarod might be a sort of vigilante, but he always left room for the law to do its work. For some reason he respected the law and authority, so long as they did their work properly and did not take advantage of their positions. I had to attribute that to Sydney in some way. From some of the other recordings he’d shown me, Sydney was the one who developed his moral sense and his desire to do good and help people. A strange thing, since Sydney was the one carrying on such immoral work. The Centre really did seem to mess people up.

            Young John—perhaps I had better call him by his real name, Dave, but he was so very Young John-like! Dave, then, was terribly excited about being involved in bringing a killer to justice. Well, so was I, but my excitement had considerably more apprehension to it. My father’s future was at stake, after all. Dave had nothing to risk except his life, and he was a teenager, with all of a teenager’s inability to see himself as anything but indestructible. Jarod warned him about the risk, but he wasn’t having any.

            “Dude,” he said, “get over it. I’m helping.”

            “Then you know what to do.”

            An excited grin on his face, Dave left us to our coffee, which he didn’t like, peculiar boy. I had a cappuccino again, and Jarod was indulging his horrendous sweet tooth with a latte that contained some odd assortment of flavors which he said tasted like ice cream.

            “Dude,” he said in an excellent imitation of Dave, “it occurs to me that that boy ought to be in school.”

            “Oh, he’s homeschooled. Plus he takes classes at the Marshalsea.”

            “Homeschooled?’

            “Schooled at home. If the parents are competent teachers, it’s supposed to be a really good education. Homeschooled kids tend to win all the national spelling bees and become chess champions and things.”

            “So why doesn’t everyone homeschool?”

            “Not every parent is a competent teacher. Many have to work. Others couldn’t deal with their kids at home all day every day. That’s just the way it is. A lot of the time you’d end up with kids who learn nothing and run wild, like Mrs. Jellyby’s kids.”

            He made that face that combined amusement and pain. “When I first read Bleak House, I didn’t want to believe that people like Mrs. Jellyby could really exist, devoting their attention to everything but the most precious thing in their lives, their kids. But Dickens never invented gratuitous characters. People really do neglect their children. It’s a terrible thing to realize. Parents should love their children.”

            “Most do. It’s only the unusual ones that you hear about on the news. Anyway, homeschooling is usually an indication that parents care so much about their children’s development that they don’t want to hand them over to strangers. That can be a good thing or a bad thing. Depends on the parents, and on the kids, too.”

            “If I ever have kids, I think I’d like to homeschool them,” Jarod mused.

            “I think you’d be a great father, and probably a great homeschooler, too.”

            His face went bright. “You think so?”

            “Yeah, I do.”

            Something flashed bright around us, and we both started.

            “Ms. Doran! Who’s your friend?”

            It was my nemesis, the press. I had managed to avoid them all week and congratulated myself that they had decided my father and I were old news. But here was another reporter and his photographer.

            “So, Ms. Doran, tell us how you’re consoling yourself over the continued absence of your father.”

            Jarod took one look at my face and rose from his chair. He was suddenly far taller than he’d been before, and bigger, too, menacing, his face dark. “Leave, now,” was all he said, but the tone was so low and dark and his eyes so ominous that they left without another word, almost running away. Then the sun came out from behind the storm clouds, and he sat down and drank his latte.

            I stared at him, wide-eyed. “Remind me never to cross you.”

            “You could never do that. I reserve my ire for people who deserve it.”

            “You don’t like the press?”

            “I don’t like people who take advantage of other people’s pain. I’ve been a reporter, Little Dorrit. The press offers a valuable service, helping people know what’s going on around them. It’s usually how I pick up my own cases. But far too often they go beyond offering a service and get into hounding injured people just to have a story and make a profit.”

            “I suppose any profession has its good and bad sides. It’s good to be able to see both. It’s too easy to see only what we want to see.”

            “That’s true. Sydney taught me to see all around a case, all sides, good and bad. It’s too bad he couldn’t do the same himself.”

            “Yeah,” I sighed. “So, Jarod, you decide what you’re going to do next by reading newspapers?”

            “Frequently. I keep an eye on the news, and usually something will alert me that a case isn’t quite straight-forward. I can tell a lot about a person by looking at his face in a grainy newspaper photo.”

            “Is that how you found out about my father?” I asked quietly.

            “No. It wasn’t your father. It was you.”

            “Me?”

            He reached to his back waistband and pulled out a red notebook, medium-sized, and opened it to the first page. My face looked back at me from the newspaper clipping taped to the page. “Killer Professor Innocent? Daughter of alleged murderer claims his innocence.” I turned the page. Another clipping. “Daddy Didn’t Do It! Amy Doran says her father’s hatred of murder victim Tim Morone had nothing to do with his death.” I winced and closed the notebook.

            “You were stalking me! You knew who I was when you came up to me that day!”

            “Guilty.”

            “Did you know Dad calls me Little Dorrit?” I asked accusingly.

            “No, I didn’t. I didn’t even know at that point that he was particularly interested in Dickens. After I read that first article—I was in Ohio at the time—I read all the others I could find. You convinced me your father was innocent.”

            I closed my eyes, letting my hand rest on the red notebook. “I suppose all those interviews I did before getting frustrated with the press weren’t a waste, then. They…performed their valuable service.” I pushed the notebook toward him.

            “Keep it. Give it to Miss Parker when she comes.”

            “When she comes? She’ll be coming here?”

            “Yes. When that photo of you and me hits the press—with some appropriate caption such as ‘Alleged murderer’s daughter finds consolation with his replacement.’ Broots will be on it, and they’ll be here hours later. Especially when they find out that I’ve been using the name Clennam.”

            He gave me a meaningful look, and it was my turn to gape at him. “You knew.”

            “That you called Sydney? Well, call it a hunch, a gut feeling. I checked my phone records late Wednesday night. I have a recording device in my phone, and I listened to your—short—conversation. Short but effective.”

            “I’m sorry, Jarod.”

            “Don’t be. Since when do I have a monopoly on underhanded methods of finding out about people? Anyway, perhaps you have performed a valuable service. I’ve been remiss in my mysterious messages to Sydney, Miss Parker, and Broots on this Pretend, and you covered for me nicely. ‘Are you Mrs. Clennam?’ Hopefully that’ll give Syd something to think about for a quite a while, if he ever figures out what it means. I couldn’t have done better myself.” He smiled darkly.

            How did he manage to combine jocularity with so much darkness? He was like Dickens.

            “Jarod, who’s Broots?”

            “I’m hoping that someday he’ll turn out to be a Newman Noggs or even a Mr. Pancks. You’ll meet him when they come. I give them until tomorrow, Monday morning at the latest.”

            “Jarod, you have to get out of here!”

            “Not until we’re done. I don’t leave until I catch my man. Don’t worry. I’m always a step ahead of the Centre.”

            “This is Dave Rothmayer. I—I didn’t really know who to call. My dad’s gone this weekend, visiting my aunt who’s sick, you know? And I don’t want to worry my mom, not with the kids at home. But then I found the note from Tim Morone, and I figured I’d better call you—I’m real nervous. Yes, the basement of the Bailey Building! You know, I was just moving some stuff, and there’s this room—! You’re going to come? Well—I didn’t want to put you out— No, I haven’t mentioned it to anyone yet. I thought I should call the police— OK, I’ll wait till you get here.”

            Dave hung up the phone and gave it back to Jarod, who grinned at him.

            “Well done!”

            “Thanks, Professor! Now I guess I just stand here and wait.”

            “Right. I’ll be right here to back you up. Amy?”

            I nodded and stepped back behind the boxes, looked through the viewfinder of the video camera with its night-vision mode on. It was an incredibly expensive camera, I was sure, like the ones used by the press, and I wondered where he’d gotten it on such short notice. He knew everything about how to use it and had shown me what to do. I was well hidden by my boxes outside the little closet room, as was Jarod by his, but Dave was there in front of them by himself, suddenly apprehensive but excited, too. It’s not every day a teenager gets to let a murderer stalk him and then help catch him.

            The wait seemed interminable, but finally we heard a door open and close and heavy footsteps come through distant rooms. Decidedly creepy. I switched on the video camera.

            Sam Leland came into the room, a small flashlight aimed at the floor. “David?” he called softly.

            “Oh, Mr. Leland! I’m so glad to see you! I’m sure you can explain what it all means.” Dave shone his flashlight in Leland’s face.

            “Don’t do that! Lower your light, young man.”

            “Sorry. I’m just—well, it’s weird. What does it all mean?”

            “We’ll get it straightened out, son. I know you’re worried about your friend Amy’s father.” He smiled kindly. He looked like such a nice man. “Tell me what you meant by a note from Tim Morone. He’s dead, you know.”

            “Of course I know! But, see, I was moving some of these boxes ‘cause I suddenly remembered that I found this little room back here when I was a kid and I thought maybe the police would want to know about it, and there was this note stuck under one of the boxes, from Tim to Amy, but it had your name in it, and it made me nervous, you know? I mean, what he said about you. It’s not true, is it? I didn’t really believe it, because you know how Tim was, but still—I think the police ought to see it, don’t you? And this room?”

            “Maybe you should let me see the note, David.”

            Dave backed up a step. “Well, I don’t know.”

            “Let me have it, David!”

            “But—it’s not true, is it? I mean—he wasn’t blackmailing you, too, was he? Wouldn’t that make you a suspect, too? What’s—what’s that? No—no—I read somebody gave Tim this drug with a syringe like that—keep it away from me! Did you kill him, Mr. Leland? And frame Professor Doran?”

            He was backing up toward the little room, and Mr. Leland was coming after him, still smiling, the syringe gleaming in the light of Dave’s flashlight.

            “Yes, I did, David, and now, regrettably, you are a little too smart and know a little too much.”

            “But—but—you can’t kill me! I mean—you’ll never be able to hide it—or pretend like Professor Doran did it—‘cause he’s in jail! So you—you can’t!”

            “Well, David, it’ll go like this. Poor Amy Doran was so desperate to protect her father that when she found her friend Dave snooping around, she panicked. Like father, like daughter.”

            “No! You can’t do that to Amy!” There had been real fear in Dave’s voice, but now anger came into it, and Jarod decided it was time to make his own move.

            “He’s right. You can’t.”

            Leland jerked around to where the deep voice was coming from, and Jarod stepped out from behind his boxes and hit him. Just once, a smooth blow in just the right place to make him crumple. He and Dave caught him and dragged him into the little room while I turned off the video camera and brought it in. In the light of my flashlight held in my teeth, I connected it to its stand where Jarod had set it up. Dave was taking a little too much enjoyment helping Jarod duct tape the drooping Mr. Leland to the chair. He glared at him indignantly when they were done.

            “He was going to frame Amy for murdering me?”

            “He certainly was,” Jarod answered him. “You did a brilliant job, Dave. You think well on your feet. You’ve gotten us enough evidence to convict him. Now it’s time to teach him a lesson he won’t soon forget. Back behind the camera with Amy.”

            Dave squeezed in with him. I gave him a grin. He really was a sweet boy. Just like Young John.

            “Ready?” Jarod asked.

            “Ready.”

            “Camera.”

            I turned it on. Jarod, standing out of the light of our flashlights, dashed a glassful of water on Mr. Leland’s face. He came to with a gasp and a sudden panicked struggle.

            “Good evening, Mr. Casby. Welcome to the Marshalsea Prison. My name is Dickens. I’ll be your narrator for the evening.”

            “What? What is this? Who is that? You have the wrong person! My name is Leland!”

            “Casby, actually, a reference which you would understand if you had ever had the foresight to read Dickens. Let me tell you about Mr. Casby, and we’ll see if you recognize him. Mr. Casby is the financial lord and master of a number of tenants. They love him, think he’s a wonderful fatherly figure. He comes to visit and bestows smiles and kind words on one and all. A veritable biblical Patriarch. Then he goes to his place of business and engages in the day’s work of squeezing those people for every cent he can get out of them. In his heart of hearts he’s a hard, grasping, greedy miser who cares nothing for people as long as he can get what he wants out of them while still looking as good as possible. A big, fat hypocrite. Sound familiar?”

            “You’re insane!” Leland cried.

            “No more insane than a man who tortures a college student with drugs just for the fun of it!”

            “You’re insane!” the bursar shouted at him again.

            “Come, come now, Mr. Casby. I already have your confession, made to another boy you were about to kill, as well as your intention to frame an innocent man’s innocent daughter for it.”

            “What do you want? Tell me—I’ll give you what you want!”

            “The way you gave Tim Morone what he wanted? Well, I don’t want anything, Mr. Casby—except justice. And this is justice.” The syringe glinted in his hand. “Your own chosen weapon. A combination of Cyclamenaline and Paranethol. Now I’ve chosen it—for you.”

            “No!” Sam Leland cried.

            “Is that the way Tim Morone begged? And it felt good, didn’t it, to hear him beg? So much power. And now I’ve got the power, Mr. Casby.”

            As he brought the needle closer to Leland’s skin, the bursar begged, “Don’t! Don’t!”

            “It’s not quite so fun anticipating the pain as it is watching it, isn’t it? And it was fun, wasn’t it? Wasn’t it?” he roared, making Dave and me both jump. My hands were icy.

            “Yes! Yes, it was! I enjoyed making that little toad squeal and cry! But what does it have to do with you? I’ve never done anything to you!”

            “My indignation is aggravated by the dastardly cruelties practiced on helpless youth in this foul den,” Jarod snapped. “Have a care; for if you do raise the devil within me, the consequences shall fall heavily upon your own head!” I recognized the slightly-altered quote as one of Nicholas Nickleby’s, before he thrashed Mr. Squeers, the cruel schoolmaster. “The moral, Mr. Casby, is that there are people in this world who won’t sit by and let innocent people suffer!” He leaned close and said quietly, almost a snarl, “And I’m one of them. Professor Doran and his daughter won’t suffer any more for the murder of Tim Morone. You planted all that evidence, but there was no syringe found. Why is that, Mr. Casby? My guess is that you’re the kind of man who would keep it, to gloat over, as memorabilia of your moment of power. You did, didn’t you?”

            The sharp tip was dangerously close. He gasped, “Yes, I did!”

            “Where do you keep it?”

            “In—in my desk in my office.”

            “You know, I’ve said all along that you’re a man who prepares. You think of everything. But that was a stupid thing to do. Your power went to your head. It was like a drug, and drugs dull the brain. Like this one.” And he plunged the needle into Leland’s arm.

            Leland’s scream rang in the tiny room. I clutched Dave’s arm, petrified. I had been so convinced he wasn’t going to do it. I really thought he wasn’t the sort of man to do to a guilty person all the terrible things that person had done to an innocent victim. There is a reason why we punish things like torture: they’re simply wrong, whether done to a jerk like Tim Morone or a murderer like Sam Leland. I had thought his sense of justice was more…just than that.

            Jarod came back, turned off the video camera, and took it off its stand. He said to the whimpering Leland, “I’ll come back and take care of you tomorrow,” then said to us, “We’re done. Come on.”

            Dumbly we followed him. He pushed a few of the boxes back into place. Then he noticed our ashen faces in the light of his flashlight.

            “What’s wrong? I know my methods are a little unorthodox, but—”

            “A little unorthodox!” I cried. “Jarod, you—”

            Realizing dawned in his eyes. “Oh, no! No—Little Dorrit, I didn’t do what you think! That wasn’t Cyclamenaline and Paranethol I gave him but a much milder drug. Any moment now he’s going to realize that the slight burning under his skin was only enough to scare him, and he’s going to be feeling like a complete fool. I could never do that to another person, not even one as guilty as Leland.”

            I put my hand to my head. “Thank God,” I muttered.

            Jarod popped the tape out of the camera and gave it to Dave, along with a fat manila envelope. “Would you like to take the evidence to the police?”

            “Would I!” he cried.

            Jarod gave him keys. “You can take my car.” Dave’s face beamed. “Just don’t get any tickets, OK? Bring it back to the Skarsgards’ house when you’re done.”

            “Thanks, Professor!” He flew away.

            Jarod put his arm around my shoulders, and we walked out of the building. “Did you really think I would do that, Little Dorrit?”

            “I was convinced that you wouldn’t, that you didn’t have it in you to hurt someone like that, but then you did, seemingly, and I was terribly confused.”

            “I’m sorry. Other than misunderstanding, I hope it wasn’t too disturbing.”

            “Well, I know now that there’s still more to you than I thought.”

            “What do you mean?”

            “Anger,” I said softly. “You have so much anger against people who hurt others, because of the way they hurt you and forced you to hurt others.”

            His arm was heavy around my shoulders, as if he leaned on me for support. “I have gone places I don’t want to go, and I know I will go more places yet I don’t want to go. All I can do is keep focusing on helping people.”

            “The best outlet for anger,” I agreed. “Jarod, you have such a strange way of doing it. Your mind doesn’t work like anyone else’s.”

            “I tried to do it the normal way once, through proper channels. I was on a bomb squad then. It didn’t work. No one would listen. So I do it my own way. Emotional justice. Make a person believe he’s experiencing what his victim experienced. Make him feel the same emotions. Sometimes, when the law doesn’t work, that’s enough.”

            “Well, congratulations, Nicholas, on thrashing my Sir Mulberry Hawk.”

            “For your honor, Kate, and that of your father.”

            I suddenly snorted, laughing. “Mr. Casby! You really are Mr. Pancks, Jarod!”

            His laugh rang out in the quiet street.

            Between fueling the jet, taking off, landing, and driving to the tiny town of Morrison, it had been deemed quicker simply to drive from Blue Cove than to fly. Miss Parker tried not to show that she was impressed with the way Broots had seized upon the name of Clennam and searched Internet records until he found a single, tiny mention of a Jarod Clennam teaching English literature in place of a professor jailed for murder. She only wished she could get out of the car and push it to make it go faster. Taking the jet might have been slower in the long run, but it felt faster. Broots dozed in the front seat, and Sydney, beside her in the back, was still buried in his book, suddenly chuckling.

            “Syd, what are you giggling about?”

            “Dickens’ characters. This Mr. Pancks—he’s been working for a hypocrite of criminal proportions named Mr. Casby, doing his dirty work. Everyone believes Mr. Casby is good because he looks like a biblical Patriarch, with long, flowing hair and beard, and suddenly Mr. Pancks decides he’s had enough of it, and he exposes him in front of everyone. And he—” laughing “—he cuts his hair and beard and trims his hat and leaves him standing, ‘a bare-polled, goggle-eyed, big-headed lumbering personage, not in the least impressive, not in the least venerable.’”

            “Good for him,” came Broots’ sleepy tones from the front. “Sometimes I wish—”

            “What do you wish?” Miss Parker snapped.

            “Oh, nothing, really. I don’t wish anything.” He closed his eyes and feigned sleep.

            Sydney continued reading. Miss Parker snapped at Sam to drive faster.

            They sent my father home the next day, Sunday, two weeks after they’d arrested him. All charges were dropped, and there were even apologies, though they were technically unnecessary. Friends came in droves from the school to see him, everybody a bit shell-shocked to learn about Sam Leland but  most secretly pleased that it was he and not my father. The press came, and since it seemed likely to turn into a circus, Young John brought Jarod’s cotton candy maker, which he had ended up buying after all and giving to Dave. (Dave brought it out at the Marshalsea on occasion later, and cotton candy on the quad in the fall became a tradition after that.) Pastor Bert came and already seemed to be well acquainted with my father. How many times did he visit him? I wondered. I could see that we would probably be going back to the church where I had made a fool out of myself. I didn’t mind.

            The one person who was conspicuously absent was Jarod. No one seemed to notice. The press didn’t yet know what he’d done. My father certainly didn’t. The police were looking for him for a statement, but they weren’t at the party.

            After everyone had left and my father had gone to bed, very happy to be in his own bed again and looking forward to the prospect of good coffee in the morning, I left my house and walked to the Skarsgards’. It was empty of all Jarod’s things, all the Russian and English literature, all the PEZ refills and ice cream, the silver briefcase and little silvery recording discs. I wanted to cry, but then I remembered that he still had the key I’d given him to my father’s office. I walked to the school, found the front door of Clauser Hall propped open with a fat Bleak House, and brought the book up to my father’s office.

            Jarod was sitting there in the dark, watching one of his recordings. I came up behind him and watched it with him. He was a little boy, far littler than I’d seen him before, perhaps five years old, solemn-faced and dark-eyed, and there was Sydney once again pressing him to do a man’s work, ignoring his protests of fear. Anger rose in me against that man. But the little boy Jarod broke away, ran out of the room, pursued by tall men, struggling against them when they caught him. And Sydney took him from the men, spoke gently to him, and held him like a father should hold his child. Jarod’s fingers went out to the screen, touching Sydney’s strangely tender face.

            “That’s how I think of Sydney. That man there. He doesn’t want me to, but I can’t help it. That man is still inside him. I’ve been trying to find him ever since.”

            “Will you still care about Sydney when you find your family?”

            “Yes. Though maybe I won’t need him so much.” He closed the case and stood up.

            “You’re leaving now.”

            “Yes. It can’t end like Little Dorrit, you know.”

            “I never expected it to. Your beginning was like Arthur Clennam’s, but not your end. You’re much more than Arthur. You’re Smike and Oliver Twist and David Copperfield and Esther Summerson and Little Dorrit herself…all the children looking for someone to love them. And you’re Nicholas Nickleby and Mr. Pancks and Mr. Jarndyce and Nancy and Sydney Carton, the people who just can’t sit quietly and watch bad things happen to innocent people.”

            He said softly those poignant words of Sydney Carton: “I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy.”

            I couldn’t keep my tears back. “If you end up trading your life for someone else’s, escape before it comes to the guillotine, OK?”

            “I will. I promise, Kate.”

            He hugged me close, pressed his lips to the top of my head. I could almost feel him blinking back tears of his own.

            “Now go, Nicholas. Find some Smike to rescue. And someday, when all the Ralph Nicklebys and Mr. Casbys and Fagins and Squeers and Sikes and Mr. Polkinghorns and Sir Mulberry Hawks are defeated and there’s nothing more to fear, come back to the Marshalsea.”

            “I will, Little Dorrit. I will.”

            He was gone, and I sat down at my father’s desk and cried. Then I walked home to my father to begin our world again.

            When my father walked into his first class on Monday, they gave him a standing ovation. He told me later that the standing ovation really belonged to that remarkable professor who had gotten them interested in Dickens.

            While he was teaching, I went up to the nearly empty office that had been Jarod’s and waited. They were late. It turned out they had had a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, or they would have been here the night before. I took pleasure in telling Miss Parker that Jarod had left only last night.

            She was very beautiful, and I couldn’t help wondering if, maybe, in some strange way, she was the Little Dorrit to Jarod’s Arthur Clennam. The Centre was her Marshalsea Prison, she tied to it by her own father’s position in it, and Jarod the friend trying to help her see beyond it.

            Broots wasn’t what I expected, small, nervous, dressed like he was stuck in the ‘70s. He was a very strange counterpart for the tall, arrogant, elegant Miss Parker. I could see him as a kind of Mr. Pancks, quietly content to do the bad guy’s dirty work. But would he ever break out like the absurd Mr. Pancks did?

            And then there was Sydney, and he was different than the Sydney of the recordings. Thirty years older and gentler of face and voice. His eyes were deeper. They hid more. They looked around the empty office, and they looked at me with a sudden sharpness. I couldn’t hate him. Maybe I pitied him.

            Miss Parker was swearing at my news and their flat tire while Sydney and I examined each other. When she was done, I gave her the red notebook. She flipped it open.

            “Amy Doran. You’re the one whose father Jarod investigated?”

            “Yes. He got him freed from jail.”

            “Typical. The Count of Monte Cristo strikes again.”

            “Actually, Edmond Dantes was after revenge, not justice. There is a difference.”

            She glared at me. I knew too much about her to be intimidated.

            Sydney said, “What kind of literature professor was he?”

            “A brilliant one. He taught English literature, and he taught it as if it was his life. He particularly liked Dickens. He said Dickens’ themes of justice and society go far beyond their historical context. He was right.”

            “Yes, he was,” Sydney agreed.

            “Please Syd, take a literature class on your own time,” Miss Parker said. “Did he leave anything else, Miss Doran?”

            I smiled at her. “Yes, he did, Miss Parker. Like any good professor, he left you homework.” I thunked three fat books onto the desk. “Your assignment is to read the book he has chosen for you and apply it to your own social or personal context. Miss Parker.” I held out to her Bleak House. “He said you would identify with Esther Summerson. He said that like Esther you’re on a quest for your mother and your identity.” I didn’t expect the expression that crossed Miss Parker’s face, an expression of pain nearly as profound as Jarod’s. It softened her, made her human, if only for a moment. She snatched the book from me. I picked up Oliver Twist. “Broots, Jarod said you care about children. He said you might see yourself in Nancy, but he hopes it ends better for you than for her.” He blinked at me, uncertain but touched, and took the book. I picked up the last one and held it out to Sydney. “Sydney, he said he hopes you find yourself in this book, too.” He seemed surprised at the book I handed him, but he took it.

            Miss Parker said, “Do you know where he lived?”

            “Yes, but you’ll find nothing there. It’s a furnished house belonging to another professor on sabbatical. Everything in it is theirs.”

            “I want to see it anyway.”

            I shrugged and gave her the Skarsgards’ address. Sydney surprised me when he said, “You two go on ahead. I’ll meet you there.”

            Miss Parker took her book and her Broots and her large “sweeper” and swept out. Sydney looked at me.

            “Is it close enough to walk?”

            “Yes.”

            I locked the office door behind me. Sydney perused the cover of his book as we went down the stairs.

            “I had expected Little Dorrit.”

            “He figured you had probably already read it.”

            “I have. I just finished it.” He gave me a look. I gave him one back. We understood one another, Sydney and I. “But I have also read Nicholas Nickleby already, long ago.”

            “Sometimes you get more out of a rereading than you got the first time around. Do you think you might be Nicholas to his Smike?”

            “No,” he answered softly. “I never beat the school master. I never seized him and ran for it, as perhaps I should have. But perhaps…I am Newman Noggs.”

            Newman Noggs, the pathetic little man who worked for the piece’s real villain, Ralph Nickleby, and tried, in his own quiet, helpless way, to make things better for Nicholas and his sister Kate. Sydney as Newman Noggs. That put a different light on things.

            “Newman Noggs?” I said. “Not Mrs. Clennam?”

            “Yes, I am Mrs. Clennam, and I’m not proud of it. But if I may also be Newman Noggs…perhaps Jarod won’t hate me.”

            “He doesn’t hate you. Did Arthur hate Mrs. Clennam? He doesn’t hate you. Quite the opposite. He would be Smike to your Nicholas, if you would let him.”

            “I can’t be Nicholas. I don’t have it in me.”

            “But you taught him to be Nicholas. And Arthur.”

            “Maybe I did. That’s something, at least.”

            I quoted Little Dorrit’s description of Arthur to him. “Jarod Clennam is always to be relied upon for being kind and generous and good.”

            “He is. That is the amazing thing about Jarod. And you, Amy Doran, are you Little Dorrit?”

            “No,” I said. “I’m Kate Nickleby.”

            Sydney’s face flashed bright. “Are you?”

            “I had that privilege for a week. You raised an extraordinary man, Sydney. At least some part of that was your doing.”

            Sydney sighed and didn’t answer. We were approaching the Skarsgards’ house.

            “Jarod once told me what he likes best about Dickens, Sydney.”

            “What is that, Miss Doran?”

            “Hope. There is always hope for Dickens’ characters. There is always hope that evil will be defeated, that lost children will find families, and that the helpless little man caught in a web of deceit and fear will redeem himself and make a difference.”

            “Yes, there is that in Dickens,” he murmured. We stood on the steps of the Skarsgards’ house. “Did Jarod tell you all this, Miss Doran?”

            “No. I found it out. I’m going to be a criminal behaviorist, Sydney. I know how to find things out about unusual people. That’s how we caught the murderer last week. Jarod described him from inside his head, and I knew who he was. Now are you going to tell Miss Parker?”

            “No. I’m a psychiatrist. I believe in confidentiality.”

            The door opened, and Miss Parker, Broots, and their unpleasant-looking sweeper came out. “Thanks, Sydney,” Miss Parker said sarcastically. “You were a lot of help. Miss Doran, did Jarod happen to say where he was going next?”

            “No, but he did mention something about having a Circumlocution Office to deal with.”

            “Circumlocution?” Broots repeated. “What’s a Circumlocution Office?”

            Sydney answered him. “It’s a governmental office whose objective is to keep people going round in circles and not getting anywhere rather than actually accomplishing anything. One of Dickens’ brilliant caricatures.”

            “Jarod’s his own personal Circumlocution Office,” Miss Parker muttered. I hid my grin. Sydney seemed to be doing the same thing. “Come on, Syd.” As they went toward the black car at the curb, I heard her say, “What did you two have to talk about, Sydney?”

            “Dickens,” said Sydney.

            I met Jarod again two years later. I was in class at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, and there was to be a guest speaker on the subject of dealing with first impressions and intuition. The handout said Dr. Bell, but when the professor introduced him, he said, “Dr. Jarod Bell.” I sat up suddenly straight in my chair, swiveled round to stare at the tall man coming down the steps of the large lecture hall.

            He was different. I could see it in his stance, his eyes, his smile, even the way his longer hair was swept smoothly back from his brow instead of short and spiked as it used to be. Darkness and pain had happened to him in the last two years. He was an innocent child no longer. He might almost be said to be a wounded, sullen teenager. But his teaching still demonstrated a passion for justice and a care for the innocent. Whatever life had done to him, he was still working on the side of goodness.

            I didn’t know if he’d seen me in the crowded class. Afterward I went down to the front and waited while other students asked him questions. He’d been brilliant and eloquent, and they had many questions and comments. I waited, and he finally turned to me.

            “Hello, Nicholas,” I said quietly.

            “Kate?” The two years melted away, and there was the child again, momentarily. He bounded over and swept me up in a hug. “Why, Little Dorrit!”

            “Mr. Clennam. Or perhaps I should say Doctor Bell. What’s that, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. Bell?”

            “Exactly. So you took my advice, Little Dorrit.”

            “I did. I’m studying criminal psychology. Someday I hope to work with the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.”

            “Lofty ambitions. It’s difficult to get into that department. But you’ll do it.”

            “And you? What are you doing here? We meet under such academic circumstances. Who are you stalking now?”

            He went grave. “No. I can’t tell you. If you are in any way mixed up with me again, you’ll have your own Centre investigation, you and everyone associated with you. I can’t let that happen to you. I’m only here one day, just to get a single piece of information. I’ll get it and be gone. Promise me you’ll stay out of it.”

            Heavy disappointment settled around me. “I promise, Jarod. But in exchange, tell me about the last two years. Something. Anything. Where have you gone? What have you been?”

            A smile went across his face. “I’ve been a psychiatric patient and a junkie, an ex-con on parole, a bounty hunter, a pool shark, a white supremacist, and an elementary school substitute teacher.”

            I laughed. “That’s quite a combination.”

            “Yes. And—I’ve also been Sydney Carton. I exchanged my life for—for my own döppelganger—I was taken to La Force prison—I faced my own guillotine.”

            “Jarod. They caught you?”

            He smiled a grim smile. “I escaped. Again. And, Little Dorrit, I found my father.”

            “Oh, Jarod.”

            “Found him and lost him. The story of my life. Everything I find I lose. But he was there. I felt him hug me. I called him Dad. He said he loved me, was proud of me.” Tears gleamed in his eyes but didn’t fall. “And you, Kate? Has anything happened to you other than striking out into the wide world?”

            “Well—I’m engaged, Nicholas.”

            “You are?” His smile was pure joy. “Congratulations!”

            I laughed. “Guess what his name is.”

            His eyebrows went up, puzzled. “Well—I don’t know. Arthur?”

            “No. Frank.”

            “Frank?” Now he laughed. “Frank Cheeryble?”

            “Very, very like Kate Nickleby’s husband. I met him at the Methodist church in Morrison. He’s Pastor Bert’s nephew, and Pastor Bert himself is very much like one of those wonderful Cheeryble brothers.”

            “Ned or Charles?”

            “Charles. But now for a last name I will have Wojciechowski. Which I can pronounce now.”

            Jarod laughed again, a good sound. We looked at each other a moment. “I have to go.”

            I sternly quelled my tears. “You changed my life, Jarod. My life is ‘peaceful, useful, prosperous, and happy.’”

            He blinked back his own. “And you…brought joy to mine, Little Dorrit. You gave me family, at a time when I needed it badly.”

            “You and me both.”

            He hugged me again. “Goodbye, Kate.”

            “Goodbye, Nicholas.”