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.