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.