“They never ought to have renovated that old school for the administration headquarters. They just love throwing the taxpayers’ money away, don’t they? But I guess I shouldn’t complain, since that includes paying you.” She made a funny sound, and he knew she had brought her fist up to her mouth. “I don’t mean paying you is a waste.”

“I know,” he said. “Look, Marie, I have to go. Our minutes-”

“Then why do you tell me to call your cell instead of the office phone?”

“They’re sticklers about personal calls,” he began, trying to talk over her, but she was hurtling down her own track of thought: “You always – Mounds bars! That’s what I want. Mounds bars. I was watching television, and there was some commercial, and it reminded me of the old commercial, sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don’t. Well, I don’t, so I want Mounds, okay?”

Trust me, Marie. You feel like a nut every day. Then he felt bad, as he always did, for his sour interior monologue. Marie couldn’t help how she was. “Mounds bars, got it.”

“The little ones. But not the ones in the bag. The ones that they line up in a row, on the cardboard.”

“You’ve got it, my sweet tooth Marie.”

He opened his wallet, and looked at the ATM slip from that morning’s withdrawal: $17,922 in his account. There was another $55,000 in the IRAs, but they couldn’t touch it for another five years. He had their regular expenses down to less than $2,500 a month, so they had a year before the money ran out, and then there was always a second mortgage, although that would require Marie’s signature. But he didn’t need a year. All he needed was to get that girl’s attention, get her to fulfill the promises she had made, even if she acted as if she had never heard of him.

The french fries had passed their peak, but he ate them anyway. Why was that? Why did fries lose their perfection so quickly, and why did people keep eating them once they had turned cold and mushy? If he were an inventor, he would come up with a way to produce ever-crisp, ever-hot french fries. Or maybe a restaurant that served only french fries, and not just the Thrasher’s-in-a cup-on-the-boardwalk thing. He’d have french fries with gravy and hollandaise and mayonnaise and all kinds of sauces. That’s what he would do, if he were an inventor. But he was a dreamer, in the best sense of the word. His head was filled with beautiful stories, stories that unfolded the way that How the West Was Won had raced across the screen at the Hillendale, back when he and Bob were no more than eleven, and you could see the lines on the print, breaking the picture into thirds, because the theater wasn’t set up for the Cinerama technique.

He remembered, too, how ancient Jimmy Stewart had looked to them, how they had cringed at the idea of that bony codger pitching woo to Carroll Baker, who made them feel vaguely strange inside, although they didn’t want to admit it to each other, and didn’t have the vocabulary to explain what they felt, not even to themselves.

Now he was older than Jimmy Stewart was then. How had that happened?

Tess’s day was thrown off course much as her scull had been, and she never quite caught up, running late for every appointment, five in all. Autumn was turning into a reliably busy season, almost as good as February. It was as if back-to-school fever carried over into every aspect of people’s lives. Summer gone, people got serious about their messy legal claims. Tess also had a booming business in background checks on nannies. She had told Flip Tumulty the truth: She had more business than she could handle.

Besides, Tess, too, had gone back to school in a fashion, teaching a course through Johns Hopkins’ noncredit division, the Odyssey program. To her amazement, there were a dozen people in Baltimore who thought they might want to be private investigators. More shockingly, they believed Tess Monaghan was the woman who could show them how. She had scoffed at the idea when the program’s director first proposed it – her own career path had been highly unorthodox, perhaps even mildly illegal – but her network of PI friends had been so openly covetous of the offer that she had been forced to reconsider. The only downside was that it made for a very long Monday, and today’s disruptions meant she barely had time to fortify herself with a Luna bar before the three-hour session started at 6:30.

For this, the fourth meeting in the ten-week course, the students had been asked to bring laptops with wireless access. Eleven of her Charles Street Irregulars, as she had begun to think of them, had their computers open and ready to go. The twelfth, Felicia Blossom, had a cell phone on her desk, a cell phone so ancient and relatively massive that it could be a candidate for a Smithsonian exhibit on early mobile telecommunications.

“Do you not have a laptop, Mrs. Blossom?” The woman was in her sixties and given, perhaps inevitably, to wearing flowery dresses. Had she dressed that way after she became Mrs. Blossom, or had her riotous prints of peonies and cabbage roses attracted Mr. Blossom to her?

She nodded, brandishing the phone.

“That’s a phone,” Tess said, trying to mask her irritation.

“Yes, but don’t phones have all the same geegaws as computers?”

“Geegaws?”

“You know, the bells and whistles? Whatever. My son’s phone can take pictures and send e-mails – he sends me photos of my grandbabies from Phoenix – so I figure mine could, too, if someone showed me how. I couldn’t find the instruction booklet.”

Tess was aware of the rest of the class’s simmering impatience, an almost Colosseum-like lust for a little Blossom blood on the floor. The woman was never prepared, and she had a habit of asking questions that were achingly off point. But Tess wanted to believe that she would never be one of those teachers who won over the majority by exploiting the class pariah.

True, Mrs. Blossom was never going to be a private investigator – but then, neither were the others in the class. She was simply the only one who was honest about it, writing on her orientation form, under “What do you hope to achieve through this class?” Something to do on Monday nights until NBC stops running those weird shows I don’t understand. In some ways, Tess even preferred Mrs. Blossom to the three wannabe crime novelists, who believed themselves undercover in the class. They thought they were so stealthy, but they didn’t know that Odyssey provided teachers with all the students’ previous coursework in the program, and this trio of thirty-something men had taken two semesters of creative writing and one survey, Writing Wrongs: The Crime Novel in the Twenty-first Century. But even if Tess hadn’t seen their records, she would be onto them by now, with their endless questions about the quotidian details of an investigator’s life. One had even asked what she ate for breakfast.

“I’m afraid I’m not much good with phones, either,” Tess said to Mrs. Blossom. “I know how to use mine, but not others. Why don’t you come up front and sit next to me, as I talk the class through public record searches, online and off-line?”

Beaming as if she had been anointed teacher’s pet, Mrs. Blossom bustled up front and pulled her chair so close that Tess was overwhelmed by her perfume, a sickly sweet gardenia.

“Let’s start with land records,” Tess said, trying to reach past Mrs. Blossom and type. The lyrics from the old Police song “Don’t Stand So Close to Me” popped into her head, and she had to lose herself in the byways of the Maryland Department of Assessments and Taxation to stifle her giggles. This woman had paid six hundred dollars because NBC’s Monday night lineup had failed her. She deserved the pretense of respect at the very least. “In Maryland, you can research the history of ownership with just the address, using the assessor’s Web site, but you still might have to go to the courthouse for additional information. Your address, Mrs. Blossom?”