What were the chances? I hung up and looked at Poe. “What does this mean?”

“It means that Miss Goody-Goody’s got a secret crib.”

I considered this for a moment. “Is it possible that everyone was right all along? That Jenny did just go away for the weekend, but now maybe she’s run into trouble down in New York?”

Poe gave a determined nod. “I’m going down there.”

“I’m coming with you.”

He looked at me. “Amy, you haven’t slept and you look like hell.”

“So? I’ll sleep on the train.”

“And…it could be dangerous.”

“Right, because you’re the badass who freaks out when he punches someone?”

Poe took a deep breath. “You are very difficult.”

“You set the curve.”

Sleeping on the Metro North commuter train takes talent. Sleeping on the Metro North commuter train in the middle of a (possible) kidnapping investigation while your partner-né-nemesis sits across from you and marks up pages of his law textbook with a squeaky highlighter takes the kind of talent usually reserved for deaf, blind, and comatose Zen monks. I gave up before we hit Stamford.

According to Poe’s curt update when I stopped pretending to sleep, Josh had called the police, who’d berated him for not contacting campus security when Lydia had caught an intruder in my room. If anything was stolen, we were to file a report—with campus security. But nothing had been stolen, and the second Josh dropped the words “Rose & Grave” in the mix, the cops clammed up. Either they thought we were Eli pranksters, or they didn’t want to get involved. Either way, we were on our own.

I stared out the window for a while, and then, for a while longer, I stared at Poe. He was back in his usual attire today: wool pants slightly shiny at the knees, and a pilled gray sweater under a black wool overcoat in dire need of a good lint brushing. But really, who was I to talk? I was wearing yesterday’s clothes for my glamorous trip into the city. Maybe later we could catch dinner and a show.

You know, after we did our Remington Steele act.

Poe caught me staring. “Can I help you?”

“Sorry,” I said. “I was just thinking—sorry, spacing out.” I looked out the window. “This isn’t what I imagine when I think about going to the city for the weekend.”

He returned to his textbook. “I wouldn’t know. I never went into the city for the weekend.”

“Not even with Malcolm?”

He snorted. “I don’t think we’d be interested in the same spots. Plus, I’d probably cramp his style.”

Shocker. Poe had no style. I returned to my absent gazing out at the dreary rain-soaked landscape.

“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?” Poe went on, and I looked at him. “You never have to worry about anything. You have no idea how rough it was for me at school. I was broke.”

“I’m broke, too,” I said. “Way over a hundred thousand dollars in debt. You’ve seen my files. You know my parents aren’t rolling like Malcolm’s or George’s or Clarissa’s—”

“No, Amy, I was penniless broke. Beyond loans. I didn’t go into the city, I didn’t go out, I didn’t go…get pizza and a beer. A two-dollar slice of pizza! I had about five dollars of discretionary spending per week. Thank God for the coffee I stole from the dining hall.” He looked back down at his book. “When I got into—you know—that was it for me. I suddenly had a social life. I couldn’t go to the bars or the clubs or whatever, but I could go to the tomb. It was still tough, though. I had the chops, but not exactly the pedigree. My dad’s a landscaper. I think he practically starved these last four years so I could go to Eli instead of a state college. That’s who I worked for this summer.”

And it must have been nigh on impossible to go crawling home to his father and admit he couldn’t get a job the year he graduated from Eli. Sudden contrition overcame my usual disdain for the man seated across from me.

I leaned forward. “James, I’m so sorry—”

He slammed the book closed. “For Christ’s sake, stop calling me that!” He looked away, ran his fingers through his hair. “My name is Jamie. Always has been. Not Jim, or Jimbo, or James. Nobody calls me James.”

Jamie? I sat back against my seat and digested this for a few moments. So Poe had financial issues at school. He was far from the first. Lydia’s dad got laid off from work her sophomore year, putting the whole family in pretty rough financial straits, and she didn’t become a misanthrope. She simply picked social activities that were free. Amazing how much fun you could have with some classmates and your college’s cracked Parcheesi set. Still, it explained a lot.

“I still think of you as Poe, you know. It suits you.”

He met my eyes and cracked a smile. A real smile. “Two dollars. And you don’t want to know what I think of you as.”

“I can probably guess.” I watched him open his book back up. “So, are things…better now?”

“Law school gives me a more reasonable living expenses budget,” he said, “but I’m not exactly carting around in high style.” He gestured to his outfit. “It’s okay, though. I’ll make it all back when I’m out of school. I’m going to work for some big firm for a while, get rich.”

“And then?”

He shrugged. “Politics. Provided I have any connections left after this little caper. Which looks unlikely. You still going to work in publishing?”

“I don’t know. I thought about it a lot this summer. I was working for—”

“Kelting’s think tank.”

“Right. We put together a little book of memoirs. Exprostitutes, illegal aliens caught up in the sex trade…. It was pretty powerful stuff. But it also made me realize how limited my education really is. Smollett et al. are fine, but I think I’ve got a lot more to learn.” I looked down the train car, at the gum-encrusted floor, anywhere but at Jamie. I hadn’t talked to many people about this. “I was thinking of maybe going to graduate school. Not necessarily for Literature. Maybe something else.”

“More school, more debt,” Poe said. “I don’t suggest going unless you have a clear plan in mind.”

Right. Way to pop that little bubble.

“Unless you do know what you want to do, and pretending you don’t is your way of getting around actually making the decision.”

“Pardon me?”

Poe put his feet up on my seat. “In undergrad, there was this type. Drove me crazy. They would always act coy about it, but what they wanted to do was go into politics. And not the government-appointee kind like Josh or me or even Kurt Gehry. They wanted to run for office. But somehow, they believed that saying they wanted to run for office was some sort of ego trip that signified they shouldn’t.”

“I don’t want to run for office.”

“Not saying you do. But maybe you want to be a social worker, or a teacher, but won’t admit it because you’re afraid people won’t think it’s lofty enough for an Eli grad.”

“If I thought that, you’re precisely the type of person who I’d be afraid of judging me.”

He put his hand to his chest. “I’m the son of a gardener.”

“You’re a Digger at the best law school in the country.”

“You’re a Digger at the best university in the country.”

“Even more reason to aspire to greatness.”

He laughed. “Someday, go look through the roster of the patriarchs. See what they all do for a living. You may be surprised. We’ve even got a garbageman.” He opened his book again. After a page or so, he added, “My mom was a social worker.”

“Did she retire?”

“She died.”

And that pretty much killed the conversation. We rode the rest of the way into New York City in silence, and I even managed to doze off for a little while. I don’t know how many pages Poe read, and I can’t be sure, but I think the humidity in the car must have done wonders for the squeakiness of his highlighter, because it completely stopped making noise.