Read Jimmy Fox - Nick Herald 01 - Deadly Pedigree for Free Online

dolts–mine!”
    Smirking in disappointment, Una looked at Dion, as if to confirm their suspicion that Nick had turned into a hardhearted capitalist swine. They contemplated their drinks while Nick fidgeted, and the loud, eclectic, alternative-alternative music of the Folio swirled around them.
    “Just think about it, okay?” Una urged before lapsing into a pout.

    How could he refuse? Nick asked the dregs of his beer, as Dion launched into a particularly inspired diatribe against their perennial archfoe, Frederick “the Usurper” Tawpie, currently the assistant department head of the Freret University English department.
    He owed these friends so much. And for a time twelve years before, he and Una had been much closer than friends–lovers, in fact.
    She had just joined the department then, a rosy-faced, diminutively sexy, enthusiastic young professor, who frolicked like a nymph through the wordy marshes of Thackeray, Dickens, George Eliot, Hardy, Meredith, and Trollope. There had been three, four years of passion and cozy togetherness, many late nights of nakedness and laughter and wine and both Brownings aloud by candlelight. A lifetime of love seemed the logical outcome–at least in her mind.
    And Nick? Well, he merely let things go on their course, feeling cocky and smiled upon by the universe, feeling the very focus of creation in his unvanquished young man’s egoism.
    But the happier he told himself he was, the more dissatisfied he became. He changed, became moody, solitary; life lost its savor. He turned into a cad, though his students continued to crowd into his classes. Everybody who cared said it was too much Shelley and Byron, the subjects of his graduate seminar that fateful semester. Just an affectation, a Romantic pose he would grow out of. Now, looking back, Nick supposed it was nothing more unusual than a normal professional burnout, which would have been temporary had malice not worsened his circumstances, had Tawpie and computers not given his wheel of fortune a gratuitous damaging turn.
    He had enemies he never suspected, who resented his youth, his good looks, his popularity with the students, his relationship with Una–who knows what. Does jealousy really need a good reason? One thing he did know: jealousy takes more insidious form in the minds of highly educated people.
    There was a charge of plagiarism. He wasn’t sure to this day who first made it; it permeated the department, as if someone had broken wind. He had always suspected that Tawpie at least had something to do with not letting the matter drop, as some of the school’s heavyweights, on and off the faculty, wanted to do.
    An article Nick had published in a literary journal seemed to echo too closely an obscure article by a long-dead critic. Nick was no paragon, but he did have a deep respect for words in the service of art and knowledge; that’s what had drawn him to the study of literature as a profession in the first place. He had never even read the earlier article and maintained that fact through it all.
    They sicced the new department workstation on him. The computer found an unacceptable number of similarities of phrasing. Today, Nick would tell them how dangerous it could be to trust coincidences, especially in the field of genealogy.
    His depressed mood undermined his defense. It was his word against a growing prejudice, until he grew disgusted with the whole thing. He wanted them to can him, to give him his freedom at the cost of his former identity and livelihood.
    The judgment was rendered. Thumbs down.
    Una and Dion defended him to the last. They lobbied successfully for the dropping of charges without comment in exchange for Nick’s quiet departure. Quiet, that is, if not for the unkind, self-serving mouth of then-Assistant Professor Frederick Tawpie. Because he was chairing the departmental affairs committee at the time, and willing to speak for attribution, reporters sought him out. In his statements to the school