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checked out an uppercase K , which can be written a number of different ways and therefore is very useful in handwriting analysis.
    “Oh, the armored car. That was neat.”
    It was neat. But it didn’t answer the boy’s question. Parker continued. “You know Thomas Jefferson?”
    “Third president. Oh, and he lived in Virginia. Like us.”
    “Good. This’s a letter that somebody thinks he wrote. They want me to check it and make sure.”
    One of the more difficult conversations he’d had with Robby and Stephie was explaining what he did for a living. Not the technical part of being a questioned document examiner. But that people would forge letters and documents and try to claim they were real.
    “What’s it say?” the boy asked.
    Parker didn’t answer right away. Oh, answers were important to him. He was, after all, a puzzle master—his lifelong hobby was riddles and word games and brain-teasers. He believed in answers and he tried never to defer responding to his children’s questions. When a mother or father said, “Later,” it was usually for their convenience, hoping the child would forget the question. But the content of this letter made him hedge. After a moment he said, “It’s a letter Jefferson wrote to his oldest daughter.” This much was true. But Parker didn’t go on and tell the boy that the subject of the letter was Mary—his second daughter—who had died of complications from childbirth, as had Jefferson’s wife some years before. He read:
    Back here in Washington I live under a sorrowful pall, haunted as I am by visions of Polly on horseback and running along the porch in good-natured defiance of my prescriptions to her to exercise more caution. . . .
    Parker, certified document examiner, struggled to ignore the sadness he felt reading those words. Concentrate, he told himself, though the terrible image of a father being deprived of one of his children kept intruding.
    A sorrowful pall . . .
    Concentrate.
    He observed that the girl’s nickname in the letter was what Jefferson would have used—born “Mary,” the girl was called “Polly” by her family—and that the punctuation-sparse style was typically Jeffersonian. Theseattested to authenticity. So did some of the events that the letter referred to; they had in fact occurred in Jefferson’s life and had done so around the time the letter had purportedly been written.
    Yes, textually at least, the letter seemed real.
    But that was only half the game. Document examiners are not only linguists and historians, they are scientists too. Parker still had to perform the physical examination of the letter.
    As he was about to slip it under one of his Bausch & Lomb compound microscopes the doorbell rang again.
    Oh, no . . . Parker closed his eyes. It was Joan. He knew it. She’d picked up her dogs and returned to complicate his life further. Maybe she had the social worker with her now. A surprise commando raid . . .
    “I’ll get it,” Robby said.
    “No,” Parker said quickly. Too quickly. The boy was unnerved by his abrupt reaction.
    Father smiled at son. “I’ll go.” And slid off the stool, climbed the stairs.
    He was mad now. He was determined that the Whos would have a fun New Year’s Eve, despite their mother. He flung the door open.
    Well . . .
    “Hello, Parker.”
    It took him a second to remember the name of the tall, gray-haired man. He hadn’t seen the agent for years. Then he recalled. “Cage.”
    He didn’t recognize the woman standing beside him.

4
    “How you doin’, Parker? Never expected to see me in a month of blue Mondays, did you? Wait, I’m mixing up my expressions. But you get the picture.”
    The agent had changed very little. A bit grayer. A little more gaunt. He seemed taller. Parker remembered that Cage was exactly fifteen years older than he. They shared June as a birth month. Gemini. Yin-yang.
    From the corner of his eye Parker saw Robby appear in the hallway with his