PROLOGUE September 2009: “Cuttings” The reader was a retired middle school English teacher whose mother had come to live at the facility in 2001. Every week for the next five years, the reader made the thirty-minute drive from Alachua to Gainesville to visit her mother. In clement weather they sat in the same cobblestoned courtyard, nestled between the two main residential buildings of the retirement home, where she now sat with me. A fountain gurgled in the center of the courtyard, ringed on three sides by bistro-style tables that had been painted and repainted to stay the corrosive effects of Florida’s tropical climate. Even now, in late September, the air was thick with moisture and the temperature hovered near ninety—and that was in the shade. Her mother had passed away in ’06, but the reader still returned each week as a volunteer to read to the residents who either had no family or had family who rarely, if ever, visited. The director of the facility had given me her name and phone number. No, he had told me, to his knowledge the man calling himself William James Henry had not been close to any resident. The only visitor he had had was the volunteer who sat across from me, sipping iced tea from a tall glass in which no ice remained. Perhaps she could help me, the director had said. “I can’t help