I admit it: I, Clinton E. Hall, am the reason Nicholas Holloway is in a mental institution.

            Eleven of my peers wanted to send him to prison, but that isn’t where he belongs. I listened carefully to all the evidence. The defending attorney, Mr. Gray, was right. His client is insane.

            There was no question that Holloway committed the crime. The bus driver who came on the scene witnessed the last part of it, and the little girl, the victim, Rebecca—her testimony was specific and damning. She’d met him in the park, this Mr. Holloway. He’d sat on the other end of the same bench where she’d been sitting reading a Nancy Drew book. He was tall, she said, very thin, with pale skin and dark rings under his eyes. He’d stared at her, which made her uncomfortable. After a while she noticed a tear trickling slowly from his right eye down his cheek.

            “What’s wrong, mister?” she asked, innocently enough. Rebecca is eleven.

            He told her he was lost, lost in a way no one in the world had ever been lost, and that he didn’t think he’d ever find his way back again.

            “Where do you need to go?” Rebecca asked him. A pleasant child, blue eyes and plain brown hair, not beautiful but plain-pretty. “I know every place around here. I can give you directions.”

            He laughed then, she said, laughed sadly, a kind of laugh that sounded more like tears.

            “Don’t you know that I know that?” he asked her. “In school they call you ‘Map Girl’ because you know where everything is.”

            Rebecca said that frightened her. How did he know that? She’d never seen this man before.

            “Your name is Rebecca Gold,” he said. “You live at 319 Glendale Road. You’re in the sixth grade. You have a black and-white cat named Moochie. Your mom and dad are divorced. You don’t see your dad much. Your mom works at Wal-Mart.” He looked down, his voice weak and shaking. “You have a friend named Nick Holloway, don’t you?”

            “Yes,” she said, “I have a friend named Nick Holloway.”

            “I’m Nick Holloway,” he said. She noticed the beard stubble on his face and the odor of alcohol on his breath.

            She laughed then, nervously. “You’re not Nick. You’re old.”

            And then he told her the story. This was the one part Rebecca didn’t remember so clearly, because he used some big words and said things she didn’t completely understand. Basically what he seems to have told her was that he came from the future, that he’d come back here to the time when his life was still good, before his divorces and drinking and feelings of wanting to kill himself. He’d returned. He didn’t say how.

            But now he couldn’t get back, he said. He was trapped. Something had gone wrong somehow and he couldn’t return to where—or rather when—he came from.

            “Rebecca,” he said at last, “do you like Nick?”

            “Nick’s my boyfriend,” she said.

            “Yes,” said Holloway, eyes looking pained, she said, as if someone had hit him. “Yes.”

            The thing is, Nick Holloway—the real Nick Holloway, our Nick Holloway—came to the trial. He came with his mother and with Rebecca’s parents, to support her. What she’d gone through was terrible, but what she had to do in court was almost as bad. There he was, a good-looking boy, freckle-faced and serious in his little suit and tie. He listened to every word of the trial. He often had a perplexed expression on his face when Rebecca talked about Nick Holloway—that Nick Holloway, the other Nick Holloway. Later, after Rebecca finished testifying I happened to see them in the courtroom hallway. She was in tears. He was very sweet to her, very manly, putting his arm around her and telling her it was okay. It was touching.

            “Do you think,” the man said to Rebecca, easing closer to her on the bench, “that you might marry Nick Holloway someday?”

            Rebecca allowed that yes, she wasn’t sure but she thought she might.

            His voice trembled as he looked at her and whispered, “You won’t, Beckers,” which was young Nick Holloway’s private pet name for her and which they’d never told anyone. He reached for her then, saying, “I’m lost, I’m lost and I’m so lonely and I can never get home and I’m sorry, Beckers, forgive me, please forgive me.” She slapped at his hands but he’s a big man and she’s a small girl. He grabbed at her, pulled her to him, ran his hands up and down her body—she was crying in the courtroom as she described it—kissed her on her lips, stroked her hair, ran his hand down into her pants and touched her bottom.

            That was when Bill Blackstone, the bus driver for the elementary school, happened on the scene. He knows Rebecca, of course; he drives her to school five days a week. He broke into a run toward them, grabbed the man’s shoulder, pulled him away, punched him again and again, shouting, “Bastard! You bastard! Leave her alone, you bastard!” According to Mr. Blackstone’s testimony, the man put up no resistance. Didn’t fight back or try to run. He just let Mr. Blackstone punch him again and again until he collapsed on the ground bleeding from his nose and forehead.

            “I’m sorry,” the man whispered, according to Rebecca, as he was lying there. “Just kill me, please kill me.” Mr. Blackstone didn’t hear that. He was on his cell phone, calling the police.

            It was an open-and-shut case, or so the prosecutor, Ms. Carpenter, would have had us believe.

            But there were, both attorneys admitted, anomalies. One was that the man’s name was, in fact, Nicholas Holloway—at least as far as anyone could determine. He had a strange kind of I.D. card no one had ever seen before, with a kind of moving hologram inside it, like a little movie, showing him from every angle. You could press different parts of the card and different things would pop up—his fingerprints, his DNA sequence, his retina pattern. We were allowed to see this card in the jury room, to play around with it. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.

            What’s more, he knew everything about our Nick Holloway. Everything from basic facts you could get online to the most crazily intimate things, things only Nick could verify, which he did in a closed session with only his mother and the judge and a stenographer present.

            But all that was nothing compared to what happened at the end of the trial. We’d found him Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity—yes, that was the verdict, even though I was the only one who actually thought him insane. The foreman absolutely refused to let us go back in as a hung jury—he was convinced Nicholas Holloway was a child-molesting monster and that a hung jury would only lead to another trial, where he might still be acquitted. He’d seen that happen years ago, on another case. He reasoned with the rest of them that if I weren’t willing to change my mind, it would be better to bring back a Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity verdict—because the law would require Nicholas Holloway’s being institutionalized then. It was better, he said with disgust in his voice, than nothing. They agreed, and that’s the verdict we brought back into the court.

            It was when the foreman read the verdict that Nicholas Holloway—the defendant Nicholas Holloway, pale and weak in his ill-fitting blue court suit—began to laugh. The sound started somewhere down deep in his throat, a low sound, almost a kind of grumble, and then began to rise in volume and pitch until it became a high-pitched shriek. He shouted that we were all fools, everyone in the courtroom. He pointed to the foreman and said, “Charlie Tate, you’re going to die next year! Did you know that? I don’t remember the exact date, but it’s next year, in the wintertime. You’re going to have a massive heart attack in the back of your store and drop dead on the toilet, just like Elvis!” He pointed to the prosecutor, Ms. Carpenter. “You’ve got a long life ahead of you, lady. Too bad you’re going to spend a lot of it in prison after they get you on those bribery changes. Don’t worry—that’s eight or ten years down the road still.” He laughed again, even cackled, whirling around and looking at the people assembled in the courtroom, pointing. “Mr. Davis? I remember. You’ll be getting divorced soon. Your wife is going to take you for everything you’ve got and you’re going to end up working in a car wash.” He pointed again. “Mrs. Jordan—enjoy life while you’ve got it. You’re a nice person, but you’re going to come down with Alzheimer’s and end life totally demented. It’ll go on for years and years. Your family will run through all its savings and have to sell the house to pay for your care.”  Head darting around, seemingly searching for anyone else whose fate he thought he knew, his eyes slipped finally onto me.

            “Oops, sorry, Mr. Hall!” he cried. “A brain aneurism. So young!”

            The judge had been trying to silence him, and now the bailiff came to escort Nicholas Holloway from the courtroom. His voice rose in pitch again, but this time the words became incoherent. Something about time and lost and no return, no return.

             When we were all dismissed, some of us in the jury stepped into the hallway to chat. That's when I saw young Nick and Rebecca together, Nick being so mature and strong with his troubled little girlfriend.

             "Well, I admit it,” the foreman, Mr. Tate, said, coming up to me. “You were right, Clint. Insanity was the right verdict. He’s nuts.”

            “Yes,” I said, the picture of Charlie Tate clutching his heart while on the toilet breaking unbidden into my mind. “Nuts.”

            I made my way down the front steps toward the parking lot, saying a few goodbyes to my fellow jurors on the way. I tried not to think of the defendant’s high-pitched shriek, his wild eyes, the words brain aneurism or so young. What better evidence could there be of Holloway’s madness? “So young”?

            Hell, I’m already forty.