House Rules: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  As it turns out, the map is a very good one, even if it’s not drawn to scale. After I get off the bus, I turn right at the fire hydrant and then count six houses on the left. Jess’s new temporary home is an old brick house with ivy growing up the sides. I wonder if she knows that the tendrils of ivy can break apart mortar and brick. I wonder if I should tell her. If someone told me, I would lie in bed at night wondering if the whole house was going to crumble around me.

  I am still very nervous when I ring the front doorbell, because I have never seen the inside of this house before and that makes me feel like my bones have gone to jelly.

  No one answers, so I go around the back.

  I glance down at the snow and make a mental note of what I see, but it isn’t really important because The Door Is Unlocked, and that must mean Jess is expecting me. I feel myself relaxing already: it’s just like her dorm room; I will go in and wait, and when she returns, everything will be back to normal.

  There are only two times that Jess has gotten angry with me, and both occurred while I was waiting for her to show up. The first was when I took all her clothes out of her closet and arranged them according to the electromagnetic color spectrum, like mine. The second time was when I sat down at her desk and noticed the calculus problem set she was working on. She’d done half the problems wrong, so I fixed them for her.

  Theo is the person who made me understand that the rules of violence are based on threat. If there is an actual problem, there are only two options:

  1. Retaliation

  2. Confrontation

  It’s gotten me into trouble.

  I have been sent to the principal’s office for smacking a boy who threw a paper airplane at me during English class. When Theo ruined one of my forensic experiments-in-progress, I went into his bedroom with a pair of scissors and systematically hacked his comic book collection to bits. Once in eighth grade, I found out that a group of kids were making fun of me, and as if someone had flipped an electrical switch inside me, I went into a frantic rage. I huddled in a cubicle in the school library, crafting a hit list of the people I hated and how I would like their lives to end: knife wound in the locker room at gym, bomb in their locker, cyanide in their Diet Coke. As is the Aspergian nature, I’m fanatically organized about some things and disorganized about others, and as luck would have it I lost that piece of paper. I figured someone (maybe me) had thrown it out, but my history teacher found it and gave it to the principal, who called my mother.

  She yelled at me for seventy-nine straight minutes, mostly about how violated she felt by my actions, and then she got even more angry because I couldn’t really understand why something I did had upset her. So she took ten of my CrimeBusters notebooks and ran them through her bill shredder page by page, and suddenly, her point was crystal clear. I was so furious that, that night, I dumped the bin of shredded paper over her head while she was asleep.

  Luckily, I didn’t get suspended—most of the administration of the school knew me well enough to know I was not a threat to public safety—but my mother’s lesson was enough to make me see why I could never do anything like that again.

  I say all this by way of explanation: Impulsiveness is part of what it means to have Asperger’s.

  And it never ends well.

  Emma

  I am allowed to work at home on my column, but every Tuesday afternoon I have to trot downtown to meet with my editor. Mostly it’s a therapy session—she tells me what’s wrong with her life and expects me to dole her out advice, the way I do for the masses in the paper.

  I don’t mind, because I think that one hour a week of counseling is a pretty fair trade for a paycheck and health insurance. But it also means that on Tuesdays, when Jacob meets with Jess, she is responsible for getting him back to our house.

  Tonight, as soon as I walk through the door, I find Theo in the kitchen. “How do you feel?” I ask, pressing my palm against his forehead. “Do you have a fever?”

  I’d called home from Burlington, like I usually do before I leave the office, only to find out that Theo was sick and frantic because he’d left school without remembering that today is the day he walks Jacob to his appointment with Jess. A second call to the guidance department kept me from panicking: Mrs. Grenville had talked to Jacob about taking a bus to Jess’s new house and said he felt confident about doing it on his own.

  “It’s just a cold,” Theo says, ducking away. “But Jacob’s not home yet and it’s past four-thirty.”

  He doesn’t really need to say any more: Jacob would rather saw off his arm with a butter knife than miss an episode of CrimeBusters. But Jacob’s only fifteen minutes later than normal. “Well, he was meeting Jess somewhere new today. Maybe it’s a little farther away than her dorm was.”

  “But what if he never got there?” Theo says, visibly upset. “I should have just stayed in school and walked him there like usual—”

  “Honey, you were sick. Besides, Mrs. Grenville thought this might be a good opportunity for Jacob to be independent. And I think I’ve got Jess’s new phone number on my email; I can call if it makes you feel better.” I wrap my arms around Theo. It’s been too long since I hugged him; at fifteen, he ducks away from physical affection. But it’s sweet to see him worried about Jacob. There might be friction between them, but at heart, Theo loves his brother. “I’m sure Jacob’s fine, but I’m glad he’s got you looking out for him,” I say, and in that instant, I make a snap decision to capitalize on the goodwill Theo’s feeling for Jacob. “Let’s go out for Chinese tonight,” I suggest, even though eating out is a luxury we can’t afford; plus, it’s harder to find food Jacob can eat if I don’t make it myself.

  An unreadable expression crosses Theo’s face, but then he nods. “That would be cool,” he says gruffly, and he slides away from my grasp.

  The door to the mudroom opens. “Jacob?” I call, and I go to meet him.

  For a moment, I can’t speak. His eyes are wild and his nose is running. His hands flap at his sides as he shoves me into the wall and runs up to his room. “Jacob!”

  He has no lock on his bedroom door; I removed it years ago. Now, I push the door open and find Jacob inside his closet, underneath the tendrils of shirt cuffs and sweatpants, rocking back and forth and emitting a high, reedy note from his throat.

  “What’s the matter, baby?” I say, getting down on my hands and knees and crawling into the closet, too. I wrap my arms tight around him and start singing:

  “I shot the sheriff … but I didn’t shoot the deputy.”

  Jacob’s hands are flapping so hard that he is bruising me. “Talk to me,” I say. “Did something happen with Jess?”

  At the sound of her name, he arches backward, as if he’s been pierced by a bullet. He starts smacking his head against the wall so hard that it dents the plaster.

  “Don’t,” I beg, using every bit of strength I have to drag him forward, so that he cannot hurt himself.

  Dealing with an autistic meltdown is like dealing with a tornado. Once you are close enough to see it coming, there’s nothing to do but weather the storm. Unlike a child having a temper tantrum, Jacob doesn’t care if his behavior is making me react. He doesn’t make sure he’s not hurting himself. He isn’t doing it in order to get something. In fact, he’s not in control of himself at all. And unlike when he was four or five, I am not big enough to control him anymore.

  I get up and turn off all the lights in the room and pull down the blackout shades so that it is dark. I put on his Marley CD. Then I start pulling clothes off the hangers in his closet and pile them on his body—which at first makes him scream harder and then, as the weight builds, calms him down. By the time he falls asleep in my arms, I have ripped my blouse and my stockings. The CD has repeated four times in its entirety. The LED display on his alarm clock reads 8:35 P.M.

  “What set you off?” I whisper. It could have been anything—an argument with Jess, or the fact that he didn’t like the layout of the kitchen in her new ac
commodations, or the realization too late that he was missing his favorite TV show. I kiss Jacob on the forehead. Then, gently, I disengage myself from the knot of his arms and leave him curled on the floor with a pillow under his head. I cover him with the rainbow postage-stamp summertime quilt that’s been folded up for the season in his closet.

  Muscles stiff, I walk downstairs again. The lights have all been turned off, except for one in the kitchen.

  Let’s go out for Chinese tonight.

  But that was before I knew that I would be sucked into the black hole that Jacob can become at any given moment.

  There is a cereal bowl on the counter, with a puddle of soy milk still in the bottom. The Rice Chex box stands beside it like an accusation.

  Motherhood is a Sisyphean task. You finish sewing one seam shut, and another rips open. I have come to believe that this life I’m wearing will never really fit.

  I carry the bowl to the sink and swallow the tears that spring to the back of my throat. Oh, Theo. I’m so sorry.

  Again.

  CASE 3: BRAGGED, TAUNTED, “KAUGHT”

  Dennis Rader was a married man with two grown children, a former Cub Scout leader, and president of his Lutheran church. He also—after a thirty-one-year investigation—was revealed to be the serial killer known as BTK, short for Bind, Torture, and Kill—his method for murdering ten people in the Wichita, Kansas, area between 1974 and 1991. After the killings, letters were sent to the police bragging of the killings and offering grisly details. Following a twenty-five-year silence, those letters and packages resumed in 2004, claiming responsibility for a murder for which he had not been suspected. DNA was taken from beneath the fingernails of a victim, and authorities gathered eleven hundred DNA samples, attempting to find the serial killer.

  In one of BTK’s communications—a computer disk mailed to KSAS-TV—metadata from the Microsoft Word document revealed that the author was someone named Dennis, as well as a link to the Lutheran Church. Searching on the Internet, police were able to find a suspect: Dennis Rader. By obtaining his daughter’s DNA and comparing it with DNA samples found on the victims, the police were able to make a familial match—giving them enough probable cause for arrest. He has been sentenced to 175 years to life.

  So to all of you who surf for Internet porn or spend your free time writing anarchist manifestos: Beware. You can’t ever really get rid of something on your computer.

  3

  Rich

  I’ve faced down a lot of harrowing situations in my twenty years on the job: suicides in progress, felons on the run after an armed robbery, rape victims too traumatized to tell me their story. None of these, however, compare to having to work an audience made up of seven-year-olds.

  “Can you show us your gun again?” one kid asks.

  “Not a great idea,” I say, glancing at the teacher, who already asked me to remove my holster and weapon before coming into the class for Job Day—a request I had to refuse, since technically, I was still on the clock.

  “Do you get to shoot it?”

  I look over the ammo-obsessed boy’s head at the rest of the class. “Any other questions?”

  A little girl raises her hand. I recognize her; she might have come to one of Sasha’s birthday parties. “Do you always get the bad guys?” she asks.

  There’s no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn’t nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren’t proud of.

  I look her in the eye. “We sure try,” I say.

  On my hip, my cell phone starts to vibrate. I flip it open, see the number of the station, and stand up. “I’m going to have to cut this short … So one more time—what’s the number one rule of crime scenes?”

  The class sings the answer back to me: “Don’t touch something wet if it’s not from you!”

  As the teacher asks them all to thank me with a round of applause, I crouch down near Sasha’s desk. “What do you think? Did I embarrass you beyond repair?”

  “You did okay,” she says.

  “I can’t stay to have lunch with you,” I apologize. “I have to go down to the station.”

  “That’s all right, Daddy.” Sasha shrugs. “I’m used to it.”

  The hell with a bullet. What kills me is disappointing my kid.

  I kiss her on the crown of her head and let the teacher walk me to the door. Then I drive right to the station and get a quick briefing from the sergeant who took the original complaint.

  Mark Maguire, a UVM graduate student, is slouched in the waiting room. He’s wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his face and is bouncing his leg up and down nervously. I watch him for a second through the window before I head out to meet him.

  “Mr. Maguire?” I say. “I’m Detective Matson. What can I do for you?”

  He stands up. “My girlfriend’s missing.”

  “Missing,” I repeat.

  “Yeah. I called her last night, and there was no answer. And this morning, when I went to her place, she was gone.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Tuesday morning,” Mark says.

  “Could there have been some emergency? Or an appointment she didn’t tell you about?”

  “No. She never goes anywhere without her purse, and it was still in the house … along with her coat. It’s freezing out. Why would she have gone somewhere without her coat?” His voice is wild, worried.

  “You two have a fight?”

  “She was kind of pissed off at me this weekend,” he admits. “But we’d talked it out. We were good again.”

  I bet, I think. “Have you tried calling her friends?”

  “No one’s seen her. Not her friends, not her teachers. And she’s not the kind of person who cuts classes.”

  We do not usually open up a missing person’s case until thirty-six hours have passed—although that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. The extent of the net to be cast is determined by the missing person’s status: at risk, or at no apparent risk. And right now, there’s something about this guy—some hunch—that makes me think he’s not telling me everything. “Mr. Maguire,” I say, “why don’t you and I take a ride?”

  * * *

  Jess Ogilvy is doing pretty damn well for a grad student. She lives in a tony neighborhood full of brick houses and BMWs. “How long has she lived here?” I ask.

  “Only a week—she’s house-sitting for one of her professors, who’s in Italy for the semester.”

  We park on the street, and Maguire leads me to the back door, which isn’t locked. That’s not an uncommon occurrence around here; in spite of all my warnings about being safe instead of sorry, a lot of folks make the incorrect assumption that crime could not and does not happen in this town.

  In the mudroom, there’s a mélange of items—from the coat that must belong to the girl to a walking stick to a pair of men’s boots. The kitchen is tidy, and there is a mug in the sink with a tea bag in it. “I didn’t touch anything,” Maguire says. “This was all here when I showed up this morning.” The mail is stacked neatly in a pile on the table. A purse lies on its side, and I open it to find a wallet with $213 still in it.

  “Did you notice anything missing?” I ask.

  “Yeah,” Maguire says. “Upstairs.” He leads me to a guest bedroom where the drawers of a single dresser are half open, clothes spilling out of them. “She’s a neat freak,” he says. “She’d never leave the bed unmade, or have clothes lying around the floor like this. But this box with the gift wrap on it? It had a backpack inside that’s gone now. It still had the tags on it. Her aunt got it for her for Christmas, and she hated it.”

  I walk to the closet. Inside are several dresses, as well as a few button-down men’s shirts and pairs of jeans. “Those are mine,” Maguire says.

  “You live here, too?”

  “Not officially, as far as
the professor goes. But yeah, I’ve been staying over most nights. Until she kicked me out, anyway.”

  “She kicked you out?”

  “I told you, we kind of had a fight. She didn’t want to talk to me on Sunday night. But Monday, we’d worked things out.”

  “Define that,” I say.

  “We had sex,” Maguire replies.

  “Consensual?”

  “Jesus, dude. What kind of guy do you think I am?” He seems truly affronted.

  “What about her makeup? Her toiletries?”

  “Her toothbrush is missing,” Maguire says. “But her makeup’s still here. Look, shouldn’t you be calling in backup or something? Or posting an AMBER Alert?”

  I ignore him. “Did you try contacting her parents? Where do they live?”

  “I called them—they’re in Bennington, and they haven’t heard from her, and now they’re in a panic, too.”

  Great, I think. “Has she ever disappeared like this before?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve only been going out with her for a few months.”

  “Look,” I say. “If you stick around, she’ll probably call, or just come back home. Sounds to me like she needed to cool off for a while.”

  “You gotta be kidding me,” Maguire says. “If she left on purpose, why would she forget to take her wallet but remember her cell phone? Why would she use a backpack she couldn’t wait to return for store credit?”

  “I don’t know. To throw you off her trail, maybe?”

  Maguire’s eyes flash, and I know the moment before he springs that he is going to come after me. I throw him off with one quick move that twists his arm behind his back. “Careful,” I mutter. “I could arrest you for that.”