House Rules: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  Everyone always talks about the proverbial icicle—stab someone and the murder weapon will melt—but it’s a long shot (a) that you will be able to grip that icicle long enough to inflict a wound and (b) that it won’t break off when it hits the skin before puncturing it. Mescaline sprinkled over someone’s salad would be subtler—the brown powder would be virtually indistinguishable mixed with vinaigrette, and you wouldn’t taste the bitter flavor, especially if there was chicory or arugula in the mix. But what if you only made your victim have a bad trip instead of die, and plus, where would you get your stash? You could take someone sailing and shove him overboard, preferably after getting him drunk, and say he fell accidentally—but then, you would need to have a boat. A mix of Vicodin and alcohol would slow the heart excessively, but your victim would have to pretty much be a party animal for a detective to not find that suspicious. I’ve heard of people who try to burn down a house after committing murder, but that never really works. The arson inspectors can trace where the fire started. Plus, a body has to be charred beyond recognition—and dental work—to not point a finger back at you. I wouldn’t recommend anything that leaves blood, either. It’s messy; you’ll need lots of bleach to clean it, and there’s bound to still be a drop left behind.

  The conundrum of the perfect crime is complicated, because getting away with murder has very little to do with the mechanism of the killing and everything to do with what you do before and after. The only way to really cover a crime is to not tell a soul. Not your wife, not your mother, not your priest. And, of course, you have to have killed the right kind of person—someone who isn’t going to be looked for. Someone who nobody wants to see again.

  Theo

  Once, a girl came up to me in the cafeteria and asked me if I wanted to go to Jesus Camp. You will be saved, she told me, and man, I was tempted. I mean, it’s been pretty clear to me for a while that I’m going to hell, because of all the secret thoughts I’m not supposed to have about Jacob.

  You always read these books about kids who have autistic siblings and who are constantly looking out for them, who love them to death, who do a better job defusing their tantrums than the adults. Well, I’m not one of those people. Sure, when Jacob used to wander off I’d feel sick in the pit of my stomach, but it wasn’t because I was worried about him. It was because I had to be an awful brother to be thinking what I was: Maybe he’ll never be found, and I can get on with my life.

  I used to have dreams that my brother was normal. You know, that we could fight about ordinary things, like whose turn it was to control the television remote, or who got to ride shotgun in the car. But I was never allowed to fight with Jacob. Not when I’d forget to lock my bedroom door and he came in and stole my CDs for some forensics project; not when we were little and he’d walk around the table at my birthday party, eating cake off the plates of my friends. My mother said it was a house rule, and she explained it like this: Jacob’s different from the rest of us. Gee, you think? And by the way, since when does being different net you a free pass in life?

  The problem is, Jacob’s difference doesn’t confine itself to Jacob. It’s like the time my mother’s red shirt bled in the wash and turned all my clothes pink: my brother’s Asperger’s has made me different, too. I could never have friends over, because what if Jacob had a meltdown? If I thought it was weird to see my brother peeing on the heater to watch steam rise, what the hell would someone from school think? That I was a freak, no doubt, by association.

  True confession number one: When I’m walking down the hall in school and I see Jacob at the other end of the corridor, I intentionally divert my path to avoid him.

  True confession number two: Once, when a bunch of kids from another school started making fun of Jacob as he attempted to play kickball—a hot mess if ever there was one—I pretended that I didn’t know him; I laughed along, too.

  True confession number three: I truly believe that I have it worse than Jacob, because he’s oblivious most of the time to the fact that people want nothing to do with him; but I am one hundred percent aware that they’re all looking at me and thinking, Oh, that’s the bizarre kid’s brother.

  True confession number four: I don’t sit around thinking about having kids, normally, but when I do it scares the shit out of me. What if my own son winds up being like Jacob? I’ve already spent my whole childhood dealing with autism; I don’t know if I can handle doing it for the rest of my life.

  Any time I think of one of these things, I feel like crap. I’m pretty much useless: not Jacob’s parent, and not one of his teachers. I’m just here as the benchmark alternative, so that my mother can look from Jacob to me and measure the distance between an AS kid and a so-called normal one.

  When that girl asked me to go to Jesus Camp, I asked her if Jesus was going to be there. She looked confused, and then said no. Well, I said, isn’t that a little like going to hockey camp and not playing hockey? As I walked away, the girl told me Jesus loved me.

  How do you know? I asked.

  Once, after Jacob had raged through my room like a tropical storm and destroyed most of what was important to me, my mother came in to commiserate. Deep down, he loves you, she told me.

  How do you know? I asked.

  I don’t, she admitted. But it’s what I have to believe to keep going.

  I’ve looked in my jacket, my pants. I’ve scoured the driveway. But I can’t find the iPod, and that means it’s lost somewhere between here and her house.

  What if she knows I tried to take it?

  What if she tells someone?

  * * *

  By the time I get home from school, life is back to normal. My mother is typing away on her laptop at the kitchen table, and Jacob is in his room with the door closed. I make myself ramen noodles and eat them in my room with Coldplay blasting as I do my French homework.

  My mother’s always telling me I can’t listen to music when I do my homework. Once, she barged in and accused me of not working on my English paper when it was what I’d been doing all along. How good could it possibly be, she said, if you’re not concentrating?

  I told her to sit down and read the stupid paper on my computer.

  She did, and shut up pretty quickly. I got an A on that project, as I recall.

  I guess that somehow the gene pool in our family got all mixed up, and as a result, Jacob can only focus on one thing, an extreme obsession, while I can do sixteen thousand things at a time.

  When I finish my homework I’m still hungry, so I go downstairs. My mother is nowhere to be found—and there’s no freaking food in the house, for a change (not)—but I notice Jacob sitting in the living room. I look up at the clock, but I hardly have to—if it’s 4:30 in our house, it must be CrimeBusters.

  I hesitate at the doorway, watching him pore over his notebooks. Half of me is ready to slink away without being seen by Jacob, but the other half remembers what he looked like this morning. In spite of all I’ve said about wishing he was never born, seeing him like that—like the light had gone out inside him, sort of—made me feel like I’d been punched over and over in the gut.

  What if I’d been born first, and was the one who wound up with Asperger’s? Would he be standing here wishing I wouldn’t notice him, too?

  Before I can even let myself get good and guilty, Jacob starts talking. He doesn’t look at me—he never does—but that probably means all his other senses are more finely tuned. “It’s episode twenty-two today,” he says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation. “An oldie but a goodie.”

  “How many times have you seen this one?” I ask.

  He glances down at his notebook. “Thirty-eight.”

  I’m not a huge fan of CrimeBusters. In the first place, I think the acting is bad. In the second place, this has to be the richest CSI lab ever, with all its bells and whistles. Something tells me that the fuming chamber at the state lab in Vermont looks a lot more like Jacob’s duct-taped old fish tank than the CrimeBusters version, wh
ich is jazzed up with blue neon lights and lots of chrome. Plus, the investigators seem to spend a lot more time figuring out who’s going to jump into bed with whom than they do solving crimes.

  All the same, I sit down next to my brother on the couch. There’s a good foot of space between us, because Jacob isn’t crazy about being touched. I know better than to talk when the show is on—instead, I limit my editorial comments to the moments when there are commercials for erectile dysfunction drugs and OxiClean.

  The story line involves a girl who’s found dead after a hit-and-run. There’s a paint scrape on her scooter, so the sexy CSI takes it to the lab. Meanwhile, the dude who does the autopsies finds a bruise on the girl’s body that looks like a fingerprint. The crusty old CSI photographs it and takes it to the lab and gets a hit—some retired government employee who’s drinking his prune juice and using a Clapper when Crusty and Sexy show up. They ask him if he’s had a car accident lately, and he says that his car was stolen. Unfortunately for him, the CSIs find it parked in the attached garage. Caught red-handed, he admits that he was driving and that his foot hit the accelerator instead of the brake. When Sexy examines the car, though, she finds the driver’s seat pushed back too far for the old man’s height, and the stereo set to hip-hop. Sexy asks if anyone else drives Grandpa’s car just as a teenage boy enters. Gramps admits that after hitting the girl on her scooter, he banged his head, so his grandson drove him home. Needless to say, no one believes him, but it’s his word against theirs until Crusty finds a piece of tooth lodged in the steering wheel, which gets matched to the grandson. The kid’s arrested, and his grandfather gets released.

  The whole time I am watching this, Jacob is scribbling away in his notebooks. He has shelves full of them, all filled with crime scenarios that aired on this TV show. “What do you write down in there?” I ask.

  Jacob shrugs. “The evidence. Then I try to deduce what will happen.”

  “But you’ve seen this one thirty-eight times,” I say. “You already know how it’s going to turn out.”

  Jacob’s pen keeps scratching across the page. “But maybe it’ll end differently this time,” he says. “Maybe today, the kid won’t get caught.”

  Rich

  On Thursday morning my phone rings. “Matson,” I say, answering.

  “The CDs are in alphabetical order.”

  I frown at the unfamiliar voice. Sounds like some kind of speakeasy password. The CDs are in alphabetical order. And the bluebird wears fishnet stockings. And just like that, you get entry to the inner sanctum.

  “I beg your pardon?” I say.

  “Whoever took Jess hung around long enough to alphabetize the CDs.”

  Now I recognize the voice—Mark Maguire. “I assume your girlfriend hasn’t returned yet,” I say.

  “Would I be calling you if she had?”

  I clear my throat. “Tell me what you noticed.”

  “I dropped a handful of change on the carpet this morning, and when I picked it up, I realized that the tower that holds the CDs had been moved. There was a little sunken spot in the carpet, you know?”

  “Right,” I say.

  “So these professors—they’ve got hundreds of CDs. And they keep them in this four-sided tower that spins. Anyway, I noticed that all the Ws were organized together. Richard Wagner, Dionne Warwick, Dinah Washington, the Who, John Williams, Mary Lou Williams. And then Lester Young, Johann Zumsteeg—”

  “They listen to the Who?”

  “I looked on all four sides—and every single CD is in order.”

  “Is it possible they always were, and you didn’t notice?” I ask.

  “No, because last weekend, when Jess and I were looking for some decent music to listen to, they sure as hell didn’t look that way.”

  “Mr. Maguire,” I say. “Let me call you right back.”

  “Wait—it’s been two days now—”

  I hang up and pinch the bridge of my nose. Then I dial the state lab and talk to Iris, a grandmother type who has a little crush on me, which I milk when I need my evidence processed fast. “Iris,” I say, “how’s the prettiest girl in the lab?”

  “I’m the only girl in the lab.” She laughs. “You calling about your mailbox note?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Came up clean. No prints at all.”

  I thank her and hang up the phone. It figures that a perp who alphabetizes CDs is smart enough to wear gloves while leaving a note. We probably won’t get any prints off the computer keyboard, either.

  On the other hand, the spices might be organized by indigenous regions.

  If Mark Maguire is involved with his girlfriend’s disappearance, and wants to lead us on a very different profiling track, he might conceivably alphabetize CDs—the least likely thing I’d ever expect of Mark Maguire.

  Which could also explain why it took him twenty-four more hours to do it.

  In any case, I am going to take a look at those CDs myself. And the contents of Jess Ogilvy’s purse. And anything else that might indicate where she is, and why she’s there.

  I stand up and grab my jacket, heading past dispatch to tell them where I am going, when one of the desk sergeants pulls at my sleeve. “This here’s Detective Matson,” he says.

  “Good,” another man barks. “Now I know who to get the chief to fire.”

  Behind him, a woman in tears twists the leather straps of her handbag.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, smiling politely. “I didn’t catch your name?”

  “Claude Ogilvy,” he replies. “State Senator Claude Ogilvy.”

  “Senator, we’re doing everything we can to find your daughter.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” he says, “when you haven’t even had anyone in this department investigating it.”

  “As a matter of fact, Senator, I was just on my way to your daughter’s residence.”

  “I assume, of course, that you’re meeting the rest of the police force there. Because I certainly wouldn’t want to find out that two whole days had gone by without this police department taking my daughter’s disappearance seriously—”

  I cut him off midsentence by taking his arm and propelling him toward my office. “With all due respect, Senator, I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell me how to do my own job—”

  “I damn well will tell you whatever I want whenever I want until my daughter is brought back safe and sound!”

  I ignore him and offer a chair to his wife. “Mrs. Ogilvy,” I say, “has Jess tried to contact you at all?”

  She shakes her head. “And I can’t call her. Her voice-mail box is full.”

  The senator shakes his head. “That’s because that idiot Maguire kept leaving messages—”

  “Has she ever run away before?” I ask.

  “No, she’d never do that.”

  “Has she been upset lately? Worried about anything?”

  Mrs. Ogilvy shakes her head. “She was so excited about moving into that house. Said it beat out the dorms any day …”

  “How about her relationship with her boyfriend?”

  At that, Senator Ogilvy stays blissfully, stonily silent. His wife spares him a quick glance. “There’s no accounting for love,” she says.

  “If he hurt her,” Ogilvy mutters. “If he laid a finger on her—”

  “Then we will find out about it, and we will take care of it,” I smoothly interject. “The first priority, though, is locating Jess.”

  Mrs. Ogilvy leans forward. Her eyes are red-rimmed. “Do you have a daughter, Detective?” she asks.

  Once, at a fairground, Sasha and I were walking through the midway when a rowdy group of teenagers barreled between us, breaking the bond between our hands. I tried to keep my eye on her, but she was tiny, and when the group was gone, so was Sasha. I found myself standing in the middle of the fairground, turning in circles and screaming her name, while all around me rides spun in circles and wisps of cotton candy flew from their metal wheels onto a spool and the roar of chain saws s
pitting through wood announced the lumberjack contest. When I finally found her, petting the nose of a Jersey calf in a 4-H barn, I was so relieved that my legs gave out; I literally fell to my knees.

  I haven’t even responded, but Mrs. Ogilvy puts her hand on her husband’s arm. “See, I told you, Claude,” she murmurs. “He understands.”

  Jacob

  The sensory break room at school has a swing hanging from the ceiling. It’s made of rope and stretchy blue material, and when you sit inside it, it wraps you like a cocoon. You can pull the sides close so that you can’t see out and no one can see in, and spin in circles. There are also mats with different textures, wind chimes, a fan. There’s a fiber-optic lamp that has hundreds of points of light that change from green to purple to pink. There are sponges and Koosh balls and brushes and Bubble Wrap and weighted blankets. There’s a noise machine that only an aide is allowed to turn on, and you can choose to listen to waves or rain or white noise or a jungle. There’s a bubble tube, about three feet tall, with plastic fish that move in lazy circles.

  In school, part of my IEP is a cool-off pass—a COP. If I need to, at any time, even during an exam, my teachers will allow me to leave the classroom. Sometimes, the outside world gets a little too tight for me, and I need a place to relax. I can come to the sensory break room, but the truth is, I hardly ever do. The only kids who use the sensory break room are special needs, and walking through the door, I might as well just slap a big fat label on myself that says I’m not normal.

  So most of the time when I need a break, I wander around the hallways. Sometimes I go to the cafeteria to get a bottle of Vitaminwater. (The best flavor? Focus, kiwi-strawberry, with vitamin A and lutein for clarity. The worst? Essential. Orange-orange. Need I say more?) Sometimes I hang out in the teachers’ room, playing chess with Mr. Pakeeri or helping Mrs. Leatherwood, the school secretary, stuff envelopes. But these past two days, when I leave my classroom I head right for that sensory break room.