House Rules: A Novel

by Jodi Picoult

  Emma

  It all starts with a mouse.

  After our weekly Saturday shopping excursion (thank goodness, the Free Sample Lady had been replaced temporarily by a sullen teenager handing out vegetarian cocktail wieners at the door of the grocery store), I leave Jacob sitting at the kitchen table with the remainders of his lunch while I do a cursory cleaning of his room. He forgets to bring glasses and bowls of cereal downstairs to the kitchen, and if I don’t play middleman, we wind up with thriving colonies of mold that have bonded to my dishes like concrete. I pick up a bevy of mugs from his desk and spot the tiny face of a field mouse struggling to survive this winter by taking up residence behind Jacob’s computer.

  I am embarrassed to admit I have a very typical female reaction and go completely ballistic. Unfortunately, I am holding a half-full glass of chocolate soy milk at the time, and most of it spills over Jacob’s comforter.

  Well, it has to be washed. Although it’s the weekend, and that’s problematic. Jacob doesn’t like seeing his bed stripped; it has to be made at all times unless he happens to be in it. Usually I wash his sheets while he’s at school. Sighing, I pull fresh sheets out of the linen closet and tug the winter comforter off his bed. He can make do for a night with his summertime quilt, an old postage-stamp design in all the rainbow colors—ROYGBIV—in correct order, which my mother sewed for him before she died.

  The summer quilt is kept in a black trash bag on the upper shelf of his closet. I pull it down and shake out the blanket inside.

  A backpack rolled into its center tumbles to the floor.

  It’s clearly not one that belongs to the boys. Flesh-colored with red and black stripes, it seems to be trying to be a Burberry knockoff, but the stripes are too wide and the colors too bright. There is still a Marshalls’ tag on the strap, with the price ripped off.

  Inside is a toothbrush, a satin blouse, a pair of shorts, and a yellow T-shirt. The blouse and shorts are both plus-size. The T-shirt is much smaller and says SPECIAL OLYMPICS on the front and staff on the back.

  At the very bottom of the backpack is a notecard still inside its torn envelope. There’s a picture of a snowy landscape, and the inside reads, in spidery handwriting: Merry Christmas Jess, Love Aunt Ruth.

  “My God,” I murmur. “What did you do?” I close my eyes for a moment, and then I bellow Jacob’s name. He comes running into his room, stopping abruptly when he sees me holding the backpack in my arms.

  “Oh,” he says.

  He sounds as if I’ve caught him in a white lie: Jacob, did you wash your hands before dinner?

  Yes, Mom.

  Then how come the bar of soap’s still dry?

  Oh.

  But this isn’t a white lie. This is a girl who’s missing. A girl who could be dead by now. A girl whose backpack and clothes my son inexplicably has.

  Jacob starts to flee downstairs, but I grab his arm to stop him. “Where did this come from?”

  “A box at Jess’s place,” he grinds out, shutting his eyes tight until I let go.

  “Tell me why you have this. Because a lot of people are searching for Jess, and this does not look good.”

  His hand starts twitching at his side. “I told you I went to her house Tuesday, like I was supposed to. And things weren’t right.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There were stools knocked over in the kitchen, and papers all over the floor, and all the CDs were thrown on the carpet. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right …”

  “Jacob,” I say. “Focus. How did you get this backpack? Does Jess know you have it?”

  There are tears in his eyes. “No. She was already gone.” He starts to walk in a small circle, his hand still flapping. “I went in, and the mess … and I was scared. I didn’t know what happened. I called out her name and she wouldn’t answer and I saw the backpack and the other things and I took them.” His voice is a roller coaster, reeling off-track. “Houston, we have a problem.”

  “It’s okay,” I say, wrapping my arms around him and holding him with the deepest pressure, the way a potter would center the clay on her wheel.

  But it isn’t okay. It won’t be, until Jacob gives Detective Matson this new information.

  Rich

  I am not in a good mood.

  It’s Saturday, and although I am supposed to have Sasha for the weekend, I had to cancel as soon as it became apparent that we had an ongoing investigation that demanded my full resources. Basically, I’m going to eat, sleep, and breathe Jess Ogilvy until I find her, dead or alive. Not that that seemed to sway my ex, who made sure to give me a fifteen-minute tongue-lashing about parental responsibility and how on earth was she supposed to carry on with her life when my emergencies kept interrupting? It wasn’t worth pointing out that this was not my emergency, technically, or that the disappearance of a young woman might take precedence over rescheduling a date night with her new spouse, Mr. Coffee. I tell myself that missing one weekend with Sasha is worth it if I can make sure that Claude Ogilvy gets to have another weekend with his daughter.

  En route to Jess’s home, where a team of CSIs is entrenched, I get a call from the local FBI field agent, who has been trying to ping the girl’s cell phone. “You’re not getting a signal,” I repeat. “So what does that mean?”

  “Several things,” the agent explains. “The GPS locator only works when the phone’s active. So it could be at the bottom of a lake right now. Or she could be alive and well and just have run out of juice.”

  “Well, how am I supposed to know which of those it is?”

  “Guess once you find a body, it’ll be pretty clear,” he says, and then I drive through one of Vermont’s notorious dead zones and the call is dropped.

  When the phone rings again, I am still cursing out the FBI (which is good for one thing and one thing only: screwing up a perfectly sound local investigation), so you can imagine how surprised I am to hear Emma Hunt on the end of the line. I had left her my card yesterday, just in case. “I was hoping you might be able to come back to my house,” she says. “Jacob has something he needs to tell you.”

  I have a team of investigators waiting for me on-site. I have a surly boyfriend who might be a murderer and a state senator breathing down my boss’s neck, demanding my job if I don’t find his missing kid. But I put on my flashing blues and do an illegal U-turn. “Give me ten minutes,” I tell her.

  I’m in a slightly better mood now.

  I have, fortunately, three whole hours before CrimeBusters airs. We are sitting in the living room—Emma and Jacob on one couch, me on a side chair. “Tell the detective everything you told me, Jacob,” Emma says.

  His eyes roll upward, as if he is reading something printed on the ceiling. “I went to her house that day, like I was supposed to. Things weren’t right. There were stools knocked over in the kitchen, and papers all over the floor, and all the CDs were thrown on the carpet. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right.” His voice seems almost computerized, it’s that mechanical. “She was already gone. I went in, and the mess … and I was scared. I didn’t know what happened. I called out her name and she wouldn’t answer and I saw the backpack and the other things and I took them. Houston, we have a problem.” He nods, satisfied. “That’s it.”

  “Why did you lie to me about going to Jess’s?” I ask.

  “I didn’t lie,” he says. “I told you I didn’t have my session with her.”

  “You didn’t tell me about the backpack, either,” I point out. It sits between us, on a coffee table.

  Jacob nods. “You didn’t ask.”

  Wiseass, I think, just as Emma jumps in. “A kid with Asperger’s, like Jacob, is going to be painfully literal,” she says.

  “So if I question him directly, he’ll answer directly?”

  “He,” Jacob interjects testily, “is sitting within earshot.”

  That makes me grin. “Sorry,” I say, addressing him. “How did you get into Jess’s house?”

  “She used to leave
her dorm room open for me, and when I got to her house, that door was left open, too. So I went in to wait.”

  “What did you see when you went inside?”

  “The kitchen was a mess. Stools were knocked over; and the mail was all over the floor.”

  “How about Jess? Was she there?”

  “No. I called her name, and she didn’t answer.”

  “What did you do?”

  He shrugs. “I cleaned up.”

  I sink back into the cushions of the chair. “You … cleaned up.”

  “Yes, that’s correct.”

  My mind is racing through all the tampered evidence sacrificed to Jacob Hunt’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies. “You know all about preserving evidence at crime scenes,” I say. “What on earth would make you destroy it?”

  Just like that, Emma bristles. “My son’s doing you a favor by speaking with you, Detective. We didn’t have to call and give you this information.”

  I tamp down my frustration. “So you cleaned up the mess you saw downstairs?”

  “Right,” Jacob says. “I picked up the stools and I set the mail back onto the kitchen counter. And I put all the CDs that had been knocked over in alphabetical order.”

  “Alphabetical order,” I repeat, remembering Mark Maguire’s call, and my theory about an anal-retentive kidnapper. “You’re kidding me.”

  “That’s what his room’s like,” Emma says. “Jacob’s a big fan of everything being in its right place. For him, it’s the spatial equivalent of knowing what’s coming next.”

  “So when did you take the backpack?”

  “After I cleaned up.”

  The backpack still has its tags on, just like Maguire said. “Would you mind if I hang on to it, for the case?”

  Suddenly, Jacob lights up. “You have to take it. You’re going to need to run DNA tests on the straps and you can do an AP on the underwear inside. It might be worth spraying the whole thing with Luminol, to be honest. And you can probably get prints off the card inside with ninhydrin, but you’ll want to compare them against my mother’s since she handled the card when she first found the backpack. Which reminds me, you can look through it now if you want. I have latex gloves upstairs in my room. You don’t have a latex allergy, do you?” He is halfway out of the room when he turns back. “We have a grocery bag somewhere, don’t we? That way Detective Matson can carry this back to the lab.”

  He runs upstairs, and I turn to Emma. “Is he always like that?”

  “And then some.” She looks up at me. “Is anything Jacob said helpful?”

  “It’s all food for thought,” I say.

  “Everything changes if there are signs of a struggle,” she points out.

  I raise a brow. “You’re a closet CSI, too?”

  “No, in spite of Jacob’s best efforts to teach me.” She glances out the window for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about Jess’s mother,” she says. “The last time she talked to her daughter, was it about stupid things, you know? Did they have a fight about how she never called, or how she had forgotten to send a thank-you card to her aunt?” She faces me. “I used to say I love you every time I tucked my boys in at night. But now, they go to bed after I do.”

  “My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.” I smile faintly. “He had a stroke a few years ago. Before that, I used to screen his calls because I didn’t have time to talk about whether the Sox would make it into the playoffs. But afterward, I started to call him. Every time, I’d finish by saying I loved him. We both knew why; and it didn’t sit right after all the time I hadn’t said it. It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon. He died eight months ago.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  I laugh tightly. “And I don’t know why the hell I’m telling you this.”

  At that moment, Jacob reappears, clutching a pair of latex gloves. I snap them on and carefully lift the backpack just as my cell rings. “Matson,” I say.

  It’s one of the lieutenants in the department, asking how much longer I’m going to be.

  “I have to run.” I lift the grocery bag into my arms.

  Jacob ducks his head. “I’d be interested in hearing the test results, naturally.”

  “Naturally,” I reply, although I have no intent of sharing them. “So what’s on CrimeBusters today?”

  “Episode sixty-seven. The one where a mutilated woman is found in a shopping cart outside a box store.”

  “I remember that one. Keep an eye on—”

  “—the store manager,” Jacob finishes. “I’ve seen it already, too.”

  He walks me to the door, his mother trailing behind. “Thanks, Jacob. And Emma?” I wait until she glances up. “Say it when you wake them up in the morning, instead.”

  * * *

  When I reach Jess Ogilvy’s place, the two CSIs who have been processing the house are standing outside in the freezing cold, staring at a cut window screen.

  “No prints?” I say, my breath fogging in the cold.

  But I already know the answer. So would Jacob, for that matter. The chances of prints being preserved in temperatures as low as these are pretty slim.

  “No,” the first investigator says. Marcy’s a bombshell with a knockout figure, a 155 IQ, and a girlfriend who could probably knock my teeth out. “But we did find the window jimmied to break the lock, too, and a screwdriver in the bushes.”

  “Nice. So the question is, was this a B and E gone bad? Or was the screen cut to make us think that?”

  Basil, the second investigator, shakes his head. “Nothing inside screams breaking and entering.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s not necessarily true. I just interviewed a witness who says otherwise and who, um, cleaned up.”

  Marcy looks at Basil. “So he’s a suspect, not a witness.”

  “No. He’s an autistic kid. Long story.” I look at the edge of the screen. “What kind of knife was used?”

  “Probably one from the kitchen. We’ve got a bunch to take back to the lab to see if any of them have traces of metal on the blade.”

  “You get any prints inside?”

  “Yeah, in the bathroom and off the computer, plus a few partials around the kitchen.”

  But in this case, Mark Maguire’s prints won’t raise a red flag; he’s admitted to living here part-time with Jess.

  “We also got a partial boot print,” Basil says. “The silver lining to it being crap weather for prints on the sill is that it’s perfect for footwear impressions.” Underneath the overhang of the gutter I can see the red splotch of spray wax he’s used to make a cast. He’s lucky to have found a protected ledge; there’s been a dusting of fresh snow since Tuesday. It’s the heel, and there’s a star in the center, surrounded by what look like the spokes of a compass. Once Basil photographs it, we can enter it into a database to see what kind of boot it is.

  The sound of a car driving down the street is punctuated by the slam of a door. Then footsteps approach, crunching on the snow. “If that’s the press,” I say to Marcy, “shoot first.”

  But it’s not the press. It’s Mark Maguire, looking like he hasn’t slept since I last saw him. “It’s about fucking time you got around to looking for my girlfriend,” he shouts, and even from a few feet away, the fumes of alcohol on his breath reach me.

  “Mr. Maguire,” I say, moving slowly toward him. “You happen to know if this screen’s always been cut?”

  I watch him carefully to see his reaction. But the truth is, I can amass all the evidence I want against Mark Maguire and I still have nothing to arrest him for unless a body is recovered.

  He squints at the window, but the sun is in his eyes, as well as the brilliant reflection of snow on the ground. As he moves a little closer, Basil steps behind him and shoots a jet of spray wax on the boot print he left behind.

  Even from this far away I can make out the star, and the spokes of a compass.

  “Mr. Maguire,” I say, “we
’re going to have to take your boots.”

  Jacob

  The first time I saw a dead person was at my grandfather’s funeral.

  It was after the service, where the minister had read aloud from the Bible, even though my grandfather did not routinely go to church or consider himself religious. Strangers got up and talked about my grandfather, calling him Joseph and telling stories about parts of his life that were news to me: his service during the Korean War, his childhood on the Lower East Side, his courtship of my grandmother at a high school carnival kissing booth. All of their words landed on me like hornets, and I couldn’t make them go away until I could see the grandfather I knew and remembered, instead of this impostor they were all discussing.

  My mother was not crying so much as dissolving; that is the one way I can describe the fact that tears had become so normal for her it looked strange to see her face smooth and dry.

  It should be noted that I do not always understand body language. That’s quite normal, for someone with Asperger’s. It’s pointless to expect me to look at someone and know how she is feeling simply because her smile is too tight and she is hunched over and hugging her arms to herself, just as it would be pointless to expect a deaf person to hear a voice. Which means that when I asked to have my grandfather’s coffin opened, I shouldn’t be blamed for not realizing it would upset my mother even more.

  I just wanted to see if the body inside was still my grandfather, or maybe the man all those speakers had known, or something entirely different. I am skeptical about lights and tunnels and afterlives, and this seemed the most logical way to test my theories.

  Here is what I learned: Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.

  I don’t really see why that freaks people out, since it’s the most natural cycle in the world.

  The body in the coffin still looked like my grandfather. When I touched his cheek, though, with its crosshatched wrinkles, the skin no longer felt like human skin. It was cold, and slightly firm, like pudding that’s been left too long in the refrigerator and has developed a virtual hide as a surface crust.