by Jodi Picoult
I may not understand emotion, but I can feel guilt about not understanding it. So when I finally cornered my mother, hours after she ran sobbing from the sight of me poking The-Thing-That-Used-to-Be-My-Grandfather’s cheek, I tried to explain why she shouldn’t be crying. “He’s not Grandpa,” I told her. “I checked.”
Remarkably, this did not make her feel better at all. “That doesn’t mean I miss him any less,” my mother said.
Pure logic suggests that if the entity in the coffin is not fundamentally the person you used to know, you cannot miss him. Because that’s not a loss; that’s a change.
My mother had shaken her head. “Here’s what I miss, Jacob. I miss the fact that I won’t get to ever hear his voice again. And that I can’t talk to him anymore.”
This wasn’t really true. We had Grandpa’s voice immortalized on old family videos that I sometimes liked to watch when I couldn’t sleep at night. And it wasn’t that she couldn’t talk to him that was hard for her to accept; it was that he could no longer talk back.
My mother had sighed. “You’ll get it, one day. I hope.”
I would like to be able to tell her that, yes, now I get it. When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.
I am headed to my meeting with Jess.
I’m late. It’s 3:00 A.M., which is really Monday, not Sunday. But there’s no other time for me to go, with my mother watching over me. And although she will probably argue that I broke a house rule, technically, I didn’t. This isn’t sneaking out to a crime scene. The crime scene is three hundred yards away from where I’m headed.
My backpack is full of necessities; my bike whispers on the pavement as I pedal fast. It’s easier not being on foot this time, not having to support more than my own weight.
Directly behind the yard of the house into which Jess had moved is a small, scraggly forest. And directly behind that is Route 115. It runs across a bridge over the culvert that siphons the runoff from the woods in the spring, when the water level is high. I noticed it last Tuesday when I took the bus from school to Jess’s new residence.
My mind is full of maps—from social flowcharts (Person is frowning → Person keeps trying to interrupt → Person takes step backward = Person wants to leave this conversation, desperately) to grids of relativity, like an interpersonal version of Google Earth. (Kid says to me, “You play baseball? What position? Left out?” and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put that way, the comment loses its importance.)
But my mind also functions geographically and topographically, so that at any given moment I can locate myself (this shower stall is on the upper level of the house at 132 Birdseye Lane, Townsend, Vermont, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth). So by the time I got to Jess’s new house last Tuesday, I completely understood where it lay in relation to everywhere else I’d ever been.
Jess is just where I left her five days ago, propped against the damp stone wall.
I lean my bike against the far end of the culvert and squat down, shining a flashlight into her face.
Jess is dead.
When I touch her cheek with the backs of my knuckles, it feels like marble. That reminds me, and so I open up my backpack and pull out the blanket. It is a silly thing, I know, but so is leaving flowers on a grave, and this seems to make more sense. I tuck it around Jess’s shoulders and make sure it covers her feet.
Then I sit down beside her. I put on a pair of latex gloves and I hold Jess’s hand for a moment before taking out my notebook. In it, I begin to write down the physical evidence.
The bruises underneath her eyes.
The missing tooth.
The contusions on her upper arms, which are, of course, covered up by her sweatshirt right now.
The leathery yellow scrapes on her lower back, which are also covered by that sweatshirt.
To be honest, I’m a little disappointed. I would have expected the police to be able to read the clues I left behind. But they haven’t found Jess, and so I have to take the next step.
Her phone is still in my pocket. I have carried it everywhere with me, although I’ve only turned it on five times. Detective Matson would have subpoenaed Jess’s cell phone records by now; they’ll see the instances when I called her residence to listen to her voice on the answering machine, but they will assume it was Jess herself who made the call.
He’s probably tried to locate her by GPS, too, which nearly all phones have now and which can be accessed by the FBI using a computer program that will pinpoint an active phone within a range of a few feet. This was first piloted in emergency response programs, namely, the 911 call. As soon as dispatch picks up on the other end, they begin to track, just in case an officer or an ambulance has to be sent out.
I decide to make it easy for them. I sit down next to Jess again, so that our shoulders are touching. “You are the best friend I ever had,” I tell her. “I wish this had never happened.”
Jess, of course, does not respond. I cannot say whether she has ceased to be or if this is just her body and the thing that makes Jess Jess has gone somewhere else. It makes me think of my meltdown—of the room with no windows, no doors, the country where nobody speaks to each other, the piano with only black keys. Maybe this is why funeral dirges are always in a minor key; being on the other side of dead isn’t that different from having Asperger’s.
It would be incredible to stay and watch. There is nothing I would like more than to see the police swarm in to rescue Jess. But that would be too risky; and so I know I’ll just get on my bike and be safe and sound in my bed before the sun or my mother rises for the day.
First, though, I power up her pink Motorola. It feels like I should recite something, a tribute or a prayer. “E.T., phone home,” I finally say, and then I press 911 and place the little receiver on the stone beside her.
Through the speakers I can hear the voice of the dispatcher. What is your emergency? she says. Hello? Is anybody there?
I am halfway through the woods when I see the flashing lights in the distance on Route 115, and I smile to myself the whole rest of the way home.
CASE 4: SOMETHING’S FISHY
Something Stella Nickell loved: tropical fish. She dreamed of opening her own store.
Something Stella Nickell did not love: her husband, whom she poisoned in 1986 with Excedrin capsules she’d laced with cyanide in order to collect on his life insurance policies.
She first attempted to poison Bruce Nickell with hemlock and foxglove, but neither worked on him. So instead she contaminated Excedrin capsules. In order to cover her tracks, she also placed several packages of poisoned Excedrin in three different stores—leading to the death of Sue Snow, who had the bad luck to have been shopping at one of them. The drug manufacturers released the batch numbers of the pills to warn consumers, which was when Stella Nickell came forward and told authorities she had two bottles of contaminated pills that had been purchased from two different stores. This seemed unlikely, since out of thousands of bottles that had been checked in that region, only five were found to have tainted capsules. What were the odds of Stella having two of those?
While examining the Excedrin capsules, the FBI lab found an essential clue: green crystals were mixed in with the cyanide. These turned out to be Algae Destroyer—a product used in fish tanks. Stella Nickell had an aquarium and had bought Algae Destroyer at a local fish store. According to the police, Stella had crushed some algae tablets for her beloved fish in a bowl and then, later, used the same bowl to mix the cyanide. Stella’s estranged daughter subsequently went to the police and testified that her mother had planned to kill Bruce Nickell for years.
Tal
k about the mother of all headaches.
4
Rich
Sometimes I’m just too damn late.
Last year, the day after Christmas, a thirteen-year-old girl named Gracie Cheever never came downstairs. She was found hanging from a closet rack. When I arrived with the CSIs who were photographing the scene, the first thing I noticed was what a mess Gracie’s room was—cereal bowls stacked high and papers and dirty laundry thrown on the floor—no one ever asked this kid to clean up. I looked through her journals and learned that Gracie was a cutter; Gracie hated her life and herself; Gracie hated her face and thought she was fat, and wrote down every morsel she ate and every time she cheated on her diet. And then, on one page: I miss my mom. I asked one of the patrol officers if the mother was dead, and he shook his head. “She’s in the kitchen,” he said.
Gracie was the older child of two. She had a younger sister with Down syndrome, and boy, did her mom live for that kid. She home-schooled her; she did the girl’s physical therapy on mats in the family room. And while her mother was busy being a saint, Gracie’s dad was molesting her.
I took Gracie’s journal back to the station, and I Xeroxed it twice. It was covered with blood, because while she was writing, she was cutting herself. One copy I gave to the medical examiner. The second I brought to the chief. Someone in this family needs to know what was going on, I told him.
After Gracie was buried, I called her mother and asked to meet with her. We sat down in the living room, in front of a blazing fire. At that appointment, I gave her a copy of the journal and told her I’d marked the pages that she really needed to read. She stared at me with glassy eyes and told me the family was starting fresh. She thanked me, and then, while I was watching, she threw the journal into the flames.
I am thinking of Gracie Cheever now as I move gingerly around the culvert where Jess Ogilvy’s body has been located. She is wrapped in a quilt, and fully dressed. There’s a fine sheen of frost on her clothes and her skin. Wayne Nussbaum snaps off the latex gloves he’s been using to examine the body and instructs his assistants to wait for the CSIs to finish their photographs of the scene before moving the victim back to the hospital for an autopsy.
“First impression?” I ask.
“She’s been dead awhile. Days, I’m thinking, although it’s hard to say. The cold weather made a nice makeshift morgue.” He tucked his bare hands under his armpits. “I doubt she was killed here. The scrapes on her back look like they were caused by being dragged postmortem.” As an afterthought, he asks, “Did any of your guys find a tooth?”
“Why?”
“Because she’s missing one.”
I make a mental note to tell my investigators to search for that. “Knocked out with a punch? Or taken as a trophy after death?”
He shakes his head. “Rich, you know I’m not playing a guessing game with you at four in the morning. I’ll call you with my report.”
As he walks off, the flash of a CSI photographer illuminates the night.
In that instant, we all look like ghosts.
Mark Maguire swallows when he sees the backpack that has been returned from the lab. “That’s the one her aunt gave her,” he murmurs.
He is shell-shocked. Not only has he been told his girlfriend is dead but, seconds afterward, he was arrested for her murder. It was 7:00 A.M. when the officers went to his apartment to pick him up. Now, during the interrogation, he is still wearing the clothes he wore to bed last night: sweatpants and a faded UVM tee. From time to time he’s shivered in the drafty conference room, but that only makes me think of Jess Ogilvy’s blue-cast skin.
My time line is shaping up. The way I see it, Maguire was fighting with Jess, punched her—knocking out her tooth and inadvertently killing her. Panicking, he cleaned up the evidence and then tried to cover his tracks by making it look like a kidnapping: the cut screen, the overturned CD rack and kitchen stools, the mailbox note, the backpack full of Jess’s clothes.
I take the clothes out of the backpack—mostly plus-sizes far too big for Jess’s tiny frame. “A smarter criminal who was leaving a red herring would have picked clothes that actually still fit her,” I muse. “But then again, Mark, you aren’t very smart, are you?”
“I already told you, I had nothing to do with—”
“Did you knock out her tooth when you were fighting with her?” I ask. “Is that the way a guy like you gets off? By beating up his girlfriend?”
“I didn’t beat her up—”
“Mark, you can’t win here. We’ve got her body, and there are bruises clear as day on her arms and her neck. How long do you think it’s going to take us to tie them to you?”
He winces. “I told you—we were having a fight, and I did grab her arms. I pinned her up against the wall. I wanted … I wanted to teach her a lesson.”
“And this lesson went a little too far, didn’t it?”
“I never killed her. I swear to God.”
“Why did you bring her body out into the woods?”
He looks up at me. “Please. You have to believe me.”
I rise to my feet and loom over him. “I don’t have to believe anything you say, you little prick. You already lied to me once about fighting with her on the weekend, when it turns out you fought with her on Tuesday, too. I’ve got your boots outside the window with a cut screen, your handprints on her throat, and a dead girl who was cleaned up and moved. You ask any jury in this country, and that looks a hell of a lot like a guy who killed his girlfriend and wanted to conceal it.”
“I never cut that screen. I don’t know who did. And I didn’t beat her up. I got mad, and I shoved her … and I left.”
“Right. And then you came back, and you killed her.”
Maguire’s eyes fill with tears. I wonder if he really is sorry about Jess Ogilvy’s death, or just sorry that he’s been caught. “No,” he says, his voice thick. “No, I loved her.”
“Did you cry this much when you were cleaning up her blood in the bathroom? How about when you had to wipe all the blood off her face?”
“I want to see her,” Maguire begs. “Let me see Jess.”
“You should have thought of that before you murdered her,” I say.
As I walk away from him, intending to let him stew in his own guilt for a few minutes before I come back in to break his confession, Maguire buries his face in his hands. That’s when I realize that they are completely uninjured—no bruising, no cuts, which you’d expect if you hit someone hard enough to make her lose a tooth.
Theo
By the time I was five, I knew that there were differences between Jacob and me.
I had to eat everything on my plate, but Jacob was allowed to leave behind things like peas and tomatoes because he didn’t like the way they felt inside his mouth.
Whatever kids’ tape I was listening to in the car while we drove took a backseat to anything by Bob Marley.
I had to pick up all my toys after I was done playing, but the six-foot line of Matchbox cars that Jacob had spent the day arranging perfectly straight was allowed to snake down the hallway for a month until he got tired of it.
Mostly, though, I was aware of being the odd guy out. Because the minute Jacob had any kind of crisis—and that happened constantly—my mom would drop everything and run to him. And usually the thing she dropped was me.
Once, when I was about seven, my mother had promised me she’d take us to see Spy Kids 3-D on a Saturday afternoon. I had been excited all week, because we didn’t often see movies, much less 3-D ones. We didn’t have the extra money for it, but I had gotten a free pair of glasses in our cereal box and begged and begged until my mother said yes. However—big surprise—it turned out to be a nonissue. Jacob had read all of his dinosaur books and started flapping and rocking at the thought of not having something new to read for bedtime, and my mother made an executive decision to take us to the library instead of the theater.
Maybe I would have been okay with this, but at the libra
ry, there was a big honking display case taking advantage of the movie tie-in with reading in general. BE A SPY KID! it said, and it was full of books like Harriet the Spy and stories about the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. I watched my mother take Jacob to the nonfiction section—567 in the world of Dewey decimals, which even I knew meant dinosaurs. They sat down right in the aisle, as if dragging me to the library and ruining my day didn’t matter at all. They started to read a book about ornithopods.
Suddenly, I realized what I had to do.
If my mother only noticed Jacob, then that’s what I would become.
It was probably seven years of frustration that boiled over just then, because I can’t really explain why else I did what I did. I mean, I knew better.
Libraries are places where you are supposed to be quiet.
Library books are sacred, and don’t belong to you.
One minute I had been sitting in the children’s room, in the comfy green chair that looked like a giant’s fist, and the next, I was screaming my head off and yanking books off the shelves and ripping out the pages, and when the librarian said Whose child is this? I kicked her in the shins.
I was gifted at throwing a fit. I’d been watching a master, after all, my whole life.
A crowd gathered. Other librarians ran in to see what was going on. I only hesitated once during my tantrum, and that was when I saw my mother’s face hovering at the edge of the group that was staring at me. She had gone white, like a statue.
Obviously, she had to get me out of there. And obviously, that meant Jacob couldn’t check out the books he wanted to bring home. She grabbed him by the wrist as he started to have his own meltdown, and lifted me with her free arm. My brother and I both kicked and screamed the whole way into the parking lot.