The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  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 spitting 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.

  The aide who staffs the room, Ms. Agworth, is also the Quiz Bowl teacher. Every day at 11:45 she leaves to make photocopies of whatever it is she’s using in Quiz Bowl later that day. For this very reason, I’ve made it a point to use my COP pass at 11:30 for the past two days. It gets me out of English, which is a blessing in disguise, since we are reading Flowers for Algernon and just last week a girl asked (not in a mean way but truly curious) whether there were any experiments under way that might cure people like me.

  Today, I enter the sensory break room and make a beeline for the Koosh balls. Holding one in each hand, I wrestle my way into the swing and pull the material closed around me. “Morning, Jacob,” Ms. Agworth says. “You need anything?”

  “Not right now,” I murmur.

  I don’t know why people with AS are so sensitive to things like texture and color and sound and light. When I don’t look someone in the eye, and when other people very pointedly look away from me so they don’t appear to be staring, I sometimes wonder if I even really exist. The items in this room are the sensory equivalent of the game Battleship. Instead of calling out coordinates—B-4, D-7—I call for another physical sensation. Each time I feel the weight of a blanket on my arm, or the pop of Bubble Wrap under my body when I roll on it, it’s a direct hit. And at the end of my sensory break, instead of sinking my battleship, I’ve just found a way to locate myself in the grid of this world.

  I close my eyes and slowly spin inside this dark, close ball. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” I murmur.

  “What’s that, Jacob?” Ms. Agworth says.

  “Nothing,” I shout. I wait until I’ve swung in three more slow pivots, and then I emerge.

  “How are you doing today?” she asks.

  It seems like a pretty gratuitous question, given the fact that I wouldn’t be in this room if I were able to tolerate sitting in class like neurotypical people. But when I don’t answer, she doesn’t pry. She just keeps reading her trivia books and jotting down notes.

  The largest fish in the world is a whale shark, at fifty feet. Four million marshmallow Peeps are made each day.

  (That sort of makes me wonder who on earth is buying them when it’s not Easter.)

  It takes the average adult man thirteen minutes to eat his dinner.

  “I’ve got one for you, Ms. Agworth,” I say. “The word ass is in the Bible 170 times.”

  “Thanks for that, Jacob, but it’s not really appropriate.” She shuffles her papers and looks down at her watch. “You think you’d be okay for a few minutes, if I ran down to the office to make some copies?”

  Technically, she is not supposed to leave me alone. And I know there are certain other autistic kids who use the sensory room that she’d never stop watching like a hawk—Mathilda, for example, would probably fashion a noose o