The Jodi Picoult Collection #4 Read online

  “Why don’t we go up to your closet and find something?” Emma suggests, and we all trudge upstairs again, this time to Jacob’s room. I studiously avoid looking into the bathroom as we pass.

  Although the police still have his fuming chamber as evidence, Jacob has configured a new one, an overturned planter. It’s not transparent, like his fish tank, but it must be getting the job done, because I can smell the glue. Emma throws open the closet door.

  If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Chromatically ordered, Jacob’s clothes hang side by side, not quite touching. There are jeans and chinos in the blue area; and a rainbow of long- and short-sleeved tees. And yes, in its correct sequence, the lucky green sweatshirt. It looks like a Gay Pride shrine in there.

  There is a fine line between looking insane in court and looking disrespectful. I take a deep breath, wondering how to explain this to a client who cannot think beyond the feeling of a placket of buttons on his skin. “Jacob,” I say, “you have to wear a shirt with a collar. And you have to wear a tie. I’m sorry, but none of this will work.”

  “What does the way I look have to do with you telling the jury the truth?”

  “Because they still see you,” I answer. “So you need to make a good first impression.”

  He turns away. “They’re not going to like me anyway. Nobody ever does.”

  He doesn’t say this in a way that suggests he feels sorry for himself. More like he’s just telling me a fact, relating the way the world works.

  After Jacob leaves to clean up his mess, I remember that Emma’s in the room with me. “The bathroom. I . . . I don’t know what to say.” She sinks down onto Jacob’s bed. “He does this all the time—sets up scenes for me to solve. It’s what makes him happy.”

  “Well, there’s a big difference between using a bottle of corn syrup to get your jollies and using a human being. I don’t need the jury to be wondering how far a leap there is from one to the other.”

  “Are you nervous?” she asks, turning to face me.

  I nod. I probably shouldn’t be admitting this to her, but I can’t help it.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure,” I say. “Anything.”

  “Do you believe he killed Jess?”

  “I already told you that doesn’t matter to a jury—we’re utilizing the defense most likely to—”

  “I’m not asking you as Jacob’s lawyer,” Emma interrupts. “I’m asking you as my friend.”

  I draw in my breath. “I don’t know. If he did, I don’t believe it was intentional.”

  She folds her arms. “I just keep thinking that if we could get the police to reopen the case, to look harder at Jess’s boyfriend—”

  “The police,” I say, “think they’ve found their murderer, based on the evidence. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t be going to court on Wednesday. The prosecutor thinks she’s got enough proof to make a jury see things her way. But Emma, I’m going to do everything I can to keep that from happening.”

  “I have a confession to make,” Emma says. “When we saw Dr. Newcomb? I was supposed to meet with her for a half hour. I told Jacob that I’d be thirty minutes. And then I very intentionally kept talking for another fifteen. I wanted Jacob to get rattled, because I was late. I wanted him stimming by the time he met with her, so that she’d be able to write about all that behavior in the court report.” Emma’s eyes are dark and hollow. “What kind of mother does that?”

  I look at her. “One who’s trying to save her son from going to prison.”

  Emma shivers. She walks to the window, rubbing her arms, even though it is downright hot in the room. “I’ll find him a collared shirt,” she promises. “But you’ll have to get it on him.”

  CASE 9: PAJAMA GAME

  Early in the morning on February 17, 1970, the officers at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, responded to a call from Army Doctor Jeffrey MacDonald. They arrived to find his pregnant wife, Colette, and two young daughters dead from multiple stab wounds. Colette had been stabbed thirty-seven times with a knife and an ice pick, and MacDonald’s torn pajama top was draped on top of her. On the headboard of the bed, in blood, was the word PIG. MacDonald himself was found with minor wounds, beside his wife. He said he’d been hurt by three males and a woman in a white hat who chanted, “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs.” When the men attacked him, MacDonald said that he pulled his pajama top over his head and used it to block the jabs of the ice pick. Eventually, he said, he was knocked unconscious.

  The Army didn’t believe MacDonald. The living room, for example, didn’t show signs of a struggle, except for an overturned table and plant. Fibers from the torn pajama top were not found in the room where it was torn but rather in the bedrooms of his daughters. They theorized that MacDonald killed his wife and daughters and tried to cover up the murders by using articles about the Manson Family in a magazine that was found in the living room. The Army dropped the case because of the poor quality of the investigative techniques, and MacDonald was honorably discharged.

  In 1979 MacDonald was tried in a civilian court. A forensic scientist testified that the doctor’s pajama top, which he said had been used to block his attackers, had forty-eight clean, cylindrical holes that were too tidy for a violent attack—to make a hole that shape, the top would have had to be immobile, something that was very unlikely if MacDonald was defending himself from someone trying to stab him. The scientist also showed how, by folding the top a certain way, those forty-eight holes could have been created by twenty-one jabs—the exact number of times Colette MacDonald had been stabbed with an ice pick. The holes lined up with the pattern of her wounds, indicating that the pajama top had been placed on her before she was stabbed and not used in self-defense by MacDonald. He was sentenced to life in prison for three murders and still maintains that he is innocent.

  9

  Theo

  It isn’t the first time I’ve wrestled my brother into a coat and tie. “Jesus, Jacob, cut it out before you give me a black eye,” I mutter, holding his hands pinned over his head and straddling his body, which twists like a fish that’s suddenly found itself on a dock. My mother is working her hardest to make a knot in his tie, but Jacob’s thrashing so much that it’s practically a noose.

  “Do you really need to button it?” I yell, but I doubt she can hear me. Jacob’s got us beat in sheer decibels. I bet the neighbors can hear him, and I wonder what they think. Probably that we’re sticking pins in his eyeballs.

  My mother manages to fasten one of the tiny buttons on the oxford shirt collar before Jacob bites her hand. She makes a little squeak and jerks her fingers away from his neck, leaving one of the buttons still unfastened. “That’s good enough,” she says, just as Oliver arrives to pick us all up for the first day of the trial.

  “I knocked,” he says, but obviously we wouldn’t have heard him downstairs.

  “You’re early,” my mother answers. She is still wearing a bathrobe.

  “Well, let’s see the finished product,” Oliver says, and my mom and I both step away from Jacob.

  Oliver looks at him for one long moment. “What the hell is this?” he asks.

  Okay, I’ll admit, Jacob’s not going to win any fashion awards, but he’s in a coat and tie, which were the criteria. He is wearing a polyester suit the color of an egg yolk that my mother found at a thrift store. A pale yellow shirt, with a stretchy golden knit tie.

  “He looks like a pimp,” Oliver says.

  My mother presses her lips together. “It’s Yellow Wednesday.”

  “I don’t care if it’s polka-dot Sunday,” Oliver says. “And neither does anyone on that jury. That’s the kind of suit Elton John wears to a gig, Emma, not what a defendant wears to trial.”

  “It was a compromise,” my mother insists.

  Oliver runs a hand down his face. “Didn’t we talk about a blue blazer?”

  “Fridays are blue days,” Jacob says. “I’m wearing one then.”