House Rules: A Novel Read online

  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