House Rules: A Novel Read online

  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