House Rules: A Novel Read online

  One, one, two, three. Why five, and not four?

  I take my pen out of my pocket and write the numbers on my hand until I see the pattern. It’s not ate, it’s eight. “Eleven,” I say, staring at Jacob. “Nineteen.”

  He rolls over. “Sign these,” I say, “and I will take you to your mother.” I push the papers toward him on the floor. I roll the pen in his direction.

  At first Jacob doesn’t move.

  And then, very slowly, he does.

  Jacob

  Once Theo asked me if there was an antidote for Asperger’s, would I take it?

  I told him no.

  I am not sure how much of me is wrapped up in the part that’s Asperger’s. What if I lost some of my intelligence, for example, or my sarcasm? What if I could be afraid of ghosts on Halloween instead of the color of the pumpkins? The problem is that I do not remember who I was without Asperger’s, so who knows what would remain? I liken it to a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that you peel apart. You can’t really get rid of the peanut butter without taking some of the jelly as well, can you?

  I can see my mother. It’s like the sun when you’re underwater, and brave enough to open your eyes. She’s unfocused and slightly runny and too bright to see clearly. I am that far below the surface.

  I have a sore throat from screaming so loud; I have bruises that reach to the bone. The few times I fell asleep, I woke up crying. All I wanted was someone who understood what I had done, and why. Someone who gave a damn as much as I did.

  When they gave me that injection at the jail, I dreamed that my heart had been cut out of my chest. The doctors and the correctional officers passed it around in a game of Hot Potato and then tried to sew it back into place, but it only made me look like the Frankenstein monster. See, they all exclaimed, you can’t even tell, and since that was a lie, I could trust nothing they said anymore.

  I would not take the jelly without the peanut butter, but sometimes, I wonder why I could not have been lunch meat, which everyone prefers.

  There used to be a theory that autistic brains didn’t work right because of the gaps between the neurons, the lack of connectivity. Now there’s a new theory that autistic brains work too well, that there is so much going on in my head at once I have to work overtime to filter it out, and sometimes the ordinary world becomes the baby tossed out with the bathwater.

  Oliver—who says he is my lawyer—spoke to me in the language of nature. That’s all I’ve ever wanted: to be as organic as the whorl of seeds in a sunflower or the spiral of a shell. When you have to try so hard to be normal, that means you’re not.

  My mother walks forward. She’s crying, but there’s a smile on her face. For God’s sake, is it any wonder I can’t ever understand what you people are feeling?

  Usually, when I go where I go, it’s a room with no doors and no windows. But in jail, that was the world, and so I had to go somewhere else. It was a metal capsule, sunk to the bottom of the sea. If anyone tried to come for me, with a knife or a chisel or a crust of hope, the ocean would sense the change and the metal would implode.

  The problem was the same rules applied to me, trying to get out.

  My mother is five steps away. Four. Three.

  When I was very small, I watched a Christian television program on a Sunday morning geared to kids. It was about a special-needs boy playing hide-and-seek with some other children in a junkyard. The other kids forgot about him, and a day later, the police found him suffocated in an old refrigerator. I did not get a religious message out of that, like the Golden Rule or eternal salvation. I got: Do not hide in old refrigerators.

  This time, when I went where I went, I thought I’d gone too far. There was no more pain and nothing mattered, sure. But no one would find me, and they’d eventually stop looking.

  Now, though, my head is starting to hurt again, and my shoulders ache. I can smell my mother: vanilla and freesia and the shampoo she uses that comes in a green bottle. I can feel the heat of her, like asphalt in the summer, the minute before she wraps her arms around me. “Jacob,” she says. My name rises on the roller coaster of a sob. My knees give with relief, with the knowledge that I have not faded away after all.

  CASE 6: BITE ME

  You probably know who Ted Bundy is—a notorious serial killer who was linked to the murder of thirty-six victims, although many experts believe that number is closer to one hundred. He would approach a woman in a public place, gain trust by feigning injury or impersonating an authority figure, and then abduct her. Once the victim was in his car, he’d hit her in the skull with a crowbar. He strangled all but one of his victims. Many bodies were driven miles away from where they disappeared. While on death row, Bundy admitted that he decapitated over a dozen of his victims and kept their heads for a while. He visited the bodies and applied makeup to the corpses or engaged in sexual acts. He kept souvenirs: photos, women’s clothing. To this day, many of his victims remain unknown.

  It is widely believed that the expert testimony by Dr. Richard Souviron, a forensic dentist, was what secured Bundy’s conviction and eventual execution. Bite marks were found on the buttocks of the victim Lisa Levy. The first was a complete bite mark. The second was rotated so that there were two impressions of the lower teeth. This gave authorities more places to compare dental records against the mark, which increased the odds of a match.

  The analysis of the bite marks was possible only because a particularly savvy crime scene investigator who was taking pictures at the scene included a ruler in the photo of the bite mark, in order to show scale. Without this photograph, Bundy might have been acquitted. The bite mark had degraded past identifiable by the time the case was presented in court, so the only useful evidence of its original size and shape was that photograph.

  6

  Rich

  “Care to do the honors?” Basil asks me.

  We are crowded into Jessica Ogilvy’s bathroom—me and the pair of CSIs who have been combing the house for evidence. Marcy’s taped up the windows with black paper and is standing ready with her camera. Basil has mixed the Luminol to spray all over the tub, the floor, the walls. I flip the light switch and plunge us into darkness.

  Basil sprays the solution, and suddenly the bathroom lights up like a Christmas tree, the grout between the tiles glowing a bright, fluorescent blue.

  “Hot damn,” Marcy murmurs. “I love it when we’re right.”

  Luminol glows when it meets the correct catalyst—in this case, the iron in hemoglobin. Jacob Hunt might have been smart enough to clean up the mess he’d left behind after murdering Jess Ogilvy, but there were still traces of blood that would go far toward convincing a jury of his guilt.

  “Nice work,” I say, as Marcy takes a furious run of photographs. Assuming the blood matches the victim’s, this latest piece of the puzzle helps me map out the crime. “Jacob Hunt comes for his appointment with the victim,” I muse, thinking aloud. “They argue, maybe knocking over the CD rack and the mail and a few stools, and he corners her—right here, apparently—beating her up and eventually striking a blow that kills her.” As the Luminol loses its glow, I flip on the lights. “He cleans up the bathroom, and then he cleans up the victim, dressing her and dragging her to the culvert.”

  I glance down at the floor. In full light, you can’t see the chemical, and you can’t see the blood at all. “But Jacob’s a CSI buff,” I say.

  Basil grins. “I read this article in Esquire about how women find us sexier than firemen—”

  “Not all women,” Marcy qualifies.

  “And so,” I continue, ignoring them, “he comes back to the scene of the crime and decides to cover his tracks. The thing is, he’s smart—he wants to pin this on Mark Maguire. So he thinks to himself, If Mark did this, how would he try to cover it up? As a kidnapping. So he puts on Mark Maguire’s boots and stomps around outside, and then cuts the screens in the windows. He cleans up the CDs and the mail and the overturned stools. But he also knows Mark would be sharp enou