House Rules: A Novel Read online

  Directly across from the desk is a small table with an overturned fish tank that has been kitted out like a fuming chamber. Jacob sees me looking at it. “What do you get prints off?” I ask.

  “Don’t answer that, Jacob,” Emma interjects.

  “Toothbrushes,” he replies. “Mugs. I once got a great partial off a manila folder with magnetic powder.”

  His mother and I both stare at him—Emma because he’s probably said more in the last second than in the past three days; and I because there are CSIs who don’t even know that technique for getting prints off a porous surface.

  I pick up the trash bin beside the desk and begin to leaf through it. There are several drafts of an English essay. There’s a gum wrapper. What’s extraordinary about the contents is not what they are but how they are: instead of being balled up or crumpled, each piece of garbage has been folded into crisp eighths. Even the tiny gum wrapper. The trash is stacked, like laundry.

  The first item I take is Jacob’s police scanner—now I know how he managed to get to the crime scene for the hypothermic guy. Jacob’s hand begins to flap a little harder. “That … that’s mine.”

  Emma puts her hand on his shoulder. “Remember what I said?”

  I quickly procure the items that are in the fuming chamber: a mug, a mirror, the tank itself. I look under Jacob’s bed, but there is only a pair of slippers and two plastic bins—one filled with back issues of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the other filled with Legos. From his bookshelf I take the complete DVD series of CrimeBusters, and then I see the composition notebooks. He told me he has more than a hundred, and he wasn’t lying. I pull the first one down.

  “You can’t have those,” Jacob cries.

  “I’m sorry, Jacob.” Episode 74, I read. Silent Witness, 12/4/08.

  Two teenagers out for a joyride run over a deaf man, who turns out to be already dead.

  This is followed by a list of evidence. Solved, it reads, 0:36.

  Emma has her head bent close to Jacob’s now. She’s murmuring, but I cannot hear the words. Turning my back to them, I flip through the entries. Some are repeats of episodes; Jacob seems to have written about each of them when they aired, even if he’d seen the show before. Some of them have the disclaimer that Jacob could not solve the crime before the TV detectives did.

  There are kidnappings. Stabbings. Cult ritual murders. One episode catches my eye: Joffrey puts on her boyfriend’s boots and leaves prints in the mud behind the house to mislead investigators.

  Stuck between the pages is a pink index card, and as I scan it I realize this is a note Jacob has written to himself:

  I am miserable. I can’t stand it anymore.

  The people who supposedly care don’t.

  I get my hopes up and everyone eventually lets me down. I finally know what’s wrong with me: all of you. All of you who think I’m just an autistic kid, so who really cares? Well, I hate you. I hate all of you. I hate how I cry at night because of you. But you are just people. JUST PEOPLE.

  So why do you make me feel so small?

  Was this written a week ago, a month, a year? Was it in response to bullying in school? To a teacher’s criticism? To something Jess Ogilvy said?

  It could point to motive. I quickly close the journal and stick the notebook into the box. You can’t see that index card anymore, but I know it’s there, and it feels too private, too raw to be considered simply evidence. All of a sudden I am flooded by the image of Jacob Hunt huddled in this room after a whole day of trying unsuccessfully to blend in with the hundreds of kids in his school. Who, out of all of us, hasn’t felt marginalized at some point? Who hasn’t felt like they don’t belong?

  Who hasn’t tried … and failed?

  I had been the fat kid, the one who was stuck in the soccer goal during gym class and cast as a rock in the school play. I’d been called Doughboy, Lardass, Earthquake Boy, you name it. In eighth grade, after a graduation ceremony, a kid had come up to me. I never knew your real name was Rich, he’d said.

  When my dad got laid off and we had to move to Vermont for his new job, I spent the summer reinventing myself. I ran—a half mile the first day, and then a whole one, and gradually more. I ate only green things. I did five hundred sit-ups every morning before I even brushed my teeth. By the time I got to my new school, I was a totally different guy, and I never looked back.

  Jacob Hunt can’t exercise himself into a new personality. He can’t move to another school district and start over. He’ll always be the kid with Asperger’s.

  Unless, instead, he makes himself the kid who killed Jess Ogilvy.

  “I’m all done here,” I say, stacking the boxes. “I just need you to sign the receipt for the property so you can eventually get it back.”

  “And when might that be?”

  “When the DA’s done with it.” I turn to say good-bye to Jacob, but he’s staring at the empty spot where his fuming chamber was located.

  Emma walks me downstairs. “You’re wasting your time,” she says. “My son isn’t a murderer.”

  I push the inventory receipt toward her, silent.

  “If I were Jess’s parents, I’d want to know the police were actively trying to find the person who killed my child instead of basing their entire case on the ridiculous notion that an autistic boy with no criminal history—a boy who loved Jess—killed her.” She signs the receipt I give her and then opens the front door. “Are you even listening?” she says, her voice rising. “You’ve got the wrong person.”

  There have been times—albeit very rarely—that I wished this were the case. When I snapped handcuffs on an abused wife who’d gone after her husband with a knife, for example. Or when I arrested a guy who’d broken into a grocery store to steal formula for his baby because he couldn’t afford it. But just like then, I can’t contradict the evidence that’s in front of me now. I may feel bad for someone who’s committed a crime, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t committed it.

  I pick up the boxes and, at the last moment, turn back. “I’m sorry,” I say. “For what it’s worth … I’m really sorry.”

  Her eyes flash. “You’re sorry? For what, exactly? Lying to me? Lying to Jacob? Throwing him into jail without giving any thought to his special needs—”

  “Technically, the judge did that—”

  “How dare you,” Emma shouts. “How dare you come in here as if you’re on our side, and then turn around and do this to my son!”

  “There are no sides,” I yell back at her. “There’s just a girl, who died alone and scared and who was found a week later frozen solid. Well, I’ve got a girl, too. What if it had been her?” By now my face is flushed. I am inches away from Emma. “I didn’t do this to your son,” I say, more softly. “I did this for my daughter.”

  The last thing I see is Emma Hunt’s jaw drop. She doesn’t speak to me as I heft the boxes more firmly in my arms and walk down her driveway, but then, it’s never the differences between people that surprise us. It’s the things that, against all odds, we have in common.

  Jacob

  My mother and I are riding in the car to the office of the state psychiatrist, who happens to work out of a hospital. I am nervous about this because I don’t like hospitals. I have been in them twice: once when I fell out of a tree and broke my arm, and once when Theo got hurt after I knocked over his high chair. What I remember about hospitals is that they smell white and stale, the lights are too bright, and every time I’ve been in one I’ve either been in pain or been ashamed or maybe both.

  This makes my fingers start to flutter on my leg, and I stare at them as if they are disconnected from my body. For the past three days, I’ve been doing better. I’m taking all my supplements again and my shots, and it hasn’t felt quite as much as if I’m constantly swimming in a bubble of water that makes it harder to understand what people say or to focus on them.

  Believe me, I know it’s not normal to flap my hands or walk in circles or repeat words over and over, but somet