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House Rules: A Novel Page 40
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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.”
“And coincidentally you are also wearing it today,” Oliver replies. He glances at me. “I want you to help me, while your mother goes and gets dressed.”
“But—”
“Emma, I don’t have time to fight with you right now,” Oliver tells her.
My mother is planning to wear a very simple dark gray skirt with a blue sweater. I was here when Oliver went through her entire closet channeling his inner Heidi Klum and picked out what he said would be “dark and conservative.”
Angry, my mother huffs out of Jacob’s room. I fold my arms. “I just got him into those clothes. No way I’m getting him out of them.”
Oliver shrugs. “Jacob, take that off.”
“Gladly,” Jacob explodes, and he rips the clothes off his own body in seconds flat.
Oliver tackles him. “Get the pin-striped shirt and the blazer and the red tie,” he orders, squinting into Jacob’s open closet. The second I do, Jacob takes one look at the clothing—styles he hates, plus they’re the wrong color—and lets out a bloodcurdling scream.
“Holy shit,” Oliver murmurs.
I reach for Jacob’s hands and pin them over his head again. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” I say.
The last time I had to dress my brother in a coat and tie we were headed to my grandfather’s funeral. My mother was not herself that day, which is maybe why Jacob didn’t put up as big a fight about the clothes as he did today. Neither of us owned a coat and tie, so my mother had borrowed them from a neighbor’s husband. We were younger then, and a man’s jacket fit neither of us. We sat on the side of the viewing room where the coffin was with our clothes swimming on us, as if we’d been bigger before our grief hit.
In reality, I didn’t know my grandfather very well. He’d been in a nursing home since my grandmother died, and my mom dragged us to visit him twice a year. It smelled like pee, and I used to get totally creeped out by the old people in their wheelchairs, whose skin seemed stretched too shiny and tight over bony knuckles and knees. The one good memory I had of my grandfather invo