Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“Look, I don’t remember them all, but that’s probably true.”

“In fact, Detective,” I say, “Jacob seemed to know your job better than you do.”

He narrows his eyes. “He certainly knew the crime scene better than I did.”

“Those composition notebooks that you found. Did you read them all?”

“Yes.”

“What did the other hundred and fifteen notebooks contain?”

“Synopses,” he says. “Of episodes of CrimeBusters. ”

“Do you know what CrimeBusters is, Detective?”

“I think you’d have to be living under a rock to not know,” he says. “It’s a police procedural television show that’s probably syndicated on Mars by now.”

“You ever watch it?”

He laughs. “I try not to. It’s not exactly realistic.”

“So the cases aren’t true crime.”

“No.”

“Then is it fair to say that the hundred and sixteen journals you seized from Jacob’s room are full of descriptions of fictional crime scenes?”

“Well, yes,” Matson says, “but I don’t think the one he wrote in the hundred and sixteenth journal was fictional at all.”

“How do you know?” I take a few steps toward him. “In fact, Detective, there was media coverage of Jess Ogilvy’s disappearance before you got hold of this notebook, wasn’t there?”

“Yes.”

“Her name was on the news, her parents were asking for help solving the crime?”

“Yes.”

“You testified that Jacob would show up at crime scenes looking to help, correct?”

“Yes, but-”

“Did he ever offer up information that was surprising to you?”

Matson hesitates. “Yes.”

“So isn’t it possible, especially given that he knew this particular victim, that he wasn’t using the notebook to brag about a murder… but rather, like he did with every CrimeBusters episode, using it to help solve the case?”

I turn to the jury before he can even answer. “Nothing further,” I say.

Helen stands up at the prosecutor’s table. “Detective Matson,” she says, “can you read the notation at the bottom of the first page of the notebook?”

“It says SOLVED: ME, twenty-four minutes.”

“What about the notation at the bottom of the entry on page six?”

“SOLVED: THEM, fifty-five minutes… Good one!”

She walks toward Matson. “Do you have any idea what that notation indicates?”

“Jacob told me, when I first saw him writing in the journals. He marks down whether he solved the crime before the TV detectives did, and how long it took.”

“Detective,” Helen says, “can you read the notation at the bottom of page fourteen, the entry entitled ‘At Her House’ that you read for us earlier?”

He glances down at the page. “It says SOLVED: ME.”

“Anything else notable about that line?”

Matson looks at the jury. “It’s underlined. Ten times.”

At dinner, I’m the one who sees my brother stealing the knife.

I don’t say anything at first. But it’s perfectly clear to me, the way he pauses in the middle of his yellow rice and scrambled eggs to carve the kernels off an ear of corn-and then pushes the knife with his thumbs to the edge of the table, so that it falls into his lap.

My mother yammers on about the trial-about the coffee machine at the courthouse which only dispenses cold coffee; about what Jacob is going to wear tomorrow; about the defense, which will present its case in the morning. I don’t think either of us is listening, because Jacob is trying to not move his shoulders while he wraps the knife in a napkin and I am trying to study his every move.

When he starts to get up from the table and my mother cuts him off with a sharp, forced cough, I am sure she’s going to call him on his stolen cutlery. But instead, she says, “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“May I be excused?” Jacob mutters, and a minute later he’s scraped his plate and heads upstairs.

“I wonder what’s the matter,” my mother says. “He hardly ate.”

I shovel the rest of my food into my mouth and then mumble a request to be excused. I hurry upstairs, but Jacob’s not in his room. The bathroom door is wide open, too. It’s like he’s just vanished.

I walk into my own bedroom, and all of a sudden I’m grabbed and pulled against the wall, and there’s a knife at my throat.

Okay, I’m just going to say it’s pretty depressing that this is not the first time I’ve found myself in this scenario with my brother. I do what I know works: I bite his wrist.

You’d think he’d see it coming, but he doesn’t; the knife clatters to the floor, and I elbow him in his soft gut. He doubles over, grunting. “What the fuck are you doing?” I yell.

“Practicing.”

I reach for the knife and stick it inside my desk drawer, the one I keep locked, where I’ve learned to keep the things I don’t want Jacob to get. “Practicing murder?” I say. “You crazy motherfucker. This is why you’re going to get convicted.”

“I wasn’t going to actually hurt you.” Jacob sits down heavily on my bed. “There was someone looking at me funny today.”

“I’d think a lot of people in that courtroom were looking at you funny.”

“But this one guy followed me to the bathroom. I have to be able to protect myself.”

“Right. And what do you think is going to happen tomorrow morning when you walk into the courthouse and the metal detectors start beeping? And the stupid reporters all watch you pull a steak knife out of your sock?”

He frowns. This is one of those harebrained Aspie schemes of his, the ones he never thinks through. Like when he called the cops on my mom two months ago. To Jacob, I’m sure it seemed perfectly logical. To the rest of the free world, not so much.

“What if there’s nothing wrong with me?” Jacob says. “What if the reason I act like I do and think like I do is that I’m left out all the time? If I had friends, you know, maybe I wouldn’t do things that look strange to everyone else. It’s like bacteria that only grows in a vacuum. Maybe there’s no such thing as Asperger’s. Maybe all there is is what happens to you when you don’t fit in.”

“Don’t go telling your lawyer that. He needs Asperger’s to exist big-time right now.” I look at Jacob’s hands. His cuticles are bitten down to the skin; often he draws blood. My mother used to have to wrap Band-Aids around all his fingers before she sent him to school. Once, in the hallways, I heard two girls calling him the Mummy. “Hey, Jacob,” I say quietly. “I’ll tell you something no one else knows.”

His hand flutters on his thigh. “A secret?”

“Yeah. But you can’t tell Mom.”

I want to tell him. I’ve wanted to tell someone for so long now. But maybe Jacob is right: in the absence of having space in the world, the thing that’s left behind just gets bigger and more unrecognizable. It swells in my throat; it steals all the air in the room. And suddenly, I’m blubbering like a baby; I’m wiping my eyes with my sleeves and trying to pretend that my brother isn’t in court; my brother isn’t going to jail; that this isn’t karmic payment for all the bad things I’ve done and all the bad thoughts I’ve had.

“I was there,” I blurt out. “I was there the day Jess died.”

Jacob doesn’t look at me, and maybe that’s easier. He flutters his hand a little faster and then brings it up to his throat. “I know,” he says.

My eyes widen. “You do?”

“Of course I do. I saw your footprints.” He stares just over my shoulder. “That’s why I had to do it.”

Oh my God. She told Jacob that I’d been spying on her naked and that she was going to go to the cops, and he shut her up. Now I’m sobbing; I can barely catch my breath. “I’m sorry.”