Jodi Picoult - House Rules

He glances at my notebook. “What’s that for?”

“I take notes on the episodes,” I tell him. “I have over a hundred.”

“Episodes?”

“Notebooks.”

He nods. “Was Mark at Jess’s place when you got there?”

“No.” Now, the commercial on television is for denture cream. Secretly I am very scared of losing all my teeth. Sometimes I dream about waking up and finding them rolling around on my tongue like marbles. I close my eyes so I don’t have to watch. “You know Mark?”

“We’ve met,” the detective says. “Did you and Jess ever talk about him?”

My eyes are still closed, so maybe that’s why I see what I do: Mark with his hand sliding up Jessica’s shirt at the pizza place. His hideous orange sweatshirt. The earring in his left ear. The bruises I saw once on Jessica’s side when she reached for a book on a high shelf, two uneven purple ovals like quality stamps on a cut of beef. She told me she’d fallen off a stepladder, but she looked away when she said it. And unlike me, who looks away out of comfort, she does it in moments of discomfort.

I see Mark smiling with only half his mouth, too.

Now the commercial is for Law & Order: SVU, a promo, which means that the next image on the screen will be CrimeBusters again. I pick up my pen and turn the page in my notebook.

“Did Jess and Mark fight?” the detective asks again.

On the TV, Rhianna is in the woods with Kurt, and they’re investigating a dead dog with a human finger found undigested in its stomach.

“Jacob?”

“Hasta la vista, baby,” I murmur, and I make up my mind that, no matter what this detective says to me, I’m not speaking again until my show is over.

So I’m headed downstairs to get something to eat when I hear a voice in the kitchen I do not recognize. This is pretty extraordinary-I’m not the only one who doesn’t have friends as a result of Jacob’s Asperger’s; I can probably count on one hand the number of people my mother has ever trusted enough to invite over. The fact that the voice is male is even more bizarre. And then I hear my mom refer to him as Detective Matson.

Holy crap.

I run back upstairs and lock myself in my room. He’s here because of Jess Ogilvy, and I’m officially freaked out.

And, for the record, still hungry.

Here’s what I know for sure: Jess was alive and well at about 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday. I know this because I saw her- all of her. Her tits, let me just say, rank right up there as masterworks of art.

I’d say we were equally surprised when she reached for her towel, wiped her eyes, and looked in the mirror. She certainly didn’t expect to find some random guy in her house, watching her naked. And I sure as hell didn’t expect the object of my momentary lust to be my brother’s tutor.

“Hey!” she yelled, and in one smooth move she grabbed the towel and wrapped it around herself. Me, meanwhile, I was totally paralyzed. I stood there like an idiot until I realized she was pissed and she was coming after me.

The only reason I got away is that the floor of the bathroom was wet. When she stumbled, I flew out of the master bedroom, where I’d been standing, down the stairs. In my hurry, I crashed into some of the furniture and knocked a whole mess of papers off the kitchen counter, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of that house and join a monastery or hop on a plane to Micronesia-anything that would put me far away by the time Jess Ogilvy asked my brother and my mom whether they were aware that Theo Hunt was a Peeping Tom, a total perv.

But sometime between now and then, Jess Ogilvy got dressed, left her house, and vanished. Is she wandering around with amnesia? Or hiding out and plotting some kind of revenge scheme against me?

I don’t know.

I can’t tell the cops, though, without incriminating myself.

It’s just past five-thirty when I get the nerve to leave my bedroom. I can smell blueberry pie cooking (the only good thing about Blue Food Fridays, if you ask me) and know it will be ready at six-like everything else, we eat on a schedule to keep Jacob calm.

The door to his room is open, and he’s standing on his desk chair, slipping one of his CrimeBusters journals back into its predetermined spot on a shelf.

“Hey,” I say to him.

He doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits down on the bed with his back to the wall and picks up a book on his nightstand.

“I saw that the cops were here.”

“Cop,” Jacob murmurs. “Singular.”

“What did he want to talk to you about?”

“Jess.”

“What did you tell him?”

Jacob draws his knees up to his chest. “If you build it, he will come.”

My brother may not communicate the way the rest of us do, but after all this time, I’ve learned to read him loud and clear. When he doesn’t feel like talking, he hides behind someone else’s words.

I sit beside him, just staring at the wall while he reads. I want to tell him that I saw Jess alive on Tuesday. I want to ask him if he did as well, and if that’s part of the reason he doesn’t want to talk to the police, either.

I wonder if he’s got something to hide, too.

For the first time in my life, Jacob and I just might have something in common.

It all starts with a mouse.

After our weekly Saturday shopping excursion (thank goodness, the Free Sample Lady had been replaced temporarily by a sullen teenager handing out vegetarian cocktail wieners at the door of the grocery store), I leave Jacob sitting at the kitchen table with the remainders of his lunch while I do a cursory cleaning of his room. He forgets to bring glasses and bowls of cereal downstairs to the kitchen, and if I don’t play middleman, we wind up with thriving colonies of mold that have bonded to my dishes like concrete. I pick up a bevy of mugs from his desk and spot the tiny face of a field mouse struggling to survive this winter by taking up residence behind Jacob’s computer.

I am embarrassed to admit I have a very typical female reaction and go completely ballistic. Unfortunately, I am holding a half-full glass of chocolate soy milk at the time, and most of it spills over Jacob’s comforter.

Well, it has to be washed. Although it’s the weekend, and that’s problematic. Jacob doesn’t like seeing his bed stripped; it has to be made at all times unless he happens to be in it. Usually I wash his sheets while he’s at school. Sighing, I pull fresh sheets out of the linen closet and tug the winter comforter off his bed. He can make do for a night with his summertime quilt, an old postage-stamp design in all the rainbow colors-ROYGBIV-in correct order, which my mother sewed for him before she died.

The summer quilt is kept in a black trash bag on the upper shelf of his closet. I pull it down and shake out the blanket inside.

A backpack rolled into its center tumbles to the floor.

It’s clearly not one that belongs to the boys. Flesh-colored with red and black stripes, it seems to be trying to be a Burberry knockoff, but the stripes are too wide and the colors too bright. There is still a Marshalls’ tag on the strap, with the price ripped off.

Inside is a toothbrush, a satin blouse, a pair of shorts, and a yellow T-shirt. The blouse and shorts are both plus-size. The T-shirt is much smaller and says SPECIAL OLYMPICS on the front and staff on the back.

At the very bottom of the backpack is a notecard still inside its torn envelope. There’s a picture of a snowy landscape, and the inside reads, in spidery handwriting: Merry Christmas Jess, Love Aunt Ruth.

“My God,” I murmur. “What did you do?” I close my eyes for a moment, and then I bellow Jacob’s name. He comes running into his room, stopping abruptly when he sees me holding the backpack in my arms.