Jodi Picoult - House Rules

He runs upstairs, and I turn to Emma. “Is he always like that?”

“And then some.” She looks up at me. “Is anything Jacob said helpful?”

“It’s all food for thought,” I say.

“Everything changes if there are signs of a struggle,” she points out.

I raise a brow. “You’re a closet CSI, too?”

“No, in spite of Jacob’s best efforts to teach me.” She glances out the window for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about Jess’s mother,” she says. “The last time she talked to her daughter, was it about stupid things, you know? Did they have a fight about how she never called, or how she had forgotten to send a thank-you card to her aunt?” She faces me. “I used to say I love you every time I tucked my boys in at night. But now, they go to bed after I do.”

“My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.” I smile faintly. “He had a stroke a few years ago. Before that, I used to screen his calls because I didn’t have time to talk about whether the Sox would make it into the playoffs. But afterward, I started to call him. Every time, I’d finish by saying I loved him. We both knew why; and it didn’t sit right after all the time I hadn’t said it. It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon. He died eight months ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

I laugh tightly. “And I don’t know why the hell I’m telling you this.”

At that moment, Jacob reappears, clutching a pair of latex gloves. I snap them on and carefully lift the backpack just as my cell rings. “Matson,” I say.

It’s one of the lieutenants in the department, asking how much longer I’m going to be.

“I have to run.” I lift the grocery bag into my arms.

Jacob ducks his head. “I’d be interested in hearing the test results, naturally.”

“Naturally,” I reply, although I have no intent of sharing them. “So what’s on CrimeBusters today?”

“Episode sixty-seven. The one where a mutilated woman is found in a shopping cart outside a box store.”

“I remember that one. Keep an eye on-”

“-the store manager,” Jacob finishes. “I’ve seen it already, too.”

He walks me to the door, his mother trailing behind. “Thanks, Jacob. And Emma?” I wait until she glances up. “Say it when you wake them up in the morning, instead.”

When I reach Jess Ogilvy’s place, the two CSIs who have been processing the house are standing outside in the freezing cold, staring at a cut window screen.

“No prints?” I say, my breath fogging in the cold.

But I already know the answer. So would Jacob, for that matter. The chances of prints being preserved in temperatures as low as these are pretty slim.

“No,” the first investigator says. Marcy’s a bombshell with a knockout figure, a 155 IQ, and a girlfriend who could probably knock my teeth out. “But we did find the window jimmied to break the lock, too, and a screwdriver in the bushes.”

“Nice. So the question is, was this a B and E gone bad? Or was the screen cut to make us think that?”

Basil, the second investigator, shakes his head. “Nothing inside screams breaking and entering.”

“Yeah, well, that’s not necessarily true. I just interviewed a witness who says otherwise and who, um, cleaned up.”

Marcy looks at Basil. “So he’s a suspect, not a witness.”

“No. He’s an autistic kid. Long story.” I look at the edge of the screen. “What kind of knife was used?”

“Probably one from the kitchen. We’ve got a bunch to take back to the lab to see if any of them have traces of metal on the blade.”

“You get any prints inside?”

“Yeah, in the bathroom and off the computer, plus a few partials around the kitchen.”

But in this case, Mark Maguire’s prints won’t raise a red flag; he’s admitted to living here part-time with Jess.

“We also got a partial boot print,” Basil says. “The silver lining to it being crap weather for prints on the sill is that it’s perfect for footwear impressions.” Underneath the overhang of the gutter I can see the red splotch of spray wax he’s used to make a cast. He’s lucky to have found a protected ledge; there’s been a dusting of fresh snow since Tuesday. It’s the heel, and there’s a star in the center, surrounded by what look like the spokes of a compass. Once Basil photographs it, we can enter it into a database to see what kind of boot it is.

The sound of a car driving down the street is punctuated by the slam of a door. Then footsteps approach, crunching on the snow. “If that’s the press,” I say to Marcy, “shoot first.”

But it’s not the press. It’s Mark Maguire, looking like he hasn’t slept since I last saw him. “It’s about fucking time you got around to looking for my girlfriend,” he shouts, and even from a few feet away, the fumes of alcohol on his breath reach me.

“Mr. Maguire,” I say, moving slowly toward him. “You happen to know if this screen’s always been cut?”

I watch him carefully to see his reaction. But the truth is, I can amass all the evidence I want against Mark Maguire and I still have nothing to arrest him for unless a body is recovered.

He squints at the window, but the sun is in his eyes, as well as the brilliant reflection of snow on the ground. As he moves a little closer, Basil steps behind him and shoots a jet of spray wax on the boot print he left behind.

Even from this far away I can make out the star, and the spokes of a compass.

“Mr. Maguire,” I say, “we’re going to have to take your boots.”

The first time I saw a dead person was at my grandfather’s funeral.

It was after the service, where the minister had read aloud from the Bible, even though my grandfather did not routinely go to church or consider himself religious. Strangers got up and talked about my grandfather, calling him Joseph and telling stories about parts of his life that were news to me: his service during the Korean War, his childhood on the Lower East Side, his courtship of my grandmother at a high school carnival kissing booth. All of their words landed on me like hornets, and I couldn’t make them go away until I could see the grandfather I knew and remembered, instead of this impostor they were all discussing.

My mother was not crying so much as dissolving; that is the one way I can describe the fact that tears had become so normal for her it looked strange to see her face smooth and dry.

It should be noted that I do not always understand body language. That’s quite normal, for someone with Asperger’s. It’s pointless to expect me to look at someone and know how she is feeling simply because her smile is too tight and she is hunched over and hugging her arms to herself, just as it would be pointless to expect a deaf person to hear a voice. Which means that when I asked to have my grandfather’s coffin opened, I shouldn’t be blamed for not realizing it would upset my mother even more.

I just wanted to see if the body inside was still my grandfather, or maybe the man all those speakers had known, or something entirely different. I am skeptical about lights and tunnels and afterlives, and this seemed the most logical way to test my theories.

Here is what I learned: Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.

I don’t really see why that freaks people out, since it’s the most natural cycle in the world.

The body in the coffin still looked like my grandfather. When I touched his cheek, though, with its crosshatched wrinkles, the skin no longer felt like human skin. It was cold, and slightly firm, like pudding that’s been left too long in the refrigerator and has developed a virtual hide as a surface crust.