Jodi Picoult - House Rules

While examining the Excedrin capsules, the FBI lab found an essential clue: green crystals were mixed in with the cyanide. These turned out to be Algae Destroyer-a product used in fish tanks. Stella Nickell had an aquarium and had bought Algae Destroyer at a local fish store. According to the police, Stella had crushed some algae tablets for her beloved fish in a bowl and then, later, used the same bowl to mix the cyanide. Stella’s estranged daughter subsequently went to the police and testified that her mother had planned to kill Bruce Nickell for years.

Talk about the mother of all headaches.

Sometimes I’m just too damn late.

Last year, the day after Christmas, a thirteen-year-old girl named Gracie Cheever never came downstairs. She was found hanging from a closet rack. When I arrived with the CSIs who were photographing the scene, the first thing I noticed was what a mess Gracie’s room was-cereal bowls stacked high and papers and dirty laundry thrown on the floor-no one ever asked this kid to clean up. I looked through her journals and learned that Gracie was a cutter; Gracie hated her life and herself; Gracie hated her face and thought she was fat, and wrote down every morsel she ate and every time she cheated on her diet. And then, on one page: I miss my mom. I asked one of the patrol officers if the mother was dead, and he shook his head. “She’s in the kitchen,” he said.

Gracie was the older child of two. She had a younger sister with Down syndrome, and boy, did her mom live for that kid. She home-schooled her; she did the girl’s physical therapy on mats in the family room. And while her mother was busy being a saint, Gracie’s dad was molesting her.

I took Gracie’s journal back to the station, and I Xeroxed it twice. It was covered with blood, because while she was writing, she was cutting herself. One copy I gave to the medical examiner. The second I brought to the chief. Someone in this family needs to know what was going on, I told him.

After Gracie was buried, I called her mother and asked to meet with her. We sat down in the living room, in front of a blazing fire. At that appointment, I gave her a copy of the journal and told her I’d marked the pages that she really needed to read. She stared at me with glassy eyes and told me the family was starting fresh. She thanked me, and then, while I was watching, she threw the journal into the flames.

I am thinking of Gracie Cheever now as I move gingerly around the culvert where Jess Ogilvy’s body has been located. She is wrapped in a quilt, and fully dressed. There’s a fine sheen of frost on her clothes and her skin. Wayne Nussbaum snaps off the latex gloves he’s been using to examine the body and instructs his assistants to wait for the CSIs to finish their photographs of the scene before moving the victim back to the hospital for an autopsy.

“First impression?” I ask.

“She’s been dead awhile. Days, I’m thinking, although it’s hard to say. The cold weather made a nice makeshift morgue.” He tucked his bare hands under his armpits. “I doubt she was killed here. The scrapes on her back look like they were caused by being dragged postmortem.” As an afterthought, he asks, “Did any of your guys find a tooth?”

“Why?”

“Because she’s missing one.”

I make a mental note to tell my investigators to search for that. “Knocked out with a punch? Or taken as a trophy after death?”

He shakes his head. “Rich, you know I’m not playing a guessing game with you at four in the morning. I’ll call you with my report.”

As he walks off, the flash of a CSI photographer illuminates the night.

In that instant, we all look like ghosts.

Mark Maguire swallows when he sees the backpack that has been returned from the lab. “That’s the one her aunt gave her,” he murmurs.

He is shell-shocked. Not only has he been told his girlfriend is dead but, seconds afterward, he was arrested for her murder. It was 7:00 A.M. when the officers went to his apartment to pick him up. Now, during the interrogation, he is still wearing the clothes he wore to bed last night: sweatpants and a faded UVM tee. From time to time he’s shivered in the drafty conference room, but that only makes me think of Jess Ogilvy’s blue-cast skin.

My time line is shaping up. The way I see it, Maguire was fighting with Jess, punched her-knocking out her tooth and inadvertently killing her. Panicking, he cleaned up the evidence and then tried to cover his tracks by making it look like a kidnapping: the cut screen, the overturned CD rack and kitchen stools, the mailbox note, the backpack full of Jess’s clothes.

I take the clothes out of the backpack-mostly plus-sizes far too big for Jess’s tiny frame. “A smarter criminal who was leaving a red herring would have picked clothes that actually still fit her,” I muse. “But then again, Mark, you aren’t very smart, are you?”

“I already told you, I had nothing to do with-”

“Did you knock out her tooth when you were fighting with her?” I ask. “Is that the way a guy like you gets off? By beating up his girlfriend?”

“I didn’t beat her up-”

“Mark, you can’t win here. We’ve got her body, and there are bruises clear as day on her arms and her neck. How long do you think it’s going to take us to tie them to you?”

He winces. “I told you-we were having a fight, and I did grab her arms. I pinned her up against the wall. I wanted… I wanted to teach her a lesson.”

“And this lesson went a little too far, didn’t it?”

“I never killed her. I swear to God.”

“Why did you bring her body out into the woods?”

He looks up at me. “Please. You have to believe me.”

I rise to my feet and loom over him. “I don’t have to believe anything you say, you little prick. You already lied to me once about fighting with her on the weekend, when it turns out you fought with her on Tuesday, too. I’ve got your boots outside the window with a cut screen, your handprints on her throat, and a dead girl who was cleaned up and moved. You ask any jury in this country, and that looks a hell of a lot like a guy who killed his girlfriend and wanted to conceal it.”

“I never cut that screen. I don’t know who did. And I didn’t beat her up. I got mad, and I shoved her… and I left.”

“Right. And then you came back, and you killed her.”

Maguire’s eyes fill with tears. I wonder if he really is sorry about Jess Ogilvy’s death, or just sorry that he’s been caught. “No,” he says, his voice thick. “No, I loved her.”

“Did you cry this much when you were cleaning up her blood in the bathroom? How about when you had to wipe all the blood off her face?”

“I want to see her,” Maguire begs. “Let me see Jess.”

“You should have thought of that before you murdered her,” I say.

As I walk away from him, intending to let him stew in his own guilt for a few minutes before I come back in to break his confession, Maguire buries his face in his hands. That’s when I realize that they are completely uninjured-no bruising, no cuts, which you’d expect if you hit someone hard enough to make her lose a tooth.

By the time I was five, I knew that there were differences between Jacob and me.

I had to eat everything on my plate, but Jacob was allowed to leave behind things like peas and tomatoes because he didn’t like the way they felt inside his mouth.

Whatever kids’ tape I was listening to in the car while we drove took a backseat to anything by Bob Marley.

I had to pick up all my toys after I was done playing, but the six-foot line of Matchbox cars that Jacob had spent the day arranging perfectly straight was allowed to snake down the hallway for a month until he got tired of it.