Jodi Picoult - House Rules

She doesn’t shake it. Instead, she slips the key into the ignition and peels out of the parking spot with a recklessness that makes my jaw drop. “Emma Hunt,” she says.

She takes a corner, and the back wheels spin. “You, um, should probably tell me a little more about what’s going on…” I gasp as she runs a red light.

“Do you watch the news, Mr. Bond?”

“Oliver, please.” I tighten my seat belt. The police station is only a mile or two away, but I’d like to be alive when we reach it.

“Have you followed the story about the UVM student who went missing?”

“The one whose body was just found?”

The car screeches to a stop in front of the police station. “I think my son might be responsible,” she says.

Alan Dershowitz, the famous Jewish lawyer, was once asked if he’d defend Adolf Hitler. “Yes,” he said. “And I’d win.”

When I fell asleep during my torts class, the professor-who spoke in a monotone and made law slightly less exciting than watching paint dry-poured a bottle of water over my head. “Mr. Bond,” he intoned, “you strike me as the kind of student on whom admission should not have been wasted.”

I sat up, sputtering and soaked. “Then with all due respect, sir, you should be struck harder,” I suggested, and I got a standing ovation from my classmates.

I offer these anecdotes to the proverbial jury as examples of the fact that I have never lived my life by shirking a challenge, and I’m not about to start right now.

“Let’s go.” Emma Hunt turns off the ignition.

I put my hand on her arm. “Maybe you should start by telling me your son’s name.”

“Jacob.”

“How old is he?”

“Eighteen,” she says. “He has Asperger’s syndrome.”

I’ve heard the term, but I’m not about to pretend I’m an expert. “So he’s autistic?”

“Technically, yes, but not in a Rain Man kind of way. He’s very high-functioning.” She looks longingly at the police station. “Can’t we discuss this later?”

“Not if you want me to represent Jacob. How did he get here?”

“I drove him.” She takes a long, shaky breath. “When I was watching the news today, and they were reporting from the crime scene, I saw a quilt that belongs to Jacob.”

“Is it possible that other people have it, too? Like, anyone who happened to shop at Kohl’s last season?”

“No. It’s handmade. It was upstairs in his closet, or so I thought. And then I heard the reporter say that they’d arrested Jess’s boyfriend for the murder.”

“Was Jacob her boyfriend?”

“No. That’s someone named Mark. I don’t know him, but I couldn’t stand the thought of him going to jail for something he didn’t do. I called the detective in charge of the case, and he said if I brought Jacob down here, he’d talk to him and take care of everything.” She buries her face in her hands. “I didn’t realize that meant he’d ambush Jacob. Or tell me I couldn’t sit in on the interview.”

“If he’s eighteen, that’s true,” I point out. “Did Jacob agree to talk to him?”

“He practically raced into the police station, once he was told he could help analyze a crime scene.”

“Why?”

“It would be like you getting a high-profile celebrity murder case after years of practicing property law.”

Oh. Well, that I could understand. “Did the police tell you Jacob was under arrest?”

“No.”

“So you just brought him down here voluntarily?”

She crumples in front of me. “I thought they were going to talk to him. I didn’t know he would be considered a suspect right away.” Emma Hunt is crying now, and I know less about what to do with a crying woman than I would with a greased piglet on a New York City subway. “I was just trying to do the right thing,” she sobs.

When I was a farrier, I worked with a mare that had a fracture in the pedal bone. Weeks of rest hadn’t helped her; the owners were talking about putting her down. I convinced them to let me hot-fit a straight bar shoe to the hoof, and I wrapped it instead of nailing it. At first, the mare didn’t want to walk, and who could blame her? It took a week of coaxing to get her to take a step from her stall, and then I worked with her for thirty minutes a day, until a year later, I led her out to a field and watched her fly across the open space, fast as a rumor.

Sometimes, you need someone else to help you take the first step.

I put my hand on her shoulder; she jumps at the contact and stares up at me with those crazy molten eyes of hers. “Let’s see what we can do,” I say, and I hope like hell she cannot tell that my knees are shaking.

At the dispatch desk, I clear my throat. “I’m looking for an officer…”

“Which one?” the bored sergeant asks.

My face floods with heat. “The one who’s doing the interview with Jacob Hunt,” I say. Why hadn’t I thought to ask her the guy’s name?

“You mean Detective Matson?”

“Yes. I’d like you to interrupt that interview he’s doing.”

The sergeant shrugs. “I’m not interrupting anything. You can wait. I’ll let him know you’re here when he’s done.”

Emma isn’t listening. She’s edged away from me, toward a door that leads down the hallway of the police department. It’s on a locked mechanism controlled by dispatch. “He’s down there,” she murmurs.

“Well, I think right now the best course of action is to play by their rules until-”

Suddenly the door buzzes and opens. A secretary wanders into the waiting area carrying a FedEx box for pickup.

“Now,” Emma says. She grabs my wrist and pulls me through the windfall of that open doorway, and in tandem, we start to run.

I am here as living proof to tell you that dreams really do come true.

1. I am sitting with Detective Matson, shooting the shit.

2. He’s sharing details of an open investigation with me.

3. Not once has he yawned or checked his watch or in any way indicated that he is not enjoying speaking to me at length about crime scene investigation.

4. He wants to talk to me about the crime scene surrounding Jess’s disappearance-a crime scene that I orchestrated.

Seriously, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Or so I think until he begins firing questions at me that feel like bullets. And his mouth is smiling halfway, and I cannot remember if that means he’s happy or not. And the conversation moves from the practical-the weight of the human brain, the nature of postmortem toxicity tests-to the personal.

The fascination of creating a liver slide to look at microscopically loses some of its entertainment value when Detective Matson forces me to remember that the liver in question belonged to someone I actually knew, someone I laughed with and looked forward to seeing, which is far from how I feel about most social interactions. As theoretical as I would like death to be, it turns out there is a significant difference when it’s corn syrup and food coloring instead of the real McCoy. Although I can logically understand that Jess is gone, which therefore means there’s no point wishing she weren’t since she’s not able to reverse the situation, it doesn’t account for the fact that I feel like a helium balloon is caught inside me, and that it keeps inflating, and that it might actually tear me apart.

Just when I think things cannot get any worse, Detective Matson accuses me of being the one to hurt Jess.

You’re the one who grabbed Jess by the arms, aren’t you?

I wasn’t. And I tell him so.

What about choking her? You’re not going to lie to me about doing that, are you?

I know the answer, of course, but it’s bogged down in the syntax. It’s like when someone asks you at dinner, You don’t want that last piece of steak, do you? when of course you do. If you say yes, are you saying that you want the last piece of steak? Or that you don’t want it?