Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“Great,” I say. “Well, Jacob, either I run the insanity defense or you can take that quirk of yours right back to prison.”

“No, actually, in the State of Vermont, you can’t run an insanity defense if I tell you that you can’t,” Jacob answers. “It’s all in the Vermont Supreme Court case of State versus Bean, one-seventy-one Vermont Reports two-ninety, seven-sixty-two Atlantic Reporter second twelve fifty-nine, two thousand.”

“Jesus Christ, you know that case?”

“Don’t you ?” He raises his brows. “Why can’t you just tell them the truth?”

“Fine, Jacob. What’s the truth?”

No sooner have I asked than I realize my mistake. Any lawyer knows to be careful what you ask when representing a criminal defendant, since anything he says might incriminate himself. If he gets on the stand later and denies what he told you earlier, you’re left in a quandary and have to either withdraw from representation (which would prejudice him) or tell the court that he’s not being truthful (which would prejudice him even more). Instead of asking what happened, you dance around the truth and the facts. You ask the client how he’d answer certain questions.

Or in other words, I just royally screwed up. Now that I’ve asked him for the truth, I can’t let him get up on the stand and incriminate himself.

So I stop him from answering.

“Wait, I don’t want to hear it,” I say.

“What do you mean you don’t want to hear it! You’re supposed to be my lawyer !”

“The reason we can’t tell the court the truth is that facts speak a lot louder in a courtroom.”

“You can’t handle the truth,” Jacob yells. “I’m not guilty. And I’m definitely not insane!”

I scoop up Thor and stalk into the mudroom, Emma following. “He’s right,” she says. “Why do you have to plead insanity? If Jacob’s not guilty, shouldn’t the judge get to hear that?”

I spin around so quickly she falls back. “I want you to think about something. Say you’re on the jury for this case, and you’ve just listened to a long list of facts that tie Jacob to the murder of Jess Ogilvy. Then you get to watch Jacob on the stand explaining his version of the truth. Which story would you believe?”

She swallows, silent, because this point (at least) she cannot argue: Emma knows very well what Jacob looks like and sounds like to other people, even when Jacob doesn’t know it himself. “Look,” I tell her, “Jacob has to accept that this insanity defense is the best chance we’ve got.”

“How are you going to convince him?”

“I’m not,” I say. “You are.”

The teachers at Townsend Regional High School all know Jacob Hunt, even if they haven’t had him in class. This is partly due to his current infamy, but I get the sense that, even before he was arrested for murder, he was the kind of kid everyone could spot in the halls-because he stuck out like a sore thumb. After interviewing staff for several hours, and hearing how Jacob used to sit by himself during lunch and how he’d move from class to class wearing bulky headphones to block out the noise (and the rude comments of classmates), there is a part of me wondering how Jacob managed to wait eighteen years to commit murder.

What I’ve learned is that Jacob twisted his schoolwork around his passion for CSI. In English class, when he had to read a biography and give an oral report, he chose Edmond Locard. In math, his independent research project involved Herb Macdonald’s angled impact of the point of origin of blood spatter.

His guidance counselor, Frances Grenville, is a thin, pale woman whose features resemble a garment that’s been washed so often its original color has faded. “Jacob would do anything to fit in,” she says, as I sit in her office, thumbing through Hunt’s file. “Quite often, that would make him the butt of jokes. In a way, he was doomed if he tried to fit in, and doomed if he didn’t.” She shifts uncomfortably. “I used to worry he’d bring a gun into school one day, you know, to get even. Like that boy over in Sterling, New Hampshire, a few years back.”

“Did Jacob ever do that? Get even, I mean.”

“Oh, no. Honestly, he’s the sweetest child. Sometimes he’d come here during free periods and do his homework in the outer office. He fixed my computer when it crashed, once, and even recovered the file I’d been working on. Most of the teachers love him.”

“And the rest?”

“Well, some are better with special needs kids than others, but you didn’t hear it from me. A student like Jacob can be challenging, to say the least. There’s some deadwood in this school, if you know what I mean, and when you get a kid like Jacob who challenges a lesson plan you’ve been too lazy to adapt for the past twenty years-and when it turns out he’s right -well, that doesn’t always sit well.” She shrugs. “But you can ask the staff. On the whole, Jacob interacted much more fluidly with them than with his peers. He wasn’t caught up in the usual high school adolescent drama-instead, he wanted to talk about politics, or scientific breakthroughs, or whether Eugene Onegin was really Pushkin’s tour de force. In many ways, having Jacob around was like talking to another teacher.” She hesitates. “No, actually, it was like talking to the kind of enlightened scholar that teachers wish they could grow up to be-before bills and car payments and orthodontist appointments get in the way.”

“If Jacob wanted so badly to fit in with students, what was he doing in the teachers’ room?” I ask.

She shakes her head. “I suppose there’s only so many times you can take being rebuffed before you need some validation,” Mrs. Grenville says.

“What do you know about his connection to Jessica Ogilvy?”

“He enjoyed spending time with her. He referred to her as his friend.”

I glance up. “How about as his girlfriend?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Did Jacob ever have a girlfriend in school?”

“I don’t think so. He took a girl to prom last year, but he talked more about Jess, who’d encouraged him to do it, than about his actual date.”

“Who else did Jacob hang around with?” I ask.

Mrs. Grenville frowns. “Here’s the thing,” she says. “If you asked Jacob for a list of his friends, he’d probably be able to give you that list. But if you asked those same kids for their lists, Jacob wouldn’t be on them. His Asperger’s leads him to mistake proximity for emotional connection. So, for example, Jacob would say he’s friendly with the girl he’s paired with as a lab partner in physics, even though that might not be a reciprocal feeling.”

“So he wasn’t considered a discipline problem?”

Mrs. Grenville purses her lips. “No.”

I place the open school file on her desk and point to a note inside it. “Then why was Jacob Hunt suspended for assault last year?”

Mimi Scheck is the kind of girl I drooled over in high school, in spite of the fact that she wasn’t aware we even inhabited the same building for four years. She has long black hair and a body made for worship, artfully showcased in clothes that reveal just an inch of skin above the waistline of her jeans when she reaches up or bends down. She also looks so nervous that she’d bolt, if not for the fact that Mrs. Grenville just closed the door of her office.

“Hi, Mimi,” I say, smiling. “How are you doing today?”

She looks from me to the guidance counselor, her lips pressed tight. Then she melts into the couch, anguished. “I swear, I didn’t know about the vodka until I got to Esme’s.”

“Well. That’s interesting… but it’s not why I asked to speak to you today.”