Jodi Picoult - House Rules

But I don’t answer.

Dr. Newcomb isn’t giving up, though. “When you were at Jess’s house on the day she died, did you understand that it’s wrong to kill somebody?”

“I’m not bad,” I quote. “I’m just drawn that way.”

“I really need you to answer the question, Jacob. On the day that you were at Jess’s house, did you feel like you were doing something wrong?”

“No,” I say immediately. “I was following the rules.”

“Why did you move Jess’s body?” she asks.

“I was setting up a crime scene.”

“Why did you clean up the evidence at the house?”

“Because we’re supposed to clean up our messes.”

Dr. Newcomb writes something down. “You had a fight with Jess during your tutoring session a couple of days before she died, right?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say to you that day?”

“‘Just get lost.’”

“But you went to her house on Tuesday afternoon anyway?”

I nod. “Yes. We had an appointment.”

“Jess was obviously upset with you. Why did you go back?”

“People are always saying things that aren’t true.” I shrug. “Like when Theo tells me to get a grip. It doesn’t mean hold something, it means calm down. I assumed Jess was doing the same kind of thing.”

“What were your reactions to the victim’s responses?”

I shake my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“When you got to Jess’s house, did you yell at her?”

At one point I had leaned right down into her face and screamed at her to wake up.

“Yes,” I say. “But she didn’t answer me.”

“Do you understand that Jess is never coming back?”

Of course I understand that. I could probably tell Dr. Newcomb a thing or two about body decomposition. “Yeah.”

“Do you think Jess was scared that day?”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you think you would have felt, if you were the victim?”

For a moment, I consider this. “Dead,” I say.

Three weeks before we go to trial, we start jury selection. You would think that, with autism being diagnosed at the rate it currently is, finding a jury of Jacob’s peers-or at least parents who have children on the spectrum-would not be as difficult as it is. But the only two jurors with autistic children who are in our initial pool are the ones Helen uses her peremptory strikes against to get them removed.

In between my stints in court, I receive the reports from Dr. Newcomb and Dr. Cohn, the two psychiatrists who’ve met with Jacob. Unsurprisingly, Dr. Cohn has found Jacob quite sane-the State’s shrink would declare a toaster sane-and Dr. Newcomb has said that Jacob was legally insane at the time the crime was committed.

Even so, Newcomb’s report isn’t going to be that much help. In it, Jacob comes off sounding like an automaton. The truth is, jurors might want to be fair, but their gut instinct about a defendant has a great deal to do with the verdict rendered. Which means that I’d better stack the odds to make Jacob look as sympathetic as possible, since I have no intention of letting him actually testify. With his flat affect, his darting eyes, his nervous tics-well, that would just be a disaster.

A week before the trial begins, I turn my attention to getting Jacob ready for court. When I reach the Hunt household, Thor bolts out of the car and runs to the porch, his tail wagging. He’s gotten pretty attached to Theo, to the point where I sometimes wonder if I ought to just leave him curled up on the kid’s bed overnight, since he seems to have taken up residence there anyway. And God knows Theo needs the company-in the wake of his cross-country journey, he’s been grounded until he’s thirty-although I keep telling him that I can probably find a reason to appeal.

I knock, but no one answers the door. I’ve gotten used to letting myself inside, though, so I walk in and watch Thor trot upstairs. “Hello,” I call out, and Emma steps forward with a smile.

“You’re just in time,” she says.

“For what?”

“Jacob got a hundred on a math test, and as a reward I’m letting him set up a crime scene.”

“That’s macabre.”

“Just another day in my life,” she says.

“Ready!” Jacob calls from upstairs.

I follow Emma, but instead of heading to Jacob’s room, we continue on to the bathroom. When she pushes open the door, I gag, my hand pressed against my mouth.

“What… what is this?” I manage.

There is blood everywhere. It’s like I’ve stepped into the lair of a serial killer. One long line of blood arcs horizontally across the white shell of the shower wall. Facing that, on the mirror, are a series of drops in various elongated shapes.

Even more strange, Emma doesn’t seem to be the least bit upset that the walls of the shower and the mirror and sink are completely drenched with blood. She takes one look at my face and starts laughing. “Relax, Oliver,” she says. “It’s just corn syrup.”

She reaches over to the mirror, dabs her finger to the mess, and holds it up to my lips.

I can’t resist the urge to taste her. And yeah, it is corn syrup, with red dye, I’m guessing.

“Way to contaminate a crime scene, Mom,” Jacob mutters. “So you remember that the tail of the bloodstain usually points in the direction the blood was traveling…”

All of a sudden I can see Jess Ogilvy standing in the shower, and Jacob across from her, standing right where Emma is.

“I’ll give you a hint,” Jacob tells Emma. “The victim was right here.” He points to the bath mat between the shower stall and the mirror over the sink.

I can easily picture Jacob with a bleach solution, wiping down the mirror and the tub at Jess Ogilvy’s place.

“Why the bathroom?” I ask. “What made you choose to set your crime scene here, Jacob?”

Those words are all it takes to make Emma understand why I’m so shaken. “Oh, God,” she says, turning. “I didn’t think… I didn’t realize…”

“Blood spatter’s messy,” Jacob says, confounded. “I thought my mom would be less likely to yell at me if I did it in the bathroom.”

A line from Dr. Newcomb’s report jumps out at me: I was following the rules.

“Clean it up,” I announce, and I walk out.

“New rules,” I say, when the three of us are sitting at the kitchen table. “First and foremost: No more crime scene staging.”

“Why not?” Jacob demands.

“You tell me, Jake. You’re on trial for homicide. You think it’s smart to create a fake murder a week before your trial? You don’t know what neighbors are peeking through your curtains-”

“(A) Our neighbors are too far to see through the windows and (B) that crime scene upstairs was nothing like what was at Jess’s house. This one showed the arterial bleed in the shower and also the cast-off pattern of blood flung from the knife that killed the victim behind her, on the mirror. At Jess’s-”

“I don’t want to hear it,” I interrupt, covering my ears.

Every time I think I have a chance to save Jacob’s ass, he does something like this. Unfortunately, I waver between thinking that behavior like what I’ve just witnessed proves my case (how could he not be considered insane?) and thinking that it’s chillingly off-putting to a jury. After all, Jacob’s not talking to imaginary giant rabbits, he’s pretending to kill someone. That looks pretty fucking deliberate to me. That looks like practice so that, in reality, he might get it perfect.

“Rule number two: you need to do exactly what I tell you in court.”

“I’ve been to court, like, ten times now,” Jacob says. “I think I can figure it out.”