Jodi Picoult - House Rules

“Did you notice anything unusual?”

“The door was open. I went in, and her coat was hanging up and her purse was on the table, but she didn’t answer when I called. I looked all over for her, but she was gone. There were clothes all over the bedroom, and the bed was messed up.”

“What did you think?”

“At first, I figured she might have left on a trip. But she would have told me that, and she had a test that day. I called her phone, but no one answered. I called her parents and her friends, and no one had seen her; and she hadn’t told anyone she was leaving. That’s when I went to the police.”

“What happened?”

“Detective Matson told me I couldn’t file a missing person’s report for thirty-six hours, but he came with me to Jess’s place. I didn’t get the sense he was taking me seriously, to be honest.” Mark looks at the jury. “I skipped class and stayed at the house, in case she came back. But she didn’t. I was sitting in the living room when I realized that someone had organized all the CDs, and I told the police that, too.”

“When the police began a formal investigation,” Helen Sharp asks, “were you cooperative in giving them forensic samples?”

“I gave them my boots,” Mark says.

The prosecutor turns around and looks at the jury. “Mr. Maguire, how did you find out what had happened to Jess?”

He sets his jaw. “A couple of cops came to my apartment and arrested me. When Detective Matson was interrogating me, he told me Jess was… was dead.”

“Were you released from custody shortly thereafter?”

“Yes. When they arrested Jacob Hunt.”

“Mr. Maguire, did you have anything to do with Jess Ogilvy’s death?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Do you know how she sustained a broken nose?”

“No,” Mark says tightly.

“Do you know how her tooth got knocked out?”

“No.”

“Do you know how she got abrasions on her back?”

“No.”

“Did you ever strike her in the face?”

“No.” Mark’s voice sounds like it is wrapped up in wool. He has been looking down at the floor, but when he lifts his face now, everyone can see how his eyes are wet, how he is swallowing hard. “When I left her,” he says, “she looked like an angel.”

As Helen Sharp finishes, Oliver stands up and buttons his suit jacket. Why do lawyers always do that? On CrimeBusters, the actors playing lawyers do it, too. Maybe it’s so that they look professional. Or they need something to do with their hands.

“Mr. Maguire, you just testified that you were actually arrested for the murder of Jess Ogilvy.”

“Yes, but they had the wrong guy.”

“Still… for a little while, anyway, the police believed you were involved, isn’t that true?”

“I suppose.”

“You also testified that you grabbed Jess Ogilvy during your fight?”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“On her arms.” He touches his biceps muscle. “Here.”

“You choked her, too, didn’t you?”

He goes beet red. “No.”

“You are aware, Mr. Maguire, that the autopsy revealed bruises around Jess Ogilvy’s neck, as well as on her upper arms?”

“Objection,” the prosecutor says. “Hearsay.”

“Sustained.”

“You are aware that you’re testifying here today under oath?”

“Yes…”

“So let me ask you again if you choked Jess Ogilvy.”

“I didn’t choke her!” Mark argues. “I just… put my hands on her neck. For a second!”

“While you were fighting?”

“Yes,” Mark says.

Oliver raises his eyebrows. “Nothing further,” he says, and he sits back down beside me.

Me, I duck my head, and smile.

I was nine when my mother made me go to a therapy group for siblings of autistic kids. There were only four of us-two girls with faces that looked like ground over a sinkhole, who had a baby sister who apparently never stopped screaming; a boy whose twin was severely autistic; and me. We all had to go around a circle and say one thing we loved about our sibling, and one thing we really hated.

The girls went first. They said they hated the way the baby kept them up all night, but they liked the fact that her first word had not been Mama or Dada but instead Sissy. Then I went. I said that I hated when Jacob took my stuff without asking and how it was okay for him to interrupt me to give some dinosaur fact nobody cared about but that if I interrupted him he’d get really angry and have a meltdown. I liked the way he said things, sometimes, that were hilarious-even though they weren’t meant to be-like when a camp counselor told him swimming would be a piece of cake and he freaked out because he thought he’d have to eat underwater and surely would drown. Then it was the other boy’s turn. But before he could speak the door burst open and his twin brother ran inside and sat down on his lap. The kid reeked-and I mean reeked. All of a sudden their mom poked her head into the room. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Harry doesn’t like anyone but Stephen to change his diaper.”

Sucks to be Stephen, I thought. But instead of getting totally embarrassed, like I would have been, or pissed off, like I also would have been, Stephen just laughed and hugged his brother. “Let’s go,” he said, and he held his twin’s hand and led him out of the room.

We did other stuff that day with the therapist, but I wasn’t concentrating. I couldn’t get out of my head the image of nine-year-old Harry wearing a giant diaper, of Stephen cleaning up the messes. There was one more thing I liked about my own sibling with autism: he was potty-trained.

At our lunch break, I found myself gravitating toward Stephen. He was sitting by himself, eating apple slices from a plastic bag.

“Hey,” I said, climbing into the seat next to him.

“Hey.”

I opened the straw of my juice pack and poked it into the cardboard box. I stared out the window, trying to figure out what he was looking at.

“So how do you do it?” I asked, after a minute.

He didn’t pretend to misunderstand. He picked an apple slice out of the bag, chewed it, swallowed. “It could have been me,” he said.

Mama Spatakopoulous can’t fit into the witness chair. She has to push and wedge, and finally the judge asks the bailiff to get a seat that might be more comfortable. If it were me up there, I’d want to hide under the stupid chair in embarrassment, but she seems to be perfectly happy. Maybe she thinks it’s a testimonial to how good her food is.

“Mrs. Spatakopoulous, where do you work?” asks the Dragon Bitch, a.k.a. Helen Sharp.

“Call me Mama.”

The prosecutor looks at the judge, who shrugs. “Mama, then. Where do you work?”

“I own Mama S’s Pizzeria, on Main Street in Townsend.”

“How long have you run the restaurant?”

“Fifteen years this June. Best pizza in Vermont. You come by, I’ll give you a free sample.”

“That’s very generous of you… Mama, were you working the afternoon of January tenth, 2010?”

“I work every afternoon,” she says proudly.

“Did you know Jess Ogilvy?”

“Yes, she was a regular. Good girl, with a good head on her shoulders. Helped me salt the walkway once after an ice storm because she didn’t want me to throw my back out.”

“Did you speak to her on January tenth?”

“I waved to her when she came in, but it was a madhouse.”

“Was she alone?”

“No, she came with her boyfriend, and the kid she tutored.”

“Do you see that kid in the courtroom today?”

Mama S. blows my brother a kiss.

“Had you ever seen Jacob before January tenth?”

“Once or twice, he came in with his mama to get pizza. Got celiac problems, like my father, God rest his soul.”