House Rules (18 page)

My eyes slide to his left, his right, and then up anywhere so that I don‘t have to see him directly again. That‘s when I notice the clock, and realize that it‘s 4:17.

Without any traffic it takes sixteen minutes to get from the police station to my house. That means we will not get home till 4:33, and
CrimeBusters
begins at 4:30. I stand up, both of my hands fluttering in front of my chest like hummingbirds, but I don‘t even care anymore about trying to stop them. It feels like the moment on the TV show when the perp finally caves in and falls to the metal table, sobbing with guilt. I want to be watching that TV show, instead of living it. Are we done now? I ask. Because I really have to go.

Detective Matson gets up, and I think he might open the door for me, but instead he blocks my exit and leans closer, until he is too close for me to breathe, because what if I wind up with some of the air that he exhaled? Did you know you fractured her skull? he says. Did that happen at the same time you knocked out her tooth?

I close my eyes. I don‘t know.

What about her underwear? You put it on backward, didn‘t you?

At that, my head whips up. It was on
backward
? How was I supposed to know?

There were no labels, like there are in my boxer shorts. Shouldn‘t the graphic of the butterfly have gone on the front, rather than back?

Did you take her underwear
off
her, too?

No, you just said it was
on
her …

Did you try to have sex with her, Jacob? the detective asks.

I am utterly silent. Just thinking about that makes my tongue swell up like a monkey‘s fist knot.

Answer me, goddammit! he yells.

I scramble for words, any words, because I do not want him to yell at me again. I will tell him that I had sex with Jess eighty times that night if that‘s what he needs to hear, if that makes him open the door.

You moved her after she died, Jacob, didn‘t you?

Yes! Of course I moved her! Isn‘t that obvious?

Why?

I needed to set up the crime scene, and that‘s where she had to be. He, of all people, should understand.

Detective Matson tilts his head. Is that why you did this? You wanted to commit a crime and see if you could get away with it?

No, that‘s not why

Then what is? he interrupts.

I try to find a way to put into words all the reasons I have done what I did. But if there is one subject I do not understand not internally, much less externally it‘s the ties that bind us to each other.
Love means never having to say you‘re sorry,
I mutter.

Is this a joke to you? Some big joke? Because I don‘t see it that way. A girl‘s dead, and there‘s nothing funny about that. He comes closer, until his arm is brushing mine, and I can barely concentrate because of the buzzing in my head. Tell me, Jacob, he says.

Tell me why you killed Jess.

Suddenly the door slams open, striking him in the shoulder. Don‘t answer that, a strange man yells. Behind him stands my mother, and behind her are two uniformed officers, who have just raced down the hall, too.

Who the hell are you? Detective Matson asks.

I‘m Jacob‘s attorney.

Oh, really, he says. Jacob, is this your lawyer?

I glance at the man. He‘s wearing khaki pants and a dress shirt but no tie. He has sandy hair that reminds me of Theo‘s and looks too young to be a real lawyer. No, I reply.

The detective smiles triumphantly. He‘s eighteen years old, Counselor. He says you‘re not his lawyer, and he hasn‘t asked for one.

I am not stupid. I‘ve watched enough
CrimeBusters
to know where this is headed. I want a lawyer, I announce.

Detective Matson throws up his hands.

We‘re leaving now. My mother elbows her way closer. I reach for my coat, which is still draped over the back of the chair.

Mr. … what‘s your name? the detective asks.

Bond, my new lawyer says. Oliver Bond. He grins at me.

Mr. Bond, your client is being charged with the murder of Jessica Ogilvy,

Detective Matson says. He‘s not going anywhere.

CASE 5: THE NOT-SO-GOOD DOCTOR

Kay Sybers was fifty-two years old and, by anyone‘s standards, unhealthy. She‘d been a
smoker years ago; she was overweight. But she didn‘t show signs of medical problems until
one evening in 1991, when (after a dinner of prime rib and Chardonnay) she had trouble
breathing and developed shooting pain down her left arm. Those are classic signs of a
heart attack something her husband, Bill, should have recognized. After all, he was a
Florida physician who doubled as the county coroner. Instead of calling an ambulance or
whisking her to the ER, though, he attempted to draw blood from her arm. He wanted to
run a few tests that day at work, he said. Yet hours later, Kay was dead. Concluding that
she had died from a coronary, Bill Sybers decided against an autopsy.

A day later, based on an anonymous tip of suspicious activity, Kay Sybers was scheduled
for autopsy. The toxicology reports came back inconclusive, and Kay was buried. However,
suspicions arose again when rumors circulated that Bill Sybers was sleeping with a lab
technician at his workplace. Kay‘s body was exhumed, and forensic toxicologist Kevin
Ballard screened for succinylcholine, a drug that increases the release of potassium and
paralyzes the muscles, including the diaphragm. In the tissues, he discovered
succinylmonocholine, a by-product of succinylcholine and proof of the poison‘s presence in
Kay‘s body.

Ironically, although Bill Sybers seemed in a hurry to bury his wife and hide the
evidence, the embalming process helped preserve the succinylmonocholine and made it
easier to detect.

5

Rich

The fabulous Hunt brothers, I repeated, and I watched Jacob dig to the bottom with his shovel. I wondered how long it would be before I outgrew him.

Jacob

I don‘t really understand what‘s happening.

At first I thought maybe this was protocol, like the way that my mother was wheeled out of the hospital after she gave birth to Theo, even though she could easily have walked and carried him in her arms. Maybe it was a liability issue, which is why the bailiffs had to get me out of the courtroom (this time they were a little more hesitant to
touch
me). I assumed they would lead me to the front of the building, or maybe to a loading dock where defendants could be picked up and taken home.

Instead, I was stuffed into the back of a police car and driven two hours and thirty-eight minutes to jail.

I do
not
want to be in jail.

The officers who drop me off are not the same ones who take me into the jail. This new one wears a different colored uniform and asks me the same questions that Detective Matson asked me at the police station. There are fluorescent lights on the ceiling, like they have at Walmart. I don‘t enjoy going to Walmart for this very reason the lights spit and hiss sometimes due to their transformers, and I worry that the ceiling will collapse on me.

Even now, I cannot speak without glancing up at the ceiling every few moments. I‘d like to call my mother now, I say to the officer.

Well, I‘d like a winning lottery ticket, but something tells me neither of us is going to get what we want.

I can‘t stay here, I tell him.

He‘s still typing on his computer. I don‘t remember asking for your opinion.

Is this man particularly thickheaded? Or is he trying to annoy me? I‘m a student, I explain, the same way I might explain mass spectrometry to someone who doesn‘t have a clue about trace evidence analysis. I have to be at school by seven forty-seven in the morning, or else I won‘t have time to get to my locker before class.

Consider yourself on winter break, the officer says.

Winter break isn‘t until February fifteenth.

He punches a button on the keyboard. All right. Stand up, he says, so I do.

What‘s in your pockets?

I glance down at my jacket. My hands.

So you‘re a wiseass, the officer says. Empty them, come on.

Confused, I hold my palms up in front of me. There‘s nothing in them.

Your pockets.

I pull out a stick of gum, a green pebble, a piece of sea glass, a strip of photographs of my mother and me, and my wallet. He takes them all. Hey

The money will be logged in to your account, he says. I watch him write notes on a piece of paper, and then he opens my wallet and takes out my money and my picture of Dr. Henry Lee. He starts to count the money, and by accident, he drops the pile. When he gathers it back up, it‘s out of order.

Sweat breaks out on my forehead. The money, I say.

I didn‘t take any, if that‘s what you‘re worried about.

I see a twenty rubbing up against a dollar bill, and the five-dollar bill is backward, with President Lincoln facedown.

In my wallet, I make sure that everything is in order from the smallest denomination to the biggest, and everything faces up. I have never taken cash out of my mother‘s wallet without her permission, but sometimes when she is unaware I sneak into her purse and organize her money for her. I just don‘t like the thought of all that chaos; the coin pocket is already haphazard enough.

You okay? the officer says, and I realize he is staring at me.

Could you … I can barely speak, my throat has gotten so tight. Could you just put the bills in order?

What the hell?

With my hand curled to my chest, I point a single finger at the stack of bills.

Please, I whisper. The ones go on top.

If at least the money looks the way it is supposed to, that‘s something that hasn‘t changed.

I don‘t believe this, the officer mutters, but he does it, and once that twenty is resting safely at the bottom of the pile, I let out the breath I‘ve been holding.

Thanks, I say, even though I noticed at least two of the bills are still upside down.

Jacob,
I tell myself,
you can do this. It doesn‘t matter if you are in another bed
tonight instead of your own. It doesn‘t matter if they do not let you brush your teeth. In the
grand scheme of things, the world will not stop spinning.
(That is a sentence my mother likes to use when I get nervous about a change in routine.) Meanwhile the officer leads me to another room, one not much bigger than a closet.

Strip, he says, and he folds his arms.

Strip what? I answer.

All of it. Underwear, too. When I realize he wants me to take off my clothes, I am so surprised that my jaw drops.

I‘m not changing in front of you, I say, incredulous. I won‘t even change for gym class in the locker room. I have a doctor‘s note from Dr. Moon saying that I do not have to, that I can participate in class while wearing my normal clothes.

Again, the officer says, I didn‘t
ask
you.

On television I‘ve seen inmates wearing jumpsuits, although I never really gave much thought to what happened to their clothes. But what I am remembering now is bad.

Very Bad, with capital letters. On television, the jumpsuits are always orange. Sometimes it is enough to make me change the channel.

I can feel my pulse accelerate at the thought of all that orange, touching my skin. Of the other inmates, wearing the same color. We would be like an ocean of hazard warnings, a sea of danger.

If you don‘t take off your clothes, the officer says, I will do it for you.

I turn my back to him and peel off my coat. I pull my shirt over my head. My skin is white, like a fish belly, and I don‘t have rippling stomach muscles like the Abercrombie & Fitch guys; this embarrasses me. I unzip my jeans and pull down my underwear and then remember my socks. Then I crouch into a ball and carefully organize my clothes so that the olive khaki pants are on the bottom, then the green shirt, finally the green boxers and socks.

The officer takes the clothes and starts shaking them out. Hands out at your sides,

he says, and I close my eyes and do what he says, even when he makes me turn around and bend down and I can feel his fingers moving me apart. A soft cloth sack hits my chest. Get dressed again.

Inside it is clothing but not my own. Instead, there are three pairs of socks, three pairs of underwear, three T-shirts, thermal pants, a thermal top, three pairs of dark blue pants and matching shirts, rubber flip-flops, a jacket, a hat, gloves, a towel.

This is a huge relief. I won‘t be wearing orange after all.

I have been to one sleepover in my life. It was at the home of a boy named Marshall, who has since moved to San Francisco. Marshall had a lazy eye and was, like me, often the butt of classmates‘ jokes in second grade. Our mothers were the ones who organized the sleepover, after mine learned that Marshall could spell the names of most dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period as well.

My mother and I talked for two whole weeks about what would happen if I woke up in the middle of the night and wanted to come home (I‘d call). What would happen if Marshall‘s mother served something for breakfast that I didn‘t like (I would say
No thank you
). We talked about how Marshall might not have his clothes organized in his closet the way I do and how he had a dog and dogs sometimes drop hair on the floor without intending to.

The night of the sleepover my mother dropped me off after dinner. Marshall asked if I wanted to watch
Jurassic Park,
and I said yes. But when I started telling him during the video what was anachronistic and what was downright fictionalized, he got angry and told me to shut up and I went to play with his dog instead.

The dog was a Yorkshire terrier with a pink bow in its hair even though it happened to be male. It had a very small pink tongue, and it licked my hand, which I thought I would like but which I wanted to wash off immediately.

That night when we went to sleep Marshall‘s mother put a rolled blanket between us to divide up his full-size bed. She kissed him on the forehead and then she kissed me, which was strange because she was not my mother. Marshall told me that in the morning if we got up early we could watch TV before his mother got up and caught us. Then he fell asleep, but I didn‘t. I was awake when the dog came into the room and burrowed underneath the covers, scratching me with its tiny black toenails. And I was still awake when Marshall wet the bed in his sleep, too.

I got up and called my mother. It was 4:24 A.M.

When she arrived, she knocked on the door, and Marshall‘s mother answered it in her bathrobe. My mother thanked her on my behalf. I guess Jacob‘s an early riser, she said.
Very
early. She tried to laugh a little, but it sounded like a brick falling.

When we got into the car, she said, I‘m sorry.

Even though I didn‘t meet her gaze, I could feel her looking at me. Don‘t ever do that to me again, I answered.

I have to fill out a form for visitors. I can‘t imagine who might want to come, so I write down my mother‘s name and my brother‘s name and our address, and their birth dates. I add Jess‘s name, too, although I know she can‘t visit, obviously, but I bet she would have wanted to.

Then a nurse examines me, taking my temperature and checking my pulse, just like at the doctor‘s office. When she asks me if I‘m on any medication, I tell her yes, but she gets angry when I don‘t know the names of the supplements, when I can only tell her the colors, or the fact that it comes in a syringe.

Finally, I am taken to the place where I will be staying. The officer walks me down a hallway until we reach a booth. Inside, another officer pushes a button, and the metal door in front of us slides open. I am given another laundry bag, this one with two sheets and two blankets and a pillowcase.

The cells are on the left side of a hallway that has a metal grate instead of a floor.

Each cell has two beds, a sink, a toilet, and a television inside it. Each cell also has two men inside. They look like the same people you would see on the street, except of course they have all done something bad.

Well, maybe not. After all,
I‘m
here, too.

You‘ll stay here for a week while you‘re evaluated, the officer says. Based on your behavior, you might be moved to the minimum-security population. He nods at one cell, which, unlike the others, has a smaller window. That‘s the shower, the officer says.

How am I supposed to make sure I shower first when there are so many other
people around?

How am I going to brush my teeth when I don‘t have my toothbrush with me?

How will I take my shot in the morning, and my supplements?

As I think about these details, I feel myself starting to lose control.

It‘s not like a tsunami, although I‘m sure that‘s what it looks like to someone on the outside. It‘s more like a packet of mail that‘s wrapped tight several times with a rubber band. When it snaps, the band stays in place out of habit, or out of muscle memory, I don‘t know and then one tiny move of the packet and it begins to unravel. Before you know it, there is nothing holding that packet of letters together.

My hand starts moving a little, my fingers playing a beat on my thigh.

Jess is dead and I am in jail and I missed
CrimeBusters
today and my right eye has a tic now that I can‘t stop.

We stop walking when we reach the cell at the end of the hallway. Home sweet home, the officer says. He unlocks the door to the cell and waits for me to move inside.

The minute he locks the door again, I grab the bars. I can hear the lights buzzing overhead.

Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid didn‘t go to jail; instead they jumped off a cliff.
Kid, the next time I say ‗Let‘s go someplace like Bolivia,‘
I mutter,
let‘s
go
someplace like Bolivia.

My head hurts, and out of the corners of my eyes, I am seeing red. I shut them, but the sounds are still there and my hands feel too big for my body and my skin is getting tighter. I picture it stretching so hard that it splits.

Don‘t worry, a voice says. You‘ll get used to it.

I spin around and hold my hands clutched in front of my chest, the way I used to walk sometimes when I wasn‘t concentrating on looking like everyone else. I‘d assumed the officer had put me in a special cell for people who have to be in jail but shouldn‘t really be. I had not realized that I, like everyone else, would have a roommate.

He is wearing all his blue clothes plus his jacket and hat, pulled down to his eyebrows. What‘s your name?

I stare at his face without looking him in the eye. He has a mole on his left cheek, and I have never liked people with moles.
I am Spartacus.

No shit? Then I hope you‘re in here for killing your parents. He gets up from the bunk and walks behind me. How about I call you Bitch instead? My hands grip the bars more tightly. Let‘s get some things straight, so that you and me, we get along. I get the bottom bunk. I get to go out to the exercise yard before you do. I pick the TV channel. You don‘t fuck with me, and I won‘t fuck with you.

There is a common behavior in dogs that are put together in close quarters. One will snap at the other until the beta dog knows that the alpha dog is to be obeyed.

I am not a dog. Neither is this man. He is shorter than I am. The mole on his cheek is raised, and shaped like a beehive.

If Dr. Moon were here she‘d ask,
What‘s the number?

Sixteen. On a scale of one to ten, ten being the highest, my anxiety level is a sixteen. Which is the worst number, because it‘s (a) even, (b) has an even square root, and (c) its even square root has an even square root.

If my mother were here, she‘d start singing I Shot the Sheriff. I stick my fingers in my ears so I cannot hear him and I close my eyes so I cannot see him and I start to repeat the chorus without any breaks between the words, just a ribbon of sound that I can imagine circling me like a force field.