“Care to do the honors?” Basil asks me.
We are crowded into Jessica Ogilvy’s bathroom-me and the pair of CSIs who have been combing the house for evidence. Marcy’s taped up the windows with black paper and is standing ready with her camera. Basil has mixed the Luminol to spray all over the tub, the floor, the walls. I flip the light switch and plunge us into darkness.
Basil sprays the solution, and suddenly the bathroom lights up like a Christmas tree, the grout between the tiles glowing a bright, fluorescent blue.
“Hot damn,” Marcy murmurs. “I love it when we’re right.”
Luminol glows when it meets the correct catalyst-in this case, the iron in hemoglobin. Jacob Hunt might have been smart enough to clean up the mess he’d left behind after murdering Jess Ogilvy, but there were still traces of blood that would go far toward convincing a jury of his guilt.
“Nice work,” I say, as Marcy takes a furious run of photographs. Assuming the blood matches the victim’s, this latest piece of the puzzle helps me map out the crime. “Jacob Hunt comes for his appointment with the victim,” I muse, thinking aloud. “They argue, maybe knocking over the CD rack and the mail and a few stools, and he corners her-right here, apparently-beating her up and eventually striking a blow that kills her.” As the Luminol loses its glow, I flip on the lights. “He cleans up the bathroom, and then he cleans up the victim, dressing her and dragging her to the culvert.”
I glance down at the floor. In full light, you can’t see the chemical, and you can’t see the blood at all. “But Jacob’s a CSI buff,” I say.
Basil grins. “I read this article in Esquire about how women find us sexier than firemen-”
“Not all women,” Marcy qualifies.
“And so,” I continue, ignoring them, “he comes back to the scene of the crime and decides to cover his tracks. The thing is, he’s smart-he wants to pin this on Mark Maguire. So he thinks to himself, If Mark did this, how would he try to cover it up? As a kidnapping. So he puts on Mark Maguire’s boots and stomps around outside, and then cuts the screens in the windows. He cleans up the CDs and the mail and the overturned stools. But he also knows Mark would be sharp enough to want to throw investigators off the trail a little, so he types up the note for the mailman and packs a bag full of the victim’s clothes and takes it with him-both hints that Jess left of her own accord.”
“You’re losing me,” Marcy says.
“Jacob Hunt doctored his crime scene to look like it had been committed by someone else-someone who would doctor a crime scene to hide his involvement. It’s fucking brilliant.” I sigh.
“So what are you thinking?” Basil asks. “Lovers’ quarrel?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.” Yet.
Marcy shrugs. “Too bad perps never seem inclined to talk.”
“Good thing victims do,” I say.
Wayne Nussbaum is up to his elbows in the chest cavity of a dead man from Swanton when I snap on a mask and booties and enter the room. “I can’t hang around anymore,” I say. For the past forty-five minutes I’ve been cooling my heels in Wayne’s office.
“Neither can he,” Wayne replies, and I notice the ligature marks around the guy’s neck. “Look, it’s not like I could have predicted a murder-suicide would throw me off schedule.” He lifts a gleaming red organ in his palm, his eyes dancing. “Come on, Detective. Have a heart.”
I don’t crack a smile. “That the kind of stuff you learn at clown college?”
“Yeah. It comes after Pie Throwing 101.” He turns to his diener, a young woman who assists him during autopsies. Her name is Lila, and she once tried to hit on me by inviting me to a rave in South Burlington. Instead of flattering me, it just made me feel really old.
“Lila,” he says, “give me ten minutes.”
He strips off his gloves and jacket and booties as soon as we’re out of the sterile atmosphere and walks beside me down the hall to his office. He shuffles files on his desk until I see one with Jess Ogilvy’s name on the tab. “I don’t know what else I can tell you that my report didn’t already spell out, crystal clear,” Wayne says, sitting down. “The cause of death was a subdural hematoma, due to a basilar skull fracture. He popped her so hard he drove her skull into her brain and killed her.”
I knew that. But it wasn’t really why Jess Ogilvy had died. That was because she’d said something to Jacob Hunt that had set him off. Or maybe she had refused to say something to him-such as I feel the same way about you.
It would be simple enough to assume that a boy who fell for his tutor-and was rebuffed-might lash out at her.
Wayne skims through his report. “The lacerations on her back-drag marks-were made postmortem. I’d assume they occurred when the body was moved. There were bruises, however, that were made premortem. The facial ones, of course. And a few on her upper arms and throat.”
“No semen?”
Wayne shook his head. “Nada.”
“Could he have worn a condom?”
“Highly unlikely,” the medical examiner says. “We didn’t get any pubic hairs or any other physical evidence concurrent with rape.”
“But her underwear was on backward.”
“Yeah, but that only proves that your perp hasn’t shopped for lingerie-not that he’s a rapist.”
“Those bruises,” I say. “Can you tell how old they are?”
“Within a day or so,” Wayne replies. “There’s not really a reliable technique to determine the age of a bruise beyond color and immunohistochemical methods. Bottom line is, people heal at different rates, so although I could look at two bruises and say one occurred a week before the other, I can’t look at two bruises and say one occurred at nine A.M. and the other occurred at noon.”
“So conceivably, the choke marks around her throat-and the fingerprint bruises on her arms-those could have happened minutes before she died?”
“Or hours.” Wayne tosses the folder to a pile on the side of his desk. “He could have threatened her and then come back to beat her to death.”
“Or it could have been two different people at two different times.” My gaze meets his.
“Then Jessica Ogilvy truly did have the shittiest day on record,” the coroner says. “I suppose you could charge the boyfriend with assault. It seems like an unnecessary complication, though, if your perp already confessed to moving the body.”
“Yeah. I know.” I just didn’t understand why that bothered me so much. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Why did you stop being a clown?”
“It wasn’t fun anymore. Kids screaming in my face, barfing their birthday cake in my lap…” Wayne shrugs. “My clients here are much more predictable.”
“I guess.”
The coroner looks at me for a long moment. “You know the hardest case I ever did? Motor vehicle accident. Woman rolls her SUV on the highway, and her baby pops right out of the car seat and suffers severe spinal injuries and dies. They brought the whole car seat into the morgue. I had to put that dead baby back into the seat and show how the mother didn’t buckle it the right way, which is why the kid fell out.” Wayne stands up. “Sometimes you have to keep reminding yourself that you’re in this for the victim.”
I nod. And wonder why that label makes me think not of Jess Ogilvy but of Jacob Hunt.
The boy who answers the door at the Hunt household looks nothing like his brother, but the minute I show my badge, the color drains from his face. “I’m Detective Matson,” I say. “Is your mother home?”
“I, uh… I plead the Fifth,” the kid says.
“That’s great,” I tell him. “But it wasn’t a particularly probing question.”
“Who’s at the door?” I hear, and then Emma Hunt steps into my line of sight. The minute she recognizes me, her eyes narrow. “Did you come to check up on me? Well, I’m here, with the boys, just like the judge ordered. Close the door, Theo. And you,” she says, “can talk to our lawyer.”
I manage to wedge my foot in the door just before it closes. “I have a search warrant.” I hold up the piece of paper that will allow me to comb through Jacob’s bedroom and take away what might constitute evidence.
She takes the paper out of my hand, scans it, and then lets the door swing open again. Without speaking, she turns on her heel. I follow her into the house, pausing when she picks up the phone in the kitchen and calls her baby-faced lawyer. “Yes, he’s here now,” she says, cupping her hand around the receiver. “He gave the paper to me.”
She hangs up a moment later. “Apparently I don’t have a choice.”
“I could have told you that,” I say cheerfully, but she turns away and walks upstairs.
I keep a few steps behind until she opens a door. “Jacob? Baby?” I stand in the hallway and let her talk softly to her son. I hear words like required and legal, and then she reappears with Jacob at her side.
It takes me by surprise. The kid’s whole face is black and blue; a butterfly bandage disappears into his hairline. “Jacob,” I say. “How are you doing?”
“How does it look like he’s doing?” Emma snaps.
I’d been told by Helen Sharp that Jacob was released into his mother’s custody pending the competency hearing. She had said that, apparently, Jacob couldn’t handle jail well. We had laughed about it. Who can handle jail well?
My job, as a detective, is to go behind the scenes and see what strings are controlling the puppets. Sometimes that means collecting evidence, or swearing out arrest warrants, or getting background information, or conducting interrogations. But it usually also means I miss what is going on onstage. It was one thing to arrest Jacob and send him off to his arraignment; it is another thing entirely to see this boy in front of me again in this condition.
He doesn’t look like the kid I interviewed a week ago. No wonder his mother wants my head.
She takes Jacob’s hand to lead him down the hallway, but we are all stopped by the thin, reedy sound of the boy’s voice. “Wait,” Jacob whispers.
Emma turns, her face lighting up. “Jacob? Did you say something?”
I get the sense that, if he has been saying anything, it’s not a lot. He nods, his mouth working for a moment before another syllable is forced out. “I want…”
“What do you want, baby? I’ll get it for you.”
“I want to watch.”
Emma faces me, her eyebrows raised in a question.
“Not possible,” I tell her flatly. “He can stay in the house, but he can’t be anywhere near the room.”
“Can I speak to you for a moment?” she asks evenly, and she walks into Jacob’s bedroom, leaving him in the hallway. “Do you have any idea what kind of hell it is to watch your child become completely unresponsive?”
“No, but-”
“Well, this is the second time for me. I haven’t even been able to get him out of his bed,” she says. “And as I recall, the last thing you said to me was that I should trust you. I did, and you stabbed me in the back and arrested my son, after I offered him up to you on a silver platter. From where I’m standing, my son wouldn’t be hanging on by a thread if it weren’t for you. So if watching you load up your goddamn boxes with his possessions is what brings him back to the world of the living, then I would hope for the sake of common decency you’d simply let him.”
By the time she finishes, her eyes are glittering and her cheeks are flushed. I open my mouth, about to talk about search and seizure cases and the Supreme Court, but then change my mind. “Jacob?” I stick my head out the door. “Come on in.”
He sits down on the bed, and Emma leans against the doorjamb with her arms crossed. “I’m, uh, just going to take a look around,” I say.
Jacob Hunt is a wicked neat freak. One weekend with Sasha and I’m forever finding tiny socks wedged into the couch or cereal underfoot in the kitchen or books left strewn across the living room floor. But something tells me this isn’t the case with Jacob. His bed is made with military precision. His closet is so organized it looks like an advertisement. I’d assume he has a full-blown case of OCD, except for the fact that there are exceptions to the rule: his math notebook, lying open, is a disaster-loose-leaf pages haphazardly stuffed, papers falling out, handwriting so messy it looks like modern art. The same goes for a bulletin board on one wall, which is overstuffed with papers and pictures and photographs overlapping each other. Dirty dishes and mugs litter his desk.
Directly across from the desk is a small table with an overturned fish tank that has been kitted out like a fuming chamber. Jacob sees me looking at it. “What do you get prints off?” I ask.
“Don’t answer that, Jacob,” Emma interjects.
“Toothbrushes,” he replies. “Mugs. I once got a great partial off a manila folder with magnetic powder.”
His mother and I both stare at him-Emma because he’s probably said more in the last second than in the past three days; and I because there are CSIs who don’t even know that technique for getting prints off a porous surface.
I pick up the trash bin beside the desk and begin to leaf through it. There are several drafts of an English essay. There’s a gum wrapper. What’s extraordinary about the contents is not what they are but how they are: instead of being balled up or crumpled, each piece of garbage has been folded into crisp eighths. Even the tiny gum wrapper. The trash is stacked, like laundry.
The first item I take is Jacob’s police scanner-now I know how he managed to get to the crime scene for the hypothermic guy. Jacob’s hand begins to flap a little harder. “That… that’s mine.”
Emma puts her hand on his shoulder. “Remember what I said?”
I quickly procure the items that are in the fuming chamber: a mug, a mirror, the tank itself. I look under Jacob’s bed, but there is only a pair of slippers and two plastic bins-one filled with back issues of the Journal of Forensic Sciences, the other filled with Legos. From his bookshelf I take the complete DVD series of CrimeBusters, and then I see the composition notebooks. He told me he has more than a hundred, and he wasn’t lying. I pull the first one down.
“You can’t have those,” Jacob cries.
“I’m sorry, Jacob.” Episode 74, I read. Silent Witness, 12/4/08.
Two teenagers out for a joyride run over a deaf man, who turns out to be already dead.
This is followed by a list of evidence. Solved, it reads, 0:36.
Emma has her head bent close to Jacob’s now. She’s murmuring, but I cannot hear the words. Turning my back to them, I flip through the entries. Some are repeats of episodes; Jacob seems to have written about each of them when they aired, even if he’d seen the show before. Some of them have the disclaimer that Jacob could not solve the crime before the TV detectives did.
There are kidnappings. Stabbings. Cult ritual murders. One episode catches my eye: Joffrey puts on her boyfriend’s boots and leaves prints in the mud behind the house to mislead investigators.
Stuck between the pages is a pink index card, and as I scan it I realize this is a note Jacob has written to himself:
I am miserable. I can’t stand it anymore.
The people who supposedly care don’t.
I get my hopes up and everyone eventually lets me down. I finally know what’s wrong with me: all of you. All of you who think I’m just an autistic kid, so who really cares? Well, I hate you. I hate all of you. I hate how I cry at night because of you. But you are just people. JUST PEOPLE.
So why do you make me feel so small?
Was this written a week ago, a month, a year? Was it in response to bullying in school? To a teacher’s criticism? To something Jess Ogilvy said?
It could point to motive. I quickly close the journal and stick the notebook into the box. You can’t see that index card anymore, but I know it’s there, and it feels too private, too raw to be considered simply evidence. All of a sudden I am flooded by the image of Jacob Hunt huddled in this room after a whole day of trying unsuccessfully to blend in with the hundreds of kids in his school. Who, out of all of us, hasn’t felt marginalized at some point? Who hasn’t felt like they don’t belong?
Who hasn’t tried… and failed?
I had been the fat kid, the one who was stuck in the soccer goal during gym class and cast as a rock in the school play. I’d been called Doughboy, Lardass, Earthquake Boy, you name it. In eighth grade, after a graduation ceremony, a kid had come up to me. I never knew your real name was Rich, he’d said.
When my dad got laid off and we had to move to Vermont for his new job, I spent the summer reinventing myself. I ran-a half mile the first day, and then a whole one, and gradually more. I ate only green things. I did five hundred sit-ups every morning before I even brushed my teeth. By the time I got to my new school, I was a totally different guy, and I never looked back.
Jacob Hunt can’t exercise himself into a new personality. He can’t move to another school district and start over. He’ll always be the kid with Asperger’s.
Unless, instead, he makes himself the kid who killed Jess Ogilvy.
“I’m all done here,” I say, stacking the boxes. “I just need you to sign the receipt for the property so you can eventually get it back.”
“And when might that be?”
“When the DA’s done with it.” I turn to say good-bye to Jacob, but he’s staring at the empty spot where his fuming chamber was located.
Emma walks me downstairs. “You’re wasting your time,” she says. “My son isn’t a murderer.”
I push the inventory receipt toward her, silent.
“If I were Jess’s parents, I’d want to know the police were actively trying to find the person who killed my child instead of basing their entire case on the ridiculous notion that an autistic boy with no criminal history-a boy who loved Jess-killed her.” She signs the receipt I give her and then opens the front door. “Are you even listening?” she says, her voice rising. “You’ve got the wrong person.”
There have been times-albeit very rarely-that I wished this were the case. When I snapped handcuffs on an abused wife who’d gone after her husband with a knife, for example. Or when I arrested a guy who’d broken into a grocery store to steal formula for his baby because he couldn’t afford it. But just like then, I can’t contradict the evidence that’s in front of me now. I may feel bad for someone who’s committed a crime, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t committed it.
I pick up the boxes and, at the last moment, turn back. “I’m sorry,” I say. “For what it’s worth… I’m really sorry.”
Her eyes flash. “You’re sorry? For what, exactly? Lying to me? Lying to Jacob? Throwing him into jail without giving any thought to his special needs-”
“Technically, the judge did that-”
“How dare you,” Emma shouts. “How dare you come in here as if you’re on our side, and then turn around and do this to my son!”
“There are no sides,” I yell back at her. “There’s just a girl, who died alone and scared and who was found a week later frozen solid. Well, I’ve got a girl, too. What if it had been her?” By now my face is flushed. I am inches away from Emma. “I didn’t do this to your son,” I say, more softly. “I did this for my daughter.”
The last thing I see is Emma Hunt’s jaw drop. She doesn’t speak to me as I heft the boxes more firmly in my arms and walk down her driveway, but then, it’s never the differences between people that surprise us. It’s the things that, against all odds, we have in common.
My mother and I are riding in the car to the office of the state psychiatrist, who happens to work out of a hospital. I am nervous about this because I don’t like hospitals. I have been in them twice: once when I fell out of a tree and broke my arm, and once when Theo got hurt after I knocked over his high chair. What I remember about hospitals is that they smell white and stale, the lights are too bright, and every time I’ve been in one I’ve either been in pain or been ashamed or maybe both.
This makes my fingers start to flutter on my leg, and I stare at them as if they are disconnected from my body. For the past three days, I’ve been doing better. I’m taking all my supplements again and my shots, and it hasn’t felt quite as much as if I’m constantly swimming in a bubble of water that makes it harder to understand what people say or to focus on them.
Believe me, I know it’s not normal to flap my hands or walk in circles or repeat words over and over, but sometimes it’s the easiest way to make myself feel better. It’s like a steam engine, really: Fluttering my hands in front of my face or against my leg is my exhaust valve, and maybe it looks weird, but then again, just compare it to the folks who turn to alcohol or porn to alleviate pressures.
I haven’t been out of the house since I left the jail. Even school is off-limits now, so my mother has found textbooks and is home-schooling both Theo and me. It’s sort of nice, actually, not having to stress out about the next time I will be accosted by another student and will have to interact; or if a teacher will say something I don’t understand; or if I’ll need to use my COP pass and look like a total loser in front of my peers. I wonder why we never thought of this before: learning without socialization. It’s every Aspie’s dream.
Every now and then, my mother looks at me in the rearview mirror. “You remember what’s going to happen, right?” she asks. “Dr. Cohn is going to ask you questions. All you have to do is tell the truth.”
Here’s the other reason I’m nervous: the last time I went off to answer questions without my mother, I wound up in jail.
“Jacob,” my mother says, “you’re stimming.”
I slap my free hand over the one that’s fluttering.
When we get to the hospital, I walk with my head ducked down so that I do not have to see sick people. I have not vomited since I was six years old; the very thought of it makes me sweat. Once when Theo got the flu, I had to take my sleeping bag and quilt and stay in the garage because I was afraid I’d catch it. What if coming here for a stupid competency interview turns out to be much worse than anyone anticipates?
“I don’t understand why he couldn’t come to us,” I mutter.
“Because he’s not on our side,” my mother says.
The way competency works is this:
1. The State of Vermont hires a psychiatrist who will interview me and tell the judge everything the DA wants to hear.
2. My lawyer will counter this with Dr. Moon, my own psychiatrist, who will tell the judge everything Oliver Bond wants to hear.
Frankly, I don’t see the point, since we all know this is how it’s going to shake out, anyway.
Dr. Martin Cohn’s office is not as nice as Dr. Moon’s. Dr. Moon decorates in shades of blue, which have been proven to enhance relaxation. Dr. Martin Cohn decorates in industrial gray. His secretary’s desk looks like the one my math teacher uses. “Can I help you?” she asks.
My mother steps forward. “Jacob Hunt is here to see Dr. Cohn.”
“You can go right in.” She points to another doorway.
Dr. Moon has that, too. You go into her office through one door and exit through the other, so that no one who’s waiting will see you. I know it’s supposed to be about privacy, but if you ask me, it’s like the psychiatrists themselves are buying into that stupid belief that therapy is something to hide.
I put my hand on the doorknob and take a deep breath. This time you’re coming back, I promise myself.
A joke:
A guy is flying in a hot-air balloon and he’s lost. He lowers himself over a cornfield and calls out to a woman. “Can you tell me where I am and where I’m headed?”
“Sure,” this woman says. “You are at 41 degrees, 2 minutes, and 14 seconds north, 144 degrees, 4 minutes, 19 seconds east; you’re at an altitude of 762 meters above sea level, and right now you’re hovering, but you were on a vector of 234 degrees at 12 meters per second.”
“Amazing! Thanks! By the way, do you have Asperger’s syndrome?”
“I do!” the woman replies. “How did you know?”
“Because everything you said is true, it’s much more detail than I need, and you told me in a way that’s of no use to me at all.”
The woman frowns. “Huh. Are you a psychiatrist?”
“I am,” the man says. “But how the heck could you tell?”
“You don’t know where you are. You don’t know where you’re headed. You got where you are by blowing hot air. You put labels on people after asking a few questions, and you’re in exactly the same spot you were in five minutes ago, but now, somehow, it’s my fault!”
Dr. Martin Cohn is smaller than I am and has a beard. He wears glasses without rims, and as soon as I come into the room, he walks toward me. “Hello,” he says. “I’m Dr. Cohn. Take a seat.”
The chairs are metal frames with pleather cushions. One is orange, and that’s totally not happening. The other is gray and has a sunken circle in the middle, as if the cushion has simply given out.
When I was younger and I was asked to take a seat, I’d lift it up. Now I know that it means I am supposed to sit down. There are many statements that do not mean what they say: Mark my words. Hang around. Just a second. Get off my back.
The psychiatrist takes out a pen from his pocket. He sits down, too, and puts his yellow pad on his lap. “What’s your name?”
“Jacob Thomas Hunt,” I say.
“How old are you, Jacob?”
“Eighteen.”
“Do you know why you’re here?”
“Don’t you?”
He writes something down on his paper. “Do you know that you’ve been charged with a crime?”
“Yes. Thirteen VSA, section 2301. Murder committed by means of poison, or by lying in wait, or by willful, deliberate and premeditated killing, or committed in perpetrating or attempting to perpetrate arson, sexual assault, aggravated sexual assault, robbery or burglary, shall be murder in the first degree. All other kinds of murder shall be murder in the second degree.”
I would have thought reciting the entire statute would impress Dr. Cohn, but he doesn’t register any emotion.
Maybe he’s got Asperger’s, too.
“Do you understand whether that’s a major or minor charge, Jacob?”
“It’s a felony that carries a minimum sentence of thirty-five years to life in prison.”
Dr. Cohn looks up over his glasses. “What about probation?” he asks. “Do you know what that is?”
“It’s when you have to check in with a court officer for a certain amount of time,” I say. “You have to follow rules and give reports, you have to have a job, you have to live somewhere where they know your address, you have to stay out of trouble, you have to not drink alcohol…”
“Right,” Dr. Cohn says. “Tell me, Jacob, what should your lawyer focus on in order to defend you?”
I shrug. “My innocence.”
“Do you understand what a plea of guilty or not guilty means?”
“Yes. Guilty means that you admit you committed the crime and that you need to be punished for it. Not guilty means you don’t admit you committed the crime and you don’t think you should be punished for it… but it’s not the same as being innocent, because in our legal system you get found guilty or not guilty. You don’t get found innocent, even if you are, like me.”
Dr. Cohn stares at me. “What’s a plea bargain?”
“When the prosecutor talks to the lawyer and they agree on a sentence, and then they both go before the judge to see if the judge will accept that, too. It means you don’t have to have a trial, because you’ve admitted to the crime by taking the plea.”
These are all easy questions, because the end of every CrimeBusters episode is a trial, where the evidence is relayed to a judge and jury. If I’d known the questions were going to be this simple, I wouldn’t have been so nervous. Instead, I’d been expecting Dr. Cohn to ask me about Jess. About what happened that afternoon.
And of course I couldn’t tell him, which would mean I’d have to lie, and that would be breaking the rules.
“What’s an insanity plea?” Dr. Cohn asks.
“When you claim you’re not guilty because you were dissociated from reality at the time you committed the crime and can’t be held legally responsible for your actions. Like Edward Norton in Primal Fear.”
“Great flick,” the psychiatrist says. “Jacob, if your lawyer thinks you shouldn’t testify, would you agree to that?”
“Why wouldn’t I want to testify? I’m going to tell the truth.”
“When can you speak out in the courtroom?”
“I can’t. My lawyer told me not to talk to anyone.”
“What do you think your chances are of being found not guilty?”
“One hundred percent,” I say, “since I didn’t do it.”
“Do you know how strong the case is against you?”
“Obviously not, since I haven’t seen the discovery-”
“You know what discovery is?” Dr. Cohn asks, surprised.
I roll my eyes. “Pursuant to Rule Sixteen of the Vermont Rules of Discovery, Rules of Procedure for the Superior Court, the Prosecution is required to turn over all the evidence they have in the case, including the photographs, documents, statements, physical examinations, and any other material that they intend to use at the trial, and if they don’t turn it over, then I’m allowed to go free.”
“Do you understand the difference between the defense, the prosecution, the judge, the jury, the witnesses…?”
I nod. “The defense is my team-my lawyer and the witnesses and me, because we’re defending me against the crime the prosecution’s charged me with. The judge is the man or woman who has authority over everyone in the courtroom. He runs the trial and listens to the evidence and makes decisions about the law, and the judge I met a few days ago wasn’t very nice and sent me to jail.” I take a breath. “The jury is a group of twelve that listens to the facts and hears the evidence and the arguments of the lawyers and then goes into a room where no one can hear them or see them and they decide the outcome of the case.” As an afterthought I add, “The jury is supposed to be twelve peers, but technically that would mean every single person on the jury should have Asperger’s syndrome, because then they’d really understand me.”
Dr. Cohn makes another note. “Do you have confidence in your lawyer, Jacob?”
“No,” I say. “The first time I met him I wound up in jail for three days.”
“Do you agree with how he’s handling the case?”
“Obviously not. He needs to tell them the truth so that the charges will be dismissed.”
“That’s not how it works,” Dr. Cohn says.
“It worked that way in My Cousin Vinny,” I tell him. “When Joe Pesci tells the court that the car isn’t the same as the one the witness identified because it had different tires. And it worked that way on CrimeBusters, episode eighty-eight. Do you want me to tell you about it?”
“No, that’s okay,” Dr. Cohn says. “Jacob, what would you do if a witness told a lie on the stand?”
I feel my fingers start to flutter, so I clamp my other hand down on top of them. “How would I know?” I say. “Only the liar knows that he’s lying.”
On paper, Jacob Hunt not only looks competent to stand trial but looks like a damn prelaw student, one who is probably more qualified to defend himself than I am.
Only the liar knows that he’s lying.
It’s the third time I’ve read Jacob’s answers to Dr. Cohn, the state shrink, and the third time that statement has jumped out at me. Is Jacob Hunt brilliant, with a photographic memory that I could have used back in law school? Or is he just snowing his mother… and everyone else?
Either way, during my last pass through the report, I realized that I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of challenging his competency-especially in a place like Vermont. No, if anyone’s feeling incompetent right now, it’s me-because I have to tell Emma that I’m not even going to fight the State on this one.
I drive to the Hunts’-since Emma and Jacob are basically under house arrest, I can’t very well ask them to meet me at my office. Thor’s riding in my lap, half tucked beneath the steering wheel.
I pull into the driveway and cut the ignition but don’t make a move to get out of the car. “If she goes haywire,” I tell the dog, “I’m counting on you to defend me.”
Because it’s cold today-just above zero degrees-I carry Thor inside my coat and head to the front door. Emma answers before I can even knock. “Hi,” she says. “It’s good to see you.” She even smiles a little, which makes her soft around all the edges. “Frankly, when you’re stuck in the house, even a visit from the electric company meter reader is a highlight of the day.”
“And here I thought you were starting to like me.” Thor pops his head between the buttons of my coat. “Would it be okay to bring him in? It’s really cold in the car.”
She eyes the dog warily. “Is it going to pee on my carpet?”
“Only if you keep looking at him like that.”
I set Thor on the floor of the mudroom and watch him trot away. “I don’t like dog hair,” Emma murmurs.
“Then aren’t you lucky you weren’t born a spaniel?” I take off my coat and fold it over my arm. “I got the competency results back.”
“And?” In one heartbeat, Emma is focused, intense.
“Jacob’s competent to stand trial.”
She shakes her head, as if she hasn’t quite heard me right. “You saw what happened during the arraignment!”
“Yes, but that’s not the legal definition of competency, and according to the state psychiatrist-”
“I don’t care about the state psychiatrist. Of course they’re going to find someone who says what the DA wants. Aren’t you at least going to fight back?”
“You don’t understand,” I tell her. “In Vermont you could be Charlie Manson and you’d still be found competent to stand trial.” I sit down on one of the benches in the mudroom. “You ever hear of a guy named John Bean?”
“No.”
“In 1993, he tied his mother up and built a funeral pyre for her with furniture he’d chopped into pieces. He threw bleach in her eyes, but his mother was able to escape. At his first appearance before a court, Bean told the judge he was the reincarnation of Jesus Christ. The judge said that his statements were bizarre and indicated an inability to comprehend what was happening. When he was charged with kidnapping for the same event, he refused counsel. He wanted to plead guilty, but the court wouldn’t accept that, so he was given a public defender. Bean told an evaluator that he believed he was the father of the public defender’s children and that she was the author of a comic strip and was a cross between Janet Reno and Janet Jackson. Through the next eight years of representation, he never discussed his case with his attorney-who raised the competency issue with the court-”
“I don’t see what this has-”
“I’m not done,” I say. “The defense shrink said Bean reported having computer chips inside him that were letting him be programmed. The state psychiatrist found him psychotic. During the trial, Bean tore the radiator out of the wall, threw the court television, and got hold of one of the officers’ guns. He told his attorney that he was seeing serpents coming out of people’s heads in the courtroom, and that angels were controlling the witness. He was convicted, and before sentencing, he told the court that in Riverside Park they put a memorial stone in the name of the Freddie Mercury Foundation, after Freddie Mercury had killed a Catholic priest. After that, he said Tony Curtis said he would be Bean’s father, and he used the greater power of Simon the Pig-the same power that had created the Nazi government-to bring him into his house and feed him human flesh. Oh, and a cat talked to him subliminally.”
Emma stares at me. “None of this has anything to do with Jacob.”
“It does,” I say, “because in the State of Vermont, in spite of everything I just told you, John Bean was found competent to stand trial. That’s legal precedent.”
Emma sinks down onto the bench beside me. “Oh,” she says, her voice small. “So what do we do now?”
“I, uh, think we need to plead insanity.”
Her head snaps up. “What? What are you talking about? Jacob’s not insane-”
“You just told me he wasn’t competent to stand trial, and now you’re telling me he’s too competent to use an insanity defense. You can’t have it both ways!” I argue. “We can look at the discovery when it comes in… But from what you’ve told me, there’s a pretty strong case against Jacob, including a confession. I really believe it’s the best way to keep him out of jail.”
Emma paces the mudroom. A shaft of sunlight falls across her hair and her cheek, and suddenly I remember an art history course I took in college: in Michelangelo’s Pietà, Raphael’s Madonna and Child, da Vinci’s Madonna of the Rocks, Mary was never seen smiling. Was it because she knew what was coming down the pike?
“If the insanity defense works,” Emma asks, “does he get to come home?”
“It depends. The judge has the right to put him in a secure treatment facility until he’s sure Jacob won’t hurt anyone again.”
“What do you mean, ‘secure treatment facility’? You’re talking about a mental hospital?”
“Pretty much,” I admit.
“So my son can either go to jail or be put in a mental hospital? What about the third option?”
“What third option?”
“He’s free to go,” Emma says. “He’s acquitted.”
I open my mouth to tell her that’s a huge gamble, to say that she’d have a better chance of teaching Thor to knit, but instead, I take a deep breath. “Why don’t we go ask Jacob?”
“No way,” Emma replies.
“Unfortunately, that’s not your choice.” I stand up and walk into the kitchen. Jacob is picking through a bowl of blueberries and giving the smaller ones to Thor.
“Did you know he likes fruit?” Jacob asks.
“He’ll eat anything that’s not nailed down,” I say. “We have to talk about your case, dude.”
“Dude?” Emma’s come into the room and is standing behind me, arms folded.
I ignore her and approach Jacob. “You passed the competency test.”
“I did?” he says, beaming. “Did I do really well?”
Emma steps forward. “You did great, baby.”
“We need to start thinking about your defense,” I say.
Jacob puts down the bowl of blueberries. “I have some cool ideas. There was this time on CrimeBusters when-”
“This isn’t a TV show, Jacob,” I say. “This is really important. This is your life.”
He sits down at the kitchen table and lifts Thor onto his lap. “Did you know that the guy who invented Velcro got the idea from taking his dog for a walk in the Alps? When the burrs caught on its fur, he thought about how something with hooks could catch onto anything with a loop.”
I sit down across from him. “Do you know what an affirmative defense is?”
He nods and spits back the legal definition: “It’s a reason for finding the defendant not guilty, such as self-defense, defense of another person, or not guilty by reason of insanity. The defendant has to raise it a certain amount of time before a trial, usually in writing.”
“What I’ve been thinking, Jacob, is that your best odds at this trial involve an affirmative defense.”
His face lights up. “Right! Of course! Defense of another person-”
“Who were you defending?” I interrupt.
Jacob looks down at Thor and plays with the tags on his collar. “Surely you can’t be serious,” he says. “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”
“Do you really think you’re in a position to be making jokes right now?”
“It’s from Airplane!” Jacob says.
“Well, it’s not funny. The State has a really good case against you, Jacob, which is why I think we need to use an insanity defense.”
Jacob’s head snaps up. “I’m not crazy!”
“That’s not what it means.”
“I know what it means,” he says. “It means that a person isn’t responsible for criminal conduct if, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacked the capacity to understand right from wrong at the moment the act was committed.” He stands up, knocking Thor to the floor. “I don’t have a mental disease or defect. I have a quirk. Right, Mom?”
I glance at Emma. “You have got to be kidding me.”
She hikes her chin up a notch. “We’ve always said that Asperger’s isn’t a disability… just a different ability.”
“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.”
“It’s not?” Mimi whispers. “Oh, crap.”
“I wanted to ask you about Jacob Hunt.”
Her face goes beet red. “I don’t really know him very well.”
“You were involved in an incident last year that led to his suspension, right?”
“It was all just a big joke,” she says, rolling her eyes. “I mean, how was I supposed to know he couldn’t even take a joke?”
“What happened?”
She sinks down farther on Mrs. Grenville’s couch. “He was always hanging around. It was creepy, you know? I mean, I’d be, like, talking to my friends and he’d be standing there eavesdropping. And then I got a forty on a math quiz because Mr. LaBlanc is the biggest jerk ever and I got really mad and asked to be excused to go to the bathroom. But I never went to the bathroom, I just went around the corner and started crying because if I failed math again my parents were going to take away my phone and make me give up my Facebook account-and Jacob walked up to me. I guess he’d left class for one of his weirdo breaks or something, and he was headed back. He didn’t say anything, he just kept staring at me, and I told him to get lost. So he said he would stay with me because that’s what friends do, and I said that if he really wanted to be my friend, he’d go into math class and tell Mr. LaBlanc to go fuck himself.” Mimi hesitated. “So he did.”
I glance at the guidance counselor. “And that’s why he was suspended?”
“No. He got detention for that.”
“And then?” I ask.
Mimi’s gaze slides away. “The next day a bunch of us were hanging out in the commons when Jacob showed up. I guess I sort of ignored him. I mean, it’s not like I was actively being mean to him or anything. And he just went crazy and came after me.”
“He hit you?”
She shakes her head. “He grabbed me and threw me up against a locker. He could have killed me, you know, if a teacher hadn’t stopped him.”
“Can you show me how he grabbed you?”
Mimi looks at Mrs. Grenville, who nods, encouraging her. We both stand up, and Mimi takes a step forward until she has backed me against the wall. She has to reach up because I am taller than she is, and then gingerly, she wraps her right hand around my throat. “Like this,” she says. “I had bruises for a week.”
The same bruises, I realize, that Jess Ogilvy had revealed at her autopsy.
As if I need any further reminder after Oliver Bond’s visit that my life is not and never will be what it was, my editor calls. “I was hoping you could come in this afternoon,” Tanya says. “There’s something we need to discuss.”
“I can’t.”
“Tomorrow morning?”
“Tanya,” I say, “Jacob’s under house arrest. I’m not allowed to leave.”
“Well, that’s sort of why I wanted to meet… We think that it might be best for everyone right now if you took a leave of absence from your column.”
“Best for everyone?” I repeat. “How is losing my job best for me?”
“It’s temporary, Emma. Just until this… blows over. Surely you understand,” Tanya explains. “We can’t really endorse advice from-”
“From a writer whose son was accused of murder?” I finish for her. “I write anonymously. No one knows about me, much less Jacob.”
“For how long? We’re in the news business. Someone’s going to dig this up, and then we’ll be the ones who look like idiots.”
“By all means,” I say hotly. “We wouldn’t want you to look like idiots.”
“We’re not cutting you off. Bob’s agreed to keep you at half salary plus benefits if you do freelance editing of the Sunday section for us in return.”
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to fall to my knees in gratitude?” I ask.
She is quiet for a moment. “For what it’s worth, Emma,” Tanya says, “you’re the last person in the world who deserves this. You’ve already got your cross to bear.”
“Jacob,” I say, “is not a cross to bear. He’s my son.” My hand is shaking where it holds the phone. “Go edit your own fucking Sunday section,” I tell her, and I hang up.
A tiny cry escapes as I realize the magnitude of what I’ve just done. I’m a single parent; I hardly make any money as is; I can’t work outside the home right now-how am I going to afford to live without a job? I could call my old boss from the textbook company and beg for freelance assignments, but it’s been twenty years since I worked there. I could scrape by on whatever savings we’ve got, until this is over.
And when will that be?
I admit that I’ve taken our legal system for granted. I assumed that the innocent prevail, that the guilty get their due. But as it turns out, it isn’t as simple as saying you’re not guilty if you’re not guilty. As Oliver Bond has pointed out, the jury has to be convinced. And connecting with strangers is Jacob’s weakest link.
I keep waiting to wake up. To have someone surprise me with the hidden camera and tell me this is all a big joke: that of course Jacob is free to go, that of course there has been some mistake. But no one surprises me, and I wake up every morning and nothing has changed.
The worst thing that could happen would be if Jacob goes to prison again, because they don’t understand him there. On the other hand, if he’s hospitalized, he’ll be with doctors. Oliver said that he’d be kept in a secure treatment facility until the judge could be sure that he wouldn’t hurt anyone again. Which means that he’d have a chance, however slight, of getting out one day.
I pull myself up the stairs heavily, as if my feet have been cast in lead. At Jacob’s door, I knock. He is sitting on his bed, Flowers for Algernon folded on his chest. “I finished,” he says.
As part of our new home-schooling protocol, I have to make sure he keeps up with the school curriculum, and this novel was the first assignment for his English class. “And?”
“It was stupid.”
“I always thought it was sad.”
“It’s stupid,” Jacob reiterates, “because he never should have had the experiment done.”
I sit down beside him. In the narrative, Charlie Gordon, a retarded man, undergoes a surgical procedure that triples his IQ, only to have the experiment ultimately fail and leave him with subnormal intelligence again. “Why not? He got to see what he was missing.”
“But if he never had that procedure, he would never know he was missing it.”
When Jacob says things like this-truths so raw most of us won’t even admit them in silence, much less speak them out loud-he seems more lucid than anyone else I know. I do not believe my son is insane. And I do not believe that his Asperger’s is a disability, either. If Jacob didn’t have Asperger’s, he wouldn’t be the same boy I love so fiercely: the one who watches Casablanca with me and can recite all of Bogey’s dialogue; the one who remembers the grocery list in his head when I’ve inadvertently left it sitting on the counter; the one who never ignores me if I ask him to get my wallet out of my handbag or run upstairs to get a ream of paper for the printer. Would I have rather had a kid who doesn’t struggle so hard, who could make his way in the world with less resistance? No, because that child wouldn’t have been Jacob. The crises may be what stick in my mind when it comes to him, but the in-between moments are the ones I would not have missed for the world.
Still, I know why Charlie Gordon had the procedure done. And I know why I am about to have a conversation with Jacob that makes my heart feel like it’s turned to ash. It’s because, whenever possible, humans err on the side of hope.
“I have to talk to you about what Oliver said,” I begin.
Jacob sits up. “I’m not crazy. I’m not letting him say that about me.”
“Just hear me out-”
“It’s not the truth,” Jacob says. “And you always have to tell the truth. House rules.”
“You’re right. But sometimes, it’s okay to tell a little lie, if it gets you to the truth in the long run.”
He blinks. “Saying I’m insane isn’t a little lie.”
I look at him. “I know you didn’t kill Jess. I believe you. But you have to get twelve strangers on a jury to believe you. How are you going to do that?”
“I’m going to tell them the truth.”
“Okay. Pretend we’re in court, then, and tell it to me.”
His eyes flicker across my face and then fix on the window behind me. “The first rule of Fight Club is don’t talk about Fight Club.”
“That’s exactly what I mean. You can’t use movie quotes in a courtroom to say what happened… But you can use a lawyer.” I grasp his arms. “I want you to promise me that you’ll let Oliver say whatever he has to in order for you to win this case.”
He jerks his chin down. “One martini, please,” he mutters. “Shaken, not stirred.”
“I’m going to take that as a yes,” I say.
If a school day is seven hours long, six of those are eaten up by blocks of time that are full of nothing but crap: teachers yelling at kids who misbehave, gossip as you walk to your locker, recap of a math concept you understood the first time it was explained. What being home-schooled has taught me, more than anything, is what a waste of a life high school is.
When it’s just me and Jacob, sitting at the kitchen table, I can blow through my work in about an hour’s time if I leave the reading stuff for before I fall asleep. It helps that my mother second-guesses the curriculum a lot. (“We’re skipping this part. If imaginary numbers were meant to be learned, they would have made themselves real,” or “For God’s sake, how many times have you studied the Puritans now, since first grade? A hundred? Let’s just move on to the Reformation.”) At any rate, I like being home-schooled. By definition, you’re an outcast, so you don’t have to worry about sounding stupid if you give the wrong answer or if that hot girl from your English class is checking you out when you go up to the whiteboard to write your equation for the math homework. I mean, we don’t even have a whiteboard here.
Since Jacob works on different stuff than I do, he’s buried in his work on one end of the table and I’m at the other. I finish before him, but then again, I did even when we worked on regular homework before. He may be freaking brilliant, but sometimes whatever’s cooking in his brain doesn’t quite translate onto the page. I guess it’s a little like being the world’s fastest bullet train but your wheels don’t fit the rails.
As soon as I finish my French homework (Que fait ton frère? Il va à la prison!), I close my textbook. My mom looks up from her cup of coffee. Usually, she’s typing away at her computer, but she hasn’t even been able to focus on that today. “Done,” I announce.
She stretches out her lips, and I know it’s supposed to be a smile. “Great.”
“You need me to do anything?” I ask.
“Turning back time would be nice.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of the grocery store,” I suggest. “We have, like, nothing to eat here.”
It’s true, and she knows it. She isn’t allowed to leave the house as long as Jacob’s stuck here, and that means we’re on a slow road to starvation unless I do something about it. “You can’t drive,” she says.
“I’ve got my skateboard.”
She arches a brow. “Theo, you cannot skateboard with groceries.”
“Why not? I’ll use those green bags I can loop over my arms, and I won’t buy anything heavy.”
It doesn’t take her very long to be convinced, but then we hit another snafu-she has only ten bucks in her wallet, and I can’t very well pretend to be Emma Hunt when I hand over her credit card. “Hey, Jacob,” I say, “we need to borrow some money.”
He doesn’t look up from his history book. “Do I look like a bank?”
“Are you kidding me?” My brother has, I swear, every dollar he’s ever been given for a birthday, Christmas, you name it. I have only seen him spend money once, on a thirty-five-cent pack of gum.
“Don’t,” my mother says quietly. “Let’s not get him upset.” Instead, she rummages in her wallet and pulls out her ATM card. “Stop off at the bank in the shopping center, and take out some cash. My PIN is 4550.”
“Really?” I say, beaming. “You just gave me your PIN?”
“Yes, so don’t make me regret it.”
I grab the card and head out of the kitchen. “So, is it your computer password, too?”
“Soy milk,” she says. “And gluten-free bread, and no-salt ham. And anything else you want.”
I make the executive decision to not take my skateboard and instead walk to the bank. It’s only two miles into town anyway. I keep my head ducked and tell myself it’s because of the wind, but really it’s because I don’t want to run into anyone I know. I pass cross-country skiers on the golf course and a pair of joggers. When I get to the bank, I realize that it’s after hours and I don’t know how to get into the little lobby where the ATM is located. Instead, I walk around to the back of the building, where there is a drive-up machine. I stand behind a Honda and wait my turn.
ENTER AMOUNT, the screen reads. I type in $200, and then I hesitate and cancel the transaction. Instead of doing a withdrawal, I look up the account balances.
Could we really have only $3,356 in our savings account? I try to remember whether my mother gets statements from more banks than just this one. If there’s a safe in our house where she keeps money.
I know that the Townsend Inn hires fifteen-year-olds as busboys for the restaurant. And I am pretty sure that, if I can get a lift into Burlington, I could work at the McDonald’s. Clearly, if someone needs to be employed, it’s me-since my mother can’t leave the house right now, and since Jacob has proven himself pathologically incapable of holding down a job.
He’s had three. The first was working at a pet store in town, back when he was obsessive about dogs. He got fired for telling his boss that she was stupid to keep the dog food in the back of the store, since the bags were so heavy. The second job he had was bagging groceries at a food co-op, where the cashiers kept telling him to “get his ducks in a row” as the items came down the conveyor belt and then got mad because he wouldn’t listen, when in reality Jacob probably just didn’t understand. The third job was selling concessions at a snack bar during the summer at the town pool. I guess that worked out fine for the first hour or so, but when lunchtime came and there were six kids shouting to him for sno-cones and hot dogs and nachos all at once, he took off his apron and just walked out.
A car drives up behind me, which makes me feel like a moron. I shuffle my feet and punch the Withdrawal button, and then enter $200 on the keypad. When the money comes out of the mouth of the machine, I stuff it into my pocket. And then I hear my name being called.
“Theo? Theo Hunt, is that you?”
I feel guilty, as if I’ve been caught in the act of doing something I shouldn’t be. But it’s not, like, illegal to walk up to a drive-up ATM, is it?
The door of the car behind me opens, and out steps my biology teacher, Mr. Jennison. “How are you doing?” he asks.
I remember how once, when my mother was getting on Jacob’s back because he refused to make small talk at a distant cousin’s wedding, he said that he would have asked Aunt Marie how she was doing if he really truly cared… but he didn’t, so pretending he did would be a big lie.
There are times when Jacob’s world makes a lot more sense to me than the one the rest of us live in. Why do we ask people how they’re doing when we don’t give a crap about the answer? Is Mr. Jennison asking me that question because he’s worried about me, or because it’s something to say to fill up the air between us?
“I’m okay,” I say, because old habits die hard. If I were like Jacob, I would have answered directly: I can’t sleep at night. And sometimes, when I run too fast, I can’t breathe. But in reality, someone who asks you how you’re doing doesn’t want to hear the truth. He wants the pat answer, the expected response, so that he can go on his merry way.
“You need a lift? It’s freezing out here.”
There are some teachers I have really liked, and others I’ve really disliked, but Mr. Jennison doesn’t fall into either category. He’s nondescript, from his thinning hair to his lectures; the kind of teacher whose name I’ll probably forget by the time I go to college. I’m pretty sure that-until recently-he could say the same about me: I was an average student in his class who didn’t excel or fail enough to leave an impression. Until, of course, all this happened.
Now I’m the boy at the center of six degrees of separation: Oh yeah, my aunt was Theo’s third-grade teacher. Or I sat behind him at a school assembly once. I am the kid whose name they will toss out at cocktail parties years from now: That autistic murderer kid? I was in his brother’s class at Townsend High.
“My mom’s double-parked across the street,” I mumble, realizing too late that, if our car was indeed in town, it would most likely be at this drive-through ATM right now. “Thanks anyway,” I say, and I leave in such a hurry that I almost forget to take the transaction receipt.
I jog all the way to the grocery store, as if I’m expecting Mr. Jennison to tail me in his car and call me a liar to my face. Only once do I think about taking the $200 and hopping on a bus and leaving for good. I imagine sitting in the backseat next to a pretty girl who shares her trail mix with me, or an old lady who’s knitting a cap for her newborn grandson, who asks me where I’m headed.
I imagine telling her that I’m going to visit my big brother at college. That we’re really close and that I miss him when he’s away at school.
I imagine how cool it would be if small talk wasn’t lies.
When I’m getting ready to go to sleep that night, my toothbrush goes missing. Furious-this isn’t the first time this has happened, believe me-I stalk down the hall to my brother’s room. Jacob’s got an audiotape of Abbott and Costello’s “Who’s on First” routine playing on an old tape deck. “What the hell did you do with my toothbrush this time?” I ask.
“I didn’t touch your stupid toothbrush.”
But I don’t believe him. I glance at the old fish tank he uses for a fuming chamber, but it’s not there-it was seized as evidence.
Abbott’s and Costello’s voices are so faint, I can barely make out the words. “Can you even hear that?” I say.
“It’s loud enough.”
I remember once, at Christmas, when my mom got Jacob a watch. She had to return it because the ticking noise drove him crazy.
“I’m not crazy,” Jacob says, and for a second I wonder if I’ve spoken out loud.
“I never said you were!”
“Yes, you did,” Jacob says.
He’s probably right. His memory’s like a steel trap. “Considering all the shit you steal from my room for your fuming chamber and your crime scenes, I think we can call it even.”
What’s the guy’s name on first base?
No. What is on second.
I’m not asking you who’s on second.
Who’s on first.
I don’t know.
He’s on third, we’re not talking about him.
Okay, so I know some people find that comedy routine hilarious, but I’ve never been one of them. Probably the reason Jacob likes it so much is that it makes perfect sense to him, since the names are taken literally.
“Maybe it got thrown out,” Jacob says, and at first I think it’s Costello’s line, until I realize that he’s talking about my toothbrush.
“Did you do it?” I ask.
Jacob stares at me. It always gives me a jolt when that happens, because he spends so much time not looking me in the eye. “Did you?” he replies.
Suddenly I’m not sure what we’re talking about, but I don’t think it’s oral hygiene. Before I can respond, my mother sticks her head in the doorway. “Which one of you does this belong to?” she asks, holding up my toothbrush. “It was in my bathroom.”
I grab it from her. On the cassette deck, Abbott and Costello are arguing over the canned laugh track.
Now that’s the first thing you’ve said right.
I don’t even know what I’m talking about!
“I told you so,” Jacob says.
When I was little, I convinced my brother that I had superpowers. Why else would I be able to hear what our mother was doing upstairs when we were downstairs? Why not say that the reason fluorescent bulbs made me dizzy was that I was so sensitive to light? When I missed a question Theo asked me, I told him it was because I could hear so many conversations and background noises at once, that sometimes it was hard for me to focus on just one sound at a time.
For a while, it worked. And then my brother figured out I wasn’t gifted with extrasensory perception. I was just strange.
Having Asperger’s is like having the volume of life at full blast all the time. It’s like a permanent hangover (although I admit I have only been drunk once, when I tried Grey Goose straight to see the effect it would have on me and was dismayed to learn that, rather than giggling, like everyone on television who’s drunk, I only felt more displaced and disoriented, and the world only got more fuzzy and indistinct). All those little autistic kids you see smacking their heads against walls? They’re not doing it because they’re mental. They’re doing it because the rest of the world is so loud it actually hurts, and they’re trying to make it all go away.
It’s not just sight and sound that are ratcheted up, either. My skin is so sensitive that I can tell you whether my shirt is cotton or polyester just by its temperature against my back. I have to cut all the labels out of my clothes so they don’t rub because they feel like coarse sandpaper. If someone touches me when I am not expecting it, I scream-not out of fear but because it sometimes feels like my nerve endings are on the outside rather than the inside.
And it’s not just my body that’s hypersensitive: my mind is usually in overdrive. I’ve always thought it strange when someone describes me as robotic or flat, because if anything, I’m always panicked about something. I don’t like to interact with people if I can’t predict how they are going to respond. I never wonder what I look like from someone else’s point of view; I would never even have thought to consider that if my mother had not brought it to my attention.
If I give a compliment, it’s not because it’s the right thing to say, it’s because it’s true. Even routine language doesn’t come easily to me. If you say thank you, I have to rummage around in my database brain for you’re welcome. I can’t chat about the weather just for the sake of filling up silence. The whole time I’m thinking, This is so fake. If you’re wrong about something, I will correct you-not because I want to make you feel bad (in fact, I am not thinking of you at all) but because facts are very important to me, more important than people are.
Nobody ever asks Superman if X-ray vision is a drag; if it gets old looking into brick buildings and seeing guys beat their wives or lonely women getting wasted or losers surfing porn sites. Nobody ever asks Spider-Man if he gets vertigo. If their superpowers are anything like mine, it’s no wonder they’re always putting themselves in harm’s way. They’re probably hoping for a quick death.
Mama Spatakopoulous will not talk to me until I agree to eat a little something, which is how I wind up with a full plate of spaghetti and meatballs as I ask her questions about Jess Ogilvy. “Do you remember this girl?” I ask, showing her a photo of Jess.
“Yes, poor thing, I saw on the news what happened.”
“I understand that she came here a few days before she was killed?”
The woman nods. “With her boyfriend, and that other one.”
“You mean Jacob Hunt?” I show her a picture of Jacob, too.
“That’s him.” She shrugs.
“Do you have any security cameras in here?”
“No. Why? Is the neighborhood dangerous?”
“I just thought I might be able to see the interaction that afternoon,” I say.
“Oh, I can tell you that,” Mama Spatakopoulous says. “It was a big fight.”
“What happened?”
“The girl, she got very upset. She was crying, and eventually she ran out. She stuck the Hunt kid with the bill and a whole pizza.”
“Do you know why she was upset?” I ask. “What they were fighting about?”
“Well,” the woman says, “I couldn’t hear everything, but it seemed like he was jealous.”
“Ms. Spatakopoulous.” I lean forward. “This is very important: did you hear anything Jacob said in particular that was threatening to Jess? Or see him physically attack her in any way?”
Her eyes widen. “Oh, it wasn’t Jacob who was jealous,” she says. “It was the other one. The boyfriend.”
When I intercept Mark Maguire, he is leaving the student center with two of his buddies. “How was lunch, Mark?” I ask, stepping away from the lamppost against which I’ve been leaning. “Did you order pizza? Was it as good as Mama Spatakopoulous’s?”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” he says. “I’m not talking to you.”
“I’d think as a grieving boyfriend you’d want to do just that.”
“You know what I want to do? Sue the shit out of you for what you did to me!”
“I let you go,” I say, shrugging. “People get unarrested all the time.” I fall into step beside him. “I just had a really interesting chat with the pizza lady. She seems to remember you and Jess fighting when you were there.”
Mark starts walking, and I fall into step beside him. “So what? So we fought. I already told you that.”
“What was that fight about?”
“Jacob Hunt. Jess thought he was some helpless moron, and the whole time he was using that act to get her interested in him.”
“Interested how?”
“He wanted her,” Mark says. “He played pathetic so that she’d be in the palm of his hand. At the restaurant, he had the nerve to ask her out. In front of me, like I wasn’t even there. All I did was put Hunt in his place-and remind him that his mommy was buying him Jess’s company.”
“How did she react?”
“She got pissed.” He stops in his tracks and faces me. “Look, maybe I’m not the most sensitive guy…”
“Gee, I didn’t notice.”
Mark glares at me. “I’m trying to make a point here. I said and did things I’m not proud of. I’m jealous; I wanted to be number one on Jess’s list. Maybe I crossed the line a few times, trying to make sure of that. But I never would have hurt her, never. The reason I started the fight at the pizza place in the first place was to protect her. She trusted everyone; she only saw the good in people. I could read right through Hunt’s bullshit, even if Jess couldn’t.”
“What do you mean?”
He folds his arms. “My freshman year roommate still played with Pokémon cards. He never showered, and he pretty much lived in the computer lab. I probably said less than ten sentences to him all year. He was fucking brilliant-graduated early and went to go design missile systems for the Pentagon or something. He probably had Asperger’s, too, but no one ever slapped a label on him other than nerd. All I’m saying is that there’s a difference between being mentally retarded and being socially retarded. One’s a handicap. The other’s just a Get Out of Jail Free card.”
“I think current psychiatry might trump you, Mark. There’s a difference between being socially awkward and being clinically diagnosed with Asperger’s.”
“Yeah.” He meets my gaze. “That’s what Jess used to say, and now she’s dead.”
When I step into the kitchen at the Hunts’ house for the second day in a row, Emma is cooking something at the stove while Jacob sits at the kitchen table. I look from his face, bent toward the table over a gruesome collection of crime scene photography, to his mother’s. “Go ahead,” Emma says.
“The Americans with Disabilities Act prohibits discrimination by the State or local government, including in the courts,” Jacob recites, in his monotone. “In order to be protected by the Americans with Disabilities Act, you have to have a disability or have a relationship with someone with a disability. A person with a disability is defined as a person with a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities… like communication… or is a person who is perceived by others as having such an impairment.”
He flips a page; now the pictures are of bodies in a morgue. Who the hell publishes this kind of book?
“Dr. Moon and my mother say I have quirks, but other people, like my teachers and the kids at school and that judge, might assume I have a disability,” Jacob adds.
I shake my head. “I don’t really understand.”
“There’s a logical and valid legal reason for you to speak for me,” Jacob says. “You may use the insanity defense, if you think it will work best during the trial.” He stands up, tucking the book under his arm. “But for the record, I personally subscribe to the belief that normal is just a setting on the dryer.”
I nod, considering this. “What movie is that from?”
Jacob rolls his eyes. “Not everything’s from a movie,” he says, and he walks off.
“Wow.” I walk toward Emma. “I don’t know how you did that, but thank you.”
“Don’t underestimate me,” she answers, and with a spatula, she flips the fish that is being sautéed in a pan.
“Was that the only reason you asked me to come over?”
“I thought that was what you wanted,” Emma says.
“It was. Until I smelled what you were cooking.” I grin. “I’ll knock ten bucks off my retainer if you feed me lunch.”
“Don’t you have a built-in cafeteria downstairs from your office?”
“A guy gets sick of red sauce every now and then,” I say. “Come on. Surely you could use a little grown-up conversation after being cooped up in the house.”
Emma makes a pretense of looking around the kitchen. “Sure… where’s the other grown-up?”
“I’m ten years older than Jacob,” I remind her. “So what are we eating?”
“Sea bass with garlic.”
I sit down at one of the counter stools and watch her carry a pot of boiling something to the sink and dump it in a colander. The steam curls the hair around her face. “One of my favorites,” I say. “I’m so glad you invited me.”
“Fine,” she sighs. “Stay already.”
“All right, but only if you can contain your enthusiasm for my company.”
She shakes her head. “Make yourself useful and set the table.”
There’s an intimacy to being in someone else’s kitchen that makes me homesick-not for my apartment over the pizza place but for my childhood home. I grew up as the youngest of a big family in Buffalo; sometimes even now I miss the sound of chaos. “My mom used to cook fish on Fridays,” I say as I open and close drawers, trying to find the silverware.
“Are you Catholic?”
“No-Norwegian. Fish is a Scandinavian aphrodisiac.”
Emma’s cheeks flush. “Did it work?”
“My parents had five kids,” I say, and I gesture at the sea bass. “Foreplay on a platter.”
“I guess I could go along with the metaphor,” Emma murmurs. “My ex’s cooking could be considered contraception.”
“Would it be rude to ask how long you’ve been a single parent?”
“Yes,” Emma says. “But the short answer is, since Jacob’s diagnosis.” She takes some milk out of the refrigerator and pours it into a pan, then begins to whip the contents with a hand mixer. “He’s not involved with Jacob or Theo, except for the monthly child support.”
“Well, you should be proud of doing it all on your own.”
“Yeah, I’m proud. I have a son accused of murder. What mother wouldn’t think of herself as a huge success after that?”
I look up at her. “Accused,” I repeat. “Not convicted.”
For a long moment she looks at me, as if she is afraid to believe there could be someone else who believes Jacob might not be guilty. Then she begins to make up individual plates. “Jacob, Theo!” she yells, and the boys file into the kitchen.
Jacob takes his and immediately returns to the living room and the television. Theo thunders down the stairs, takes one look at me sitting at the table, and frowns. “Shouldn’t he be buying us lunch?” he asks.
“It’s lovely to see you, too,” I answer.
He looks at me. “Whatever.”
As he shuffles back upstairs with his meal, Emma fixes plates for the two of us. “Usually we all sit down to dinner together,” she says, “but sometimes it’s nice to have a break from each other, too.”
“I imagine that’s hard when you’re all under house arrest.”
“It’s pretty sad when the high point of my day is walking to the end of the driveway to get the mail.” Leaning down, she sets a plate in front of me.
There’s a block of white fish, creamy white mashed potatoes, and a tiny hill of white rice.
“Meringues for dessert?” I guess.
“Angel food cake.”
I poke at the food with my fork.
She frowns. “Is the fish undercooked?”
“No, no-it’s great. I’ve just, um, never seen anyone color-coordinate a meal before.”
“Oh, it’s February first,” she says, as if that explains everything. “The first of every month is a White Food Day. I’ve been doing it so long I forget it’s not normal.”
I taste the potatoes; they’re out of this world. “What do you do on the thirty-first? Burn everything to a black crisp?”
“Don’t give Jacob any ideas,” Emma says. “Would you like some milk?”
She pours me a glass, and I reach for it. “I don’t get it. Why does the color of his food matter?”
“Why does the texture of velvet send him into a panic? Why can’t he stand the hum of an espresso machine? There are a million questions I don’t have answers for,” Emma replies, “so the easiest thing to do is just roll with the punches and keep him from having a meltdown.”
“Like he did in court,” I say. “And jail.”
“Exactly. So Monday’s food is green, Tuesday’s is red, Wednesday’s is yellow… you get the idea.”
I think for a moment. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but it seems like sometimes Jacob’s more adult than you or me-and other times, he gets totally overwhelmed.”
“That’s him. I truly think he’s smarter than anyone I’ve ever met, but he’s also more inflexible. And he takes every little thing that happens to heart, because he’s the center of his universe.”
“And yours,” I point out. “He’s the center of your universe, too.”
She ducks her head. “I guess.”
Maybe my Scandinavian parents knew what they were doing, because maybe it’s the fish and maybe it’s the way she looks in that moment-surprised, and a little flustered-but to my shock I realize I’d like to kiss her. However, I can’t because she’s my client’s mother, and because she would probably knock me flat on my ass.
“I assume you have a plan of attack,” she says.
My eyes widen-is she thinking the same thing about me? I tamp down an image of me pinning her to the table.
“The quicker the better,” Emma says, and my pulse triples. She glances over her shoulder to the living room, where Jacob is slowly shoveling rice into his mouth. “I just want this whole nightmare to be over.”
And with those words, I come crashing back to my sad little reality. I clear my throat, totally professional. “The most damaging discovery is the confession Jacob made. We need to try to get rid of it.”
“I thought I was going to be able to sit with Jacob in the interrogation room. If I’d been there, it would never have gotten this far, I just know it. They had to be asking him questions he didn’t understand, or firing them at him too fast.”
“We have a transcript. The questions were pretty straightforward, I think. Did you tell Matson that Jacob had Asperger’s before they started talking?”
“Yes, when he came to interview Jacob the first time.”
“First time?”
Emma nods. “He was going through Jess’s appointment book, and Jacob’s social skills lesson was on it, so the detective asked him a few questions.”
“Were you there to help translate?”
“Right here at the kitchen table,” Emma says. “Matson acted like he completely understood Jacob’s issues. That’s why, when he told me to bring Jacob to the station, I assumed it was going to be the same sort of interview and that I could be part of it.”
“That’s good, actually,” I tell her. “We can probably file a motion to suppress.”
“What’s that?”
Before I can answer, Jacob comes into the kitchen with his empty plate. He sets it in the sink and then pours himself a glass of Coca-Cola. “Under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, you have a right to remain silent, unless you waive that right, and in certain circumstances if the police don’t read you your Miranda rights or properly ask you to waive them, anything you say can be used against you. A defense attorney can file a motion to suppress in order to prevent that evidence from coming before the jury.” Then he walks back to the living room.
“That’s just plain wrong,” I mutter.
“It is?”
“Yeah,” I say. “How come he gets to drink Coke on White Food Day?”
It takes a moment, and then, for the very first time, I hear the music of Emma Hunt’s laugh.
I did not expect to feed Jacob’s lawyer lunch.
I didn’t expect to enjoy his company so much, either. But when he makes a joke about White Food Day-which is, let’s face it, as ridiculous as everyone in the fairy tale pretending the emperor is beautifully clothed instead of stark naked-I can’t help myself. I start to giggle. And before I know it, I am laughing so hard I cannot catch my breath.
Because when you get right down to it, it’s funny when I ask my son, How did you sleep? And he answers: On my stomach.
It’s funny when I tell Jacob I’ll be there in a minute and he starts counting down from sixty.
It’s funny that Jacob used to grab my collar every time I came home, his interpretation of “catch you later.”
It’s funny when he begs for a forensics textbook on Amazon.com and I ask him to give me a ballpark figure and he says, Second base.
And it’s funny when I move heaven and earth to give Jacob white food on the first of the month and he breezily pours himself a glass of Coke.
It’s true what they say about Asperger’s affecting the whole family. I’ve been doing this for so long, I forgot to consider what an outsider would think of our pale rice and fish, our long-standing routines-just like Jacob has no capacity to put himself in the shoes of someone else he encounters. And, as Jacob has learned one rebuff at a time, what looks pitiful from one angle looks absolutely hilarious from another.
“Life’s not fair,” I tell Oliver.
“That’s the reason there are defense attorneys,” he replies. “And Jacob’s right about the legal jargon, by the way. I’m going to file a motion to suppress because the police were on notice that they weren’t dealing with someone mentally able to truly understand his Miranda rights-”
“I know my Miranda rights!” Jacob yells from the other room. “You have the right to remain silent! Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law-”
“I’ve got it, Jacob, I’m good,” Oliver calls back. He stands up and puts his plate on the counter. “Thanks for lunch. I’ll let you know what happens with the hearing.”
I walk him to the door and watch him unlock his car. Instead of getting into it, though, he reaches into the backseat and then walks toward me again, his face sober. “There’s just one more thing,” Oliver says. He reaches for my hand and presses a miniature-size Milky Way into it. “Just in case you want to sneak it in before Brown Thursday,” he whispers, and for the second time that day, he leaves me smiling.