I’ve faced down a lot of harrowing situations in my twenty years on the job: suicides in progress, felons on the run after an armed robbery, rape victims too traumatized to tell me their story. None of these, however, compare to having to work an audience made up of seven-year-olds.
“Can you show us your gun again?” one kid asks.
“Not a great idea,” I say, glancing at the teacher, who already asked me to remove my holster and weapon before coming into the class for Job Day-a request I had to refuse, since technically, I was still on the clock.
“Do you get to shoot it?”
I look over the ammo-obsessed boy’s head at the rest of the class. “Any other questions?”
A little girl raises her hand. I recognize her; she might have come to one of Sasha’s birthday parties. “Do you always get the bad guys?” she asks.
There’s no way to explain to a child that the line between good and evil isn’t nearly as black and white as a fairy tale would lead you to believe. That an ordinary person can turn into a villain, under the right circumstances. That sometimes we dragon slayers do things we aren’t proud of.
I look her in the eye. “We sure try,” I say.
On my hip, my cell phone starts to vibrate. I flip it open, see the number of the station, and stand up. “I’m going to have to cut this short… So one more time-what’s the number one rule of crime scenes?”
The class sings the answer back to me: “Don’t touch something wet if it’s not from you!”
As the teacher asks them all to thank me with a round of applause, I crouch down near Sasha’s desk. “What do you think? Did I embarrass you beyond repair?”
“You did okay,” she says.
“I can’t stay to have lunch with you,” I apologize. “I have to go down to the station.”
“That’s all right, Daddy.” Sasha shrugs. “I’m used to it.”
The hell with a bullet. What kills me is disappointing my kid.
I kiss her on the crown of her head and let the teacher walk me to the door. Then I drive right to the station and get a quick briefing from the sergeant who took the original complaint.
Mark Maguire, a UVM graduate student, is slouched in the waiting room. He’s wearing a baseball cap pulled low over his face and is bouncing his leg up and down nervously. I watch him for a second through the window before I head out to meet him.
“Mr. Maguire?” I say. “I’m Detective Matson. What can I do for you?”
He stands up. “My girlfriend’s missing.”
“Missing,” I repeat.
“Yeah. I called her last night, and there was no answer. And this morning, when I went to her place, she was gone.”
“When was the last time you saw her?”
“Tuesday morning,” Mark says.
“Could there have been some emergency? Or an appointment she didn’t tell you about?”
“No. She never goes anywhere without her purse, and it was still in the house… along with her coat. It’s freezing out. Why would she have gone somewhere without her coat?” His voice is wild, worried.
“You two have a fight?”
“She was kind of pissed off at me this weekend,” he admits. “But we’d talked it out. We were good again.”
I bet, I think. “Have you tried calling her friends?”
“No one’s seen her. Not her friends, not her teachers. And she’s not the kind of person who cuts classes.”
We do not usually open up a missing person’s case until thirty-six hours have passed-although that’s not a hard-and-fast rule. The extent of the net to be cast is determined by the missing person’s status: at risk, or at no apparent risk. And right now, there’s something about this guy-some hunch-that makes me think he’s not telling me everything. “Mr. Maguire,” I say, “why don’t you and I take a ride?”
Jess Ogilvy is doing pretty damn well for a grad student. She lives in a tony neighborhood full of brick houses and BMWs. “How long has she lived here?” I ask.
“Only a week-she’s house-sitting for one of her professors, who’s in Italy for the semester.”
We park on the street, and Maguire leads me to the back door, which isn’t locked. That’s not an uncommon occurrence around here; in spite of all my warnings about being safe instead of sorry, a lot of folks make the incorrect assumption that crime could not and does not happen in this town.
In the mudroom, there’s a mélange of items-from the coat that must belong to the girl to a walking stick to a pair of men’s boots. The kitchen is tidy, and there is a mug in the sink with a tea bag in it. “I didn’t touch anything,” Maguire says. “This was all here when I showed up this morning.” The mail is stacked neatly in a pile on the table. A purse lies on its side, and I open it to find a wallet with $213 still in it.
“Did you notice anything missing?” I ask.
“Yeah,” Maguire says. “Upstairs.” He leads me to a guest bedroom where the drawers of a single dresser are half open, clothes spilling out of them. “She’s a neat freak,” he says. “She’d never leave the bed unmade, or have clothes lying around the floor like this. But this box with the gift wrap on it? It had a backpack inside that’s gone now. It still had the tags on it. Her aunt got it for her for Christmas, and she hated it.”
I walk to the closet. Inside are several dresses, as well as a few button-down men’s shirts and pairs of jeans. “Those are mine,” Maguire says.
“You live here, too?”
“Not officially, as far as the professor goes. But yeah, I’ve been staying over most nights. Until she kicked me out, anyway.”
“She kicked you out?”
“I told you, we kind of had a fight. She didn’t want to talk to me on Sunday night. But Monday, we’d worked things out.”
“Define that,” I say.
“We had sex,” Maguire replies.
“Consensual?”
“Jesus, dude. What kind of guy do you think I am?” He seems truly affronted.
“What about her makeup? Her toiletries?”
“Her toothbrush is missing,” Maguire says. “But her makeup’s still here. Look, shouldn’t you be calling in backup or something? Or posting an AMBER Alert?”
I ignore him. “Did you try contacting her parents? Where do they live?”
“I called them-they’re in Bennington, and they haven’t heard from her, and now they’re in a panic, too.”
Great, I think. “Has she ever disappeared like this before?”
“I don’t know. I’ve only been going out with her for a few months.”
“Look,” I say. “If you stick around, she’ll probably call, or just come back home. Sounds to me like she needed to cool off for a while.”
“You gotta be kidding me,” Maguire says. “If she left on purpose, why would she forget to take her wallet but remember her cell phone? Why would she use a backpack she couldn’t wait to return for store credit?”
“I don’t know. To throw you off her trail, maybe?”
Maguire’s eyes flash, and I know the moment before he springs that he is going to come after me. I throw him off with one quick move that twists his arm behind his back. “Careful,” I mutter. “I could arrest you for that.”
Maguire tenses in my hold. “My girlfriend’s gone missing. I pay your salary, and you won’t even do your job and investigate?”
Technically, if Maguire is a student, he’s not paying my salary, but I am not about to press the point. “Tell you what,” I say, releasing him. “I’ll take one more look around.”
I wander into the master bedroom, but clearly Jess Ogilvy hasn’t been sleeping there; it is pristine. The master bathroom reveals slightly damp towels, but the shower floor is already dry. Downstairs, there’s no sign of disorder in the living room. I walk around the perimeter of the house and then check the mailbox. Inside is a note, printed from a computer, asking the postman to hold the mail until further notified.
Who the hell types a note to the postman?
Snapping on a pair of gloves, I slip the note into an evidence bag. I’ll have the lab run a ninhydrin test for prints.
Right now, my hunch is that if they don’t match Jess Ogilvy’s, they’re going to match Mark Maguire’s.
I don’t know what to expect when I go into Jacob’s room the next morning. He slept through the night-I checked on him every hour-but I know from past experience that he won’t be expressive until those neurotransmitters aren’t raging through his bloodstream anymore.
I called Jess twice-on her cell, and at her new residence-but only got voice mail. I’ve sent her an email, asking her to tell me what happened at yesterday’s session, if there was anything out of the ordinary. But until I hear back from her, I have to deal with Jacob.
When I peek in at 6:00 A.M., he’s not sleeping anymore. He’s sitting on his bed with his hands in his lap, staring at the wall across from him.
“Jacob?” I say tentatively. “Honey?” I walk closer and gently shake him.
Jacob continues to stare at the wall in silence. I wave a hand in front of his face, but he doesn’t respond.
“Jacob!” I grab his shoulders and pull on them. He topples to the side and just lies where he has fallen.
Panic climbs the ladder of my throat. “Speak to me,” I demand. I am thinking catatonia. I am thinking schizophrenia. I am thinking of all the lost places Jacob could slip to in his own mind, and not return.
Straddling his big body, I strike him hard enough across the face to leave a red handprint, and still he doesn’t react.
“Don’t,” I say, starting to cry. “Don’t do this to me.”
There is a voice at the door. “What’s going on?” Theo asks, his face still hazy with sleep and his hair sticking up in hedgehog spikes.
In that instant, I realize that Theo might be my savior. “Say something that would upset your brother,” I order.
He looks at me as if I’m crazy.
“There’s something wrong with him,” I explain, my voice breaking. “I just want him to come back. I need to make him come back.”
Theo glances down at Jacob’s slack body, his vacant eyes, and I can tell he’s scared. “But-”
“Do it, Theo,” I say.
I think it’s the quiver in my voice, not the command, which makes him agree. Tentatively, Theo leans close to Jacob. “Wake up!”
“Theo,” I sigh. We both know he’s holding back.
“You’re going to be late for school,” Theo says. I watch closely, but there’s no recognition in Jacob’s eyes.
“I’m getting in the shower first,” Theo adds. “And then I’m gonna mess up your closet.” When Jacob just stays silent, the anger Theo usually keeps hidden rolls over him like a tsunami. “You freak,” he shouts, so loud that Jacob’s hair stirs with the force of his breath. “You stupid goddamn freak!”
Jacob doesn’t even flinch.
“Why can’t you be normal?” Theo yells, punching his brother in the chest. He hits him again, harder this time. “Just be fucking normal!” he cries, and I realize tears are streaming down Theo’s face. For a moment, we are caught in this hell, with Jacob unresponsive between us.
“Get me a phone,” I say, and Theo turns and flies out the door.
As I sink down beside Jacob, the bulk of his weight sways toward me. Theo reappears with the telephone, and I punch in the page number for Jacob’s psychiatrist, Dr. Murano. She calls me back thirty seconds later, her voice still rough with sleep. “Emma,” she says. “What’s going on?”
I explain Jacob’s meltdown last night, and his catatonia this morning. “And you don’t know what triggered it?” she asks.
“No. He had a meeting with his tutor yesterday.” I look at Jacob. A line of drool snakes from the corner of his mouth. “I called her, but she hasn’t phoned me back yet.”
“Does he look like he’s in physical distress?”
No, I think. That would be me. “I don’t know… I don’t think so.”
“Is he breathing?”
“Yes.”
“Does he know who you are?”
“No,” I admit, and this is what really scares me. If he doesn’t know who I am, how can I help him remember who he is?
“Tell me his vitals.”
I put the phone down and look at my wristwatch, make a count. “His pulse is ninety and his respirations are twenty.”
“Look, Emma,” the doctor says, “I’m an hour away from where you are. I think you need to take him to the ER.”
I know what will happen then. If Jacob is unable to snap out of this, he’ll be a candidate for a 302 involuntary commitment in the hospital psych ward.
After I hang up, I kneel down in front of Jacob. “Baby, just give me a sign. Just show me you’re on the other side.”
Jacob doesn’t even blink.
Wiping my eyes, I head to Theo’s room. He’s barricaded himself inside; I have to bang heavily on the door to be heard over the beat of his music. When he finally opens it, his eyes are red-rimmed and his jaw is set. “I need your help moving him,” I say flatly, and for once Theo doesn’t fight me. Together we try to haul Jacob’s big frame out of his bed and downstairs, into the car. I take his arms; Theo takes his legs. We drag, we push, we shove. By the time we reach the mudroom door, I am bathed in sweat and Theo’s legs are bruised from where he twice stumbled under Jacob’s weight.
“I’ll get the car door,” Theo says, and he runs into the driveway, his socks crunching lightly on the old snow.
Together, we manage to get Jacob to the car. He doesn’t even make a sound when his bare feet touch the icy driveway. We put him into the backseat headfirst, and then I struggle to pull him to a sitting position, practically crawling into his lap to fasten his seat belt. With my head pressed up against Jacob’s heart, I listen for the click of metal to metal.
“Heeeeere’s Johnny.”
The words aren’t his. They’re Jack Nicholson’s, in The Shining. But it’s his voice, his beautiful, tattered, sandpaper voice.
“Jacob?” I cup my hands around his face.
He is not looking at me, but then again, he never looks at me. “Mom,” Jacob says, “my feet are really cold.”
I burst into tears and gather him tight in my arms. “Oh, baby,” I reply, “let’s do something about that.”
This is where I go, when I go:
It’s a room with no windows and no doors, and walls that are thin enough for me to see and hear everything but too thick to break through.
I’m there, but I’m not there.
I am pounding to be let out, but nobody can hear me.
This is where I go, when I go:
To a country where everyone’s face looks different from mine, and the language is the act of not speaking, and noise is everywhere in the air we breathe. I am doing what the Romans do in Rome; I am trying to communicate, but no one has bothered to tell me that these people cannot hear.
This is where I go, when I go:
Somewhere completely, unutterably orange.
This is where I go, when I go:
To the place where my body becomes a piano, full of black keys only-the sharps and the flats, when everyone knows that to play a song other people want to hear, you need some white keys.
This is why I come back:
To find those white keys.
I am not exaggerating when I say that my mother has been staring at me for fifteen minutes. “Shouldn’t you be doing something else?” I finally ask.
“Right. You’re right,” she says, flustered, but she doesn’t actually leave.
“Mom,” I groan. “There has got to be something more fascinating than watching me eat.” There’s watching paint dry, for example. Or watching the laundry cycle.
I know that I’ve given her a scare today, because of what happened this morning. It’s apparent in (a) her inability to leave my side for more than three seconds and (b) her willingness to cook me Ore-Ida Crinkles fries for breakfast. She even forced Theo to take the bus today, instead of being driven into school like usual, because she didn’t want to leave me at home alone and had already decided that I was going to have a sick day.
Frankly, I don’t understand why she’s so upset, when I am the one who went missing.
Frankly, I wonder who Frank was, and why he has an adverb all to himself.
“I’m going to take a shower,” I announce. “Are you coming, too?”
That, finally, shocks her into moving. “You’re sure you feel all right?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll come up and check on you in a few minutes, then.”
As soon as she is gone, I put the plate with the French fries on the nightstand. I am going to take a shower; I just have something to do first.
I have my own fuming chamber. It used to be the home of my pet fish, Arlo, before he died. The empty fish tank sits on the top of my dresser now, inverted. Underneath the fish tank is a coffee cup warmer. I used to use a Sterno, but my mother wasn’t very enthusiastic about fire (even one burning at low level) in my room, hence the electric warmer. On top of this I make a little boat out of aluminum foil, and then I squeeze in a small nickel-size dollop of Krazy Glue. I take the mug of cocoa (nondairy, of course) my mother brought me and stick it in the chamber, too-it will provide humidity in the air, even though I won’t want to drink it after the fuming, when white scum is floating around on its surface. Finally, I place inside the drinking glass that has a known sample on it-my test fingerprint-to make sure everything is working.
There’s only one thing left to do, but it makes my stomach clench.
I have to force myself to sort through the clothes I was wearing yesterday to find the item I want to fume, the one I took home from her house. And that of course makes me think of everything else, which means the corners of my mind go black.
I have to actively work to not be sucked into that hole again.
Even through the latex glove I’ve slipped on I can feel how cold the metal is. How cold everything was, last night.
In the shower, I scrub really hard, until my skin is too pink and my eyes are raw from staring into the stream of water. I remember everything.
Even when I don’t want to.
Once, when I was in third grade, a boy made fun of the way I talked. I didn’t understand why his impression of me, with words falling flat as pancakes, would be funny to anyone. I didn’t understand why he kept saying things like Take me to your leader. All I knew was that he followed me around on the playground, and everywhere he went, people would laugh at me. What is your problem? I finally asked, turning around to find him right on my heels.
What is your problem? he parroted.
I’d really prefer it if you could find something else to do, I said.
I’d really prefer it if you could find something else to do.
And before I knew what I was really planning, my fingers closed into a fist and punched him square in the face.
There was blood everywhere. I didn’t like having his blood on my hand. I didn’t like having it on my shirt, which was supposed to be yellow.
The boy, meanwhile, was knocked unconscious, and I was dragged to the principal’s office and suspended for a week.
I don’t like to talk about that day, because it makes me feel like I am full of broken glass.
I never thought I’d see that much blood again on my hands, but I was wrong.
It only takes ten minutes for the cyanoacrylate-the Krazy Glue-to properly work. The monomers in its vapors polymerize in the presence of water, amines, amides, hydroxyl, and carboxylic acid-all of which happen to be found in the oils left by fingerprints. They stick to those oils, creating a latent image, which can be made more visible by dusting with powder. Then, the image can be photographed and resized and compared to the known sample.
There’s a knock on my door. “You okay in there?”
“No, I’m hanging from a closet rod,” I say.
This is not the truth.
“That’s not funny, Jacob,” my mother replies.
“Fine, I’m getting dressed.”
This is not the truth, either. I am actually wearing my underwear and a T-shirt right now.
“Okay,” she says. “Well, give a holler when you’re done.”
I wait until her footsteps fade down the hall, and then I remove the glass from beneath the fish tank. Sure enough, there are several prints. I dust them with a dual-use powder, which has contrast on both white and black surfaces. Then I dust the prints on the second item, too.
I photograph them at close range with the digital camera I got for Christmas two years ago and load the images into my computer. It’s always a good idea to photograph your latent prints prior to lifting them, just in case you destroy them during the process. Later, in Adobe Photoshop, I can invert the colors of the ridges and resize the prints. I can begin an analysis.
I carefully tape over the print to preserve it, intending to hide what I took away from her house in a place where no one will ever find it.
My mother, by then, is tired of waiting. She opens the door. “Jacob, put on a pair of pants!”
She holds her hand over her eyes but enters my bedroom all the same.
“No one told you to come in,” I say.
She sniffs. “You’ve been using Krazy Glue again, haven’t you? I told you I don’t want you fuming while you’re in the room-that can’t be good for you.” She pauses. “Then again, if you’re fuming, you must be feeling better.”
I don’t say anything.
“Is that your cocoa in there?”
“Yes,” I say.
She shakes her head. “Come on downstairs,” my mother sighs. “I’ll make you a fresh cup.”
Here are some facts about forensics:
1. Forensics is defined as the scientific methods and techniques used in connection with the detection of crime.
2. The word forensic comes from the Latin forensis, which means “before the forum.” In Roman times, a criminal charge was presented in front of a public group in the forum. The accused and the victim would give testimony, and the one who had the best argument would win.
3. The first written account of forensics to solve cases was during the Song Dynasty in China in 1248. After a person was killed with a sickle, an investigator told everyone to bring their sickles to a specified location, and when the flies were drawn to one by the smell of blood, the murderer confessed.
4. The earliest incidence of fingerprint use to determine identity was in the seventh century, when a debtor’s fingerprints were attached to a bill, as proof of the debt for the lender.
5. Forensic science is a lot easier to perform when you aren’t personally involved.
The tips of your fingers, the palms of your hands, and the soles of your feet aren’t smooth. They are friction-ridged skin, series of lines with contours and shapes, like a topographical map. Along those lines are sweat pores, and if they become contaminated with sweat, ink, blood, or dirt, they’ll leave a reproduction of those lines on the object that’s been touched. Or, in less fancy terms, a fingerprint.
If the print can be seen, it can be photographed. If it can be photographed, it can be preserved and compared to a known sample. It’s an art as much as it’s a science: since I don’t have an AFIS terminal in my house to scan the latent print and spit out fifty candidates with matching similarities, I have to rely on the naked eye. The goal is to find ten to twelve similarities between the known sample and the latent print-that’s what most examiners would conclude to be a match.
On my computer screen, I set images of the two prints. I place my cursor on the core, the centermost part of the print. I mark a delta-a small triangular formation to the left of the core. I note ending ridges and bifurcations and a circular whorl. A bifurcation, then two ridges, then another bifurcation downward.
Just like I assumed: This is a match.
That makes me feel like I am going to throw up, but I swallow and force myself to do what needs to be done.
Like yesterday.
Shaking my head clear, I take a small Tupperware container that I’ve filched from the kitchen and place the evidence inside. Then I rummage around in my closet until I find Jemima Puddle-Duck. She’s a stuffed animal that I used to sleep with when I was a kid, and because she is white, she is up on a shelf above the rest of my clothes that have actual pigmentation. I place her facedown in my lap and, using a box cutter, make an incision in the place where she might have had a heart.
The Tupperware has to be jammed inside, and it makes Jemima look like she has an unsightly rib cage, but it works. I suture her with the same thread I used last week to fix a hole in my sock. I’m not very good at it-I stick myself nearly every stitch-but I get the job done.
Then I take out a notebook and start writing.
When I am done, I lie down on my bed. I wish I were at school. It’s harder, when I’m not working at something.
“I shot the sheriff,” I whisper. “But I swear it was in self-defense.”
I’ve often thought about how a person could commit the perfect crime.
Everyone always talks about the proverbial icicle-stab someone and the murder weapon will melt-but it’s a long shot (a) that you will be able to grip that icicle long enough to inflict a wound and (b) that it won’t break off when it hits the skin before puncturing it. Mescaline sprinkled over someone’s salad would be subtler-the brown powder would be virtually indistinguishable mixed with vinaigrette, and you wouldn’t taste the bitter flavor, especially if there was chicory or arugula in the mix. But what if you only made your victim have a bad trip instead of die, and plus, where would you get your stash? You could take someone sailing and shove him overboard, preferably after getting him drunk, and say he fell accidentally-but then, you would need to have a boat. A mix of Vicodin and alcohol would slow the heart excessively, but your victim would have to pretty much be a party animal for a detective to not find that suspicious. I’ve heard of people who try to burn down a house after committing murder, but that never really works. The arson inspectors can trace where the fire started. Plus, a body has to be charred beyond recognition-and dental work-to not point a finger back at you. I wouldn’t recommend anything that leaves blood, either. It’s messy; you’ll need lots of bleach to clean it, and there’s bound to still be a drop left behind.
The conundrum of the perfect crime is complicated, because getting away with murder has very little to do with the mechanism of the killing and everything to do with what you do before and after. The only way to really cover a crime is to not tell a soul. Not your wife, not your mother, not your priest. And, of course, you have to have killed the right kind of person-someone who isn’t going to be looked for. Someone who nobody wants to see again.
Once, a girl came up to me in the cafeteria and asked me if I wanted to go to Jesus Camp. You will be saved, she told me, and man, I was tempted. I mean, it’s been pretty clear to me for a while that I’m going to hell, because of all the secret thoughts I’m not supposed to have about Jacob.
You always read these books about kids who have autistic siblings and who are constantly looking out for them, who love them to death, who do a better job defusing their tantrums than the adults. Well, I’m not one of those people. Sure, when Jacob used to wander off I’d feel sick in the pit of my stomach, but it wasn’t because I was worried about him. It was because I had to be an awful brother to be thinking what I was: Maybe he’ll never be found, and I can get on with my life.
I used to have dreams that my brother was normal. You know, that we could fight about ordinary things, like whose turn it was to control the television remote, or who got to ride shotgun in the car. But I was never allowed to fight with Jacob. Not when I’d forget to lock my bedroom door and he came in and stole my CDs for some forensics project; not when we were little and he’d walk around the table at my birthday party, eating cake off the plates of my friends. My mother said it was a house rule, and she explained it like this: Jacob’s different from the rest of us. Gee, you think? And by the way, since when does being different net you a free pass in life?
The problem is, Jacob’s difference doesn’t confine itself to Jacob. It’s like the time my mother’s red shirt bled in the wash and turned all my clothes pink: my brother’s Asperger’s has made me different, too. I could never have friends over, because what if Jacob had a meltdown? If I thought it was weird to see my brother peeing on the heater to watch steam rise, what the hell would someone from school think? That I was a freak, no doubt, by association.
True confession number one: When I’m walking down the hall in school and I see Jacob at the other end of the corridor, I intentionally divert my path to avoid him.
True confession number two: Once, when a bunch of kids from another school started making fun of Jacob as he attempted to play kickball-a hot mess if ever there was one-I pretended that I didn’t know him; I laughed along, too.
True confession number three: I truly believe that I have it worse than Jacob, because he’s oblivious most of the time to the fact that people want nothing to do with him; but I am one hundred percent aware that they’re all looking at me and thinking, Oh, that’s the bizarre kid’s brother.
True confession number four: I don’t sit around thinking about having kids, normally, but when I do it scares the shit out of me. What if my own son winds up being like Jacob? I’ve already spent my whole childhood dealing with autism; I don’t know if I can handle doing it for the rest of my life.
Any time I think of one of these things, I feel like crap. I’m pretty much useless: not Jacob’s parent, and not one of his teachers. I’m just here as the benchmark alternative, so that my mother can look from Jacob to me and measure the distance between an AS kid and a so-called normal one.
When that girl asked me to go to Jesus Camp, I asked her if Jesus was going to be there. She looked confused, and then said no. Well, I said, isn’t that a little like going to hockey camp and not playing hockey? As I walked away, the girl told me Jesus loved me.
How do you know? I asked.
Once, after Jacob had raged through my room like a tropical storm and destroyed most of what was important to me, my mother came in to commiserate. Deep down, he loves you, she told me.
How do you know? I asked.
I don’t, she admitted. But it’s what I have to believe to keep going.
I’ve looked in my jacket, my pants. I’ve scoured the driveway. But I can’t find the iPod, and that means it’s lost somewhere between here and her house.
What if she knows I tried to take it?
What if she tells someone?
By the time I get home from school, life is back to normal. My mother is typing away on her laptop at the kitchen table, and Jacob is in his room with the door closed. I make myself ramen noodles and eat them in my room with Coldplay blasting as I do my French homework.
My mother’s always telling me I can’t listen to music when I do my homework. Once, she barged in and accused me of not working on my English paper when it was what I’d been doing all along. How good could it possibly be, she said, if you’re not concentrating?
I told her to sit down and read the stupid paper on my computer.
She did, and shut up pretty quickly. I got an A on that project, as I recall.
I guess that somehow the gene pool in our family got all mixed up, and as a result, Jacob can only focus on one thing, an extreme obsession, while I can do sixteen thousand things at a time.
When I finish my homework I’m still hungry, so I go downstairs. My mother is nowhere to be found-and there’s no freaking food in the house, for a change (not)-but I notice Jacob sitting in the living room. I look up at the clock, but I hardly have to-if it’s 4:30 in our house, it must be CrimeBusters.
I hesitate at the doorway, watching him pore over his notebooks. Half of me is ready to slink away without being seen by Jacob, but the other half remembers what he looked like this morning. In spite of all I’ve said about wishing he was never born, seeing him like that-like the light had gone out inside him, sort of-made me feel like I’d been punched over and over in the gut.
What if I’d been born first, and was the one who wound up with Asperger’s? Would he be standing here wishing I wouldn’t notice him, too?
Before I can even let myself get good and guilty, Jacob starts talking. He doesn’t look at me-he never does-but that probably means all his other senses are more finely tuned. “It’s episode twenty-two today,” he says, as if we have been in the middle of a conversation. “An oldie but a goodie.”
“How many times have you seen this one?” I ask.
He glances down at his notebook. “Thirty-eight.”
I’m not a huge fan of CrimeBusters. In the first place, I think the acting is bad. In the second place, this has to be the richest CSI lab ever, with all its bells and whistles. Something tells me that the fuming chamber at the state lab in Vermont looks a lot more like Jacob’s duct-taped old fish tank than the CrimeBusters version, which is jazzed up with blue neon lights and lots of chrome. Plus, the investigators seem to spend a lot more time figuring out who’s going to jump into bed with whom than they do solving crimes.
All the same, I sit down next to my brother on the couch. There’s a good foot of space between us, because Jacob isn’t crazy about being touched. I know better than to talk when the show is on-instead, I limit my editorial comments to the moments when there are commercials for erectile dysfunction drugs and OxiClean.
The story line involves a girl who’s found dead after a hit-and-run. There’s a paint scrape on her scooter, so the sexy CSI takes it to the lab. Meanwhile, the dude who does the autopsies finds a bruise on the girl’s body that looks like a fingerprint. The crusty old CSI photographs it and takes it to the lab and gets a hit-some retired government employee who’s drinking his prune juice and using a Clapper when Crusty and Sexy show up. They ask him if he’s had a car accident lately, and he says that his car was stolen. Unfortunately for him, the CSIs find it parked in the attached garage. Caught red-handed, he admits that he was driving and that his foot hit the accelerator instead of the brake. When Sexy examines the car, though, she finds the driver’s seat pushed back too far for the old man’s height, and the stereo set to hip-hop. Sexy asks if anyone else drives Grandpa’s car just as a teenage boy enters. Gramps admits that after hitting the girl on her scooter, he banged his head, so his grandson drove him home. Needless to say, no one believes him, but it’s his word against theirs until Crusty finds a piece of tooth lodged in the steering wheel, which gets matched to the grandson. The kid’s arrested, and his grandfather gets released.
The whole time I am watching this, Jacob is scribbling away in his notebooks. He has shelves full of them, all filled with crime scenarios that aired on this TV show. “What do you write down in there?” I ask.
Jacob shrugs. “The evidence. Then I try to deduce what will happen.”
“But you’ve seen this one thirty-eight times,” I say. “You already know how it’s going to turn out.”
Jacob’s pen keeps scratching across the page. “But maybe it’ll end differently this time,” he says. “Maybe today, the kid won’t get caught.”
On Thursday morning my phone rings. “Matson,” I say, answering.
“The CDs are in alphabetical order.”
I frown at the unfamiliar voice. Sounds like some kind of speakeasy password. The CDs are in alphabetical order. And the bluebird wears fishnet stockings. And just like that, you get entry to the inner sanctum.
“I beg your pardon?” I say.
“Whoever took Jess hung around long enough to alphabetize the CDs.”
Now I recognize the voice-Mark Maguire. “I assume your girlfriend hasn’t returned yet,” I say.
“Would I be calling you if she had?”
I clear my throat. “Tell me what you noticed.”
“I dropped a handful of change on the carpet this morning, and when I picked it up, I realized that the tower that holds the CDs had been moved. There was a little sunken spot in the carpet, you know?”
“Right,” I say.
“So these professors-they’ve got hundreds of CDs. And they keep them in this four-sided tower that spins. Anyway, I noticed that all the Ws were organized together. Richard Wagner, Dionne Warwick, Dinah Washington, the Who, John Williams, Mary Lou Williams. And then Lester Young, Johann Zumsteeg-”
“They listen to the Who?”
“I looked on all four sides-and every single CD is in order.”
“Is it possible they always were, and you didn’t notice?” I ask.
“No, because last weekend, when Jess and I were looking for some decent music to listen to, they sure as hell didn’t look that way.”
“Mr. Maguire,” I say. “Let me call you right back.”
“Wait-it’s been two days now-”
I hang up and pinch the bridge of my nose. Then I dial the state lab and talk to Iris, a grandmother type who has a little crush on me, which I milk when I need my evidence processed fast. “Iris,” I say, “how’s the prettiest girl in the lab?”
“I’m the only girl in the lab.” She laughs. “You calling about your mailbox note?”
“Yeah.”
“Came up clean. No prints at all.”
I thank her and hang up the phone. It figures that a perp who alphabetizes CDs is smart enough to wear gloves while leaving a note. We probably won’t get any prints off the computer keyboard, either.
On the other hand, the spices might be organized by indigenous regions.
If Mark Maguire is involved with his girlfriend’s disappearance, and wants to lead us on a very different profiling track, he might conceivably alphabetize CDs-the least likely thing I’d ever expect of Mark Maguire.
Which could also explain why it took him twenty-four more hours to do it.
In any case, I am going to take a look at those CDs myself. And the contents of Jess Ogilvy’s purse. And anything else that might indicate where she is, and why she’s there.
I stand up and grab my jacket, heading past dispatch to tell them where I am going, when one of the desk sergeants pulls at my sleeve. “This here’s Detective Matson,” he says.
“Good,” another man barks. “Now I know who to get the chief to fire.”
Behind him, a woman in tears twists the leather straps of her handbag.
“I’m sorry,” I say, smiling politely. “I didn’t catch your name?”
“Claude Ogilvy,” he replies. “State Senator Claude Ogilvy.”
“Senator, we’re doing everything we can to find your daughter.”
“I find that hard to believe,” he says, “when you haven’t even had anyone in this department investigating it.”
“As a matter of fact, Senator, I was just on my way to your daughter’s residence.”
“I assume, of course, that you’re meeting the rest of the police force there. Because I certainly wouldn’t want to find out that two whole days had gone by without this police department taking my daughter’s disappearance seriously-”
I cut him off midsentence by taking his arm and propelling him toward my office. “With all due respect, Senator, I’d prefer it if you didn’t tell me how to do my own job-”
“I damn well will tell you whatever I want whenever I want until my daughter is brought back safe and sound!”
I ignore him and offer a chair to his wife. “Mrs. Ogilvy,” I say, “has Jess tried to contact you at all?”
She shakes her head. “And I can’t call her. Her voice-mail box is full.”
The senator shakes his head. “That’s because that idiot Maguire kept leaving messages-”
“Has she ever run away before?” I ask.
“No, she’d never do that.”
“Has she been upset lately? Worried about anything?”
Mrs. Ogilvy shakes her head. “She was so excited about moving into that house. Said it beat out the dorms any day…”
“How about her relationship with her boyfriend?”
At that, Senator Ogilvy stays blissfully, stonily silent. His wife spares him a quick glance. “There’s no accounting for love,” she says.
“If he hurt her,” Ogilvy mutters. “If he laid a finger on her-”
“Then we will find out about it, and we will take care of it,” I smoothly interject. “The first priority, though, is locating Jess.”
Mrs. Ogilvy leans forward. Her eyes are red-rimmed. “Do you have a daughter, Detective?” she asks.
Once, at a fairground, Sasha and I were walking through the midway when a rowdy group of teenagers barreled between us, breaking the bond between our hands. I tried to keep my eye on her, but she was tiny, and when the group was gone, so was Sasha. I found myself standing in the middle of the fairground, turning in circles and screaming her name, while all around me rides spun in circles and wisps of cotton candy flew from their metal wheels onto a spool and the roar of chain saws spitting through wood announced the lumberjack contest. When I finally found her, petting the nose of a Jersey calf in a 4-H barn, I was so relieved that my legs gave out; I literally fell to my knees.
I haven’t even responded, but Mrs. Ogilvy puts her hand on her husband’s arm. “See, I told you, Claude,” she murmurs. “He understands.”
The sensory break room at school has a swing hanging from the ceiling. It’s made of rope and stretchy blue material, and when you sit inside it, it wraps you like a cocoon. You can pull the sides close so that you can’t see out and no one can see in, and spin in circles. There are also mats with different textures, wind chimes, a fan. There’s a fiber-optic lamp that has hundreds of points of light that change from green to purple to pink. There are sponges and Koosh balls and brushes and Bubble Wrap and weighted blankets. There’s a noise machine that only an aide is allowed to turn on, and you can choose to listen to waves or rain or white noise or a jungle. There’s a bubble tube, about three feet tall, with plastic fish that move in lazy circles.
In school, part of my IEP is a cool-off pass-a COP. If I need to, at any time, even during an exam, my teachers will allow me to leave the classroom. Sometimes, the outside world gets a little too tight for me, and I need a place to relax. I can come to the sensory break room, but the truth is, I hardly ever do. The only kids who use the sensory break room are special needs, and walking through the door, I might as well just slap a big fat label on myself that says I’m not normal.
So most of the time when I need a break, I wander around the hallways. Sometimes I go to the cafeteria to get a bottle of Vitaminwater. (The best flavor? Focus, kiwi-strawberry, with vitamin A and lutein for clarity. The worst? Essential. Orange-orange. Need I say more?) Sometimes I hang out in the teachers’ room, playing chess with Mr. Pakeeri or helping Mrs. Leatherwood, the school secretary, stuff envelopes. But these past two days, when I leave my classroom I head right for that sensory break room.
The aide who staffs the room, Ms. Agworth, is also the Quiz Bowl teacher. Every day at 11:45 she leaves to make photocopies of whatever it is she’s using in Quiz Bowl later that day. For this very reason, I’ve made it a point to use my COP pass at 11:30 for the past two days. It gets me out of English, which is a blessing in disguise, since we are reading Flowers for Algernon and just last week a girl asked (not in a mean way but truly curious) whether there were any experiments under way that might cure people like me.
Today, I enter the sensory break room and make a beeline for the Koosh balls. Holding one in each hand, I wrestle my way into the swing and pull the material closed around me. “Morning, Jacob,” Ms. Agworth says. “You need anything?”
“Not right now,” I murmur.
I don’t know why people with AS are so sensitive to things like texture and color and sound and light. When I don’t look someone in the eye, and when other people very pointedly look away from me so they don’t appear to be staring, I sometimes wonder if I even really exist. The items in this room are the sensory equivalent of the game Battleship. Instead of calling out coordinates-B-4, D-7-I call for another physical sensation. Each time I feel the weight of a blanket on my arm, or the pop of Bubble Wrap under my body when I roll on it, it’s a direct hit. And at the end of my sensory break, instead of sinking my battleship, I’ve just found a way to locate myself in the grid of this world.
I close my eyes and slowly spin inside this dark, close ball. “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain,” I murmur.
“What’s that, Jacob?” Ms. Agworth says.
“Nothing,” I shout. I wait until I’ve swung in three more slow pivots, and then I emerge.
“How are you doing today?” she asks.
It seems like a pretty gratuitous question, given the fact that I wouldn’t be in this room if I were able to tolerate sitting in class like neurotypical people. But when I don’t answer, she doesn’t pry. She just keeps reading her trivia books and jotting down notes.
The largest fish in the world is a whale shark, at fifty feet.
Four million marshmallow Peeps are made each day.
(That sort of makes me wonder who on earth is buying them when it’s not Easter.)
It takes the average adult man thirteen minutes to eat his dinner.
“I’ve got one for you, Ms. Agworth,” I say. “The word ass is in the Bible 170 times.”
“Thanks for that, Jacob, but it’s not really appropriate.” She shuffles her papers and looks down at her watch. “You think you’d be okay for a few minutes, if I ran down to the office to make some copies?”
Technically, she is not supposed to leave me alone. And I know there are certain other autistic kids who use the sensory room that she’d never stop watching like a hawk-Mathilda, for example, would probably fashion a noose out of the rope on the swing; Charlie would start tearing the shelves off the walls. But me, I’m a pretty safe bet. “No problem, Ms. A,” I say.
In fact, I am counting on it. And the moment the door closes behind her again, I pull the cell phone out of my pocket. As soon as I flip it open and press the power button, it lights up: little blue squares around each number, and a picture of Jess and Mark on the screen saver.
I cover Mark’s face with my thumb.
It’s Thursday, and today I’m allowed to call her. I already broke the rules and called her twice before from this phone-dialing her own cell number, even though I knew I would be automatically dumped into voice mail. Hey, so, this is Jess, and you know what to do.
I am already starting to forget the notes in the song of her voice.
Today, though, instead of hearing her message, I heard a tinny voice telling me that this wireless customer’s mailbox is full.
I’m prepared for this. I have memorized the phone number she gave me a week ago, the one that belongs to the new house. I dial it, even though I have to do it twice because it’s unfamiliar and the numbers get tangled in my head.
A machine picks up. Hey, this is Jess at the Robertsons’ house. They’re out of town, but you can leave a message for me!
I hang up and dial it again.
Hey, this is Jess at the Robertsons’ house.
I wait till the beep, and then I hang up. I turn off the power button on the cell phone, too. Then I speak my message, the same words I say to her every Thursday: See you in three days.
By Thursday, Jacob looks like the old Jacob, but he still isn’t back to normal. I can tell by the way he’s distracted-I’ll set a full dinner plate down in front of him and he won’t eat until I remind him that it’s time to pick up his fork and dig in-and by the moments I catch him rocking or bouncing on the balls of his feet. His meds don’t seem to be helping. And I’ve heard from teachers at his school that he’s been spending nearly half the day in the sensory break room.
I’ve called Jess Ogilvy twice, but her voice-mail box is full. I’m afraid to bring her name up to Jacob, but I don’t know what else to do. So after dinner on Thursday, I knock on the door of his bedroom and let myself inside. “Hi,” I say.
He looks up from a book he is reading. “Hey.”
It took me two years to realize that Jacob had not learned to read along with the rest of his kindergarten class. His teacher said he was among the most gifted language arts students, and sure enough, every night, he would pick out a book from a big basket in his room and read it aloud. But one day I realized that what everyone assumed was reading was actually just Jacob’s photographic memory. If he’d heard the book once, he could spit it back. Read this, I had said, handing him a Dr. Seuss book, and he’d opened it up and started the story. I’d stopped him, pointing to a letter.
What’s that?
A B.
And what sound does a B make?
He hesitated. Buzz, he said.
Now, I sink down beside him on the bed. “How are you feeling?”
“Interrupted,” Jacob says.
I take the book out of his hands. “Can we talk?” He nods. “Did you and Jess have a fight on Tuesday?”
“No.”
“When you went to her house, she didn’t say anything to upset you?”
He shakes his head. “No, she didn’t say anything.”
“Well, I’m a little lost here, Jacob, since you came home from your tutoring session very upset… and I think there’s still something bothering you.”
Here is the thing about Asperger’s syndrome: Jacob won’t lie. So when he says he didn’t have an argument with Jess, I believe him. But that doesn’t mean he wasn’t traumatized by something else that relates to her. Maybe he walked in on her having sex with her boyfriend. Maybe he got freaked out by her new residence.
Or maybe it has nothing to do with Jess, and he ran across an orange construction zone sign on the way home that required him to take a detour.
I sigh. “You know that I’m here when you’re ready to talk about it. And Jess, too. She’s there if you need her.”
“I’m going to see her again on Sunday.”
“Same bat-time,” I say. “Same bat-channel.”
I hand him back his book and realize that tucked beneath his arm is the old Jemima Puddle-Duck toy he used to carry as a child. Jacob carried her so fiercely that I had to sew a leopard cape onto her back because her fur kept rubbing bald. It was a ritual piece, according to Dr. Murano-something Jacob could hold to calm himself down. She described it as a way to reboot, to remind him that he’s all right. Over the years, Jemima was retired to make room for more discreet objects that could be tucked in his pockets: a photo-booth strip of the two of us, so folded and faded you could barely see our faces; a small green pebble a teacher brought him back from Montana; a piece of sea glass Theo gave him for Christmas one year. In fact, I haven’t seen this stuffed animal in ages; she’s been buried in his closet.
It is hard to see your eighteen-year-old son clutching a stuffed toy. But that’s what autism is, a slippery slope. One minute, you convince yourself that you are so far up that hill you can’t see the bottom anymore, and the next, it’s covered with black ice, and you are falling fast.
Auntie Em’s column, Thursday, January 14, Teen Edition:
The best parenting advice I ever got was from a labor nurse who told me the following:
1. After your baby gets here, the dog will just be a dog.
2. The terrible twos last through age three.
3. Never ask your child an open-ended question, such as “Do you want to go to bed now?” You won’t want to hear the answer, believe me. “Do you want me to carry you upstairs, or do you want to walk upstairs to go to bed?” That way, you get the outcome you want and they feel empowered.
Now that my children are older, not much has changed.
Except we do not have a dog.
The terrible twos last through age eighteen.
And questions still shouldn’t be open-ended, because you won’t get an answer to “Where were you last night till two A.M.?” or “How did you get a D on your math test?”
There are two deductions you can glean from this. That parenting isn’t a noun but a verb-an ongoing process instead of an accomplishment. And that no matter how many years you put into the job, the learning curve is, well, fairly flat.
I leave Jacob’s room, intending to watch the evening news. But when I reach the living room, Theo is tuned to some god-awful MTV show about spoiled girls who are shipped off to third-world countries by their parents to learn humility. “Don’t you have homework to do?” I ask.
“Done.”
“I want to watch the news.”
“I was here first.”
I stare as a girl shovels elephant dung into a large plastic bag in Burma. “Eeew,” she squeals, and I glance at Theo. “Please tell me you’d rather open your mind to current affairs than watch this.”
“But I’m supposed to tell the truth,” Theo says, grinning. “House rules.”
“Okay, let’s try this: if I watch this program with you, I might be suitably moved to send you to Burma to broaden your horizons by cleaning up elephant dung.”
He tosses me the remote control. “That is such blackmail.”
“And yet it worked,” I say, flipping the channel to a local broadcast. A man is shouting into a microphone. “All I know,” he cries, “is that it’s a crime for a local police department to sit on the disappearance of a young girl, instead of actively pursuing an investigation.”
A white banner flashes beneath the face: STATE SENATOR CLAUDE OGILVY.
“Hey,” Theo says. “Isn’t that the name-”
“Ssh…”
The reporter’s face fills the screen. “Townsend Police Chief Fred Huckins says that the disappearance of Jess Ogilvy is a priority and urges anyone with information to contact the department at 802-555- 4490.”
Then a picture of Jacob’s social skills tutor appears, with the phone number below it.
“Live from Townsend,” the reporter wraps up, “I’m Lucy McNeil.”
I look at my mother. “That’s Jess,” I say, the obvious.
“Oh my God,” she murmurs. “That poor girl.”
I don’t understand. I totally don’t understand.
My mother grabs my arm. “This information doesn’t leave this room,” she says.
“You think Jacob isn’t going to find out? He reads the papers. He’s online.”
She pinches the bridge of her nose. “He’s so fragile right now, Theo. I can’t throw this at him yet. Just give me a little while so I can figure out how.”
I take the remote out of her hand and turn the TV off. Then, muttering some excuse about an essay, I run upstairs to my room and lock the door.
I walk in circles, my arms braced behind my head, like I’m cooling off after running a marathon. I run through everything I heard that senator say, and the reporter. The police chief, for God’s sake, who said the disappearance is a priority.
Whatever the fuck that means.
I wonder if it will turn out to be a big hoax, like that college girl who vanished and later said she was abducted and it turned out that she was making the whole story up to get attention. I kind of hope that’s what happens, because the alternative is something I don’t want to think about.
Here’s all I really need to know:
Jess Ogilvy is missing, and I was one of the last people to see her.
On the answering machine at the Robertsons’ house, there are six messages. One is from Mark Maguire, asking Jess to call him when she gets back. One is from a dry cleaner, letting her know that her skirt is ready. One is identified by caller ID as E. Hunt. The message says, “Hi, Jess, this is Jacob’s mom. Can you give me a call?” The other three messages are hang-ups, and all three came from the number registered to Jess Ogilvy’s mobile phone.
That tells me either she’s a battered woman in hiding, trying to get the nerve to call her boyfriend and failing, or her boyfriend is covering his ass after accidentally killing her.
I spend Friday crossing off the names in Jess Ogilvy’s Day-Timer. My first call is to the two girls whose names pop up the most often in the history of months past. Alicia and Cara are grad students, like Jess. Alicia has cornrowed hair that hangs to her waist, and Cara is a tiny blonde wearing camouflage cargo pants and black work boots. Over coffee at the student center, they admit they haven’t seen Jess since Tuesday.
“She missed an exam with the Gorgon,” Cara says. “Nobody misses an exam with the Gorgon.”
“The Gorgon?”
“Professor Gorgona,” she explains. “It’s a seminar course on special education.”
GORGONA, I write in my notes. “Has Jess ever gone away for a few days before?”
“Yeah-once,” Alicia says. “She went to Cape Cod for a long weekend and didn’t tell us beforehand.”
“She went with Mark, though,” Cara adds, and she wrinkles her nose.
“I take it you aren’t a fan of Mark Maguire?”
“Is anyone?” Alicia says. “He doesn’t treat her right.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“If he says jump, she doesn’t even ask ‘How high?’ She goes out and buys a pogo stick.”
“We haven’t seen a lot of her since they started hooking up,” Cara says. “Mark likes to keep her all to himself.”
So do most abusive partners, I think.
“Detective Matson?” Alicia asks. “She’s going to be okay, right?”
A week ago, Jess Ogilvy was probably sitting here where I am, drinking coffee with her friends and freaking out about the Gorgon’s upcoming exam.
“I hope so,” I say.
People don’t just disappear. There’s always a reason, or an enemy with a grudge. There’s always a loose thread that starts to unravel.
The problem is that Jess Ogilvy is, apparently, a saint.
“I was surprised when she missed the exam,” Professor Gorgona says. A slight woman with a white bun and a trace of a foreign accent, she doesn’t seem nearly as threatening as Alicia and Cara made her out to be. “She’s my star student, really. She’s getting her master’s and writing an honors thesis at the same time. Graduated with a 4.0 from Bates and worked with Teach for America for two years before she decided to make a career out of it.”
“Is there anyone who might be jealous of the fact that she does so well in class?” I ask.
“Not that I’ve noticed,” the professor says.
“Did she confide in you about any personal problems?”
“I’m not exactly the warm and fuzzy type,” the professor says wryly. “Our communication was strictly adviser-advisee in an academic sense. The only extracurricular activities I even know she participated in are education-related: she organizes the Special Olympics here in town, and she tutors an autistic boy.” Suddenly the professor frowns. “Has anyone contacted him? He’ll have a hard time coping if Jess doesn’t show up for her scheduled appointment. Changes in routine are very traumatic for kids like Jacob.”
“Jacob?” I repeat, and I open the Day-Timer.
This is the boy whose mother left a message on the answering machine at the professor’s house. The boy whose name is entered into Jess’s schedule on the day she disappeared.
“Professor,” I say, “you wouldn’t happen to know where he lives?”
Jacob Hunt and his family reside in a part of Townsend that’s a little more run-down than the rest of it-the part you have to work harder to find behind the picture-postcard town green and the stately New England antique homes. Their house is just beyond the condos that are filled with the recently separated and newly divorced, past the train tracks for an Amtrak route that’s long defunct.
The woman who opens the door has a blue stain on her shirt and dark hair wound into a messy knot and the most beautiful eyes I have ever seen. They’re pale, like a lioness’s, nearly golden, but they also look like they’ve done their share of crying, and we all know that a sky with clouds in it is much more interesting than one that doesn’t have any. I’d place her in her early forties. She’s holding a spoon, which is dribbling its contents onto the floor. “I don’t want any,” she says, starting to close the door.
“I’m not selling anything,” I say. “You’re, um, dripping.”
She glances down, and then sticks the spoon into her mouth.
That’s when I remember why I’m here. I hold up my badge. “I’m Detective Rich Matson. Are you Jacob’s mother?”
“Oh, God,” she says. “I thought he’d already called you to apologize.”
“Apologize?”
“It’s really not his fault,” she interjects. “Granted, I should have known that he was sneaking out, but with him, this hobby is almost a pathology. And if there’s any way I can convince you to keep this quiet-not a bribe, of course, just maybe a handshake agreement… You see, if it becomes public knowledge, then my career could really take a hit, and I’m a single mom who’s barely scraping by as is…”
She is babbling, and I have no idea what the hell she is talking about. Although I did hear the word single. “I’m sorry, Ms. Hunt-”
“Emma.”
“Emma, then. I… have no idea what you’re talking about. I came because your son is tutored by Jess Ogilvy-”
“Oh,” she says, sobering. “I heard about Jess on the news. Her poor parents must be frantic. Are there any leads yet?”
“That’s why I’m here to speak to your son.”
Those eyes of hers darken. “You can’t possibly think Jacob had anything to do with her disappearance?”
“No, but he was the last appointment in her date book before she disappeared.”
She folds her arms. “Detective Matson, my son has Asperger’s syndrome.”
“Okay.” And I’m red-green color-blind. Whatever.
“It’s high-functioning autism. He doesn’t even know Jess is missing yet. He’s had a hard time lately, and the news could be devastating to him.”
“I can be sensitive about the subject.”
She measures me for a moment with her gaze. Then, turning, she heads into the house, expecting me to follow. “Jacob,” she calls as we reach the kitchen.
I stand in the entryway, waiting for a child to appear. After all, Jess Ogilvy is a teacher and Professor Gorgona referred to a boy she worked with. Instead, a behemoth teenager who’s taller than I am, and probably stronger, shuffles into the room. This is who Jess Ogilvy tutored? I stare at him for a second, trying to place the reason he looks so familiar out of context, and suddenly it comes to me: hypothermic man. This kid identified the cause of death before the medical examiner did.
“You?” I say. “You’re Jacob Hunt?”
Now his mother’s rushed apologies make sense. She probably thought I’d come to slap a fine on the kid, or arrest him for interfering with a crime scene.
“Jacob,” she says drily, “I think you’re already acquainted with Detective Matson.”
“Hi, Jacob.” I hold out a hand. “Nice to officially meet you.”
He doesn’t shake it. He doesn’t even look me in the eye. “I saw the article in the paper,” he says, his voice flat and robotic. “It was buried in the back. If you ask me, someone dying of hypothermia is worthy of at least page two.” He takes a step forward. “Did the full autopsy results come back? It would be interesting to know if the alcohol lowered the freezing point for the body, or if there’s not a significant change.”
“So, Jake,” I say.
“Jacob. My name is Jacob, not Jake.”
“Right, Jacob. I was hoping to ask you a few questions?”
“If they’re about forensics,” he says, growing animated, “then I am more than happy to help. Have you heard about the research coming out of Purdue, on desorption electrospray ionization? They found that the sweat from finger pores slightly corrodes metal surfaces-anything from a bullet to a piece of a bomb. If you spray the fingerprints with positively charged water, the droplets dissolve chemicals in the fingerprints and transfer minute amounts that can be analyzed by mass spectrometer. Can you imagine how handy it would be to not only get fingerprint images but also identify the chemicals in them? You could not only place a suspect at a crime scene but also get proof that he handled explosives.”
I look at Emma Hunt, begging for help. “Jacob, Detective Matson needs to talk to you about something else. You want to sit down for a minute?”
“A minute. Because it’s almost four-thirty.”
And what, I wonder, happens at 4:30? His mother doesn’t react at all to his comment. I feel a little like Alice in Wonderland, in the Disney video that Sasha likes to watch on her weekends with me, and everyone is in on the Unbirthday routine but me. Last time we’d watched it, I realized that being a parent wasn’t all that different. We’re always bluffing, pretending we know best, when most of the time we’re just praying we won’t screw up too badly.
“Well, then,” I say to Jacob. “I guess I’d better start.”
The only reason I let Rich Matson into my house is because I’m still not entirely sure that he doesn’t want to punish Jacob for showing up at his crime scene last weekend, and I will do whatever I have to do to make that whole nightmare go away.
“Jacob,” I say, “Detective Matson needs to talk to you about something else. You want to sit down for a minute?”
We are racing against a clock, not that Matson would understand. “A minute. Because it’s almost four-thirty,” Jacob tells me.
I don’t know how anyone could look at Jacob and think he’d be a viable witness. Sure, his mind is a steel trap. But half the time, there’s no lock to get inside it.
The detective sits at the kitchen table. I turn down the flame on the stove and then join him. Jacob is struggling to look in Matson’s direction, but his eyelids keep fluttering, as if he’s staring into the sun, and finally he gives up and lets his gaze slide away.
“You have a friend named Jess, right?” the detective asks.
“Yes.”
“What do you and Jess do together?”
“We practice social skills. Conversations. Good-byes. Things like that.” He hesitates. “She’s my best friend.”
This doesn’t surprise me. Jacob’s definition of a friend isn’t legitimate. To him, a friend might be the kid whose locker is next to his in school, who therefore has an interaction at least once a day to say, Could you move over? A friend is someone who he’s never met but who doesn’t actively taunt him in school. Jess may be paid by me to meet with Jacob, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that she honestly cares about him and connects with him.
The detective looks at Jacob, who, of course, is not looking at him. I watch people falter over that normal courtesy of communication all the time-after a while, it feels like staring, so they look away from Jacob, mirroring his behavior. Sure enough, after a moment, Matson stares down at the table as if there’s something fascinating in the wood grain. “Right now, Jacob, Jess is missing. And it’s my job to find her.”
I suck in my breath. “That’s what you call sensitive?”
But Jacob doesn’t seem to be surprised, which makes me wonder if he’s seen the news, or read about the disappearance in the papers or online. “Jess is gone,” he repeats.
The detective leans forward. “Were you supposed to meet with her last Tuesday?”
“Yes,” Jacob says. “At two thirty-five.”
“And did you?”
“No.”
Suddenly, Jacob’s breakdown makes perfect sense. To travel to Jess’s unfamiliar new residence-which already would have set off his alarm bells-and then to never have Jess show up… Well, talk about a perfect storm for an AS kid. “Oh, Jacob. Was that why you had a meltdown?”
“Meltdown?” Matson echoes.
I glance at him briefly. “When Jacob’s routine is disrupted, he gets very agitated. This was a double whammy, and by the time he came home-” I break off, suddenly remembering something else. “You walked home from Jess’s place? Alone?”
It isn’t that he wouldn’t know the way-Jacob is a veritable human GPS; he can take one look at a map and have it memorized. But knowing geography and knowing how to follow directions are two very different things. Getting from point A to point B to point C inevitably trips him up.
“Yes,” Jacob says. “It wasn’t so bad.”
It was nearly eight miles. In the freezing cold. I suppose I should consider us lucky: on top of everything else, Jacob could have wound up with pneumonia.
“How long did you wait for her?”
Jacob looks up at the clock. He starts rubbing the tips of his fingers against his thumbs, back and forth. “I have to go now.”
I notice the detective staring at Jacob as he fidgets, and I know damn well what he’s thinking. “I bet when you see someone who doesn’t make eye contact and who can’t sit still, you immediately assume guilt,” I say. “Me, I assume he’s on the spectrum.”
“It’s four-thirty.” Jacob’s voice is louder, more urgent.
“You can go watch CrimeBusters,” I tell him, and he bolts into the living room.
The detective stares at me, dumbfounded. “Excuse me, I was in the middle of an interrogation.”
“I thought this wasn’t an interrogation.”
“A young girl’s life might be at stake, and you think it’s more important for your son to watch a television show?”
“Yes,” I snap.
“It doesn’t strike you as odd that your son isn’t upset by his tutor’s disappearance?”
“My son didn’t even get upset when his grandfather died,” I reply. “It was a forensics adventure for him. His feelings about Jess going missing will be determined only by how it affects him-which is the way he measures everything. When he realizes that his Sunday session with Jess might not take place, then he’ll get upset.”
The detective looks at me for a long moment. I think he’s going to give me a lecture about obstruction of justice, but instead, he tilts his head to one side, thoughtful. “That must be really hard on you.”
I don’t remember the last time anyone has said those words to me. I would not trade Jacob for the world-for his tenderness, his incredible brain, his devotion to following rules-but that doesn’t mean it’s been an easy ride. An ordinary mother doesn’t worry about whether her son being shunned at a school concert hurts him as much as it hurts me. An ordinary mother doesn’t call Green Mountain Power when the electricity goes out to say that one of the residents has a disability that requires immediate intervention-because missing CrimeBusters actually qualifies, when it comes to Jacob. An ordinary mother doesn’t lie awake at night wondering if Theo will ever accept his brother enough to watch over him when I’m gone.
“It’s my life,” I say, shrugging.
“Do you work outside the home?”
“Are you interviewing me, too?”
“Just making conversation until the commercial break,” he says, smiling.
Ignoring him, I stand up and stir the blueberries I am cooking down for tonight’s pie filling.
“Your son, he took us by surprise the other night,” Matson continues. “We’re not used to minors crashing our crime scenes.”
“Technically, he’s not a minor. He’s eighteen.”
“Well, he’s got more forensic scientific knowledge than guys I know who are four times his age.”
“Tell me something I don’t know.”
“You’ve got pretty eyes,” the detective says.
Fumbling, I drop the spoon into the pot. “What did you just say?”
“You heard me,” Matson replies, and he walks into the living room to wait for the opening credits of CrimeBusters to finish.
I have never been a big fan of I Love Lucy. That said, every time I see the episode when Lucy and Ethel are working at the candy factory and get behind on the packaging, it makes me laugh. The way they stuff the candy into their mouths and inside their uniforms-well, you know it’s going to end with Lucy wailing her famous wail.
Having Detective Matson ask me these questions makes me feel like Lucy at the candy factory. At first, I can keep up-especially after I realize that he is not angry at me for coming to the hypothermic man’s crime scene. But then it begins to get more complicated. The questions stack up like that candy, and I am still trying to wrap the last one when he sends the next one my way. All I want to do is take his words and stuff them somewhere where I don’t have to hear them anymore.
Detective Matson is standing in front of me as soon as the first commercial airs. It’s for Pedi Paws, a new incredible pet nail trimmer. That makes me think of the miniature poodle at the pizza place that we saw, and that makes me think of Jess, and that makes me feel like there’s a bird caught inside my rib cage.
What would he say if he knew that right now, in my pocket, is Jess’s pink cell phone?
“Just a couple more questions, Jacob,” he promises. “I’ll make sure I’m done in ninety seconds.”
He smiles, but it’s not because he’s happy. I had a biology teacher like that once. When I corrected Mr. Hubbard’s mistakes in class, he smiled with the left side of his mouth. I assumed that meant he was grateful. But that weird half smile apparently meant he was annoyed with me, even though if someone’s smiling it is supposed to signify that they’re cheerful. So I got sent to the principal’s office for my bad attitude when, really, it was just because the expressions on people’s faces are not always reflections of how they feel inside.
He glances at my notebook. “What’s that for?”
“I take notes on the episodes,” I tell him. “I have over a hundred.”
“Episodes?”
“Notebooks.”
He nods. “Was Mark at Jess’s place when you got there?”
“No.” Now, the commercial on television is for denture cream. Secretly I am very scared of losing all my teeth. Sometimes I dream about waking up and finding them rolling around on my tongue like marbles. I close my eyes so I don’t have to watch. “You know Mark?”
“We’ve met,” the detective says. “Did you and Jess ever talk about him?”
My eyes are still closed, so maybe that’s why I see what I do: Mark with his hand sliding up Jessica’s shirt at the pizza place. His hideous orange sweatshirt. The earring in his left ear. The bruises I saw once on Jessica’s side when she reached for a book on a high shelf, two uneven purple ovals like quality stamps on a cut of beef. She told me she’d fallen off a stepladder, but she looked away when she said it. And unlike me, who looks away out of comfort, she does it in moments of discomfort.
I see Mark smiling with only half his mouth, too.
Now the commercial is for Law & Order: SVU, a promo, which means that the next image on the screen will be CrimeBusters again. I pick up my pen and turn the page in my notebook.
“Did Jess and Mark fight?” the detective asks again.
On the TV, Rhianna is in the woods with Kurt, and they’re investigating a dead dog with a human finger found undigested in its stomach.
“Jacob?”
“Hasta la vista, baby,” I murmur, and I make up my mind that, no matter what this detective says to me, I’m not speaking again until my show is over.
So I’m headed downstairs to get something to eat when I hear a voice in the kitchen I do not recognize. This is pretty extraordinary-I’m not the only one who doesn’t have friends as a result of Jacob’s Asperger’s; I can probably count on one hand the number of people my mother has ever trusted enough to invite over. The fact that the voice is male is even more bizarre. And then I hear my mom refer to him as Detective Matson.
Holy crap.
I run back upstairs and lock myself in my room. He’s here because of Jess Ogilvy, and I’m officially freaked out.
And, for the record, still hungry.
Here’s what I know for sure: Jess was alive and well at about 1:00 P.M. on Tuesday. I know this because I saw her-all of her. Her tits, let me just say, rank right up there as masterworks of art.
I’d say we were equally surprised when she reached for her towel, wiped her eyes, and looked in the mirror. She certainly didn’t expect to find some random guy in her house, watching her naked. And I sure as hell didn’t expect the object of my momentary lust to be my brother’s tutor.
“Hey!” she yelled, and in one smooth move she grabbed the towel and wrapped it around herself. Me, meanwhile, I was totally paralyzed. I stood there like an idiot until I realized she was pissed and she was coming after me.
The only reason I got away is that the floor of the bathroom was wet. When she stumbled, I flew out of the master bedroom, where I’d been standing, down the stairs. In my hurry, I crashed into some of the furniture and knocked a whole mess of papers off the kitchen counter, but I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was get the hell out of that house and join a monastery or hop on a plane to Micronesia-anything that would put me far away by the time Jess Ogilvy asked my brother and my mom whether they were aware that Theo Hunt was a Peeping Tom, a total perv.
But sometime between now and then, Jess Ogilvy got dressed, left her house, and vanished. Is she wandering around with amnesia? Or hiding out and plotting some kind of revenge scheme against me?
I don’t know.
I can’t tell the cops, though, without incriminating myself.
It’s just past five-thirty when I get the nerve to leave my bedroom. I can smell blueberry pie cooking (the only good thing about Blue Food Fridays, if you ask me) and know it will be ready at six-like everything else, we eat on a schedule to keep Jacob calm.
The door to his room is open, and he’s standing on his desk chair, slipping one of his CrimeBusters journals back into its predetermined spot on a shelf.
“Hey,” I say to him.
He doesn’t answer. Instead, he sits down on the bed with his back to the wall and picks up a book on his nightstand.
“I saw that the cops were here.”
“Cop,” Jacob murmurs. “Singular.”
“What did he want to talk to you about?”
“Jess.”
“What did you tell him?”
Jacob draws his knees up to his chest. “If you build it, he will come.”
My brother may not communicate the way the rest of us do, but after all this time, I’ve learned to read him loud and clear. When he doesn’t feel like talking, he hides behind someone else’s words.
I sit beside him, just staring at the wall while he reads. I want to tell him that I saw Jess alive on Tuesday. I want to ask him if he did as well, and if that’s part of the reason he doesn’t want to talk to the police, either.
I wonder if he’s got something to hide, too.
For the first time in my life, Jacob and I just might have something in common.
It all starts with a mouse.
After our weekly Saturday shopping excursion (thank goodness, the Free Sample Lady had been replaced temporarily by a sullen teenager handing out vegetarian cocktail wieners at the door of the grocery store), I leave Jacob sitting at the kitchen table with the remainders of his lunch while I do a cursory cleaning of his room. He forgets to bring glasses and bowls of cereal downstairs to the kitchen, and if I don’t play middleman, we wind up with thriving colonies of mold that have bonded to my dishes like concrete. I pick up a bevy of mugs from his desk and spot the tiny face of a field mouse struggling to survive this winter by taking up residence behind Jacob’s computer.
I am embarrassed to admit I have a very typical female reaction and go completely ballistic. Unfortunately, I am holding a half-full glass of chocolate soy milk at the time, and most of it spills over Jacob’s comforter.
Well, it has to be washed. Although it’s the weekend, and that’s problematic. Jacob doesn’t like seeing his bed stripped; it has to be made at all times unless he happens to be in it. Usually I wash his sheets while he’s at school. Sighing, I pull fresh sheets out of the linen closet and tug the winter comforter off his bed. He can make do for a night with his summertime quilt, an old postage-stamp design in all the rainbow colors-ROYGBIV-in correct order, which my mother sewed for him before she died.
The summer quilt is kept in a black trash bag on the upper shelf of his closet. I pull it down and shake out the blanket inside.
A backpack rolled into its center tumbles to the floor.
It’s clearly not one that belongs to the boys. Flesh-colored with red and black stripes, it seems to be trying to be a Burberry knockoff, but the stripes are too wide and the colors too bright. There is still a Marshalls’ tag on the strap, with the price ripped off.
Inside is a toothbrush, a satin blouse, a pair of shorts, and a yellow T-shirt. The blouse and shorts are both plus-size. The T-shirt is much smaller and says SPECIAL OLYMPICS on the front and staff on the back.
At the very bottom of the backpack is a notecard still inside its torn envelope. There’s a picture of a snowy landscape, and the inside reads, in spidery handwriting: Merry Christmas Jess, Love Aunt Ruth.
“My God,” I murmur. “What did you do?” I close my eyes for a moment, and then I bellow Jacob’s name. He comes running into his room, stopping abruptly when he sees me holding the backpack in my arms.
“Oh,” he says.
He sounds as if I’ve caught him in a white lie: Jacob, did you wash your hands before dinner?
Yes, Mom.
Then how come the bar of soap’s still dry?
Oh.
But this isn’t a white lie. This is a girl who’s missing. A girl who could be dead by now. A girl whose backpack and clothes my son inexplicably has.
Jacob starts to flee downstairs, but I grab his arm to stop him. “Where did this come from?”
“A box at Jess’s place,” he grinds out, shutting his eyes tight until I let go.
“Tell me why you have this. Because a lot of people are searching for Jess, and this does not look good.”
His hand starts twitching at his side. “I told you I went to her house Tuesday, like I was supposed to. And things weren’t right.”
“What do you mean?”
“There were stools knocked over in the kitchen, and papers all over the floor, and all the CDs were thrown on the carpet. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right…”
“Jacob,” I say. “Focus. How did you get this backpack? Does Jess know you have it?”
There are tears in his eyes. “No. She was already gone.” He starts to walk in a small circle, his hand still flapping. “I went in, and the mess… and I was scared. I didn’t know what happened. I called out her name and she wouldn’t answer and I saw the backpack and the other things and I took them.” His voice is a roller coaster, reeling off-track. “Houston, we have a problem.”
“It’s okay,” I say, wrapping my arms around him and holding him with the deepest pressure, the way a potter would center the clay on her wheel.
But it isn’t okay. It won’t be, until Jacob gives Detective Matson this new information.
I am not in a good mood.
It’s Saturday, and although I am supposed to have Sasha for the weekend, I had to cancel as soon as it became apparent that we had an ongoing investigation that demanded my full resources. Basically, I’m going to eat, sleep, and breathe Jess Ogilvy until I find her, dead or alive. Not that that seemed to sway my ex, who made sure to give me a fifteen-minute tongue-lashing about parental responsibility and how on earth was she supposed to carry on with her life when my emergencies kept interrupting? It wasn’t worth pointing out that this was not my emergency, technically, or that the disappearance of a young woman might take precedence over rescheduling a date night with her new spouse, Mr. Coffee. I tell myself that missing one weekend with Sasha is worth it if I can make sure that Claude Ogilvy gets to have another weekend with his daughter.
En route to Jess’s home, where a team of CSIs is entrenched, I get a call from the local FBI field agent, who has been trying to ping the girl’s cell phone. “You’re not getting a signal,” I repeat. “So what does that mean?”
“Several things,” the agent explains. “The GPS locator only works when the phone’s active. So it could be at the bottom of a lake right now. Or she could be alive and well and just have run out of juice.”
“Well, how am I supposed to know which of those it is?”
“Guess once you find a body, it’ll be pretty clear,” he says, and then I drive through one of Vermont’s notorious dead zones and the call is dropped.
When the phone rings again, I am still cursing out the FBI (which is good for one thing and one thing only: screwing up a perfectly sound local investigation), so you can imagine how surprised I am to hear Emma Hunt on the end of the line. I had left her my card yesterday, just in case. “I was hoping you might be able to come back to my house,” she says. “Jacob has something he needs to tell you.”
I have a team of investigators waiting for me on-site. I have a surly boyfriend who might be a murderer and a state senator breathing down my boss’s neck, demanding my job if I don’t find his missing kid. But I put on my flashing blues and do an illegal U-turn. “Give me ten minutes,” I tell her.
I’m in a slightly better mood now.
I have, fortunately, three whole hours before CrimeBusters airs. We are sitting in the living room-Emma and Jacob on one couch, me on a side chair. “Tell the detective everything you told me, Jacob,” Emma says.
His eyes roll upward, as if he is reading something printed on the ceiling. “I went to her house that day, like I was supposed to. Things weren’t right. There were stools knocked over in the kitchen, and papers all over the floor, and all the CDs were thrown on the carpet. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t right.” His voice seems almost computerized, it’s that mechanical. “She was already gone. I went in, and the mess… and I was scared. I didn’t know what happened. I called out her name and she wouldn’t answer and I saw the backpack and the other things and I took them. Houston, we have a problem.” He nods, satisfied. “That’s it.”
“Why did you lie to me about going to Jess’s?” I ask.
“I didn’t lie,” he says. “I told you I didn’t have my session with her.”
“You didn’t tell me about the backpack, either,” I point out. It sits between us, on a coffee table.
Jacob nods. “You didn’t ask.”
Wiseass, I think, just as Emma jumps in. “A kid with Asperger’s, like Jacob, is going to be painfully literal,” she says.
“So if I question him directly, he’ll answer directly?”
“He,” Jacob interjects testily, “is sitting within earshot.”
That makes me grin. “Sorry,” I say, addressing him. “How did you get into Jess’s house?”
“She used to leave her dorm room open for me, and when I got to her house, that door was left open, too. So I went in to wait.”
“What did you see when you went inside?”
“The kitchen was a mess. Stools were knocked over; and the mail was all over the floor.”
“How about Jess? Was she there?”
“No. I called her name, and she didn’t answer.”
“What did you do?”
He shrugs. “I cleaned up.”
I sink back into the cushions of the chair. “You… cleaned up.”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
My mind is racing through all the tampered evidence sacrificed to Jacob Hunt’s obsessive-compulsive tendencies. “You know all about preserving evidence at crime scenes,” I say. “What on earth would make you destroy it?”
Just like that, Emma bristles. “My son’s doing you a favor by speaking with you, Detective. We didn’t have to call and give you this information.”
I tamp down my frustration. “So you cleaned up the mess you saw downstairs?”
“Right,” Jacob says. “I picked up the stools and I set the mail back onto the kitchen counter. And I put all the CDs that had been knocked over in alphabetical order.”
“Alphabetical order,” I repeat, remembering Mark Maguire’s call, and my theory about an anal-retentive kidnapper. “You’re kidding me.”
“That’s what his room’s like,” Emma says. “Jacob’s a big fan of everything being in its right place. For him, it’s the spatial equivalent of knowing what’s coming next.”
“So when did you take the backpack?”
“After I cleaned up.”
The backpack still has its tags on, just like Maguire said. “Would you mind if I hang on to it, for the case?”
Suddenly, Jacob lights up. “You have to take it. You’re going to need to run DNA tests on the straps and you can do an AP on the underwear inside. It might be worth spraying the whole thing with Luminol, to be honest. And you can probably get prints off the card inside with ninhydrin, but you’ll want to compare them against my mother’s since she handled the card when she first found the backpack. Which reminds me, you can look through it now if you want. I have latex gloves upstairs in my room. You don’t have a latex allergy, do you?” He is halfway out of the room when he turns back. “We have a grocery bag somewhere, don’t we? That way Detective Matson can carry this back to the lab.”
He runs upstairs, and I turn to Emma. “Is he always like that?”
“And then some.” She looks up at me. “Is anything Jacob said helpful?”
“It’s all food for thought,” I say.
“Everything changes if there are signs of a struggle,” she points out.
I raise a brow. “You’re a closet CSI, too?”
“No, in spite of Jacob’s best efforts to teach me.” She glances out the window for a moment. “I’ve been thinking about Jess’s mother,” she says. “The last time she talked to her daughter, was it about stupid things, you know? Did they have a fight about how she never called, or how she had forgotten to send a thank-you card to her aunt?” She faces me. “I used to say I love you every time I tucked my boys in at night. But now, they go to bed after I do.”
“My dad used to say that living with regrets was like driving a car that only moved in reverse.” I smile faintly. “He had a stroke a few years ago. Before that, I used to screen his calls because I didn’t have time to talk about whether the Sox would make it into the playoffs. But afterward, I started to call him. Every time, I’d finish by saying I loved him. We both knew why; and it didn’t sit right after all the time I hadn’t said it. It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon. He died eight months ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
I laugh tightly. “And I don’t know why the hell I’m telling you this.”
At that moment, Jacob reappears, clutching a pair of latex gloves. I snap them on and carefully lift the backpack just as my cell rings. “Matson,” I say.
It’s one of the lieutenants in the department, asking how much longer I’m going to be.
“I have to run.” I lift the grocery bag into my arms.
Jacob ducks his head. “I’d be interested in hearing the test results, naturally.”
“Naturally,” I reply, although I have no intent of sharing them. “So what’s on CrimeBusters today?”
“Episode sixty-seven. The one where a mutilated woman is found in a shopping cart outside a box store.”
“I remember that one. Keep an eye on-”
“-the store manager,” Jacob finishes. “I’ve seen it already, too.”
He walks me to the door, his mother trailing behind. “Thanks, Jacob. And Emma?” I wait until she glances up. “Say it when you wake them up in the morning, instead.”
When I reach Jess Ogilvy’s place, the two CSIs who have been processing the house are standing outside in the freezing cold, staring at a cut window screen.
“No prints?” I say, my breath fogging in the cold.
But I already know the answer. So would Jacob, for that matter. The chances of prints being preserved in temperatures as low as these are pretty slim.
“No,” the first investigator says. Marcy’s a bombshell with a knockout figure, a 155 IQ, and a girlfriend who could probably knock my teeth out. “But we did find the window jimmied to break the lock, too, and a screwdriver in the bushes.”
“Nice. So the question is, was this a B and E gone bad? Or was the screen cut to make us think that?”
Basil, the second investigator, shakes his head. “Nothing inside screams breaking and entering.”
“Yeah, well, that’s not necessarily true. I just interviewed a witness who says otherwise and who, um, cleaned up.”
Marcy looks at Basil. “So he’s a suspect, not a witness.”
“No. He’s an autistic kid. Long story.” I look at the edge of the screen. “What kind of knife was used?”
“Probably one from the kitchen. We’ve got a bunch to take back to the lab to see if any of them have traces of metal on the blade.”
“You get any prints inside?”
“Yeah, in the bathroom and off the computer, plus a few partials around the kitchen.”
But in this case, Mark Maguire’s prints won’t raise a red flag; he’s admitted to living here part-time with Jess.
“We also got a partial boot print,” Basil says. “The silver lining to it being crap weather for prints on the sill is that it’s perfect for footwear impressions.” Underneath the overhang of the gutter I can see the red splotch of spray wax he’s used to make a cast. He’s lucky to have found a protected ledge; there’s been a dusting of fresh snow since Tuesday. It’s the heel, and there’s a star in the center, surrounded by what look like the spokes of a compass. Once Basil photographs it, we can enter it into a database to see what kind of boot it is.
The sound of a car driving down the street is punctuated by the slam of a door. Then footsteps approach, crunching on the snow. “If that’s the press,” I say to Marcy, “shoot first.”
But it’s not the press. It’s Mark Maguire, looking like he hasn’t slept since I last saw him. “It’s about fucking time you got around to looking for my girlfriend,” he shouts, and even from a few feet away, the fumes of alcohol on his breath reach me.
“Mr. Maguire,” I say, moving slowly toward him. “You happen to know if this screen’s always been cut?”
I watch him carefully to see his reaction. But the truth is, I can amass all the evidence I want against Mark Maguire and I still have nothing to arrest him for unless a body is recovered.
He squints at the window, but the sun is in his eyes, as well as the brilliant reflection of snow on the ground. As he moves a little closer, Basil steps behind him and shoots a jet of spray wax on the boot print he left behind.
Even from this far away I can make out the star, and the spokes of a compass.
“Mr. Maguire,” I say, “we’re going to have to take your boots.”
The first time I saw a dead person was at my grandfather’s funeral.
It was after the service, where the minister had read aloud from the Bible, even though my grandfather did not routinely go to church or consider himself religious. Strangers got up and talked about my grandfather, calling him Joseph and telling stories about parts of his life that were news to me: his service during the Korean War, his childhood on the Lower East Side, his courtship of my grandmother at a high school carnival kissing booth. All of their words landed on me like hornets, and I couldn’t make them go away until I could see the grandfather I knew and remembered, instead of this impostor they were all discussing.
My mother was not crying so much as dissolving; that is the one way I can describe the fact that tears had become so normal for her it looked strange to see her face smooth and dry.
It should be noted that I do not always understand body language. That’s quite normal, for someone with Asperger’s. It’s pointless to expect me to look at someone and know how she is feeling simply because her smile is too tight and she is hunched over and hugging her arms to herself, just as it would be pointless to expect a deaf person to hear a voice. Which means that when I asked to have my grandfather’s coffin opened, I shouldn’t be blamed for not realizing it would upset my mother even more.
I just wanted to see if the body inside was still my grandfather, or maybe the man all those speakers had known, or something entirely different. I am skeptical about lights and tunnels and afterlives, and this seemed the most logical way to test my theories.
Here is what I learned: Dead isn’t angels or ghosts. It’s a physical state of breakdown, a change in all those carbon atoms that create the temporary house of a body so that they can return to their most elemental stage.
I don’t really see why that freaks people out, since it’s the most natural cycle in the world.
The body in the coffin still looked like my grandfather. When I touched his cheek, though, with its crosshatched wrinkles, the skin no longer felt like human skin. It was cold, and slightly firm, like pudding that’s been left too long in the refrigerator and has developed a virtual hide as a surface crust.
I may not understand emotion, but I can feel guilt about not understanding it. So when I finally cornered my mother, hours after she ran sobbing from the sight of me poking The-Thing-That-Used-to-Be-My-Grandfather’s cheek, I tried to explain why she shouldn’t be crying. “He’s not Grandpa,” I told her. “I checked.”
Remarkably, this did not make her feel better at all. “That doesn’t mean I miss him any less,” my mother said.
Pure logic suggests that if the entity in the coffin is not fundamentally the person you used to know, you cannot miss him. Because that’s not a loss; that’s a change.
My mother had shaken her head. “Here’s what I miss, Jacob. I miss the fact that I won’t get to ever hear his voice again. And that I can’t talk to him anymore.”
This wasn’t really true. We had Grandpa’s voice immortalized on old family videos that I sometimes liked to watch when I couldn’t sleep at night. And it wasn’t that she couldn’t talk to him that was hard for her to accept; it was that he could no longer talk back.
My mother had sighed. “You’ll get it, one day. I hope.”
I would like to be able to tell her that, yes, now I get it. When someone dies, it feels like the hole in your gum when a tooth falls out. You can chew, you can eat, you have plenty of other teeth, but your tongue keeps going back to that empty place, where all the nerves are still a little raw.
I am headed to my meeting with Jess.
I’m late. It’s 3:00 A.M., which is really Monday, not Sunday. But there’s no other time for me to go, with my mother watching over me. And although she will probably argue that I broke a house rule, technically, I didn’t. This isn’t sneaking out to a crime scene. The crime scene is three hundred yards away from where I’m headed.
My backpack is full of necessities; my bike whispers on the pavement as I pedal fast. It’s easier not being on foot this time, not having to support more than my own weight.
Directly behind the yard of the house into which Jess had moved is a small, scraggly forest. And directly behind that is Route 115. It runs across a bridge over the culvert that siphons the runoff from the woods in the spring, when the water level is high. I noticed it last Tuesday when I took the bus from school to Jess’s new residence.
My mind is full of maps-from social flowcharts (Person is frowning → Person keeps trying to interrupt → Person takes step backward = Person wants to leave this conversation, desperately) to grids of relativity, like an interpersonal version of Google Earth. (Kid says to me, “You play baseball? What position? Left out?” and gets a big laugh from the rest of the class. Kid is one person out of 6.792 billion humans on this planet. This planet is only one-eighth of the solar system, whose sun is one of two billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. Put that way, the comment loses its importance.)
But my mind also functions geographically and topographically, so that at any given moment I can locate myself (this shower stall is on the upper level of the house at 132 Birdseye Lane, Townsend, Vermont, United States, North America, Western Hemisphere, Planet Earth). So by the time I got to Jess’s new house last Tuesday, I completely understood where it lay in relation to everywhere else I’d ever been.
Jess is just where I left her five days ago, propped against the damp stone wall.
I lean my bike against the far end of the culvert and squat down, shining a flashlight into her face.
Jess is dead.
When I touch her cheek with the backs of my knuckles, it feels like marble. That reminds me, and so I open up my backpack and pull out the blanket. It is a silly thing, I know, but so is leaving flowers on a grave, and this seems to make more sense. I tuck it around Jess’s shoulders and make sure it covers her feet.
Then I sit down beside her. I put on a pair of latex gloves and I hold Jess’s hand for a moment before taking out my notebook. In it, I begin to write down the physical evidence.
The bruises underneath her eyes.
The missing tooth.
The contusions on her upper arms, which are, of course, covered up by her sweatshirt right now.
The leathery yellow scrapes on her lower back, which are also covered by that sweatshirt.
To be honest, I’m a little disappointed. I would have expected the police to be able to read the clues I left behind. But they haven’t found Jess, and so I have to take the next step.
Her phone is still in my pocket. I have carried it everywhere with me, although I’ve only turned it on five times. Detective Matson would have subpoenaed Jess’s cell phone records by now; they’ll see the instances when I called her residence to listen to her voice on the answering machine, but they will assume it was Jess herself who made the call.
He’s probably tried to locate her by GPS, too, which nearly all phones have now and which can be accessed by the FBI using a computer program that will pinpoint an active phone within a range of a few feet. This was first piloted in emergency response programs, namely, the 911 call. As soon as dispatch picks up on the other end, they begin to track, just in case an officer or an ambulance has to be sent out.
I decide to make it easy for them. I sit down next to Jess again, so that our shoulders are touching. “You are the best friend I ever had,” I tell her. “I wish this had never happened.”
Jess, of course, does not respond. I cannot say whether she has ceased to be or if this is just her body and the thing that makes Jess Jess has gone somewhere else. It makes me think of my meltdown-of the room with no windows, no doors, the country where nobody speaks to each other, the piano with only black keys. Maybe this is why funeral dirges are always in a minor key; being on the other side of dead isn’t that different from having Asperger’s.
It would be incredible to stay and watch. There is nothing I would like more than to see the police swarm in to rescue Jess. But that would be too risky; and so I know I’ll just get on my bike and be safe and sound in my bed before the sun or my mother rises for the day.
First, though, I power up her pink Motorola. It feels like I should recite something, a tribute or a prayer. “E.T., phone home,” I finally say, and then I press 911 and place the little receiver on the stone beside her.
Through the speakers I can hear the voice of the dispatcher. What is your emergency? she says. Hello? Is anybody there?
I am halfway through the woods when I see the flashing lights in the distance on Route 115, and I smile to myself the whole rest of the way home.