House Rules by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page A

to find Sasha with her arms outstretched.
    For a long time after the divorce, Sasha couldn‘t stand to have anyone leave her. We came up with a ritual that somehow, along the way, turned into a good-luck charm. Kiss, hug, high five, I say, kneeling down and putting the motions to the words. Then we press our thumbs together. Bag of peanuts.
    Sasha leans her forehead against mine. Don‘t worry, we say in unison.
    She waves to me as Mrs. Whitbury closes the door.
    I stick a magnetic light on top of my car and drive twenty miles over the speed limit before realizing that the dead guy won‘t be getting any deader if I‘m five minutes late, and that there‘s black ice all over the roads.
    Which reminds me.
    I never turned off the hose, and by the time I get home, Sasha‘s rink might well have spread to the entirety of my back lawn.
    Dear Auntie Em, I think.
    I had to second-mortgage my house to pay my water bill. What should I do?
    Troubled in Townsend
    Dear Troubled,
    Drink less.
    I‘m still smiling when I pull up to the spot where police tape is marking a crime scene.
    Urqhart meets me as I am checking out the abandoned vehicle, a Pontiac. I brush off a bit of snow from the window and peer inside with a flashlight to see a backseat full of empty gin bottles.
    Captain. Sorry to call you in, he says.
    What have you got?
    A jogger found a body in the woods. Guy‘s half naked and there‘s blood all over him.
    I start to follow him along a marked trail. Who the hell goes jogging at night in the dead of winter?
    The victim is half dressed and frozen. His pants are pooled around his ankles. I do a quick canvass of the other officers to see what evidence they‘ve found which is minimal.
    Except for all the blood on the man‘s extremities, there‘s no hint of an altercation. There are footprints that match the victim‘s one remaining sneaker, and another set that apparently were made by the jogger (whose alibi already eliminated him as a suspect) but the perp either brushed his own footprints away or flew in for the kill. I crouch down and am examining the crosshatch abrasions on the victim‘s lower left palm when the chief arrives. Jesus H., he says. Suicide or homicide?
    I‘m not sure. If it‘s homicide, where are the signs of a struggle? Or the defense wounds on the hands? It‘s almost as if the skin‘s been rubbed off raw instead of scratched, and there‘s no trauma to the forearms. If it‘s suicide, why is the guy in his underwear, and how did he kill himself? The blood is on his knuckles and knees, not his wrists. The truth is, we just don‘t see this often enough in Townsend, Vermont, to make a quick judgment call.
    I don‘t know yet, I hedge. Sexual assault seems like a given, though.
    Suddenly a teenager steps out of the edge of the woods. Actually, you‘re both wrong, he says.
    Who the hell are you? the chief asks, and two of the patrolmen take a step forward to flank the boy.
    Not you again, Urqhart says. He showed up at a robbery about a month ago.
    He‘s some kind of crime scene groupie. Get lost, kid. You don‘t belong here.
    Wait, I say, vaguely remembering the teenager from that robbery scene. Right now, I‘m laying odds that this kid‘s the perp, and I don‘t want him to bolt.
    It‘s really very simple, the boy continues, staring at the body. On episode twenty-six of Season Two, the whole CrimeBusters team got hauled up to Mount Washington to investigate a naked guy who was found at the summit. No one could figure out what a naked guy was doing on top of a mountain, but it turned out to be hypothermia.
    The same thing happened to this man. He became disoriented and fell down. As his core body temperature rose, he took off his own clothes because he felt hot … but in reality, that‘s what made him freeze to death. He grins. I can‘t believe you guys didn‘t know that.
    The chief narrows his eyes. What‘s your name?
    Jacob.
    Urqhart frowns. People who freeze to death don‘t usually bleed