House Rules by Jodi Picoult Read Free Book Online Page B

all over the place
    Urqhart! the chief snaps.
    He didn‘t bleed all over the place, Jacob says. Blood spatter would show up in the snow, but instead, there‘s just transfer. Look at the wounds. They‘re abrasions on the knuckles, the knees, and the lower hands. He fell down and he scraped himself up. The blood on the snow came from him crawling around before he lost consciousness.
    I look at Jacob carefully. One major flaw with his theory, of course, is that you don‘t spontaneously start bleeding when you crawl around on the snow. If that were the case, there would be hundreds of elementary school children exsanguinating at recess during the winters in Vermont.
    There‘s something just the tiniest bit … well … off about him. His voice is too flat and high; he won‘t make eye contact. He‘s bouncing on the balls of his feet and I don‘t even think he realizes it.
    On the spot where he‘s been bouncing, the snow has melted, revealing a patch of briars. I kick at the ground beneath my boots and shake my head. That poor, drunk, dead bastard had the misfortune to fall down in a field of brambles.
    Before I can say anything else, the regional medical examiner arrives. Wayne Nussbaum went to clown college before getting his medical degree, although I haven‘t seen the guy crack a smile in the fifteen years I‘ve been on the job. Greetings, all, he says, coming into the clearing of artificial light. I hear you have a murder mystery on your hands?
    You think it could be hypothermia? I ask.
    He considers this, carefully rolling the victim forward and examining the back of his head. I‘ve never seen it firsthand … but I‘ve read about it. It certainly would fit the bill.
    Wayne glances up at me. Nice work but you didn‘t need to pull me away from the Bruins in overtime for death by natural causes.
    I glance to the spot where Jacob was standing moments before, but he‘s disappeared.
    Jacob
    I pedal home as fast as I can. I can‘t wait to transcribe my notes from the crime scene into a fresh notebook. I plan to draw pictures, using colored pencils and scaled maps. I slip into the house through the garage, and I am just taking off my sneakers when the door opens behind me again.
    Immediately, I freeze.
    It‘s Theo.
    What if he asks me what I‘ve been doing?
    I have never been a very good liar. If he asks, I‘m going to have to tell him about the scanner and the dead body and the hypothermia. And that makes me angry because right now I want to keep it all to myself instead of sharing it. I tuck my notebook into the back of my pants and pull my sweater down over it and then cross my hands behind my back to hide it.
    What, now you‘re going to spy on me? Theo says, kicking off his boots. Why don‘t you get your own life?
    It isn‘t until he‘s halfway up the stairs that I look at him and see how red his cheeks are, how his hair is windblown. I wonder where he‘s been, and if Mom knows, and then the thought is gone, replaced by the vision of the dead man‘s bare skin, blue underneath the floodlights, and the pink, stained snow all around him. I will have to remember all that, the next time I set up a crime scene. I could use food coloring in water, and spray it on the snow outside. And I‘ll draw with red Sharpie on my knuckles and my knees. Although I am not too keen on lying in the snow in my underwear, I am willing to make the sacrifice for a scenario that will totally stump my mother.
    I am still humming under my breath when I get to my room. I take off my clothes and put on my pajamas. Then I sit down at my desk and carefully cut the page out of the old, used notebook so that I don‘t have to hear the sound of paper being crumpled or torn. I take out a fresh spiral notebook and begin to sketch the crime scene.
    Go figure. On a scale of one to ten, this day‘s turned out to be an eleven.

CASE 2: IRONY 101
    Imette St. Guillen was an honors student pursuing a degree in criminal justice in New York.
    One