I ignore her and approach Jacob. “You passed the competency test.”

“I did?” he says, beaming. “Did I do really well?”

Emma steps forward. “You did great, baby.”

“We need to start thinking about your defense,” I say.

Jacob puts down the bowl of blueberries. “I have some cool ideas. There was this time on CrimeBusters when-”

“This isn’t a TV show, Jacob,” I say. “This is really important. This is your life.”

He sits down at the kitchen table and lifts Thor onto his lap. “Did you know that the guy who invented Velcro got the idea from taking his dog for a walk in the Alps? When the burrs caught on its fur, he thought about how something with hooks could catch onto anything with a loop.”

I sit down across from him. “Do you know what an affirmative defense is?”

He nods and spits back the legal definition: “It’s a reason for finding the defendant not guilty, such as self-defense, defense of another person, or not guilty by reason of insanity. The defendant has to raise it a certain amount of time before a trial, usually in writing.”

“What I’ve been thinking, Jacob, is that your best odds at this trial involve an affirmative defense.”

His face lights up. “Right! Of course! Defense of another person-”

“Who were you defending?” I interrupt.

Jacob looks down at Thor and plays with the tags on his collar. “Surely you can’t be serious,” he says. “I am serious… and don’t call me Shirley.”

“Do you really think you’re in a position to be making jokes right now?”

“It’s from Airplane!” Jacob says.

“Well, it’s not funny. The State has a really good case against you, Jacob, which is why I think we need to use an insanity defense.”

Jacob’s head snaps up. “I’m not crazy!”

“That’s not what it means.”

“I know what it means,” he says. “It means that a person isn’t responsible for criminal conduct if, as a result of mental disease or defect, he lacked the capacity to understand right from wrong at the moment the act was committed.” He stands up, knocking Thor to the floor. “I don’t have a mental disease or defect. I have a quirk. Right, Mom?”

I glance at Emma. “You have got to be kidding me.”

She hikes her chin up a notch. “We’ve always said that Asperger’s isn’t a disability… just a different ability.”

“Great,” I say. “Well, Jacob, either I run the insanity defense or you can take that quirk of yours right back to prison.”

“No, actually, in the State of Vermont, you can’t run an insanity defense if I tell you that you can’t,” Jacob answers. “It’s all in the Vermont Supreme Court case of State versus Bean, one-seventy-one Vermont Reports two-ninety, seven-sixty-two Atlantic Reporter second twelve fifty-nine, two thousand.”

“Jesus Christ, you know that case?”

“Don’t you?” He raises his brows. “Why can’t you just tell them the truth?”

“Fine, Jacob. What’s the truth?”

No sooner have I asked than I realize my mistake. Any lawyer knows to be careful what you ask when representing a criminal defendant, since anything he says might incriminate himself. If he gets on the stand later and denies what he told you earlier, you’re left in a quandary and have to either withdraw from representation (which would prejudice him) or tell the court that he’s not being truthful (which would prejudice him even more). Instead of asking what happened, you dance around the truth and the facts. You ask the client how he’d answer certain questions.

Or in other words, I just royally screwed up. Now that I’ve asked him for the truth, I can’t let him get up on the stand and incriminate himself.

So I stop him from answering.

“Wait, I don’t want to hear it,” I say.

“What do you mean you don’t want to hear it! You’re supposed to be my lawyer!”

“The reason we can’t tell the court the truth is that facts speak a lot louder in a courtroom.”

“You can’t handle the truth,” Jacob yells. “I’m not guilty. And I’m definitely not insane!”

I scoop up Thor and stalk into the mudroom, Emma following. “He’s right,” she says. “Why do you have to plead insanity? If Jacob’s not guilty, shouldn’t the judge get to hear that?”

I spin around so quickly she falls back. “I want you to think about something. Say you’re on the jury for this case, and you’ve just listened to a long list of facts that tie Jacob to the murder of Jess Ogilvy. Then you get to watch Jacob on the stand explaining his version of the truth. Which story would you believe?”

She swallows, silent, because this point (at least) she cannot argue: Emma knows very well what Jacob looks like and sounds like to other people, even when Jacob doesn’t know it himself. “Look,” I tell her, “Jacob has to accept that this insanity defense is the best chance we’ve got.”

“How are you going to convince him?”

“I’m not,” I say. “You are.”

The teachers at Townsend Regional High School all know Jacob Hunt, even if they haven’t had him in class. This is partly due to his current infamy, but I get the sense that, even before he was arrested for murder, he was the kind of kid everyone could spot in the halls-because he stuck out like a sore thumb. After interviewing staff for several hours, and hearing how Jacob used to sit by himself during lunch and how he’d move from class to class wearing bulky headphones to block out the noise (and the rude comments of classmates), there is a part of me wondering how Jacob managed to wait eighteen years to commit murder.

What I’ve learned is that Jacob twisted his schoolwork around his passion for CSI. In English class, when he had to read a biography and give an oral report, he chose Edmond Locard. In math, his independent research project involved Herb Macdonald’s angled impact of the point of origin of blood spatter.

His guidance counselor, Frances Grenville, is a thin, pale woman whose features resemble a garment that’s been washed so often its original color has faded. “Jacob would do anything to fit in,” she says, as I sit in her office, thumbing through Hunt’s file. “Quite often, that would make him the butt of jokes. In a way, he was doomed if he tried to fit in, and doomed if he didn’t.” She shifts uncomfortably. “I used to worry he’d bring a gun into school one day, you know, to get even. Like that boy over in Sterling, New Hampshire, a few years back.”

“Did Jacob ever do that? Get even, I mean.”

“Oh, no. Honestly, he’s the sweetest child. Sometimes he’d come here during free periods and do his homework in the outer office. He fixed my computer when it crashed, once, and even recovered the file I’d been working on. Most of the teachers love him.”

“And the rest?”

“Well, some are better with special needs kids than others, but you didn’t hear it from me. A student like Jacob can be challenging, to say the least. There’s some deadwood in this school, if you know what I mean, and when you get a kid like Jacob who challenges a lesson plan you’ve been too lazy to adapt for the past twenty years-and when it turns out he’s right-well, that doesn’t always sit well.” She shrugs. “But you can ask the staff. On the whole, Jacob interacted much more fluidly with them than with his peers. He wasn’t caught up in the usual high school adolescent drama-instead, he wanted to talk about politics, or scientific breakthroughs, or whether Eugene Onegin was really Pushkin’s tour de force. In many ways, having Jacob around was like talking to another teacher.” She hesitates. “No, actually, it was like talking to the kind of enlightened scholar that teachers wish they could grow up to be-before bills and car payments and orthodontist appointments get in the way.”