by Jodi Picoult
“Then you knew she got pregnant when—”
“I didn’t know. I suspected as much, after talking to you and the prosecution’s investigator.” He shook his head. “I didn’t mean for Katie to take me literally. I just wanted her to see it my way.”
“Well, you succeeded,” Ellie answered flatly. “She’s modeling herself after her honest brother now. She wants to confess on the witness stand, and pretend the jury’s her congregation.”
“But I told her the insanity defense was a good one!”
“Apparently, that part of the conversation didn’t leave quite as strong an impression.” Ellie steepled her hands in front of her. “I need to know where to find Adam Sinclair.”
“I haven’t been in touch with him—even my rent checks go to a property management agency. Sinclair’s been out of the country since last October,” Jacob said. “And he hasn’t been in contact with Katie to even know about the pregnancy.”
“If you haven’t been in touch with him, then how do you know he’s still gone? Or that Katie hasn’t been writing to him all this time?”
Without a word, Jacob got off the chair and walked upstairs. He returned a minute later holding a stack of letters, bound with a rubber band. “They come to my place every two weeks, like clockwork,” he said. “To Katie, care of me. The return address hasn’t changed. The postmark’s from Scotland. And I know Katie hasn’t been writing to him because I never gave her a single one of these.”
Torn between professional curiosity and personal affront for Katie, Ellie bristled. “This is a federal offense, you know.”
“Great. You can defend me after you’re through with Katie.” Jacob pushed his hands through his hair and sat down again. “I didn’t do it to be a jerk. I was trying, actually, to be a hero. I just didn’t want Katie to have to face what I did when I decided to go English—turning her back on our folks and finding her way in a place that’s so big and unfamiliar it can keep you awake all night. I didn’t know Katie was pregnant, but even I could see that she was attracted to Adam—she hung around him like a puppy—and I knew that if the feeling was fueled, eventually Katie was going to have to make a choice between two worlds. I thought that if there was a clean break when he left, she’d forget about him, and everything would work out for the best.”
“Does your sister know you have these letters?”
Jacob shook his head. “I was going to tell her last night. But she was so upset already, about the trial coming up so fast, that it seemed like one extra heartache.” He grimaced, flexed his hands on the edge of the table. “I suppose I should give them to her today.”
Ellie stared at the neat, block type that formed the letters of Katie’s name. At the thin-skinned blue airmail stationery, folded and stamped and sealed. “Not necessarily,” she said.
* * *
Technically, Ellie should have dragged Katie into Philadelphia with her, but at this point she’d managed to screw up the legal process so much that bending the requirements for Katie’s bail couldn’t possibly get her into any greater trouble. She didn’t even know why she was driving toward Philly, actually, until she pulled into the parking lot of the medical complex where Coop’s office was located.
The address was familiar, but Ellie had never been there before. She found herself standing in front of the directory, touching her finger to the brass plate stamped with Coop’s name. In his office, when a pretty young secretary asked to help her, a stab of jealousy took Ellie’s breath away. “He’s with a patient,” the woman said. “Would you care to wait?”
“Please.” Ellie took a seat and began to leaf through a magazine that was six months old, without seeing a single page.
After a few minutes there was a buzz on the secretary’s intercom, a muted conversation, and then Coop opened the door to the inner sanctum. “Hi,” he said, his eyes dancing. “I hear this is an emergency.”
“It is,” Ellie replied, feeling better than she had since Katie had turned the world upside down. She followed Coop in and let him close the door. “I need urgent medical attention.”
He took her into his arms. “Well, you know, I’m a psychiatrist. I treat the mind.”
“You treat all of me,” Ellie said. “Don’t sell yourself short.”
When Coop kissed her, Ellie clung to him, rubbing her cheek against the crisp flat of his shirt. He eased her onto his lap in one of the overstuffed armchairs.
“Now, what would Dr. Freud have to say about this?” she murmured.
Coop shifted, his erection strong beneath her legs. “That a cigar isn’t always a cigar.” He groaned, then tumbled her into the chair as he stood up to pace. “I’ve only got a ten-minute window before the next patient arrives, and I’d rather not tempt fate.” He stuffed his hands in his pockets. “To what do I owe this visit?”
“I was hoping for a freebie,” Ellie confessed.
“Well, I’d be happy to take you up on that later—”
“I meant a clinical consult, Coop. My head’s a mess.” She buried her face in her hands. “I’m no longer using an insanity defense for Katie.”
“How come?”
“Because it goes against her code of morality,” Ellie said sarcastically. “I’m just so glad I get to defend the first alleged murderer in history with an unshakable sense of ethics.” She got up and walked to the window. “Katie told me who the baby’s father was—a professor friend of Jacob’s who never knew about the pregnancy. And now that she’s turned over this new leaf of honesty, she won’t let me get up there and say she dissociated and killed the baby, since she swears it’s not the truth.”
Coop whistled. “You couldn’t convince her—”
“I couldn’t say anything. I’m not dealing with a client who understands the way courts operate. Katie believes with all her heart that she can say her piece and she’ll be pardoned. Why shouldn’t she? That’s the way it works in her church.”
“Let’s assume that it’s the truth, that she didn’t kill the baby,” Coop said.
“Well, there are some other unalienable truths, too. Like the fact that the baby was born alive, and that it somehow was found dead and hidden.”
“Okay. So what does that leave you with?”
Ellie sighed. “Someone else killed it—which, as we’ve already discussed, is virtually impossible to use as a defense.”
“Or else the baby died on its own.”
“And walked, postpartum, to the tack room to bury itself under a stack of blankets?”
Coop smiled faintly. “If Katie wanted that baby, and woke up to find it dead, maybe that was the point when she lost touch with reality. Maybe she got rid of the corpse in a dissociative state, and can’t remember now.”
“Concealment of death is still a crime, Coop.”
“But not of nearly the same proportion,” he pointed out. “There’s a pathos to trying to keep from consciously admitting a loved one’s death that doesn’t come into play if you also caused that death.” He shrugged. “I’m no lawyer, El, but it looks to me like you’ve got one thing to go with—that the baby died on its own, and that was what Katie’s mind tried to cover up. And you’ve got to have some expert you can pull out of your hat who’ll twist the autopsy report, right? I mean, she gave birth early. What premature infant is going to make it without an incubator and lights and the services of a neonatal ICU?”
Ellie tried to turn that strategy over in her mind, but her thoughts kept snagging on something that stuck out as sharp and as stubborn as a splinter. It had been accepted, from the autopsy report forward, that Katie had delivered at thirty-two weeks. And no one—Ellie included—had bothered to question that. “How come?” she asked now.
“How come what?”
“How come Katie, a healthy eighteen-year-old girl in better physical shape than most women her age, went into premature labor?”
* * *
Dr. Owen Zeigler looked up as Ellie distracted him for the tenth time with a tremendously loud crunch
of pork rinds. “If you knew what those did to your body, you wouldn’t eat them,” he said.
“If you knew when the last time I ate was, you wouldn’t bother me.” Ellie watched him hunch over the autopsy report again. “So?”
“So. In and of itself prematurity isn’t an issue. Preterm labor is a fairly frequent occurrence, there’s no good treatment for it, and OBs don’t know what causes it most of the time. In your client’s case, however, the preterm labor was most likely caused by the chorioamnionitis.” Ellie stared at him blankly. “That’s a pathological diagnosis, not a bacteriological one. It basically means that there was marked acute inflammation of the amniotic membranes and villi.”
“Then what caused the chorioamnionitis? What does the ME say?”
“He doesn’t. He implies that the fetal tissues and the placenta were contaminated, so the cause wasn’t isolated and identified.”
“What usually causes chorioamnionitis?”
“Sexual intercourse,” Owen said. “Most of the infectious agents that cause it are bacteria living in the vagina on a regular basis. Put two and two together—” He shrugged.
“What if intercourse wasn’t a viable option?”
“Then an infectious agent entering by another route—like the mother’s bloodstream or a urinary tract infection—would have caused it. But is there evidence to support that?” Owen tapped a page of the autopsy. “This keeps catching my eye,” he admitted. “The liver findings were overlooked. There’s necrosis—cell death—but no evidence of inflammatory response.”
“Translation for those of us who don’t speak pathologese?”
“The ME thought that the liver necrosis was based on asphyxia—a lack of oxygen—his assumed cause of death. But it’s not—those lesions just don’t make sense; they point to something other than asphyxia. Sometimes you see hemorrhagic necrosis due to anoxia, but pure necrosis is unusual.”
“So where do you see that?”
“With congenital heart abnormalities, which this baby didn’t have—or with an infection. Necrosis might occur several hours before the body can mount an inflammatory response to an infection that a pathologist is able to see—and it’s possible the baby died before that happened. I’ll get the tissue blocks from the ME and do a Gram’s stain to see what I come up with.”
Ellie’s hand stopped midway to her mouth, the pork rind forgotten. “Are you saying it’s possible that the baby died of this mystery infection, and not asphyxia?”
“Yeah,” the pathologist said. “I’ll let you know.”
* * *
That night, there was going to be a frost. Sarah had heard from Rachel Yoder, who’d heard from Alma Beiler, whose rheumatoid arthritis swelled her knees to the size of melons every year before the first drop of temperature. Katie and Ellie were sent out to the garden to pick the remaining vegetables—tomatoes and squash and carrots as thick as a fist. Katie gathered the food in her apron; Ellie had taken a basket from inside the house. Ellie peered under the broad-backed leaves of the zucchini plant, looking for strays that had made it this far into the harvest season. “When I was little,” she mused, “I used to think that babies came from vegetable patches like this.”
Katie smiled. “I used to think babies came from getting poked with needles.”
“Vaccines?”
“Mmm-hmm. That’s how the cows got pregnant; I’d seen it done.” Ellie had, too; artificial insemination was the safest way to breed the milking herd. Katie laughed out loud. “Boy, did I kick up a fuss when my Mam took me to get a measles shot.”
Ellie chuckled, then sawed a squash off a vine with a knife. “When I found out for real about babies, I didn’t believe it. Logistically, it didn’t seem like it would work.”
“I don’t think so much about where babies come from now,” Katie murmured. “I wonder about where they go.”
Rocking back on her heels, Ellie gingerly set down the knife. “You’re not going to make another confession right now, are you?”
Smiling sadly, Katie shook her head. “No. Your defense strategy is safe.”
“What defense strategy?” Ellie muttered, and at Katie’s panicked glance she scrambled to cover her own words. “I’m sorry. I just don’t quite know what I’m going to do with you now.” Ellie sank down between the rows of bean plants, picked bare weeks ago. “If I had never walked into that courtroom—if I had let you try to defend yourself the way you wanted—you would have been declared incompetent to stand trial. You would have been acquitted, most likely, with the promise of psychiatric care.”
“I’m not incompetent, and you know it,” Katie said stubbornly.
“Yes, and you’re not insane. We’ve already had this conversation.”
“I’m also honest.”
“Amish?” Ellie said, hearing incorrectly. “I think the jury will get that, given your clothes.”
“I said honest. But I’m Amish, too.”
Ellie yanked at the curly head of a carrot. “They might as well be synonyms.” She tugged again, and as the root came flying out of the ground, she suddenly realized what she’d said. “My God, Katie, you’re Amish.”
Katie blinked at her. “If it’s taken you this many months to notice, I don’t—”
“That’s the defense.” A grin spread over Ellie’s face. “Do Amish boys go to war?”
“No. They’re conscientious objectors.”
“How come?”
“Because it isn’t our way to be violent,” Katie replied.
“Exactly. The Amish live according to the literal teachings of Christ. That means turning the other cheek just like Jesus—not just on Sundays, but every single minute of the day.”
Puzzled, Katie said, “I don’t understand.”
“Neither will the jury, but they will by the time I’m finished,” Ellie said. “You know why you’re the first Amish murder suspect in East Paradise, Katie? Because—quite simply—if you’re Amish, you don’t commit murder.”
* * *
Dr. Owen Zeigler liked Ellie Hathaway. He had worked with her once before, on a case involving an abusive husband who’d beaten his pregnant wife and caused her to lose her twenty-four-week fetus. He liked her no-nonsense style, her boy’s haircut, and the way her legs seemed to reach all the way to her neck—something anatomically impossible, but stimulating all the same. He had no idea who or what her client was this time around, but the way things were shaping up, Ellie Hathaway was going to get her reasonable doubt—however slim it might be.
In the owl-eye of his microscope, Owen scrutinized the results of the Gram’s stain. There were clusters of dark blue Gram-positive short rods, cocco-bacillary in shape. According to the culture results of the autopsy, these had been identified as diphtheroids—basic contaminants. But there were a hell of a lot of them, making Owen wonder if they were truly diphtheroids after all.
Ellie, actually, had planted the seed of doubt. What if those Gram-positive rods were signs of an infectious agent? A cocco-bacillary organism could easily be misinterpreted as a rod-shaped diphtheroid, especially since the microbiologist who’d performed the test hadn’t done the Gram stain.
He slipped the slide from the scope, cradled it in his palm, and walked down the hospital hall to the lab where Bono Gerhardt worked. Owen found the microbiologist huddled over a catalog of reagents. “You picking out your spring bulbs?”
The microbiologist laughed. “Yeah. I can’t decide between Holland tulips, herpes simplex virus, or cytokeratin.” He nodded at the slide Owen had brought. “What’s that?”
“I’m thinking either Group B beta-hemolytic strep or listeria,” Owen said. “But I was hoping you might be able to tell me for sure.”
* * *
Shortly before ten o’clock, the members of the Fisher family would put down whatever they were doing and gravitate, as if pulled by a magnet, to the center of the living room. Elam would say a short German prayer, and then the others would all bow their heads in silence for a moment, offerin
g up their own tribute to God. Ellie had watched it for months now, always recalling that first suspicious conversation she’d had with Sarah about her own faith. The discomfort she’d initially felt had given way to curiosity, and then to indifference—she’d finish reading whatever article she’d been skimming in the Reader’s Digest or one of her own law books, and then go up to bed when the others rose.
Tonight, she and Sarah and Katie had been playing Scrabble. It had gotten almost giddy, with Katie insisting that phonetically spelled words of Dietsch be allowed to count. When the cuckoo clock chimed ten times, Katie dumped her tray of letters into the box, followed by her mother. Aaron, who’d been in the barn, came inside on the wings of a frigid swirl of air. He hung up his coat and went to kneel beside his wife.
But that night, when Elam said the Lord’s Prayer, he recited it in English. Surprised by the overture—the Amish prayed in German, or at the very least, Dietsch—Ellie found her lips moving along. Sarah, whispering too, lifted her head. She looked at Ellie, then shifted the slightest bit to her right, to make a space.
How long had it been since Ellie had prayed, really prayed, not a last-minute send-up as the jury was filing in or when the highway patrolman had caught her doing eighty-five miles per hour? What did she have to lose? Without responding to her own questions, Ellie slipped from her chair and knelt beside Sarah as if she belonged, as if her thoughts and hopes might be answered.
* * *
“Bono Gerhardt,” the man said, sticking out his hand. “Charmed.”
Ellie smiled at the microbiologist Owen Zeigler had introduced her to. The man was only about five foot four and wore a surgical scrub cap on his head, printed with zebras and monkeys. A Guatemalan worry doll was pinned to his lapel. Around his neck were headphones, which snaked into a Sony Discman in his right pocket. “You missed the incubation,” he said, “but I’ll forgive you for coming in after the first act.”
