Plain Truth

by Jodie Picoult

  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, offering 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.”

  Bono led her to a table, where several slides were waiting. “Basically, we’re trying to identify the organism Owen found by using an immunoperoxidase stain. I cut more sections of the paraffin block of tissue, and incubated them with an antibody that will react with listeria-that’s the bacteria we’re trying to ID. Over here are our positive and negative controls: bona fide samples of listeria, courtesy of the veterinary school; and diphtheroids. And now, lady and gentleman, the moment of truth.”

  Ellie drew in her breath as Bono set a few drops of solution onto the first specimen.

  “This is horseradish peroxidase, an enzyme bound to an antibody,” Bono explained. “Theoretically, this enzyme’s only gonna go where the listeria are.”

  Ellie watched him attend to all the slides on the table. Finally, he brandished a small vial. “Iodine?” she guessed.

  “Close. It’s just a dye.” He added drops to each sample and then anchored the first slide beneath a microscope. “If that’s not listeria,” Bono murmured, “bite me.”

  Ellie looked from one man to the other. “What’s going on?”

  Owen squinted into the microscope. “You remember I told you that the necrosis in the liver was probably due to an infection? This is the bacteria that caused it.”

  Ellie peered into the scope herself, but all she could see were things that looked like tiny bits of fat rice, edged in brown.

  “The infant had listeriosis,” Owen said.

  “So he didn’t die of asphyxia?”

  “Actually, he did. But it was a chain of events. The asphyxia was due to premature delivery, which was caused by chorioamnionitis-which was caused by listeriosis. The baby contracted the infection from the mother. It’s fatal nearly thirty percent of the time in unborn fetuses, but can go undetected in the mothers.”

  “Death by natural causes, then.”

  “Correct.”

  Ellie grinned. “Owen, that’s fabulous. That’s just the sort of information I was hoping for. And where did the mother pick up the infection?”

  Owen looked at Bono. “This is the part that you’re not going to like, Ellie. Listeriosis isn’t like strep throat-you don’t go around contracting it on a daily basis. The odds of infection are roughly one in twenty thousand pregnant women. Maternal infection usually occurs after consumption of contaminated food, and with today’s technology, the specific contaminants are pretty well negated by the time the food’s available for consumption.”

  Ellie crossed her arms, impatien
t. “Food like what?”

  The pathologist hunched his shoulders. “What’s the chance that your client drank unpasteurized milk while she was pregnant?”

  TWELVE

  Ellie

  The little library at the superior court was directly above Judge Ledbetter’s chambers. Although I was supposed to be researching recent case law concerning judgments on murders of children under the age of five, I had spent considerably more time these past two hours staring at the warped wooden floor, as if I might will through the slats a softness of heart.

  “I can hear you thinking out loud,” said a deep voice, and I turned in my seat to find George Callahan standing behind me. He pulled up a chair and straddled it. “You’re sending vibes to Phil, right?”

  I searched his face for signs of rivalry, but he only looked sympathetic. “Just some light voodoo.”

  “Yeah, I do it too. Fifty percent of the time, it even works.” George smiled, and, relaxing, I smiled back. “I’ve been looking for you. I’ve got to tell you-I don’t feel like a million bucks sending some little Amish girl to jail for life, Ellie. But murder’s murder, and I’ve been trying to come up with a solution that might work for all of us.”

  “What’s your offer?”

  “You know she’s looking at life, here. I can give you ten years if she pleads guilty to manslaughter. Look, with good behavior, she’ll be out in five or six years.”

  “She won’t survive in prison for five or six years, George,” I said quietly.

  He looked down at his clasped hands. “She’s got a better chance of making it through five years than fifty.”

  I stared, hard, at the floor above Judge Ledbetter’s chambers. “I’ll let you know.”

  Ethically, I had to bring a plea offered by the prosecution to my client. I’d been in this position before, where I had to relate an offer that I didn’t think was in our best interests, but this time I was nervous about my client’s response. Usually, I could convince someone that taking our chances at trial would be in his or her best interests, but Katie was a whole different story. She’d been brought up to believe that you gave an apology and then accepted whatever punishment was meted out. George’s plea would allow Katie to bring this fiasco to an end, in a way that made perfect sense to her.