Plain Truth (22 page)

Coming up on my elbow, I smiled sadly. “But can she be blamed for committing murder?”

“That,” Coop said, “depends on a jury.” He tugged me upright. “I'd like to keep talking to her. Walk her through the night before the birth.”

“Oh, you don't have to do that. I mean, it's incredibly nice of you and far beyond the call of duty, but you must have more important things to do.”

“I said I'd help you, El, and I haven't exactly done a cracker-jack job yet. I'll drive out in the evenings and talk to her after leaving the office.”

“And meanwhile, your wife's sitting home eating dinner alone. Weren't you the one who told me psychiatrists are the ones who can't keep their own personal relationships together?”

Coop nodded. “Yeah. Which is probably why I got divorced about a year ago.”

I turned toward him, my mouth dry. “You did?” He looked down at his shoes, at the rush of the creek; and I wondered why it was so easy to speak of Katie, and so difficult to speak of ourselves. “Coop, I'm sorry.”

He reached out to the bark of a tree and plucked off a neon inchworm, which curled tight as a drum in the hollow of his palm. “We all make mistakes,” Coop said softly. He reached for my hand and held it up beside his, just as the worm began to move; traveling, stretching, a small bright bridge between us.

It took me a half hour to convince Sarah that if I left Katie in her custody for the morning, I wouldn't be breaking any laws, and chances were incredibly slim that any representative of the court would come ambling by to realize I wasn't around. “Look,” I said finally, “if you want me to gather up a defense strategy for Katie, I need flexibility.”

“Dr. Cooper drove out here,” Sarah fretted.

“Dr. Cooper doesn't have to bring half a million dollars' worth of laboratory equipment with him,” I explained. In fact, I had worked so hard just to guarantee myself the two hours I needed to meet with Dr. Owen Zeigler that I was faintly disappointed to realize I had no desire to be in the neonatal pathology lab at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. I kept thinking of sick infants, dead infants, infants born at risk to women over forty, and all I wanted to do was hightail it back to the Fishers' farm.

Owen, a man with whom I'd worked once in the past, had a Moon Pie face, a bright bald head, and a round middle that balanced on his knees whenever he hiked himself up onto one of the high stools in front of the microscopes. “The placental culture showed mixed flora, including diphtheroids,” he said. “Which basically means there was crap floating around.”

“Are you saying it might have affected the results?”

“No. It's perfectly normal, considering the placenta had been lying around in a barn.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Then tell me something that's abnormal.”

“Well, the death of the neonate. Looks like a live birth to me,” he said, and my hopes plummeted. “Based on the hydrostatic test, air made it to the alveoli.”

“Speak English, Owen.”

The pathologist sighed. “The baby breathed.”

“That's a definite, then?”

“You can tell if a newborn, even a premmie, has breathed air or just inhaled fluid, when you look at the alveoli in the lungs. They get rounded. It's more conclusive than the hydrostatic test itself, because lungs may float if artificial respiration was attempted.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “She gave it mouth to mouth, and then killed it.”

“You never know,” Owen said.

“So what made it stop breathing?”

“The medical examiner is crying suffocation. But that's not conclusive.”

I climbed onto a stool beside the pathologist. “Tell me more.”

“There are petechiae in the lungs, which suggests asphyxia, but they could have formed before or after death. As for the bruising on the neonate's lips, all that means is that it was pressed up tightly against something. That something could have been the mother's collarbone, for all we know. In fact, if the newborn was suffocated with something soft, like the shirt it was wrapped in or the mother's hand, the findings are virtually indistinguishable from SIDS.”

He reached forward and took from my hand the glass slide I'd been absently playing with. “Bottom line: the baby could very well have died without anyone laying a hand on him. At thirty-two weeks, it's a viable neonate, but just barely.”

I frowned. “Would the mother have known if the baby was dying right before her eyes?”

“Depends. If it was choking on mucus, she could have heard it. If it was suffocating, she'd see it gasping, turning blue.” He turned off his microscope and slipped the slide—marked clearly BABY FISHER—into a small box containing others.

I tried to imagine Katie paralyzed by fear, by the awareness of this tiny premature infant struggling to breathe. I pictured her watching it, wide-eyed, too stunned to intervene; and then realizing too late what had happened. I saw her wrapping it in a shirt and trying to hide it, before anyone could discover what had gone wrong.

I envisioned her standing in a court of law, still, on trial for failing to seek proper medical attention after delivering the baby. Negligent homicide—not first-degree murder. But a felony, nonetheless; one that carried with it a jail sentence.

Extending my hand to Owen, I smiled. “Thanks anyway,” I said.

On Saturday night, I headed upstairs at about ten o'clock and drew the green shades on the eastern side of the room. I took a shower and thought of Coop, wondered what he might be doing—seeing a movie? Eating out at a five-star restaurant? I was wondering if he still wore a T-shirt and boxers to bed when Katie came into the room. “What's the matter with you?” she asked, peering at my face.

“Nothing.”

Katie shrugged, then yawned. “Boy, I'm tired,” she said, but her bright eyes and the bounce in her step completely contradicted her words. As she walked into the bathroom, I turned off the bedroom light and crawled into bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Katie returned, sat down on the edge of her bed, and took off her boots. Then she slid between the sheets, fully dressed.

I came up on an elbow, amused. “Aren't you forgetting something?”

“I'm cold, is all.”

“There's another quilt in the closet, up on top.” I thought of her rolling over in the middle of the night and having one of the pins that secured her dress jab her chest.

“This is fine.”

“Suit yourself.” I rolled over, staring at the wall, and suddenly remembered being sixteen years old and going to sleep in all my clothes, so that I could sneak out of the house when I saw the headlights of my best friend's car and go to the party a football jock was throwing while his parents were out of town. Sitting up, I glared at Katie's huddled body. “Where are you planning on going?”

Her jaw dropped—guilty as charged.

“Correction,” I said. “Where are
we
planning on going?”

She drew herself to a sitting position. “On Saturday nights, Samuel comes,” Katie confessed. “We visit on the porch, or in the living room. Sometimes we stay up until morning.”

Well, whatever “visiting” encompassed, I already knew that it didn't include having sex. Katie's embarrassment stemmed from a basic Amish principle about dating—it was strictly your own business, and for some reason I didn't understand, Plain teens went out of their way to pretend that they were doing anything
but
meeting their boyfriend or girlfriend.

Katie's eyes gleamed in the dark, her gaze focused on the window. For a moment, she looked so much like any other lovesick teenager that I wanted to touch her; just cup my hand over the curve of her cheek and tell her to make this moment last, because before she knew it she'd be like me, a witness to someone else's moment. I didn't know how to say that, given the circumstances, Samuel might not come. That the baby she could not admit to bearing had changed the rules.

“Does he throw pebbles? Or use a ladder?” I asked softly.

Realizing I was not going to give her secret away, Katie smiled slowly. “A flashlight.”

“Well.” I felt duty-bound to dispense some advice for the upcoming tryst, but what could I say to a girl who'd already had a baby and was accused of killing it? “Be careful,” I said finally, settling under the covers again.

I slept fitfully, waiting to see that flashlight beam. At midnight, Katie was still lying awake in bed. At two-fifteen, she got up and sat in the rocking chair beside the window. At three-thirty, I knelt down beside her. “He's not coming for you, sweetheart,” I whispered. “In less than an hour, he'll have to start the milking.”

“But he always—”

I turned her face so that she was looking at me, and shook my head.

Stiffly, Katie got up and walked to bed. She sat down and traced the pattern of the quilt, lost in her own thoughts.

I had seen the looks on clients' faces at the moment they were sentenced to five years, ten, life in prison. In most cases, even when they knew it was likely to be coming, the truth hit them like a wrecking ball. Sentencing would be a piece of cake for Katie, compared to this: the understanding that her life would no longer be as it once was.

She was quiet for a long time, running her finger over the seams of her handiwork. Then she spoke, her voice rising thin as a trail of smoke. “When you're quilting, one missed stitch ruins the whole bunch.” With a rustle of covers, she turned to me. “You pull on it,” she whispered, “and they all unravel.”

Aaron and Sarah spent the Sunday off from church visiting friends and relatives, but Katie and I declined their invitation to come along. Instead, after we finished the chores, we went to the creek to fish. I found the rods just where she said they'd be in the shed and met her in the field, where she was overturning a clod of earth to pluck out worms for bait. “I don't know,” I said, watching them wriggle pink over her palm. “I'm having second thoughts.”

Katie dropped several into a small jelly jar. “You said you used to fish when you were a kid, here on the farm.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that was a thousand years ago.”

She smiled up at me. “You always do that. Make yourself out to be some old woman.”

“Get back to me when you're thirty-nine, and tell me how you feel.” I walked at her side, the rods canted over my shoulder.

The creek was running strong, thanks to a few days of rain. The water tumbled over rocks, forked around sticks. Katie sat down at the water's edge and took a worm out of the jar, then reached for one of the poles. “When Jacob and I used to have fishing contests, I always caught the biggest— Ouch!” Drawing back her hand, she popped her thumb into her mouth to suck away the blood. “That was stupid of me,” she said a moment later.

“You're tired.” She lowered her eyes. “We all do crazy things when we care about someone,” I said carefully. “So you waited up all night. So what?” I reached for a worm, swallowed, and baited my own hook. “When I was your age, I got stood up before my senior prom. I bought a hundred-and-fifty-dollar strapless dress that wasn't beige or cream, mind you, but ecru, and I sat in my room waiting for Eddie Bernstein to pick me up. Turns out he'd asked two girls to the dance and decided that Mary Sue LeClare was more likely to put out.”

“Put out?”

I cleared my throat. “Um, it's an expression. For having sex.”

Katie's brows rose. “Oh, I see.”

Uncomfortable, I dunked my line into the water. “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

“Did you love him? Eddie Bernstein?”

“No. The two of us were always vying for highest grade-point average, so we got to know each other pretty well. I didn't fall in love until I got to college.”

“Why didn't you get married then?”

“Twenty-one is awfully young to get married. Most women like to have a few years to get to know themselves, before getting to know marriage and children.”

“But once you have a family, there's so much more you learn about yourself,” Katie pointed out.

“Unfortunately, by the time I came around to that way of thinking, my prospects had dimmed.”

“What about Dr. Cooper?”

I dropped my fishing rod, then grabbed it up again. “What about him?”

“He likes you, and you like him.”

“Of course we do. We're colleagues.”

Katie snorted. “My father has colleagues, but he doesn't sit a little too close to them on the porch swing, or smile extra long at something they've said.”

I scowled at her. “I would think that you, of all people, would respect my right to privacy regarding my own personal affairs.”
Affairs
, I thought. Wrong word.

“Is he coming here today?”

I started. “How would you know that?”

“Because you keep looking up the driveway, like I did last night.”

Sighing, I decided to come clean. If nothing else, maybe it would spur her to honesty. “Coop was the boy in college. The one I didn't marry when I was twenty-one.”

She suddenly leaned back to pull a thrashing sunfish out of the brook. Its scales caught the sunlight; its tail thumped between Katie and me. She lifted it with her thumb in its mouth, and set it into the water for a second chance.

“Which one of you quit?” she asked.

I didn't pretend to misunderstand. “That,” I said softly, “would have been me.”

“I wasn't feeling well at dinner,” Katie told us, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond Coop's shoulder. “Mam told me to go on up and lie down, and she'd clean the dishes.”

Coop nodded, encouraging. He'd been here for two hours now, interviewing Katie about the night of the alleged murder. To my great surprise, Katie was being cooperative, if not forthcoming.

“You felt sick,” Coop prompted. “Was it a headache? Stomachache?”

“It was chills all over, with a headache. Like the flu.”

I hadn't had children myself, but those symptoms seemed to suggest a virus rather than impending labor. “Did you fall asleep?” Coop asked.