Plain Truth (37 page)

She set down her briefcase so that it lolled against her ankle, and slowly sank to the courthouse steps. Then, squandering time she could ill afford, she wondered how she was going to manage to win when she was coming from so far behind.

It took Ellie a half hour to track down Jacob, who had spent the night in Lancaster—but not at his parents' home. Leda opened the door at Ellie's knock, a smile on her face, but Ellie shoved right past her, her gaze locked on the young man swilling milk from the carton in front of the open refrigerator. “You little shit,” she growled.

Jacob started, spilling milk on the front of his flannel shirt. “What?”

“You're supposed to be helping me, dammit. You're supposed to tell me anything you can that might help your sister's case.”

“I did!”

“Does the name Adam Sinclair fall into that category?”

Leda stepped forward to keep Ellie from jumping at Jacob again, but not before Ellie saw the flat dimming of the eyes that comes with being found out. He stayed his aunt, telling her it was all right, and then turned to Ellie. “What about Adam?”

“He was your roommate?”

“And my landlord.”

Ellie crossed her arms. “And the father of Katie's child.”

Jacob ignored Leda's gasp. “I didn't know for sure, Ellie. I just suspected.”

“A suspicion would have been nice to know—oh, about three months ago. God, is anyone going to be straight with me before we get to trial?”

“I thought you were using an insanity defense,” Leda said.

“Talk to your niece about that.” Ellie turned to Jacob. “All I know is, she goes out with you for two hours last night, comes home, and refuses to let me defend her the way I want to. What the hell did you say?”

Jacob closed his eyes. “I wasn't talking about her,” he groaned. “I was talking about me.”

Ellie could feel a headache coming on. “Keep going.”

“I told Katie the reason I came back was the same reason I left in the first place—I couldn't live a lie. I couldn't let people pretend I was something I really wasn't. Six years ago, all I wanted was book learning, but I let people think I was happy being Plain. And now, I'm an associate professor, but what I miss more than anything is my family.” He looked up at Ellie, stricken. “When Hannah drowned, I thought it was my fault. I should have been out there watching the two of them, but I was hiding in the barn, trying to read. I said to Katie that for the second time in my life, I was watching my sister go under— but this time the sister was her, and this time I was hiding what happened when she came to visit me.”

“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.”