Plain Truth Read online

  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.

  "Ja, after a little bit. And then I woke up in the morning."

  "You don't remember anything between the time you went to bed sick, and the time you woke up in the morning?"

  "No," Katie said. "But what's so strange about that? I don't usually remember anything between when I fall asleep and I wake up, except a dream every now and then."

  "Did you feel sick when you woke up?"

  Katie blushed furiously. "A little."

  "The same headache and chills?"

  She ducked her head. "No. It was my time of the month."

  "Katie, was the flow heavier than usual?" I asked, and she nodded. "Did you have cramps?"

  "Some," she admitted. "Not bad enough to keep me from doing my chores."

  "Were you sore?"

  "You mean like my muscles?"

  "No. Between your legs."

  After a sidelong look at Coop, she murmured to me, "It burned a little bit. But I thought it was maybe part of the flu."

  "So," Coop said, clearing his throat, "you got up and did your chores?"

  "I started to cook breakfast," Katie answered. "There was something big going on down at the barn, and then the Englischer police came, and Mam stuck her head in long enough to tell me to make extra food for them." She stood up, pacing the length of the porch. "I didn't go into the barn until Samuel came to tell me what was happening."

  "What did you see?"

  Her eyes were bright with tears. "The tiniest baby," she whispered. "Oh, the very tiniest one I'd ever seen."

  "Katie," Coop said softly, "had you seen that baby before?"

  She gave her head a quick shake, as if she was trying to clear it.

  "Did you touch the baby?"

  "No."

  "Was it wrapped up?"

  "In a shirt," she whispered. "So that just his face was showing, and it looked like he was sleeping, like Hannah used to look when she was in her crib."

  "If the baby was wrapped up, if you never touched it ... how do you know it was a boy?"

  Katie blinked at Coop. "I don't know."

  "Try hard, Katie. Try to remember the moment you knew it was a boy."

  She shook her head, crying harder now. "You can't do this to me," she sobbed, and then she turned on her heel and ran.

  "She'll come back," I said, staring off in the direction Katie had fled. "But it's nice that you're worried."

  Coop sighed and leaned back on the porch swing. "I pushed her to the edge," he said. "Came right up against that world she's been living in in her mind. She had to shut down, or else concede that her logic doesn't work." He turned to me. "You believe she's guilty, don't you?"

  It was the first time since I'd been here that anyone had actually put the question to me. The Fisher family, their Amish friends and relatives--everyone in the community seemed to treat Katie's murder charge as some bizarre finger-pointing that they had to simply accept, but not believe. However, I wasn't looking at a girl I'd known all my life--just a mountain of evidence that seemed damning. From the police reports to my recent discussion with the neonatal pathologist, everything I had seen so far suggested that Katie had either actively or passively caused the death of her child. The concealment of the pregnancy--that was premeditation. The threat of losing Samuel, as well as her parents' respect; the fear of being excommunicated-- that was motive. The ongoing denial of hard facts--well, my gut feeling was that with an upbringing like Katie's, it was the only way to deal with something she'd known damn well was wrong.

  "I have three choices for my defense, Coop," I said. "Number one: she did it and she's sorry, and I throw her on the mercy of the court. But that would mean putting her on the stand, and if I do, they'll know she's not sorry at all--hell, she doesn't even believe she committed the crime. Number two: she didn't do it, someone else did. A nice defense, but highly unlikely, given that it was a premature birth that occurred in secret at two in the morning. And number three: she did it, but she was dissociating at the time, and