Plain Truth Read online

  "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--"

&n