The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  “Aaron. How is Katie?”

  It was slight, but Aaron stiffened visibly. “I hear she will be fine.”

  “You did not go to the hospital?” Ephram asked.

  Aaron looked away. “Neh.”

  The bishop tipped his head, his white beard glowing in the setting sun. “Walk with me awhile?”

  The three men headed toward Sarah’s vegetable garden. Elam sank down on a stone slab bench and gestured for Ephram to do the same. But the bishop shook his head and stared over the tall heads of the tomato plants and the climbing vines of beans, around which danced a spray of fireflies. They sparked and tumbled like a handful of stars that had been flung.

  “I remember coming here once, years ago, and watching Jacob and Katie chase the lightning bugs,” Ephram said. “Catching ’em in a jar.” He laughed. “Jacob said he was making an Amish flashlight. You hear from Jacob these days?”

  “No, which is the way I wish it to be,” Aaron said quietly.

  Ephram shook his head. “He was banned from the church, Aaron. Not from your life.”

  “They’re the same to me.”

  “That’s the thing I don’t understand, you know. Since forgiveness is the very first rule.”

  Aaron leveled his gaze on the bishop. “Did you come here to talk about Jacob?”

  “Well, no,” Ephram admitted. “After you dropped by this morning, Elam, I went to see John Zimmermann and Martin Lapp. It’s their understanding that if the police were here all day, they must be thinking Katie’s a suspect. It will all hinge for sure on whether the baby was born alive. If it was, she’ll be blamed for its death.” He frowned at Aaron. “They suggested speaking to a lawyer, so that you won’t get caught unawares.”

  “My Katie doesn’t need a lawyer.”

  “So I hope,” the bishop said. “But if she does, the community will stand behind her.” He hesitated, then added, “She’ll have to put herself back, you understand, during this time.”

  Elam looked up. “Just give up communion? She wouldn’t be put under the bann?”

  “I will need to speak to Samuel, of course, and then think on it.” Ephram put his hand on Aaron’s shoulder. “This isn’t the first time a young couple has gotten ahead of their wedding night. It’s a tragedy, to be sure, that the baby died. But heartache can cement a marriage just as much as happiness. And as for Katie being blamed for the other—well, none of us believes it.”

  Aaron turned, shrugging off the bishop’s hand. “Thank you. But we will not hire a lawyer for Katie, and go through the Englischer courts. It’s not our way.”

  “What makes you always draw a line, and challenge people to cross it, Aaron?” Ephram sighed. “That’s not our way.”

  “If you’ll excuse me, I have work to do.” Aaron nodded at the bishop and his father and struck off toward the barn.

  The two older men watched him in silence. “You’ve had this conversation with him once before,” Elam Fisher pointed out.

  The bishop smiled sadly. “Ja. And I was talking to a stone wall that time, too.”

  * * *

  Katie dreamed she was falling. Out of the sky, like a bird with a wounded wing, the earth rushing up to meet her. Her heart lodged in her throat, holding back the scream, and she realized at the very last second that she was heading toward the barn, the fields, her home. She closed her eyes and crashed, the scenery shattering like an eggshell at impact so that when she looked around, she recognized nothing at all.

  Blinking into the darkness, Katie tried to sit up in the bed. Wires and plastic tubes grew from her body like roots. Her belly felt tender; her arms and legs heavy.

  A comma of a moon split the sky, and a smattering of stars. Katie let her hands creep beneath the covers to rest on her stomach. “Ich hab ken Kind kaht,” she whispered. I did not have a baby.

  Tears fell on the blanket. “Ich hab ken Kind kaht. Ich hab ken Kind kaht,” she murmured over and over, until the words became a stream running through her veins, an angel’s lullaby.

  * * *

  The fax machine in Lizzie’s house beeped on just after midnight, while she was running on her treadmill. Adrenaline had kept her awake, anyway, and perfectly suited for a workout that might make her tired enough to catch a few hours of sleep. She shut off the treadmill and walked to the fax, sweating as she waited for the pages to begin rolling out. At the cover page from the medical examiner’s office, her heart rate jumped another notch.

  Words began to reach at her, tugging at her mind.

  Male, 32 weeks. 39.2 cm crown-heel; 26 cm crown-rump. Hydrostatic test . . . dilated alveolar ducts . . . mottled pink to dark red appearance . . . left and right lungs floated, excluding partial and irregular aeration. Air present in the middle ear. Bruising on the upper lip; cotton fibers on gums.

  “Good God,” she whispered, shivering. She had met murderers several times—the man who’d stabbed a convenience store owner for a pack of Camels; a boy who’d raped college girls and left them bleeding on the dormitory floor; once, a woman who had shot her abusive husband’s face off while he lay sleeping. There was something about these people, something that had always made Lizzie feel that if you cracked them open like Russian nesting dolls, you’d find a hot, smoking coal at their center.

  Something that did not fit this Amish girl at all.

  Lizzie stripped out of her workout clothes, heading for the shower. Before the girl was no longer free to leave, before she was read Miranda and formally charged, Lizzie wanted to look Katie Fisher in the eye and see what was at the heart of her.

  * * *

  It was four in the morning by the time Lizzie entered the hospital room, but Katie was awake and alone. She turned wide blue eyes to the detective, surprised to see her. “Hello.”

  Lizzie smiled and sat down beside the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” Katie said quietly. “Stronger.”

  Lizzie glanced down at Katie’s lap, and saw the Bible she’d been reading. “Samuel brought it for me,” the girl said, confused by the frown on the other woman’s face. “Isn’t it allowed in here?”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s allowed,” Lizzie said. She felt the tower of evidence she’d been neatly stacking for twenty-four hours now start to waver: She’s Amish. Could that one excuse, that one glaring inconsistency, knock it down? “Katie, did the doctor tell you what happened to you?”

  Katie glanced up. She set her finger in the Bible, closed the book around it with a rustle of pages, and nodded.

  “When I saw you yesterday, you told me you hadn’t had a baby.” Lizzie took a deep breath. “I’m wondering why you said that.”

  “Because I didn’t have a baby.”

  Lizzie shook her head in disbelief. “Why are you bleeding, then?”

  A red flush worked its way up from the neckline of Katie’s hospital johnny. “It’s my time of the month,” she said softly. She looked away, composing herself. “I may be Plain, Detective, but I’m not stupid. Don’t you think I’d know if I had a baby?”

  The answer was so open, so earnest, that Lizzie mentally stepped back. What am I doing wrong? She’d questioned hundreds of people, hundreds of liars—yet Katie Fisher was the only one she could recall getting under her skin. She glanced out the window, at the simmering red of the horizon, and realized what the difference was: This was no act. Katie Fisher believed exactly what she was saying.

  Lizzie cleared her throat, manning a different route of attack. “I’m going to ask you something awkward, Katie. . . . Have you ever had sexual relations?”

  If at all possible, Katie’s cheeks glowed brighter. “No.”

  “Would your blond friend tell me the same thing?”

  “Go ask him,” she challenged.

  “You saw that baby yesterday morning,” Lizzie said, her voice thick with frustration. “How did it get there?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Right.” Lizzie rubbed her temples. “It isn’t yours.”

  A wide s