Plain Truth Read online

  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

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  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 smile broke over Katie's face. "That's what I've been trying to tell you."

  "She's the only suspect," Lizzie said, watching George stuff a forkful of hash browns into his mouth. They were meeting at a diner halfway between the county attorney's office and East Paradise, one whose sole recommendation, as far as Lizzie could tell, was that they only served items guaranteed to double your cholesterol. "You're going to give yourself a heart attack if you keep eating like that," she said, frowning.

  George waved away her concern. "At the first sign of arrhythmia I'll ask God for a continuance."

  Breaking off a small piece of her muffin, Lizzie looked down at her notes. "We've got a bloody nightgown, a footprint her size, a doctor's statement saying she was primiparous, an ME saying the baby took a breath--plus her blood matches the blood found on the baby's skin." She popped a bite into her mouth. "I'll put five hundred bucks down saying that when the DNA test comes back, it links her to the baby, too."

  George blotted his mouth with a napkin. "That's substantial stuff, Lizzie, but I don't know if it adds up to involuntary manslaughter."

  "I didn't get to the clincher yet," Lizzie said. "The ME found bruising on the baby's lips and fibers on the gums and in the throat."

  "Fibers from what?"

  "They matched the shirt it was wrapped in. He thinks that the two, together, suggest smothering."

  "Smothering? This isn't some Jersey girl giving birth in the toilet at the Paramus Mall and then going off to finish shopping, Lizzie. The Amish don't even kill flies, I'll bet."

  "We made national headlines last year when two Amish kids were peddling cocaine," Lizzie countered. "What's 60 Minutes going to say to a murder?" She watched a spark come to George's eyes as he weighed his personal feelings about charging an Amish girl against the promise of a high-profile murder case. "There's a dead baby in an Amish barn, and an Amish kid who gave birth," she said softly. "You do the math, George. I wasn't the one who asked for this to happen, but even I can see that we've got to charge her, and we've got to do it soon. She's being released today."

  He meticulously cut his sunny-side-up eggs into bite-size squares, then placed his knife and fork down on the edge of his plate without eating a single one. "If we can prove smothering, we might be able to charge Murder One. It's willful, premeditated, and deliberate. She hid the pregnancy, had the baby, and did away with it." George glanced up. "Did you question her?"

  "Yeah."

  "And?"

  Lizzie grimaced. "She still doesn't think she had a baby."

  "What the hell does that mean?"

  "She's sticking to her story."

  Geo