The Jodi Picoult Collection Read online

  He drew her toward a man taller even than Jacob, wearing the same black robe, but with a blue sash over his shoulders. “Adam!”

  The man turned around and grinned. “Hey, that’s Dr. Sinclair to you.”

  He was a little older than Jacob, this she could see from the lines around his eyes, which made her think he laughed often, and well. He had hair the color of a honeycomb, and eyes that almost matched. But what made Katie unable to look away was the absolute peace that washed over her when she met his gaze, as if this one Englischer had a soul that was Plain.

  “Adam just got his Ph.D.,” Jacob explained. “He’s the one whose house I’m renting.”

  Katie nodded. She knew that Jacob had moved out of undergraduate housing and into a small home in town, since he was staying on as a teaching assistant at Penn State. She knew that the man who owned the home was going away to do research. She knew there would be two weeks’ time when they were roommates, before the owner left on his trip. But she had not known his name. She had not known that you could stand this far away from a person and still feel as if you were pressed up tight against him, fighting to take a breath.

  “Wie bist du heit,” she said, and then blushed, flustered that she had greeted him in Dietsch.

  “You must be Katie,” he answered. “Jacob’s told me about you.” And then he held out his hand, an invitation.

  Katie suddenly thought about Jacob’s stories of Hamlet and Holden Caulfield and Mr. Gatsby, and with perfect clarity understood how these studies of emotional conundrums might be just as useful in real life as learning how to plant a vegetable garden, or hanging out the laundry. She wondered what this man had mastered, to earn his Ph.D. With great deliberation, Katie took Adam Sinclair’s hand, and she smiled back.

  * * *

  After arriving home and having lunch, Aaron and Sarah went off to do what most Amish did on Sunday afternoons: visit relatives and neighbors. Ellie, having unearthed an entire set of Laura Ingalls’s Little House books, sat down to read. She was tired and irritable from the long morning, and the rhythmic clop of horses pulling buggies along the main road was beginning to bring on a migraine.

  Katie, who had been cleaning the dishes, came into the living room and curled up in the chair beside Ellie. Eyes closed, she began to hum softly.

  Ellie glared at her. “Do you mind?”

  “Mind what?”

  “Singing. While I’m reading.”

  Katie scowled. “I’m not singing. If it’s bothering you, go somewhere else.”

  “I was here first,” Ellie said, feeling like a seventh-grader. But she got to her feet and headed toward the door, only to find Katie following her. “For God’s sake, you have the entire living room now!”

  “Can I ask you a question? Mam said you used to come visit Paradise in the summers, to stay on a farm like ours. Aunt Leda told her. Is it true?”

  “Yes,” Ellie said slowly, wondering where this was leading. “Why?”

  Katie shrugged. “It’s just that you don’t seem to like it much. The farm, I mean.”

  “I like the farm just fine. I’m just not accustomed to having to baby-sit my clients.” At the wounded look that crossed Katie’s face, Ellie sighed inwardly. “I’m sorry. That was uncalled-for.”

  Katie looked up. “You don’t like me.”

  Ellie didn’t know what to say to that. “I don’t know you.”

  “I don’t know you, either.” Katie scuffed the toe of her boot on the wooden floor. “On Sunday, we do things different here.”

  “I’d noticed. No chores.”

  “Well, we still have chores. But we also have time to relax.” Katie looked up at her. “I thought that maybe, it being Sunday, you and I could do things different, too.”

  Ellie felt something tighten inside her. Was Katie going to suggest they skip town? Go find a pack of cigarettes? Give each other a few hours of no-holds-barred privacy?

  “I was thinking that maybe we could be friends. Just for this afternoon. You could pretend that you met me coming to visit the farm you were at when you were a kid, instead of the way it really happened.”

  Ellie put down her book. If she won Katie’s friendship and got the girl to open enough to spill out the truth, she might not need Coop to come evaluate her at all. “When I was a kid,” Ellie said slowly, “I used to be able to skip stones farther than any of my cousins.”

  A smile blossomed over Katie’s face. “Think you still can?”

  They jostled through the door and struck out across the field. At the edge of the pond, Ellie reached for a smooth, flat rock and tossed it, counting as it bounced five times over the water. She wiggled her fingers. “Haven’t lost the touch.”

  Katie picked up her own stone. Four, five, six, seven skips. With a broad smile, she turned to Ellie. “Some touch,” she teased.

  Ellie narrowed her eyes in concentration and tried again. A moment later, Katie did too. “Ha!” Ellie crowed. “I win!”

  “You do not!”

  “I beat you by a yard, fair and square!”

  “That’s not what I saw,” Katie protested.

  “Oh, right. And your eyewitness accounts these days are so accurate.” When Katie stiffened beside her, Ellie sighed. “I’m sorry. It’s hard for me to separate from why I’m really here.”

  “You’re supposed to be here because you believe me.”

  “Not necessarily. A defense attorney is paid to make a jury believe whatever she says. Which may or may not be what her client has told her.” At Katie’s baffled expression, Ellie smiled. “It probably sounds very strange to you.”

  “I don’t understand why the judge doesn’t just pick the person who’s telling the truth.”

  Reaching for a piece of timothy grass, Ellie set it between her teeth. “It’s not quite as simple as that. It’s about defending people’s rights. And sometimes, even to a judge, things aren’t black and white.”

  “It is black and white, if you’re Plain,” Katie said. “If you follow the Ordnung, you are right. If you break the rules, you get shunned.”

  “Well, in the English world, that’s communism.” Ellie hesitated. “What if you didn’t do it? What if you were accused of breaking a rule, but you were perfectly innocent?”

  Katie blushed. “When there’s a members’ meeting for discipline, the accused member has a chance to tell his story too.”

  “Yeah, but does anyone believe him?” Ellie shrugged. “That’s where a defense attorney comes in—we convince the jury that the client may not have committed the crime.”

  “And if he did?”

  “Then he still gets acquitted. That happens sometimes, too.”

  Katie’s mouth dropped open. “That would be lying.”

  “No, that would be acting as a spin doctor. There are many, many different ways of looking at what’s happened to bring someone to trial. It’s only considered lying if the client doesn’t tell the truth. Attorneys—well, we can say just about anything we want as an explanation.”

  “So . . . you would lie for me?”

  Ellie met her gaze. “Would I have to?”

  “Everything I’ve told you is the truth.”

  Sitting up, Ellie crossed her legs. “Well, then. What haven’t you told me?”

  A sparrow took off in flight, casting a shadow across Katie’s face. “It’s not our way to lie,” she said stiffly. “It’s why a Plain person can stand up for himself in front of the congregation. It’s why defense attorneys don’t have a place in our world.”

  To her surprise, Ellie laughed. “Tell me about it. I have never in my life stuck out like such a sore thumb.”

  Katie’s gaze traveled from Ellie’s running shoes to her sundress to the small, dangling earrings she wore. Even the way Ellie sat—as if the grass was too scratchy to let the backs of her legs rest upon it—was slightly uncomfortable. Unlike the hordes of people who streamed into Lancaster County to get a glimpse of the Amish, Ellie had never asked for this. She had done