Plain Truth

by Jodi Picoult

  The tape began to turn incrementally. "What's your name?" Bull asked.

  "Katie Fisher."

  "Are you eighteen?"

  "Yes."

  "Do you live in Lancaster?"

  "Yes."

  "Have you been baptized Amish?"

  "Yes."

  I listened to the preliminary questions I'd drafted from my seat beside Bull, a seat where I could see the needle on the lie detector and the printout of responses. So far, nothing was out of the ordinary. But nothing he'd asked so far could be considered a provocative question, either. This went on for a few minutes, loosening Katie's tongue up, and then we began to get down to the real reason we were all here.

  "Do you know Samuel Stoltzfus?"

  "Yes," Katie said, her voice a little more thready.

  "Did you have sexual relations with Samuel Stoltzfus?"

  "No."

  "Have you ever been pregnant?"

  Katie looked at her mother. "No," she said.

  The needle remained steady.

  "Have you ever had a baby?"

  "No."

  "Did you kill your baby?"

  "No," Katie said.

  Trumbull turned off the machine and ripped off the long printout. He marked a couple of places where the needle had wavered slightly, but he and I both knew that none of the responses indicated an out-and-out lie. "You passed," he said.

  Katie's eyes widened with delight, then she gave a small cry and hugged Sarah hard. When she pulled back, she turned to me, smiling. "This is good? You can tell the jury this?"

  I nodded. "It's definitely a step in the right direction. Usually, though, we do two tests. It's that much more proof." I nodded to Bull, asking him to set up again. "Besides, you've already gotten over the hard part."

  Much more relaxed, Katie sat down in her seat and patiently waited for Bull to adjust the microphone to her mouth. I listened to her give the same answers to the same batch of questions.

  Katie finished, her cheeks pink, and smiled at her mother. Bull pulled the printout free and circled several spots where the needle had gone sky-high--in one case, running off the top edge of the paper. This time around, Katie had lied in response to three questions: about being pregnant, about having the baby, about killing it.

  "Surprising," Bull murmured to me, "since she was so much more at ease this time around." He shrugged, and began to disconnect wires. "Then again, maybe that's why."

  It meant that I couldn't use the previous test as evidence-- not without submitting to the prosecution this final test too, which Katie had failed miserably. It meant that the outcome of the lie detector examination was inconclusive.

  Bright-eyed and blissfully unaware, Katie looked up at me. "Are we finished?"

  "Yes," I said softly. "We certainly are."

  It was Katie's job to feed the calves. After a couple of days they were taken from their mothers and housed in little plastic igloos that were queued up outside the barn like a row of doghouses. We each carried a bottle--they were fed formula, so that they didn't take milk from their moms that might otherwise provide income. "You can have Sadie," she said, referring to the little calf that had been born in front of me days before. "I'll take Gideon." Sadie had turned into quite a pretty little calf. No longer bloody with afterbirth, she reminded me of a black-and-white map, with huge continents spread across her bony hips and knobby back. Her rough nose twitched at the smell of the formula. "Hey, little girl," I said, patting the sweet block of her head. "Are you hungry?"

  But Sadie had already found the nipple of the bottle and was now intent on yanking it out of my hands. I tipped it up, frowning at the chain that haltered her to her little prison of a Quon-set hut. I knew that the milk cows didn't much mind being hooked to their stanchions, but this was just a baby. What trouble could she possibly get into?

  While Katie's back was to me, I slipped the hook on the calf's collar from the tethering chain. Just like I figured, Sadie didn't even notice. Her throat chugged up and down as she managed to drain every last drop of the bottle, and then butt her head underneath my arm.

  "Sorry," I said. "We've run dry."

  Katie smiled at me over her shoulder, where Gideon--a little older, a little less greedy--was still summarily slurping his bottle. And that was the moment when Sadie vaulted over me, kicking me hard in the stomach as she sprang for freedom.

  "Ellie!" Katie cried. "What did you do!"

  I could not answer, much less breathe. I rolled around in the dirt in front of the little igloo, clutching my side.

  Katie ran after the calf, which seemed to have developed springs on the bottoms of her hooves. Sadie ran in a half circle and then began to curve back toward me. "Grab her front legs," Katie yelled, and I dove for Sadie's knees, crumbling the rest of her body in a neat tackle.

  Panting, Katie dragged the chain to where I was bodily restraining the calf and clipped her collar secure again. Then she sat down beside me to catch her breath. "Sorry," I gasped. "I didn't know." I watched Sadie slink back to the shade of her igloo. "Hell of a good tackle, though. Maybe I ought to try out for the Eagles."

  "Eagles?"

  "Football."

  Katie stared blankly at me. "What's that?"

  "You know, the game. On TV." I could see I was getting nowhere. "It's like baseball," I finally said, remembering the school-age children I'd seen with their gloves and balls. "But different. The Eagles are a professional team, which means that the players get a lot of money to be in the game."

  "They make money for playing games?"

  Put that way, it sounded positively stupid. "Well, yeah."

  "Then what do they do for work?"

  "That is their work," I explained. But it seemed strange even to me, now--compared to the day-to-day existence of someone like Aaron Fisher, whose job directly involved putting food into his family's mouth, what was the value of tossing a ball through an end 2one? For that matter, what was the value of my own career, making a living with words instead of with my hands?

  "I don't understand," Katie said honestly.

  And sitting on the Fisher farm, at that moment, neither did I.

  I turned to Coop, amused. "You got a divorce because of a bank dispute?"

  "Well, maybe not exactly." His teeth flashed in the moonlight. "Maybe that was just the straw that broke the camel's back."

  We were sitting on the back of a contraption I'd seen Elam and Samuel and Aaron dragging behind a team of mules, and trying hard not to cut our feet. Wicked prongs stuck like fangs from three deadly pinwheels attached to the base, and it seemed to me an instrument of torture, although Katie had told me it was a tetter, used to fluff up the cut hay so that it could dry better before baling. "Let me guess. Credit card debt. She had a weakness for Neiman Marcus."

  Coop shook his head. "It was her ATM password."

  I laughed. "Why? Was it some embarrassing nickname she had for you?"

  "I don't know what it was. That was the dispute." He sighed. "I'd left my wallet at home, and we'd gone out to dinner. We needed to get cash from one of the bank machines, so I took her card from her purse and said I'd go. But when I asked for her password, she clammed up."

  "In all fairness," I pointed out, "you're not supposed to tell your password to anyone."

  "You probably had a client whose husband cleaned her out and ran off to Mexico, right? Thing is, Ellie, I'm not one of those guys. I never was. And she just wouldn't back down. Wouldn't trust me with this one thing. It made me wonder how much more she was holding back from me."

  I worried a button on my cardigan, unsure of what to say. "Once, when Stephen and I had been together, oh, I don't know--six years?--I got the flu. He brought me breakfast in bed--eggs, toast, coffee. It was sweet of him, but he'd brought the coffee with cream and sugar. And for six years, every day, I'd been sitting down across from him and drinking it black."

  "What did you do?"

  I smiled faintly. "Thanked him up one side and down another, and dated h
im for two more years," I joked. "What other choice did I have?"

  "There are always choices, Ellie. You just don't like to see them."

  I pretended not to hear Coop. Staring out over the tobacco field, I watched fireflies decorating the greenery like Christmas lights in July. "That's duvach," I said, remembering the Dietsch word Katie had taught me.

  "Changing the topic," Coop said. "Good old Ellie."

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "You heard me." He shrugged. "You've been doing it for years."

  Eyes narrowing, I turned toward him. "You have no idea what I've been doing--"

  "That," he interrupted, "was not my choice."

  I crossed my arms, annoyed. "I understand this is a professional hazard for you, but some people prefer not to drag up the past."

  "Still touchy about what happened?"

  "Me?" I laughed, incredulous. "For someone who says he's forgiven me, you sure as hell harp on our history together."

  "Forgiving and forgetting are two completely different things."

  "Well, you've had twenty years to put it out of your mind. Maybe you could manage to do that for the length of time you're involved with my client."

  "Do you really think I'm driving way the hell out here twice a week to meet pro bono with some Amish girl?" Coop reached out and cupped my cheek with his palm, my anger dissolving in the time it took to draw a startled breath. "I wanted to see you, Ellie. I wanted to know if you'd gotten what you wanted all those years ago."

  He was so close now that I could see the sparks of gold in his green eyes. I could feel his words on my skin. "You take your coffee black," he whispered. "You brush your hair a hundred strokes before you go to bed. You break out in hives if you eat raspberries. You like to shower after you make love. You know all the words to 'Paradise by the Dashboard Light' and you keep quarters in your pockets at Christmastime, to give to the Salvation Army Santas." Coop's hand slid to the back of my neck. "What did I leave out?"

  "A-T-T-Y," I whispered. "My ATM password."

  I leaned toward him, tasting him already. Coop's fingers tightened, massaging, and as I closed my eyes I thought how many stars there were here, how deep the night sky was, how this was a place where you could lose yourself.

  Our lips had just touched when we broke apart again, startled by the sound of footsteps running down the driveway.

  We had followed Katie on foot for nearly a mile now, stumbling along in silence so that she wouldn't see us. She was the one who was carrying the flashlight, however, so we were clearly at a disadvantage. Coop held my hand, squeezing it in warning when he saw a branch in our path, a rock, a small rut in the road.

  Neither of us had spoken a word, but I was certain that Coop was thinking the same thing I was: Katie was off to meet someone she didn't want to meet with me around. Which left Samuel out of the running, and cast into perfect light the absent, unknown father of her baby.

  I could see a farmhouse rising in a gray mountain just beyond us, and wondered if that was where Katie's lover lived. But before I could speculate any further, Coop yanked me to the left, into a small fenced yard that Katie had entered. It took a moment to realize that the small, white stones were actually grave markers--we were in the cemetery where Sarah and Aaron had buried the body of the dead infant.

  "Oh, my God," I breathed, and Coop's hand came up to cover my mouth.

  "Just watch her." His words fell softly into my ear. "This could be the wall tumbling down."

  We crouched at a distance, but Katie seemed oblivious, anyway. Her eyes were wide and slightly glazed. She propped the flashlight against another marker, so that it formed a spotlight as she knelt down on the freshly packed grave and touched the headstone.

  STILLBORN, just as Leda said it read. I watched Katie's finger trace each letter. She hunched over--was she crying? I started toward her, but Coop held me back.

  Katie lifted what looked like a small hammer and a chisel, and touched it to the stone. She pounded once, twice.

  Coop couldn't stop me this time. "Katie!" I called, running toward her, but she did not turn around. I squatted beside her and gripped her shoulders, then pulled the chisel and hammer out of her hands. Tears were running down her face, but her expression was perfectly blank. "What are you doing?"

  She looked at me with those vacant eyes, and then suddenly reason rose up behind them. "Oh," she squeaked, covering her face with her hands. Her body began to shake uncontrollably.

  Coop swung her into his arms. "Let's get her home," he said. He started toward the cemetery gate, Katie sobbing against his chest.

  I knelt at the grave, gathering the chisel and the hammer. Katie had managed to chip off some of the carving on the stone. A pity for Aaron and Sarah, who had paid dearly for that marker. I traced the remaining letters: STILL.

  "Maybe she was sleepwalking," Coop said. "I've had patients whose sleep disorders wreaked havoc on their lives."

  "I've been sleeping in the same room with her for two weeks, and I haven't seen her get up once to even go to the bathroom." I shivered, and he slid his arm around me. On the small wooden bench at the edge of the Fishers' pond, I moved infini-tesimally closer.

  "Then again," he hypothesized, "maybe she's starting to realize what happened."

  "I'm missing the logic here. Why would admitting that you'd been pregnant lead to defacing a gravestone?"

  "I didn't say she admitted it to herself. I said she's starting to take in some of the proof we've been throwing at her, and in some way, she's trying to reconcile it. Unconsciously."

  "Ah. If the headstone for the baby isn't there, the baby never existed."

  "You got it." He exhaled slowly, then said thoughtfully. "There's enough here, Ellie. You'll be able to find a forensic shrink who'll back you up on an insanity defense."

  I nodded, wondering why Coop's support didn't make me feel any better. "You're going to keep talking to her, right?"

  "Yeah. I'll do whatever I can to break the fall, when it comes. And it's coming." He smiled gently, adding. "As your psychiatrist, I have to tell you that you're getting too personally involved in this case."

  That made me smile. "My psychiatrist?"

  "With pleasure, ma'am. Can't think of anyone else I'd rather treat."

  "Sorry. I'm not crazy."

  He kissed a spot behind my ear, nuzzling. "Yet," he murmured. He turned me in his arms, letting his mouth travel over my jaw and my cheek before resting lightly against my lips. With a little shock I realized that after all these years, after all this time, I still knew him--the Morse-code pattern of our kisses, the places his hands would fall on my back and my waist, the feel of his hair as my fingers combed through it.

  His touch brought back memories and left a litter of new ones. My heart pumped hard against Coop's chest; my legs twined over his. In his arms, I was twenty again, the whole world spread in front of me like a banquet.

  I blinked and suddenly the pond and Coop came back into focus. "Your eyes are open," I whispered into his mouth.

  He stroked my spine. "The last time I closed them, you disappeared." So I kept my eyes wide, too, and was stunned by the sight of two things I'd never thought to see: myself, coming full circle; and the ghost of a girl who walked on water.

  I pulled back in Coop's arms. Hannah's ghost? No, it couldn't be.

  "What is it?" Coop murmured.

  I leaned into him again. "You," I said. "Just you."

  NINE

  Sometimes, when Jacob Fisher was sitting in the tiny closet-sized office he shared with another graduate student in the English department, he pinched himself. It was not so long ago, really, since he had hidden Shakespearean plays under bags of feed in the barn; since he had stayed up all night reading by the beam of a flashlight, only to stumble through his chores the next morning, drunk with what he'd learned. And now here he was, surrounded by books, paid to analyze and teach to young men and women with the same stars in their eyes that Jacob had had.

  He se
ttled in with a smile, happy to be back at work after two weeks out of town, assisting a professor emeritus on a summer lecture circuit. At a knock on his door, he glanced up from the anthology he was highlighting. "Come in."

  The unfamiliar face of a woman peeked around the edge of the door. "I'm looking for Jacob Fisher."

  "You found him."

  Too old to be one of his students; plus, students didn't tend to dress in business suits. The woman brandished a small wallet, flashing ID. "I'm Detective-Sergeant Liz2ie Munro. East Paradise Township police."

  Jacob gripped the arms of his chair, thinking of all the buggy accidents he'd seen growing up in Lancaster County, all the farm machinery that had accidentally caused death. "My family," he managed, his mouth gone dry as the desert. "Did something happen?"

  The detective eyed him. "Your family is healthy," she said after a moment. "Mind if I ask you a few questions?"

  Jacob nodded and gestured to the other grad student's desk chair. He hadn't had news of his family in nearly three months, what with summer being so busy and Katie unable to come. He'd been meaning to call his Aunt Leda, just to keep in touch, but then he got wrapped up in his work and dragged off on the lecture tour. "I understand you grew up Amish, in East Paradise?" the detective asked.

  Jacob felt the first prick of unease on his spine. Being English for so long had made him wary. "Do you mind if I ask what this is in reference to?"

  "A felony was allegedly committed in your former hometown."

  Jacob closed the anthology he'd been reading. "Look, you guys came to talk to me after the cocaine incident too. I may not be Amish anymore, but that doesn't mean I'm supplying drugs to my old friends."

  "Actually, this has nothing to do with the narcotics cases. Your sister has been charged with murder in the first degree."

  "What?" Gathering his composure, he added, "Clearly, there's been a mistake."

  Munro shrugged. "Don't shoot the messenger. Were you aware of your sister's pregnancy?"

  Jacob could not keep the shock from his face. "She ... had a baby?"

  "Apparently. And then she allegedly killed it."