My favorite place on the farm was the milk room. Thanks to the bulk refrigeration tank, it stayed cool, even at the hottest times of the day. It smelled like ice cream and winter, and the white walls and spotless floor made it a fine place to sit down and think. Once the inverter had charged the batteries of my laptop, I’d take my computer there to do my work.

It was where Leda found me when she decided to grace me with a visit ten days after I’d become an official resident of the Fisher farm. As I sat typing with my head bowed, the first things that came into my range of vision were her Clark sandals-something I hadn’t seen in a while. The Amish women who didn’t wear boots wore the ugliest sneakers I’d ever seen in my life, no doubt some bulk lot even Kmart couldn’t stand on its shelves. “It’s about time,” I said, not bothering to lift my head.

“Now, I couldn’t come any quicker, and you know that,” Leda said.

“Aaron would have gotten over it.”

“It wasn’t Aaron. It was you. If I hadn’t given you a chance to get your feet wet, you would have crawled into the trunk of my car and stowed away like a fugitive.”

I snorted. “Well, you’ll be thrilled to know that not only have my feet gotten wet, they’ve also gotten stuck in the mud, nearly run over by a buggy, and come this close to being urinated on by a heifer.”

Laughing, Leda leaned against the stainless steel sink. “Bet Marcia Clark didn’t have details like that in her book.”

“Fabulous. The best-seller I eventually write will be shrink-wrapped with the Farmer’s Almanac.”

Leda smiled. “I hear Katie got a clean bill of health?”

I nodded. We had gone to the doctor for a checkup yesterday, and the OB had pronounced Katie healing well. Physically, she would be fine. Mentally-well, that was still up in the air.

I closed the file I’d been working on and popped the disc from its drive. “You couldn’t have timed this better. Guess who’s about to become my paralegal?”

She held up her hands to ward me off. “Don’t even think it, honey. The most I know about the law is that possession is nine-tenths of it.”

“But you know how to use a computer. You used to send me e-mail.” I sighed, thinking of how long it would be before I could access my account. “I need you to print a file and deliver it to the superior court. Needless to say, my laser printer’s not running.”

“I’m surprised you even have your computer here. How upset did Aaron get?”

“The bishop took the decision out of his hands. He’s very supportive of Katie.”

“Ephram’s a good man,” Leda said faintly, her mind far away. “He was very kind to me when I was excommunicated. It meant a lot to Aaron and Sarah to have him come to the baby’s funeral.”

I shut off the computer, unplugged it from the inverter, and stood. “Why’d they do that? Have a funeral, I mean.”

Leda shrugged. “Because the baby was their responsibility.”

“It was Katie’s.”

“A lot of Amish folks will have a service for a stillborn baby.” She hesitated, then looked at me. “That’s what it says on the stone-Stillborn. I suppose that was the only way Aaron and Sarah could live with what’s happened.”

I thought about a girl who might have been sexually assaulted, and then might completely block the incident and the aftereffects-including a pregnancy-out of her mind. “According to the ME, that baby wasn’t stillborn, Leda.”

“According to the prosecutor, Katie killed the baby. I don’t believe that either.”

I scuffed my sneaker along the cement floor of the milk room, contemplating how much I should confide in her. “She might have,” I said carefully. “I’m going to have a psychiatrist come out and talk to her.”

Leda blinked. “A psychiatrist?”

“Katie’s not only denying the pregnancy and the birth-but also the conception. I’m beginning to wonder if she might have been raped.”

“Samuel is such a fine boy, he-”

“The baby wasn’t Samuel’s. He’s never had sex with Katie.” I took a step forward. “Look, this has nothing to do with the defense. In fact, if Katie was raped, it gives her an emotional motive to want to get rid of the newborn. I just think that Katie might need someone to talk to-someone more qualified than me. For all I know, Katie comes in contact with the guy every single day, and God only knows how that’s affecting her.”

Leda was quiet for a moment. “Maybe the man wasn’t Amish,” she said finally.

I rolled my eyes. “Why not? Samuel may be one thing, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t some Amish boy out there who got carried away in the heat of the moment and forced Katie to do something she didn’t want to. And besides, I can count on one hand the number of English people Katie’s talked to since I’ve been here.”

“Since you’ve been here,” she repeated.

Leda was shifting in her seat, a miserable mottled flush rising over her cheeks. Clearly, being on the farm had clouded my mind, or I would have realized that with an excommunicated aunt, Katie probably had more access to worldly people and places than most Amish girls. “What haven’t you told me?” I said quietly.

“Once a month she goes to State College on the train. To the university. Sarah knows about it, but they tell Aaron that Katie’s come to visit me. I’m her cover, and since Aaron isn’t about to come to my house to check up on his daughter, I’m a good one.”

“What’s at the university?”

Leda exhaled softly. “Her brother.”

“How on earth do you expect me to defend Katie when no one’s willing to cooperate?” I exploded. “My God, Leda, I’ve been here nearly two weeks, and nobody bothered to mention that Katie has a brother she visits once a month?”

“I’m sure it wasn’t intentional,” Leda hurried to explain. “Jacob was excommunicated, like me, because he wanted to continue his schooling. Aaron took the high road, and said if Jacob left the church, he wouldn’t be his son any longer. His name isn’t mentioned in the house.”

“What about Sarah?”

“Sarah’s an Amish wife. She yields to her husband’s wishes. She hasn’t seen Jacob since he left six years ago-but she secretly sends Katie as her emissary, once a month.” Leda jumped as the automatic stirring machine came to life, mixing the milk in the bulk tank. She raised her voice over the hum of the battery that powered it. “After Hannah, she couldn’t have any more children. She’d had a batch of miscarriages between Jacob and Katie, anyway. And she couldn’t stand the thought of losing Jacob like she’d lost Hannah. So, indirectly, she didn’t.”

I thought of Katie taking the train all the way to State College by herself, wearing her kapp and her pinned dress and her apron, attracting stares. I imagined her fresh-faced innocence lighting the room at a frat party. I pictured her fighting off the groping hands of a college boy, who at nineteen knew more about the ways of the world than Katie would learn in a lifetime. I wondered if Jacob knew that Katie had been pregnant; if he could tell me the father of the baby. “I need to talk to him,” I said, wondering whether it would be faster to drive or take the train.

Then I groaned. I couldn’t go; I had Coop coming sometime this afternoon to interview Katie.

If I had learned anything in ten days, it was that the Amish way was slow. Work was painstaking, travel took forever, even church hymns were deliberate and lugubrious. Plain people didn’t check their watches twenty times a day. Plain people didn’t hurry; they just took as much time as it needed for something to be done.

Jacob Fisher would simply have to wait.

“Why didn’t you tell me you have a brother?”

Katie’s hands froze on the hose that she was hooking up to the outside faucet. She looked away, and if I hadn’t known better I would have believed she was deciding whether or not to lie to me. “I had a brother,” she said.

“Rumor has it he’s alive and well and living in State College.” I tied the ends of the apron I’d borrowed from Sarah, shucked off my sneakers, and stepped into the rubber barn boots she’d loaned me. I wasn’t going to win any fashion awards, but then again, I was on my way to hose down heifers. “Rumor has it you visit him from time to time, too.”

Katie wrenched the faucet open, then tested the nozzle of the hose. “We don’t talk about Jacob here anymore. My father doesn’t like it.”

“I’m not your father.” Katie began walking into the field with the hose, and I fell into step behind her, swatting away a patch of mosquitoes that circled my face. “Isn’t it hard, visiting Jacob on the sly?”

“He takes me to movies. And he bought me a pair of jeans to wear. It’s not hard, because when I’m with him, I’m not Katie Fisher.”

I stopped walking. “Who are you?”

She shrugged. “Just anyone. Just any other girl in the world.”

“It must have been very upsetting when your father kicked him out of the house.”

Katie yanked again on the hose. “It was upsetting even before that, when Jacob was lying about his schooling. He should have just confessed at church.”

“Ah,” I said. “The way you’re going to. Even though you’re innocent.”

The mosquitoes hovered in an arc above Katie, a halo. “You don’t understand us,” she accused. “Just because you’ve lived here for ten days doesn’t mean you know what it’s like to be Plain.”

“Then make me understand,” I said, turning so that she had to stop, or walk around me.

“For you, it’s all about how you stand out. Who is the smartest, the richest, the best. For us, it’s all about blending in. Like the patches that make up a quilt. One by one, we’re not much to look at. But put us together, and you’ve got something wonderful.”

“And Jacob?”

She smiled wistfully. “Jacob was like a black thread on a white background. He made the decision to leave.”

“Do you miss him?”

Katie nodded. “A lot. I haven’t seen him in a while.”

At that, I turned. “How come?”

“The summer here, it’s busy. I was needed at home.”

More likely, I thought, she wouldn’t have been able to hide a pregnant belly in a pair of Levi’s. “Did Jacob know about the baby?”

Katie continued walking, tugging on the hose.

“Was it someone you met there, Katie? Some college boy, some friend of Jacob’s?”

She mulishly set her jaw, and finally we came to the pen where the one-year-old cows were kept. On days this hot, they were sprayed with water to be made more comfortable. Katie twisted the nozzle, letting the water trickle onto her bare feet. “Can I ask you something, Ellie?”

“Sure.”

“Why don’t you talk about your family? How could you move out here and not have to make a phone call to them saying where you’d be?”

I watched the cows milling in the field, lowering their heads to the fresh grass. “My mother’s dead, and I haven’t spoken to my father in a few years.” Not since I became a defense attorney, and he accused me of selling out my morals for money. “I never got married, and my boyfriend and I just ended our relationship.”

“How come?”

“We sort of outgrew each other,” I said, testing the answer on my lips. “Not surprising, after eight years.”

“How can you be boyfriend and girlfriend for eight years and not get married?”

How to describe the intricacies of 1990s dating to an Amish girl? “Well, we started out thinking we were right for each other. It took us that long to find out we weren’t.”

“Eight years,” she scoffed. “You could have had a whole bunch of kids by now.”

At the thought of all that time wasted, I felt my throat close with tears. Katie dipped her toe in the small puddle of mud forming beneath the nozzle of the hose, clearly embarrassed at having upset me. “You must miss him.”

“Not Stephen, so much,” I said softly. “Just that bunch of kids.”

I waited for Katie to make the connection, to say something about her own circumstances in relation to mine-but once again she surprised me. “You know what I noticed when I was with Jacob? In your world, people can reach each other in an instant. There’s the telephone, and the fax-and on the computer you can talk to someone all the way around the world. You’ve got people telling their secrets on TV talk shows, and magazines that publish pictures of movie stars trying to hide in their homes. All those connections, but everyone there seems so lonely.”

Just as I started to protest, Katie handed me the hose and hopped over the fence. Reaching for the nozzle again, she turned the water on and waved it over the cows, who bellowed and tried to dodge the spray. Then, with a grin, she turned the hose on me.

“Why, you little-!” Soaked from my hair to my ankles, I climbed the fence and started to run after her. The cows got between us, milling in circles. Katie shrieked as I finally grabbed the hose and saturated her. “Take that,” I laughed, then slipped on the wet grass and landed on my bottom in a slick of mud.

“Excuse me? I’m looking for Ellie Hathaway.”

At the sound of the deep voice, both Katie and I turned, the nozzle in my hand spraying the shoes of the speaker before he managed to jump out of the way. I stood up, wiping mud off my hands, and grinned sheepishly at the man on the other side of the heifer pen, a man staring at my boots and apron and the muck all over me. “Coop,” I said. “It’s been a while.”

Ten minutes later when I came downstairs fresh from a shower, I found Coop sitting on the porch with Katie and Sarah. A platter of cookies was on the wicker table, and Coop held a sweating glass of ice water in his hand. He stood up as soon as he saw me.

“Still a gentleman,” I said, smiling.

He leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek, and to my surprise a hundred memories rushed at me-the way his hair had always smelled of wood smoke and apples, the curve of his jaw, the imprint of his fingers splayed over my back. Dizzy, I stepped back and did my best not to look uncomfortable.

“These ladies have been kind enough to keep me company,” he said, and Katie and Sarah bent their heads together, whispering like schoolgirls.

Sarah came to her feet. “We’ll leave you to your caller,” she said, nodding at Coop as she walked back into the house. Katie headed toward the garden, and I sat down. After twenty years, Coop had grown into his looks. His features-just a little too sharp in college-had roughened with time, chiseling his skin with a scar here and a laugh line there. His black hair, which once hung to his shoulders, was neatly trimmed and feathered with gray. His eyes were still that clear pale green that I had only seen twice in my life: on Coop, and once from the window of a plane when I was traveling to the Caribbean with Stephen.

“You’ve aged well,” I said.

He laughed. “You make it sound like I’m a bottle of wine.” Leaning back in his chair, he grinned at me. “You look pretty good, yourself. Especially compared to about fifteen minutes ago. I’d heard defense litigation was a dirty business, but I never took it literally.”

“Well, it’s sort of like method acting. The Amish aren’t a particularly trusting lot, when it comes to outsiders. When I look like them, work with them, they open up.”

“Must be hard, being stuck here away from home.”

“Is that John Joseph Cooper the psychiatrist asking?”

He started to say something, then shook his head. “Nah. Just Coop, the friend.”

I shrugged, deliberately looking away from his careful gaze. “There are things I miss-my coffee maker, for one. Downshifting in my car. The X-Files, and ER.”

“Not Stephen?”

I had forgotten that the last time I saw Coop, we’d been with our significant others. We met in the lobby during the intermission of a performance by the Philadelphia Symphony. Although we’d been in touch occasionally for business reasons, I had never before met his wife, who was fine-boned and blond, and fit against his side as neatly as a matched jigsaw puzzle piece. Even after all those years, just the sight of her was a sucker punch.

“Stephen isn’t in the picture,” I admitted.

Coop regarded me for a moment before saying, “I’m sorry to hear that.”

I was a grown-up; I could get through this. Taking a deep breath, I summoned a smile and clapped my hands on my knees. “Well. You didn’t come all the way out here to talk to me-”

“But I would have, Ellie,” Coop said, his voice soft. “I forgave you a long time ago.”

It would have been easy to pretend that I had not heard him; to simply launch into a discussion about Katie. But you can’t speak to someone partly responsible for making you who you are without unearthing a little bit of that history. Maybe Coop had forgiven me, but I hadn’t.

Coop cleared his throat. “Let me tell you what I found out about Katie.” He dug in a briefcase and pulled out a pad of yellow legal paper covered with his chicken-scratch handwriting. “There are two camps of psychiatric explanations for neonaticide. The minority attitude is that women who kill their newborns have gone into a dissociative state that lasts throughout the pregnancy.”

“Dissociative state?”

“A very concentrated focus state, where a person blocks out all but the one thing they’re doing. In this case, these women fracture off a bit of their consciousness, so that they’re living in a fantasy world where they’re not pregnant. When the birth finally occurs, the women are totally unprepared. They’ve dissociated from the reality of the event, experiencing memory lapses. Some women even become temporarily psychotic, once the shock of the birth slams through that shell of denial. In either case, the excuse is that they’re not mentally present at the moment of the crime, so they can’t be held legally accountable for their actions.”

“Sounds very Sybil to me.”

Coop grinned and handed me a list of names. “These are some psychiatrists who’ve testified the past few years with the soft approach. They’re clinical psychiatrists, you’ll see-not forensic ones. That’s because the majority of forensic psychiatrists who deal with neonaticides say the women are not in a dissociative state-just detached from the pregnancy. They feel dissociation might occur at the moment of birth. Plus, even I’d tell you that some dissociation is entirely normal, given the pain of childbirth. It’s like when you cut yourself chopping vegetables, and you kind of stand there for a second and say, ‘Wow, that’s a deep one.’ But you don’t go chopping off your hand after that to eliminate the problem.”

I nodded. “Then why do they kill the babies?”

“Because they have no emotional connection to them-it’s like passing a gallstone. At the moment of murder, they aren’t out of touch with reality-just frightened, embarrassed, and unable to face an illegitimate birth.”

“In other words,” I said flatly, “patently guilty.”

Coop shrugged. “I don’t have to tell you how insanity defenses go over with a jury.” He handed me another list, this one three times as long as the first. “These psychiatrists have supported the mainstream view. But every case is different. If Katie’s still refusing to admit to what’s happened in the face of a murder charge and medical evidence of pregnancy, there may be something more at work creating that defense mechanism.”

“I wanted to talk to you about that. Is there any way to find out if she was raped?”

Coop whistled. “That would be a hell of a reason to get rid of a newborn.”

“Yeah. I’d just like to be the one to find out, instead of the prosecutor.”

“It’s going to be tough, so many months after the fact, but I’ll keep it in mind when I’m talking to her.” He frowned. “There’s another option, too-that she’s been lying all along.”

“Coop, I’m a defense attorney. My bullshit meter is calibrated daily. I’d know if she was lying.”

“You might not, El. You have to admit you’re a little close to the situation, living here.”

“Lying isn’t one of the hallmarks of the Amish.”

“Neither is neonaticide.”

I thought of the way Katie would blush and stammer when she was confronted with something she didn’t want to talk about. And then I thought of how she’d looked every time she denied having a baby: her chin jutting straight, her eyes bright, her focus right on me. “In her mind, that baby never happened,” I said quietly.

Coop considered this. “Maybe not in her mind,” he answered. “But that baby was here.”

Katie fisted her hands in her lap, looking as if she’d been sentenced to an execution. “Dr. Cooper just wants to ask you some questions,” I explained. “You can relax.”

Coop smiled at her. We were all sitting by the creek, far enough away from the house for privacy. He slipped a tape recorder out of his pocket, and I quickly caught his eye and shook my head. Unfazed, Coop reached for his pad instead. “Katie, I just want to start off by telling you that whatever you say isn’t going to go beyond us. I’m not here to tattle on you; I’m just here to help you work through some of the feelings you must be having.”

She looked at Ellie, then back at Coop.

He grinned. “So-how are you feeling?”

“All right,” she said, wary. “Good enough that I don’t need to talk to you.”

“I can understand why you feel that way,” Coop responded pleasantly. “A lot of people do, who’ve never spoken to a psychiatrist. And then they figure out that sometimes it’s easier to talk to a stranger about personal things than it is to talk to a family member.”

I knew Coop was watching the same things I was-how Katie’s spine had become just a little less stiff, how her hands had uncurled in her lap. As his voice continued to wash over her, as his eyes held hers, I wondered how anyone stood a chance of keeping secrets from him. There was an affability to Coop, an effortless charm, that immediately made you feel like you had an intimate connection to him.

Then again, I had.

Shaking my attention back to my client, I listened to Coop’s question. “Can you tell me about your relationship with your parents?”

Katie looked at me as if she didn’t understand. What was a perfectly normal question for a clinical interview seemed silly, given the Amish. “They are my parents,” she said haltingly.

“Do you spend a lot of time with them?”

“Ja, out in the fields or in the kitchen, at meals, at prayer.” She blinked at Coop. “I’m with them all the time.”

“Are you close to your mother?”

Katie nodded. “I’m all she’s got.”

“Have you ever had seizures, Katie, or head trauma?”

“No.”

“How about very bad bellyaches?”

“Once.” Katie smiled. “After my brother dared me to eat ten apples that weren’t ripe.”

“But not . . . recently?” She shook her head. “How about losing big chunks of time . . . you suddenly realize that hours have passed, and you can’t remember where you’ve been or what you’ve done?”

At that, inexplicably, Katie blushed again and said no.

“Have you ever had hallucinations-seen things that aren’t really there?”

“Sometimes I see my sister-”

“Who died,” I interrupted.

“She drowned at the pond,” Katie explained. “When I’m there, she comes too.”

Coop didn’t even blink, as if seeing ghosts were the normal course of one’s day. “Does she speak to you? Tell you to do anything?”

“No. She just skates.”

“Does it bother you to see her?”

“Oh, no.”

“Have you ever been very sick? Had to go to the hospital?”

“No. Not until this last time.”

“Let’s talk about that,” Coop said. “Do you know why you were hospitalized?”

Katie’s cheeks flamed and she stared into her lap. “It was for a woman’s problem.”

“The doctors said you had a baby.”

“They were wrong,” Katie said. “I didn’t.”

Coop let the denial roll right off his back. “How old were you when you started menstruating, Katie?”

“Twelve.”

“Did your mother explain what was happening?”

“Well, a little. But I knew. I’d seen the animals and such.”

“Do you and your parents talk about sex?”

Katie’s eyes widened, absolutely scandalized. “Of course not. It’s not right, not until a girl’s gotten herself married.”

“Who says it’s not right?”

“The Lord,” she said promptly. “The church. My parents.”

“Would your parents be upset if they found out you were sexually active?”

“But I’m not.”

“I understand. But if you were, what do you think would happen?”

“They’d be very disappointed,” Katie answered quietly. “And I’d be put in the bann.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s when you break a rule, and the bishop finds out. You have to confess, and then, for a little while anyway, you’re shunned.” Her voice lowered to a whisper. “You’re cut off, is all.”

For the first time I saw it through Katie’s eyes-the stigma of being an outcast in a community where sameness was so highly valued.

“If you were in trouble, Katie, would you turn to your mother or father for help?”

“I would pray,” she said. “And whatever happened would be the Lord’s will.”

“Have you ever drunk alcohol, or taken drugs?”

To my great shock, Katie nodded. “I had two beers, once, and peppermint schnapps, when I was with my gang.”

“Your gang?”

“Other young people who are my friends. We’re called the Sparkies. Most Plain kids my age join up with a gang when they come into their Rumspringa.”

“Rumspringa?”

“Running-around years. When we’re fourteen or fifteen.”

Coop looked at me, but I raised my brows. This was the first I was hearing of it. “So-what made you join the Sparkies?”

“They were right for me. Not too crazy, but still fun. We have a few fellows who’ll buy beer at the Turkey Hill and race their buggies after midnight down Route 340, but most of the wild kids would rather join the Shotguns or the Happy Jacks-they hold hops, and drive around in plain sight, and really become Sod-worldly. We get together on Sunday nights and sing hymns, mostly. But sometimes,” she admitted shyly, “we do other things.”

“Like?”

“Drink. Dance to music. Well, I used to do that, but now I leave after the singing when things are getting a little crazy.”

“How come?”

Katie fisted her hands in the grass. “Now I’m baptized.”

Coop’s brows raised. “Haven’t you been since you were a baby?”

“No, we get baptized when we’re older. For me, it was last year. We make the choice to stand before God and agree to live by the Ordnung-those rules I was talking about.”

“When you went to these singings, and drank and danced, did your parents know?”

Katie looked toward the house. “All the parents know that the kids are up to something; they just look the other way and hope it isn’t too dangerous.”

“Why would they accept behavior like this, but be disappointed by sexual activity?”

“Because it’s a sin. The singings-well, it’s kind of like a fling with being English. Folks believe if their kids have a chance to try it once or twice, they’ll still give up worldly things and take on the responsibility of living Plain.”

“Do most kids?”

“Ja.”

“Why?”

“All their friends are Plain. And their family. If they don’t join the church, they won’t be like everyone else. Plus, they have to be baptized, if they want to get married.”

“Do you? Want to get married?”

“Who doesn’t?” Katie said.

Coop grinned. “Well, Ellie for one,” he joked under his breath, just loud enough for me to hear. I was so busy turning over his words in my mind, and what they meant, that I nearly missed his next question.

“Have you ever kissed a boy, Katie?”

“Ja,” she said, blushing again. “Samuel. And before him, John Beiler.”

“Samuel is your boyfriend?”

Was, I thought.

“Have you and your boyfriend ever had sexual intercourse?”

“No!”

Coop hesitated. “Does he kiss you anywhere but on the lips?”

“On the neck,” she murmured. “My forehead.”

“What about on your breasts, Katie? Your belly?”

Katie inched her bare feet out from beneath her skirt and set them one by one into the running creek. “Samuel wouldn’t do that.”

“Have you ever let anyone else kiss or touch you?” Coop gently pressed. When she didn’t answer, he softened his voice even more. “Do you want to have babies one day, Katie?”

She lifted her face, the sun lighting her cheeks and her eyes. “Oh, yes,” she whispered. “More than anything.”

The moment Katie was out of earshot I verbally pounced on Coop. “What do you think?”

He lay back on the grassy bank. “That I’m not in Kansas anymore. I need a crash course in Amish life before I evaluate her further.”

“When you find the university offering the night session, will you sign me up?” I sighed. “She said she wants children.”

“Most women who commit neonaticide do. Just not at this time.” He hesitated. “Then again, it’s also possible that to her, this baby never existed.”

“So you don’t think she’s lying. You think she really blocked out having that baby.”

Coop was silent for a moment. “I wish I could tell you for sure. The general public seems to believe that shrinks can tell better than the average Joe whether someone’s lying through her teeth, but you know what, El? It’s a myth. It’s too early, really, to make a judgment. If she is lying, she’s awfully good at it, and I can’t imagine it was part of her upbringing.”

“Well, did you come up with anything conclusive?”

He shrugged. “I think it’s safe to say that she’s not psychotic right now.”

“Ghosts notwithstanding?”

“There’s a big difference between a figment of one’s imagination and a psychotic delusion. If her sister was appearing and telling her to kill her baby, or saying the Devil was living under the silo, that would be another story.”

“I don’t care if she’s psychotic now. What about when she delivered the baby?”

Coop pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “It’s clear she’s blocking out the pregnancy, and the act that led to it, but you didn’t need me to tell you that.”

“What about rape?” Ellie asked.

“That’s tough to call, too. She’s so skittish about sex I can’t figure out if it’s due to religious background or to assault. Even having consensual sex with someone not Amish might be enough to put up a wall in Katie’s mind. You heard how fearful she is of being shunned. If she developed a relationship with an outsider, she might as well kiss her Amish life good-bye.”

I had been there long enough to know that wasn’t quite right. You were always welcomed back-you just had to admit to your sins. “Actually, she could confess, and go back to the church.”

“Unfortunately, just because others would forgive her doesn’t mean that she would forget. She’d be carrying that around for the rest of her life.” Coop turned to me. “Given her upbringing, it’s not surprising that her mind is working overtime to block out what’s happened.”

I flopped onto my back beside him. “She tells me she didn’t kill the baby. She tells me she didn’t have the baby. But there’s proof that she did have the baby-”

“And if she lied about the one thing,” Coop finished for me, “then she’s probably lied about the other. However, lying presumes conscious knowledge. If she’s dissociating, she can’t be blamed for not knowing the truth.”

Coming up on my elbow, I smiled sadly. “But can she be blamed for committing murder?”

“That,” Coop said, “depends on a jury.” He tugged me upright. “I’d like to keep talking to her. Walk her through the night before the birth.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s incredibly nice of you and far beyond the call of duty, but you must have more important things to do.”

“I said I’d help you, El, and I haven’t exactly done a crackerjack job yet. I’ll drive out in the evenings and talk to her after leaving the office.”

“And meanwhile, your wife’s sitting home eating dinner alone. Weren’t you the one who told me psychiatrists are the ones who can’t keep their own personal relationships together?”

Coop nodded. “Yeah. Which is probably why I got divorced about a year ago.”

I turned toward him, my mouth dry. “You did?” He looked down at his shoes, at the rush of the creek; and I wondered why it was so easy to speak of Katie, and so difficult to speak of ourselves. “Coop, I’m sorry.”

He reached out to the bark of a tree and plucked off a neon inch-worm, which curled tight as a drum in the hollow of his palm. “We all make mistakes,” Coop said softly. He reached for my hand and held it up beside his, just as the worm began to move; traveling, stretching, a small bright bridge between us.

It took me a half hour to convince Sarah that if I left Katie in her custody for the morning, I wouldn’t be breaking any laws, and chances were incredibly slim that any representative of the court would come ambling by to realize I wasn’t around. “Look,” I said finally, “if you want me to gather up a defense strategy for Katie, I need flexibility.”

“Dr. Cooper drove out here,” Sarah fretted.

“Dr. Cooper doesn’t have to bring half a million dollars’ worth of laboratory equipment with him,” I explained. In fact, I had worked so hard just to guarantee myself the two hours I needed to meet with Dr. Owen Zeigler that I was faintly disappointed to realize I had no desire to be in the neonatal pathology lab at the University of Pennsylvania Medical Center. I kept thinking of sick infants, dead infants, infants born at risk to women over forty, and all I wanted to do was hightail it back to the Fishers’ farm.

Owen, a man with whom I’d worked once in the past, had a Moon Pie face, a bright bald head, and a round middle that balanced on his knees whenever he hiked himself up onto one of the high stools in front of the microscopes. “The placental culture showed mixed flora, including diphtheroids,” he said. “Which basically means there was crap floating around.”

“Are you saying it might have affected the results?”

“No. It’s perfectly normal, considering the placenta had been lying around in a barn.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Then tell me something that’s abnormal.”

“Well, the death of the neonate. Looks like a live birth to me,” he said, and my hopes plummeted. “Based on the hydrostatic test, air made it to the alveoli.”

“Speak English, Owen.”

The pathologist sighed. “The baby breathed.”

“That’s a definite, then?”

“You can tell if a newborn, even a preemie, has breathed air or just inhaled fluid, when you look at the alveoli in the lungs. They get rounded. It’s more conclusive than the hydrostatic test itself, because lungs may float if artificial respiration was attempted.”

“Yeah, right,” I muttered. “She gave it mouth to mouth, and then killed it.”

“You never know,” Owen said.

“So what made it stop breathing?”

“The medical examiner is crying suffocation. But that’s not conclusive.”

I climbed onto a stool beside the pathologist. “Tell me more.”

“There are petechiae in the lungs, which suggests asphyxia, but they could have formed before or after death. As for the bruising on the neonate’s lips, all that means is that it was pressed up tightly against something. That something could have been the mother’s collarbone, for all we know. In fact, if the newborn was suffocated with something soft, like the shirt it was wrapped in or the mother’s hand, the findings are virtually indistinguishable from SIDS.”

He reached forward and took from my hand the glass slide I’d been absently playing with. “Bottom line: the baby could very well have died without anyone laying a hand on him. At thirty-two weeks, it’s a viable neonate, but just barely.”

I frowned. “Would the mother have known if the baby was dying right before her eyes?”

“Depends. If it was choking on mucus, she could have heard it. If it was suffocating, she’d see it gasping, turning blue.” He turned off his microscope and slipped the slide-marked clearly BABY FISHER-into a small box containing others.

I tried to imagine Katie paralyzed by fear, by the awareness of this tiny premature infant struggling to breathe. I pictured her watching it, wide-eyed, too stunned to intervene; and then realizing too late what had happened. I saw her wrapping it in a shirt and trying to hide it, before anyone could discover what had gone wrong.

I envisioned her standing in a court of law, still, on trial for failing to seek proper medical attention after delivering the baby. Negligent homicide-not first-degree murder. But a felony, nonetheless; one that carried with it a jail sentence.

Extending my hand to Owen, I smiled. “Thanks anyway,” I said.

On Saturday night, I headed upstairs at about ten o’clock and drew the green shades on the eastern side of the room. I took a shower and thought of Coop, wondered what he might be doing-seeing a movie? Eating out at a five-star restaurant? I was wondering if he still wore a T-shirt and boxers to bed when Katie came into the room. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked, peering at my face.

“Nothing.”

Katie shrugged, then yawned. “Boy, I’m tired,” she said, but her bright eyes and the bounce in her step completely contradicted her words. As she walked into the bathroom, I turned off the bedroom light and crawled into bed, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. Katie returned, sat down on the edge of her bed, and took off her boots. Then she slid between the sheets, fully dressed.

I came up on an elbow, amused. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“I’m cold, is all.”

“There’s another quilt in the closet, up on top.” I thought of her rolling over in the middle of the night and having one of the pins that secured her dress jab her chest.

“This is fine.”

“Suit yourself.” I rolled over, staring at the wall, and suddenly remembered being sixteen years old and going to sleep in all my clothes, so that I could sneak out of the house when I saw the headlights of my best friend’s car and go to the party a football jock was throwing while his parents were out of town. Sitting up, I glared at Katie’s huddled body. “Where are you planning on going?”

Her jaw dropped-guilty as charged.

“Correction,” I said. “Where are we planning on going?”

She drew herself to a sitting position. “On Saturday nights, Samuel comes,” Katie confessed. “We visit on the porch, or in the living room. Sometimes we stay up until morning.”

Well, whatever “visiting” encompassed, I already knew that it didn’t include having sex. Katie’s embarrassment stemmed from a basic Amish principle about dating-it was strictly your own business, and for some reason I didn’t understand, Plain teens went out of their way to pretend that they were doing anything but meeting their boyfriend or girlfriend.

Katie’s eyes gleamed in the dark, her gaze focused on the window. For a moment, she looked so much like any other lovesick teenager that I wanted to touch her; just cup my hand over the curve of her cheek and tell her to make this moment last, because before she knew it she’d be like me, a witness to someone else’s moment. I didn’t know how to say that, given the circumstances, Samuel might not come. That the baby she could not admit to bearing had changed the rules.

“Does he throw pebbles? Or use a ladder?” I asked softly.

Realizing I was not going to give her secret away, Katie smiled slowly. “A flashlight.”

“Well.” I felt duty-bound to dispense some advice for the upcoming tryst, but what could I say to a girl who’d already had a baby and was accused of killing it? “Be careful,” I said finally, settling under the covers again.

I slept fitfully, waiting to see that flashlight beam. At midnight, Katie was still lying awake in bed. At two-fifteen, she got up and sat in the rocking chair beside the window. At three-thirty, I knelt down beside her. “He’s not coming for you, sweetheart,” I whispered. “In less than an hour, he’ll have to start the milking.”

“But he always-”

I turned her face so that she was looking at me, and shook my head.

Stiffly, Katie got up and walked to bed. She sat down and traced the pattern of the quilt, lost in her own thoughts.

I had seen the looks on clients’ faces at the moment they were sentenced to five years, ten, life in prison. In most cases, even when they knew it was likely to be coming, the truth hit them like a wrecking ball. Sentencing would be a piece of cake for Katie, compared to this: the understanding that her life would no longer be as it once was.

She was quiet for a long time, running her finger over the seams of her handiwork. Then she spoke, her voice rising thin as a trail of smoke. “When you’re quilting, one missed stitch ruins the whole bunch.” With a rustle of covers, she turned to me. “You pull on it,” she whispered, “and they all unravel.”

Aaron and Sarah spent the Sunday off from church visiting friends and relatives, but Katie and I declined their invitation to come along. Instead, after we finished the chores, we went to the creek to fish. I found the rods just where she said they’d be in the shed and met her in the field, where she was overturning a clod of earth to pluck out worms for bait. “I don’t know,” I said, watching them wriggle pink over her palm. “I’m having second thoughts.”

Katie dropped several into a small jelly jar. “You said you used to fish when you were a kid, here on the farm.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But that was a thousand years ago.”

She smiled up at me. “You always do that. Make yourself out to be some old woman.”

“Get back to me when you’re thirty-nine, and tell me how you feel.” I walked at her side, the rods canted over my shoulder.

The creek was running strong, thanks to a few days of rain. The water tumbled over rocks, forked around sticks. Katie sat down at the water’s edge and took a worm out of the jar, then reached for one of the poles. “When Jacob and I used to have fishing contests, I always caught the biggest-Ouch!” Drawing back her hand, she popped her thumb into her mouth to suck away the blood. “That was stupid of me,” she said a moment later.

“You’re tired.” She lowered her eyes. “We all do crazy things when we care about someone,” I said carefully. “So you waited up all night. So what?” I reached for a worm, swallowed, and baited my own hook. “When I was your age, I got stood up before my senior prom. I bought a hundred-and-fifty-dollar strapless dress that wasn’t beige or cream, mind you, but ecru, and I sat in my room waiting for Eddie Bernstein to pick me up. Turns out he’d asked two girls to the dance and decided that Mary Sue LeClare was more likely to put out.”

“Put out?”

I cleared my throat. “Um, it’s an expression. For having sex.”

Katie’s brows rose. “Oh, I see.”

Uncomfortable, I dunked my line into the water. “Maybe we should talk about something else.”

“Did you love him? Eddie Bernstein?”

“No. The two of us were always vying for highest grade-point average, so we got to know each other pretty well. I didn’t fall in love until I got to college.”

“Why didn’t you get married then?”

“Twenty-one is awfully young to get married. Most women like to have a few years to get to know themselves, before getting to know marriage and children.”

“But once you have a family, there’s so much more you learn about yourself,” Katie pointed out.

“Unfortunately, by the time I came around to that way of thinking, my prospects had dimmed.”

“What about Dr. Cooper?”

I dropped my fishing rod, then grabbed it up again. “What about him?”

“He likes you, and you like him.”

“Of course we do. We’re colleagues.”

Katie snorted. “My father has colleagues, but he doesn’t sit a little too close to them on the porch swing, or smile extra long at something they’ve said.”

I scowled at her. “I would think that you, of all people, would respect my right to privacy regarding my own personal affairs.” Affairs, I thought. Wrong word.

“Is he coming here today?”

I started. “How would you know that?”

“Because you keep looking up the driveway, like I did last night.”

Sighing, I decided to come clean. If nothing else, maybe it would spur her to honesty. “Coop was the boy in college. The one I didn’t marry when I was twenty-one.”

She suddenly leaned back to pull a thrashing sunfish out of the brook. Its scales caught the sunlight; its tail thumped between Katie and me. She lifted it with her thumb in its mouth, and set it into the water for a second chance.

“Which one of you quit?” she asked.

I didn’t pretend to misunderstand. “That,” I said softly, “would have been me.”

“I wasn’t feeling well at dinner,” Katie told us, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere beyond Coop’s shoulder. “Mam told me to go on up and lie down, and she’d clean the dishes.”

Coop nodded, encouraging. He’d been here for two hours now, interviewing Katie about the night of the alleged murder. To my great surprise, Katie was being cooperative, if not forthcoming.

“You felt sick,” Coop prompted. “Was it a headache? Stomachache?”

“It was chills all over, with a headache. Like the flu.”

I hadn’t had children myself, but those symptoms seemed to suggest a virus rather than impending labor. “Did you fall asleep?” Coop asked.

“Ja, after a little bit. And then I woke up in the morning.”

“You don’t remember anything between the time you went to bed sick, and the time you woke up in the morning?”

“No,” Katie said. “But what’s so strange about that? I don’t usually remember anything between when I fall asleep and I wake up, except a dream every now and then.”

“Did you feel sick when you woke up?”

Katie blushed furiously. “A little.”

“The same headache and chills?”

She ducked her head. “No. It was my time of the month.”

“Katie, was the flow heavier than usual?” I asked, and she nodded. “Did you have cramps?”

“Some,” she admitted. “Not bad enough to keep me from doing my chores.”

“Were you sore?”

“You mean like my muscles?”

“No. Between your legs.”

After a sidelong look at Coop, she murmured to me, “It burned a little bit. But I thought it was maybe part of the flu.”

“So,” Coop said, clearing his throat, “you got up and did your chores?”

“I started to cook breakfast,” Katie answered. “There was something big going on down at the barn, and then the Englischer police came, and Mam stuck her head in long enough to tell me to make extra food for them.” She stood up, pacing the length of the porch. “I didn’t go into the barn until Samuel came to tell me what was happening.”

“What did you see?”

Her eyes were bright with tears. “The tiniest baby,” she whispered. “Oh, the very tiniest one I’d ever seen.”

“Katie,” Coop said softly, “had you seen that baby before?”

She gave her head a quick shake, as if she was trying to clear it.

“Did you touch the baby?”

“No.”

“Was it wrapped up?”

“In a shirt,” she whispered. “So that just his face was showing, and it looked like he was sleeping, like Hannah used to look when she was in her crib.”

“If the baby was wrapped up, if you never touched it . . . how do you know it was a boy?”

Katie blinked at Coop. “I don’t know.”

“Try hard, Katie. Try to remember the moment you knew it was a boy.”

She shook her head, crying harder now. “You can’t do this to me,” she sobbed, and then she turned on her heel and ran.

“She’ll come back,” I said, staring off in the direction Katie had fled. “But it’s nice that you’re worried.”

Coop sighed and leaned back on the porch swing. “I pushed her to the edge,” he said. “Came right up against that world she’s been living in in her mind. She had to shut down, or else concede that her logic doesn’t work.” He turned to me. “You believe she’s guilty, don’t you?”

It was the first time since I’d been here that anyone had actually put the question to me. The Fisher family, their Amish friends and relatives-everyone in the community seemed to treat Katie’s murder charge as some bizarre finger-pointing that they had to simply accept, but not believe. However, I wasn’t looking at a girl I’d known all my life-just a mountain of evidence that seemed damning. From the police reports to my recent discussion with the neonatal pathologist, everything I had seen so far suggested that Katie had either actively or passively caused the death of her child. The concealment of the pregnancy-that was premeditation. The threat of losing Samuel, as well as her parents’ respect; the fear of being excommunicated-that was motive. The ongoing denial of hard facts-well, my gut feeling was that with an upbringing like Katie’s, it was the only way to deal with something she’d known damn well was wrong.

“I have three choices for my defense, Coop,” I said. “Number one: she did it and she’s sorry, and I throw her on the mercy of the court. But that would mean putting her on the stand, and if I do, they’ll know she’s not sorry at all-hell, she doesn’t even believe she committed the crime. Number two: she didn’t do it, someone else did. A nice defense, but highly unlikely, given that it was a premature birth that occurred in secret at two in the morning. And number three: she did it, but she was dissociating at the time, and she can’t really be convicted of a crime if she wasn’t mentally there.”

“You believe she’s guilty,” Coop repeated.

I couldn’t look him in the eye. “I believe this is my only chance to get her off.”

Aaron and I walked into the barn in the later afternoon-me heading for my computer, Aaron intent on delivering feed to the cows. Suddenly, he stopped beside me. The barn was charged with the scent of something about to happen. One of the ballooned cows in the calving pen was bellowing, a tiny hoof sticking out from between her hind legs. Swiftly, Aaron reached for a pair of long rubber kitchen gloves and went into the pen, pulling at the hoof until a miniature white face emerged beside a second hoof. Aaron tugged and tugged, and I watched with wonder as the calf emerged bloody, with the sound of a seal being broken.

It landed, sprawled, on the hay. Aaron knelt before it and brushed a blade of straw over its face. The little nose wrinkled, sneezed, and then the calf was breathing, standing, nuzzling its mother’s side. Peering under its leg, Aaron grinned. “It’s a heifer,” he announced.

Well, of course it was. What was he expecting-a whale?

As if he could read my mind, he laughed. “A heifer,” he repeated. “Not a bull.”

Peeling off his gloves, he got to his feet. “How’s that for a miracle?”

The mother rasped her tongue along the wet whorls of her baby’s hide. Mesmerized, I stared. “That’ll do just fine,” I murmured.

When she heard that Mary Esch was hosting a singing, Katie got down on her knees and begged to be allowed to go. “You can come along,” she said, just in case that was liable to sway me. “Please, Ellie.”

I knew, from what she’d told Coop and me, that this was a social event. It would give me an opportunity to see Katie react around other Amish boys, boys who might have been the father of her baby. So, five hours later, I was sitting beside Katie on the front bench of the buggy, en route to a hymn sing. I’d ridden in the Fisher buggy before, but it hadn’t seemed quite so precarious from the backseat. Gripping the edge, I asked, “How long have you been driving?”

“Since I was thirteen.” She caught my gaze and grinned. “Why? Wanna take the reins?”

There was something about Katie tonight-a sparkle, a hope-that made my eyes keep coming back to her. After we arrived, she tied up the horse beside a batch of other buggies, and we went inside the barn. Mary kissed Katie on the cheek and whispered something that made Katie cover her mouth and laugh. I tried to blend into the background and stared at the girls with their creamy complexions and their rainbow-colored dresses, the boys with their fringed bangs and furtive glances. I felt like a chaperone at a high school dance-overbearing, critical, and uncomfortably old. And then I saw a familiar face.

Samuel stood with a group of slightly older boys; the ones, I assumed, that had been baptized like him yet still remained single. His back was to Katie, and he was listening to another boy’s conversation-from the looks of it, a rude story about either a fat woman or a horse. When the group broke into laughter, Samuel smiled faintly, then walked off.

The teenagers began to drift toward two long picnic tables. The first had a bench of girls sitting opposite a bench of boys. The second was reserved for couples: girls and boys sat side by side, their entwined hands hidden in the folds of the girl’s skirt. A young woman I had never met approached me. “Ms. Hathaway, can I show you to a seat?”

I had been expecting a barrage of questions about my identity, but I should have known better. The power of word of mouth was mighty in the Amish community; these kids had heard about me for nearly two weeks. “Matter of fact,” I said, “I just might stand back here and watch.”

The girl smiled and took a seat at the singles table, whispering to her friend, who then glanced at me from beneath her lashes. Katie sat at the end of the couples table, leaving a spot beside her. As if nothing at all had happened the night before, she smiled at Samuel as he came toward the table.

He kept walking.

With Katie watching every step, Samuel slid into a spot at the singles’ table. Nearly every pair of eyes followed his progress, then darted back to Katie, but no one said a word. Katie bowed her head, her neck drooping low as a cygnet’s, her cheeks bright.

As the high notes of a hymn rose toward the ceiling, as the mouths of the girls rounded with sound and the voices of boys grew magically deeper, I took a slow step toward the couples table. I climbed over the bench seat and sank down beside Katie, who did not look at me. I placed my hand, palm facing up, on her knee and counted: a quarter note, a half, a full measure before she took what I was offering.

With my back turned, I never would have been able to identify them as Amish teens. The buzz and chatter, the giggling, the clink of glasses and plates as the snacks were served, all seemed familiar and English. Even the dark and shifting shapes in the corners-couples looking for a spot to get closer-and the odd pair who wandered outside, their faces burning with an internal fever, seemed far more suited to my world than Katie’s.

Katie sat like a queen bee on a stool, surrounded by loyal girlfriends speculating on the cause of Samuel’s defection. If she was being comforted by them, it wasn’t working. She looked shell-shocked, as if two consecutive nights of rebuff were too much for her to accept.

Then again, she was having trouble accepting more than one fact of life these days.

Suddenly the group of girls cleaved and fell back in two halves. Hat in his hands, Samuel stepped forward toward Katie. “Hello,” he said.

“Hello.”

“Could I take you home?”

Some of the girls patted Katie’s back, as if to say that they knew it would come out all right the whole time. Katie kept her face averted. “I have my own buggy. And Ellie’s with me.”

“Maybe Ellie could drive home herself.”

That was my cue to speak up. I stepped forward from where I had been shamelessly eavesdropping and smiled. “Sorry, guys. Katie, you’re welcome to a private moment, but only if it doesn’t involve me, a sway-backed mare, and a set of reins.”

Samuel glanced at me. “My cousin Susie said she’d drive you back to the Fishers’, if you’re willing. And then I can take her back home after.”

Katie waited, yielding to my wishes. “All right,” I sighed. I wondered if Susie was even old enough to have a learner’s permit in my world.

I watched Katie climb into the open buggy Samuel had brought. I hauled myself into the family carriage we’d arrived in, beside a slip of a girl with thick Coke bottle glasses who was my designated driver. Just before they drove off, Katie waved to me and smiled nervously.

The ride home was a long, silent fifteen minutes. Susie was far from the budding conversationalist; she seemed to have been struck dumb by her close proximity to someone who wasn’t Amish. When she asked to use the bathroom just as we arrived at the Fishers’, I jumped at the sound of her voice. “Sure,” I said. “Go on inside.”

It wasn’t good hostessing, but I wasn’t about to leave before Katie arrived. Just in case.

I sat in the buggy, because I had no idea how to unhook the horse from its traces. A moment later, the light clop of hooves on packed dirt announced the arrival of Samuel’s horse.

I should have let them know I was there. Instead I sank into the dark recesses of the buggy, waiting to hear what Katie and Samuel had to say.

“Just tell me.” Samuel’s voice was so soft I would not have heard it if not for the wind that carried it close. “Tell me who it was.” At Katie’s silence, he began to grow frustrated. “Was it John Lapp? I’ve seen him staring at you. Or Karl Mueller?”

“It was no one,” Katie insisted. “Stop it.”

“It was someone! Someone touched you. Someone held you. Someone made that baby!”

“There was no baby. There was no baby!” Katie’s voice rose in pitch, in volume, and then I heard a thump as she jumped down from the buggy and ran into the house.

I stepped out of my hiding spot and sheepishly looked at Samuel, and Susie, who’d collided with Katie at the door of the Fishers’ home.

“There was a baby,” Samuel whispered to me.

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

E. Trumbull Tewksbury arrived shortly after lunchtime, wearing his G-man aviator sunglasses and his buzz cut and his black suit. He looked around the farm as if he was scoping it for assassins or terrorists, and then asked where he could set up. “The kitchen,” I said, leading him inside, to where Katie was already waiting.

A former FBI man, Bull now administered lie detector tests in the private sector. Basically, he was a suitcase for hire. He’d come out before on my behalf to clients’ homes with his portable equipment, and exuded enough of his past training to invite both an air of solemnity for the occasion, and a vague threat suggesting that-criminal or not-the client had better be telling the truth.

Of course, this was probably the first time he’d had to get the thumbs-up from an Amish bishop to administer a test, what with the requisite tape recorder and microphone and battery pack that was part and parcel of a lie detector. But, since church permission had been granted, even Aaron was grudgingly leaving us alone. It was just me, Katie, and for moral support, Sarah, holding tight to her daughter’s hand.

“Breathe deeply,” I said, leaning closer to Katie. She was absolutely terrified, like several of my former clients. Of course, I didn’t know if that was due to guilt, or because she had never seen so many bells and whistles in one place. However, since the machine reacted to nerves, Katie’s fear had to be nipped in the bud, no matter what was causing it.

“I’m just going to be asking you some questions,” Bull said. “You see here? This is just a little bitty tape recorder. And this part is a microphone.” He tapped it with his fingernail. “And this thing, it’s no different from those earthquake seismographs.”

Katie’s fingers were white where they held Sarah’s hand. Beneath her breath she was whispering in the dialect, words that were becoming familiar to me after many evenings with the Fishers: “Unser Vater, in dem Himmel. Dein Name werde geheiliget. Dein Reich komme. Dein Wille geschehe auf Erden wie im Himmel.”

In all my years of practice, I’d never had a client reciting the Lord’s Prayer before a lie detector test.

“Just relax,” I said, patting her arm. “All you have to do is say yes or no.”

In the end, it wasn’t me who managed to calm Katie down. It was Bull himself, who-bless his Pentagonal heart-struck up a distracting conversation about Jersey cows and the cream content of their milk. Watching her mother chat with the strange man about a familiar topic, Katie’s shoulders softened, then her spine, then finally her resolve.

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 Quonset 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 zone? 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 him 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 infinitesimally 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 Morsecode 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.”