ometimes, 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 settled 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 Lizzie 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.”

He shook his head. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

“Yeah? You ought to try my line of work. How long since you last saw your sister?”

Calculating quickly, he said, “Three, four months.”

“Before that did she visit you on a regular basis?”

“I wouldn’t say regular,” Jacob hedged.

“I see. Mr. Fisher, did she develop any friendships or romantic interests when she was visiting you?”

“She didn’t meet people here,” Jacob said.

“Come on.” The detective grinned. “You didn’t introduce her to your girlfriend? To the guy whose chair I’m sitting on?”

“She was very shy, and she spent all her time with me.”

“You were never apart from her? Never let her go to the library, or shopping, or to the video store by herself?”

Jacob’s mind raced. He was thinking of all the times, last fall, that he’d left Katie in the house while he went off to class. Left her in the house that he was subletting from a guy who delayed his research expedition not once, but three times. He looked impassively at the detective. “You have to understand, my sister and I are two different animals. She’s Amish, through and through-she lives, sleeps, and breathes it. Visiting here for her-it was a trial. Even when she did come in contact with outsiders here, they had about as much effect on her as oil on water.”

The detective flipped to a blank page in her notebook. “Why aren’t you Amish anymore?”

This, at least, was safe ground. “I wanted to continue my studies. That goes against the Plain way. I was working as a carpentry apprentice when I met a high school English teacher who sent me off with a stack of books that might as well have been gold, for all I thought they were worth. And when I made the decision to go to college, I knew that I would be excommunicated from the church.”

“I understand this caused some strain in the relationship between you and your parents.”

“You could say that,” Jacob conceded.

“I was told that to your father, you’re as good as dead.”

Tightly, he answered, “We don’t see eye to eye.”

“If your father banished you from the household for wanting a diploma, what do you think he would have done if your sister had a baby out of wedlock?”

He had been part of this world long enough to understand the legal system. Leaning forward, he asked softly, “Which one of my family members are you accusing?”

“Katie,” Munro said flatly. “If she’s as Amish as you say she is, then it’s possible she was willing to do anything-including commit murder-to stay Amish and to keep your father from finding out about that baby. Which includes hiding the pregnancy, and then getting rid of the baby when it was born.”

“If she’s as Amish as I say she is, then that would never happen.” Jacob stood abruptly and opened the door. “If you’ll excuse me, Detective, I have work to do.”

He closed the door and stood behind it, listening to the detective’s retreating footsteps. Then he sat down at his desk and picked up the telephone. “Aunt Leda,” he said a moment later. “What in the world is going on?”

By the time the church service drew to a close that Sunday, Katie was light-headed, and not just from the pressing summer heat, intensified by so many bodies packed into one small home. The bishop called a members’ meeting, and as those who hadn’t been baptized yet filed out to play in the barn, Ellie leaned close to her. “What are they doing?”

“They have to leave. So do you.” She saw Ellie staring at her trembling hands, and she hid them under her thighs.

“I’m not budging.”

“You must,” Katie urged. “It will be easier that way.”

Ellie stared at her in that wide-eyed owl way that sometimes made Katie smile, and shook her head. “Tough beans. Tell them to take it up with me.”

In the end, though, Bishop Ephram seemed to accept that Ellie was going to sit in on the members’ meeting. “Katie Fisher,” one of the ministers said, calling her forward.

She didn’t think she was going to be able to stand, her knees were knocking so hard. She could feel eyes on her: Ellie’s, Mary Esch’s, her mother’s, even Samuel’s. These people, who would bear witness to her shame.

It didn’t matter whether or not she’d had a baby, when you got right down to it. She had no intention of discussing her private matters in front of the congregation, in spite of what Ellie had tried to explain to her about a Bill of Rights and kangaroo courts. Katie had been brought up to believe that rather than defend yourself, you’d best step up and take the medicine. With a deep breath, she walked to the spot where the ministers were sitting.

When she knelt on the floor, she could feel the ridge of the oak boards pressing into her skin and she gloried in this pain, because it kept her mind off what was about to happen. As she bowed her head, Bishop Ephram began to speak. “It has come to our attention that the young sister has found herself in a sin of the flesh.”

Every part of Katie was on fire, from her face to her chest to the very palms of her hands. The bishop’s gaze was on her. “Is this offense true?”

“Yes,” she whispered, and she might have imagined it, but she could have sworn that in the silence she heard Ellie’s defeated sigh.

The bishop turned to the congregation. “Do you agree to place Katie under the bann for a time as she considers her sin and comes to repentance?”

Each person in the room got a vote, a hand in meting out her punishment. It was rare, in cases like this, that someone wouldn’t agree-after all, it was a relief to see a sinner confessing and beginning the process of healing. “Ich bin einig,” she heard: I am agreed; each member repeating the words in succession.

Tonight, she would be shunned. She would have to eat at a separate table from her family. She would spend six weeks in the bann; still spoken to and loved, but for all that, also apart and alone. With her head bowed, Katie could pick out the soft voices of her baptized girlfriends, the reluctant sigh of her own mother, the stiff resolve of her father. Then she heard the voice that she knew best of all, the deep, rough rumble of Samuel. “Ich bin . . .” he said, stumbling. “Ich bin . . .” Would he disagree? Would he stand up for her, after all that had passed?

“Ich bin einig,” Samuel said, as Katie let her eyes drift shut.

The church service had been held at a nearby farm, so Ellie and Katie opted to walk home. Ellie slung her arm around the girl’s shoulders, trying to cheer her up. “It’s not like you’ve got a scarlet A on your chest,” she joked.

“A what?”

“Nothing.” Pressing her lips together, Ellie said softly, “I’ll eat with you.”

Katie flashed her a brief, grateful look. “I know.”

They walked in silence for a few moments, Ellie scuffing at rocks in the path. Finally she turned to Katie. “I’ve got to ask you something, and it’s going to make you angry. How come you’re willing to admit in front of a whole congregation that you had a baby, but you can’t do the same for just me?”

“Because it was expected of me,” Katie said simply.

“I expect it of you, too.”

She shook her head. “If the deacon came to me and said he wanted me to make my things right because I’d been skinny-dipping in the pond, even if I hadn’t done it, I’d say yes.”

“How?” Ellie exploded. “How can you let them railroad you like that?”

“They don’t. I could stand up and say it wasn’t me skinny-dipping, I have a birthmark on my hip you didn’t see-but I never would. You saw what it was like in there-it’s much more embarrassing to talk about the sin than to just get the confession over with.”

“But that’s letting the system walk all over you.”

“No,” Katie explained. “That’s just letting the system work. I don’t want to be right, or strong, or first. I just want to be part of them again, as soon as I can.” She smiled gently. “I know it’s hard to understand.”

Ellie willed herself to remember that the Amish system of justice was not the American system of justice, but that both had functioned rather well for hundreds of years. “I understand, all right,” she said. “It’s just that it’s not the real world.”

“Maybe not.” Katie sidled out of the way of a car, one with a tourist hanging half out the window trying to photograph her from behind. “But it is where I live.”

Katie stood anxiously at the end of the lane, holding a flashlight. She had taken risks before, especially where Adam was involved, but this would be the gamble of a lifetime. If anyone found her with this Englischer, she’d be in trouble for sure-yet Adam was leaving, and she could not let him go without taking this opportunity.

In the end, Adam hadn’t gone to New Orleans to find his ghosts. He trans ferred the grant money to a whole different locale-Scotland-and reorganized his plans so that he’d leave in November. If Jacob noticed anything odd about the arrangement, it was Adam’s generous offer to let Jacob stay on as a housemate in spite of the change of circumstances. Jacob was so grateful not to have to move that he did not bother to see anything else-such as the ease with which his sister and his roommate conversed, or the way Adam sometimes steadied her with a hand on her back when they walked across the campus, or the fact that in all these months, Adam had not dated a single girl.

A car approached, slowing at the end of every driveway. Katie wanted to wave, shout, make Adam see her, but instead she waited in the shadow of the bushes, stepping out into his headlights only when he came close. Adam turned off the car and got out, silently studying Katie’s clothes. Walking up to her, he touched the stiff organdy of her kapp, then gently pricked the ball of his thumb on the straight pin that held her dress together at the neck. She felt foolish, suddenly, dressed Plain-he was accustomed to her in jeans and sweaters. “You must be cold,” he whispered.

She shook her head. “Not so much.”

He started to slip off his coat, to give it to her, but she ducked away. For a moment, neither of them spoke. Adam looked over Katie’s head to the faint silver edge of the silo, jutting against a seamless sky. “I could go,” he said softly. “I could leave and we could pretend that I never came here after all.”

In response, Katie reached for his hand. She lifted it, staring at the fine long fingers, stroking the softness of his palm. This was not a hand that had pulled reins and hauled feed. She brought it to her lips and kissed the knuckles. “No. I’ve been waiting for you for years.”

She didn’t mean it the way Englischer girls would have, as an exaggeration, accompanied by a pout and a stamp of the foot. Katie’s words were literal, measured, true. Adam squeezed her hand, and let her lead him into the world where she’d grown up.

Sarah watched her daughter chopping vegetables for dinner, and then turned her attention to setting the table. Tonight, and for many nights from now, Katie couldn’t eat at it-that was part of carrying out the letter of shunning. For the next six weeks, Sarah would have to live apart from her in the same house: pretend that Katie was no longer a large part of her life, give up praying with her, limit their conversation. Why, it was like losing a child. Again.

Sarah frowned at her dining area: it was really one long table, with two bench seats on either side-as she was unable to have more children, there wasn’t much call for a bigger one. She looked over at Katie’s back, painfully stiff, as if she was trying to keep Sarah from noticing how very much this hurt.

Sarah went into the living room and moved a gas lamp from a card table, one she sometimes pulled out when her cousins came over to play gin rummy. She dragged it by its front legs into the kitchen, and arranged the tables so that there was no more than an inch of space between them. She took a long, white cloth from the drawers of her china cabinet and billowed it over the two tables, so that when it came to rest, if you were not looking closely, you could not tell that it wasn’t one big rectangle. “There,” she said, smoothing it, moving the silverware that was set at Katie’s usual place over to a spot on the card table. She hesitated, then moved her own silverware closer to the edge of the regular table, closer to where Katie would sit to eat. “There,” she repeated, and went again to work at her daughter’s side.

One of the chores that Ellie had been assigned was getting Nugget grain and water. The big quarter horse had scared her at first, but they seemed to have come to an understanding. “Hey, horse,” she said, sidling into the stall with the scoop of sweet grain. Nugget whinnied and stamped his foot, waiting for Ellie to get out the way so that he could settle down to business. “Don’t blame you,” she murmured, watching his heavy head bend to the fragrant, honeyed oats. “The food’s about the best thing this place has going.”

She knew by now how well the Amish treated their buggy horses-after all, if a horse broke down you couldn’t take it into the local Ford dealer for a tune-up. Even Aaron, whose quiet stoicism still managed to catch her off guard, was gentle and patient with Nugget. Apparently quite a judge of horseflesh, he was occasionally asked to accompany a neighbor to the horse auctions held on Monday afternoons, just to offer his opinion.

Ellie stretched out her hand tentatively-she was still a little afraid that those big square yellow teeth would clamp onto her wrist and never let go-and stroked the horse’s side. He smelled of dust and grass, a clean, mealy scent. Nugget pricked up his ears and snorted, then tried to wedge his nose beneath her armpit. Surprised, Ellie laughed, and patted his head as if he were a pet dog. “Cut it out,” she said, but she was smiling as she unlatched the hook of the nearly empty rubber water bucket from the eye on the wall and carried it outside to the hose.

She had just turned the corner of the barn when someone snaked out and grabbed her, one hand clamped over her mouth. The bucket fell and bounced. Fighting down the quick surge of panic, Ellie bit down on the fingers that covered her mouth and an instant later drove her elbow into her abductor’s gut, all the while thanking God that Stephen had gotten her self-defense lessons for Christmas two years ago.

She whirled around, her hands in a ready stance, and glared at the man, who was doubled over in pain. There was something vaguely familiar about him-the bright cap of his hair and the lithe, rangy spread of his body-and it annoyed Ellie that she could not put a name to the face.“Who the fuck are you?”

One arm rubbing his middle, the man lifted his gaze. “Jacob Fisher.”

“Well, you shouldn’t have grabbed at me,” Ellie said a few minutes later, standing across from Katie’s brother in the hayloft of the barn. “It’s a good way to get yourself killed.”

“I’ve been away for a while, but you rarely find black belts wandering around Amish farms.” Jacob’s smile dimmed. “You rarely find murdered babies, either.”

She sat down on a bale of hay, trying to read his face. “I’ve been trying to call you.”

“I’ve been out of town.”

“So I realized. I assume that by now you know there have been charges brought against your sister?” Jacob nodded. “Has the prosecution’s detective found you yet?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did you tell her?”

Jacob shrugged. At his reluctant silence, Ellie braced her elbows on her knees. “Let’s get something straight right now,” she said. “I didn’t ask for this case; it sort of adopted me. I don’t know what your opinion is of lawyers in general, but I’m guessing that since you’ve lived English for some time, you assume we’re all sharks, like the rest of the free world. Frankly, Jacob, I don’t care if you think I’m Attila the Hun-I’m still the best chance your sister has of getting off. You should understand better than your Amish relatives how serious a charge this is against her. Whatever I can find out from you that helps your sister’s case will be held in the strictest confidence, and will help me decide what to do to defend her, but-no matter what you tell me-I’m still going to defend her. Even if you open up your mouth right now and tell me she killed that baby in cold blood, I’ll still try to get her off any way I can, and then get her the psychiatric help she needs. However, I’d like to think that you’re going to give me information that paints a slightly different scenario.”

Jacob walked to the high window in the hayloft. “It’s beautiful here. Do you know that it’s been six years since I’ve been back?”

“I know how hard this must be,” Ellie said. “But Katie never would have been charged if there wasn’t sufficient evidence for the police to believe she’d killed the baby.”

“She didn’t tell me she was pregnant,” Jacob confessed.

“I don’t think she admitted it to herself. Is there anyone you know of that she might have been intimate with?”

“Well, Samuel Stoltzfus-”

“Not here,” Ellie interrupted. “In State College.”

Jacob shook his head.

“Did she ever show any inclination to leave the Amish church like you did?”

“No. She wouldn’t have been able to stand it, being cut off from our Mam and Dat. From everyone. Katie’s not . . . how can I say this? She used to come visit me, you know, and go to parties and eat Chinese food and wear jeans. But you can take a fish out of the pond and dress it up in sheep fur, and that’s never going to make it a lamb. And sooner or later, without that water, it’s going to die.”

“You didn’t,” Ellie said.

“I’m not Katie. I made a decision to leave the church, and once I made that decision, it led to other choices. I grew up Plain, Ms. Hathaway, but I’ve thrown a punch. I’ve taken theology courses that question the Bible. I’ve owned a car. All things that I never would have believed I could do.”

“Wouldn’t the same hold true for Katie? Maybe she made a decision to stay Amish-and therefore found herself forced to do things you’d never believe she could do.”

“No, because of one fundamental fact. When you’re English, you make decisions. When you’re Plain, you yield to a decision that’s already been made. It’s called gelassenheit-submitting to a higher authority. You give yourself up for God’s will. You give yourself up for your parents, for your community, for the way it’s always been done.”

“That’s interesting, but it doesn’t stand up against the autopsy report of a dead infant.”

“It does,” Jacob said firmly. “Committing a murder is the most arrogant act there is! To decide you have the power of God, to take someone else’s life.” He stared at Ellie, his eyes bright as beacons. “People think Plain folks are stupid, that they let the world walk all over them. But Plain folks-they’re smart; they just don’t know how to be selfish. They’re not selfish enough to be greedy, or pushy, or proud. And they’re certainly not selfish enough to kill another human being with intent.”

“The Amish faith isn’t what’s on trial, here.”

“But it should be,” Jacob countered. “My sister could not commit murder, Ms. Hathaway, simply because she’s Amish through and through.”

Lizzie Munro narrowed her eyes behind her safety goggles, raised her arms, and blew ten rounds from her 9-millimeter Glock into the heart of the life-size target at the far end of the shooting range. As she reeled it forward to judge her marksmanship, George Callahan whistled and popped out his earplugs. “Glad to know you’re on our side, Lizzie. You’ve got a real gift.”

She ran a finger appreciatively over the hole that had been blown into the target’s paper chest. “Yeah. And to think, my grandmother only wanted me to take up embroidery.” She holstered her gun and then rolled the kinks out of her shoulders.

“Must say, I’m kind of surprised to see you here.”

Lizzie raised a brow. “How come?”

“Well, how many Amish do you plan to find armed and dangerous?”

“Hopefully none,” Lizzie answered, sliding into her suit jacket. “I do this for relaxation, George. Beats decoupage.”

He laughed. “We’ve got the pretrial hearing coming up next week.”

“Five weeks flies when you’re having fun, huh?”

“I wouldn’t call it fun,” George said. They walked out of the shooting range and began to stroll across the police academy’s lush grounds. “Actually, that’s why I’m here. I just wanted to be sure we’d covered the state’s collective ass before I go in.”

Lizzie shrugged. “I didn’t get squat from the brother, but I can go back and see if he’ll talk again. The evidence is fairly cut-and-dried. The only thing that’s missing is the donor of the sperm, but even that really doesn’t matter, since the motive’s there either way. If it was an Amish boy, then she killed the baby to keep from ruining her chances with the big blond boyfriend. If it was a regular kid from outside the community, then she killed the baby to keep from fessing up to a relationship with an outsider.”

“We seized on Katie Fisher as a suspect quickly,” George mused. “I wonder if we overlooked someone.”

“She was bleeding like a stuck pig; that’s why we seized on her,” Lizzie said. “She had that baby, and it was two months premature-so who else could have known it was her time? We already know she hid it from her parents, so they’re out of the picture. She wasn’t going to tell Samuel, since it wasn’t his baby. Even if she wanted to tell her brother or her aunt that the contractions had started, she couldn’t very well whip out her cell phone at two in the morning.”

“We can tie her conclusively to birth, but not to murder.”

“We’ve got motive and logic on our side. You know that ninety percent of murders are committed by someone with a personal relationship to the victim. Do you realize that number goes up to nearly a hundred percent when it’s a newborn involved?”

George stopped, and laughed down at her. “You angling to be second chair, Lizzie?”

“Conflict of interest. I’m already testifying for the state.”

“Well, that’s a shame, because I think you could single-handedly convince a jury of Katie Fisher’s guilt.”

Lizzie grinned up at him. “You’re right,” she said. “But everything I know I’ve learned from you.”

In the wee hours of the morning, one of the cows had given birth. Aaron had been up most of the night, because the calf hadn’t been turned right. His arms hurt from being inside the cow, from the contractions that squeezed and bruised him. But look at what he had to show for it: this little wonder, black tumbled with white, wavering on its clothespin legs beside the supportive wall of its mother.

He began to spread fresh hay in the pen as the calf suckled at its mother. In a day, the baby would be taken away and put on a bottle.

You see, a small voice needled. Babies get taken from their mothers all the time.

He managed to push the thought away just as Katie came in through the barn door. Fragrant steam rose from the mug of coffee she held out to him. “Oh, another calf,” she said, her eyes lighting. “Isn’t he a sweet one?”

Aaron could recall his daughter with nearly every calf that had been born on the farm, and that was a goodly number. She’d bottle-fed the babies since she was nearly as tiny as the calves she was caring for. Aaron could remember the first time he showed her how you could stick your finger in a calf’s mouth, where there were no upper teeth to bite. He could remember explaining how a calf’s tongue would curl around you and draw you in, sandpaper rough and powerfully strong. And he could remember the way her eyes widened when, that very first time, it was just as he’d said.

As the head of this family, it had been his responsibility to teach his offspring the Plain way of life-how to give themselves up to God, how to navigate a path between what was right and what was wrong. He watched Katie kneel in the fresh hay, rubbing the crazy whorls of hair that still stuck in damp spirals on the calf’s back. It reminded him too much of what had happened weeks ago. Closing his eyes, he turned away from her.

Katie stood slowly and spoke, her voice as wobbly as the newborn animal. “It’s been five days since the kneeling confession. Are you never gonna talk to me again, Dat?”

Aaron loved his daughter; he wanted nothing more than to take her onto his lap like he had when she was just a little thing, and the world had been no bigger for her than the span of his own arms. But he was to blame for Katie’s sin and Katie’s shame, simply because he had not been able to prevent it. And it was his job, too, to see through the consequences-however painful they might be.

“Dat?” Katie whispered.

Aaron held up a hand, as if to ward her off. Then he picked up the coffee mug and turned away, heading out of the barn with the stooped shoulders and heavy gait of a much older, much wiser man.

“Have you had enough?”

Coop spoke over the litter of dishes on the table between them, and Ellie could not answer at first. She couldn’t eat another bite, but she had not had enough. She didn’t think she could ever get enough of the buzz and the chatter, the heady mix of society perfumes, the sound of cars jockeying about on the street below the rooftop restaurant.

Ellie watched the light from the chandelier spring rainbows from her glass of chardonnay, and she grinned.

“What’s so funny?” Coop asked.

“Me,” Ellie said, a laugh bubbling up from inside her. “I feel like I ought to keep checking my shoes for manure.”

“Five weeks on a farm doesn’t quite make you Daisy Mae. Besides, your dress is considerably more flattering than bib overalls.”

Ellie fluttered her hands over her waist and her hips, reveling in the feel of the silk shantung against her skin. She never would have believed Leda capable of picking something so simple and sexy off the rack at Macy’s, but then again, lots of things had been surprising her lately. Including the sidelong glances that Sarah and Katie had given each other at lunch, clearly in on a secret they did not care to share with Ellie. And including the unexpected arrival of Coop, taking her breath away with his dark suit and silk tie and small bouquet; thoughtful enough to have carted along Leda as a conspirator who came bearing formal wear and high heels and who was resolved to play warden for Katie while Coop took Ellie to dinner in Philadelphia.

The wine-it made her limbs loose and liquid, made her feel that a hummingbird had taken the place of her heart. “I can’t believe we drove two hours to a restaurant,” Ellie murmured. It was a gorgeous one, to be sure, with a Saturday-night orchestra and the lights of the city rising in its floor-to-ceiling windows-but the thought of Coop traveling all the way to the Fishers’, and then all the way back to Philly, made Ellie feel things she was not ready to feel.

“One and a half hours, actually,” Coop corrected. “And hey, it took some time to find a place that served decent chow-chow.”

Ellie groaned. “Oh, please, don’t mention that dish.”

“Maybe some pickled tripe would hit the spot?”

“No,” she laughed. “And if you even think the word ‘dumpling’ I won’t be held accountable for my actions.”

Coop glanced at her empty plate, which had once had a perfectly grilled piece of swordfish upon it. “I take it the fruits of the sea aren’t big in the Fisher household?”

“If Sarah can’t put it in a thick, rich sauce, it doesn’t get to the table. I’m going to gain so much weight there I won’t fit into my suits when it comes time to go to trial.”

“Ah, but that’s the point. You have to get fat enough for the judge to believe that you never slipped away from that farm, not even for a low-cal lunch.”

Ellie stretched in her seat like a cat. “I like slipping away from the farm,” she said. “I needed to slip away. Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said. “My dinner companions are never this entertaining. You’re certainly the first one who’s mentioned manure.”

“You see? Already I’ve lost my edge. Maybe I ought to do what Katie suggested.”

“What did Katie suggest?”

“She said-let me make sure I get this right-that if I knew I wanted a good-night kiss, I should make sure to bump up against you on the turns, and comment on your horse.”

Coop burst out laughing. “This is what you two talk about?”

“We’re just a couple of girls having a slumber party.” Ellie smiled widely. “Have I told you what a fine horse you have?”

“You know, I don’t believe you have.”

Ellie leaned forward. “Quite the stud.”

“I’ve got to get you drinking more often.” Coop stood, tugging on her hand. “I want to dance with you.”

Ellie let herself be dragged upright. “But that’ll mean the ball’s going to come to an end,” she moaned. “I’ll turn back into a pumpkin.”

“Only if you keep eating Sarah’s dumplings.” Coop pulled her close, and began to turn her slowly around the dance floor.

Ellie rested her head beneath his chin. Their hands were twined like ivy, growing up between their hearts; and his thumb grazed the bare skin of her shoulder. She closed her eyes as his lips grazed her temple, and let herself be led in gentle circles. For a moment she stopped thinking of Katie, of the trial, of her defense, of anything but the incredible heat of Coop’s hand on her back. The melody stopped, and as the musicians put down their instruments for a break and couples left the parquet floor, Ellie and Coop remained in each other’s arms, simply staring.

“I think I might like to see where you stable that horse,” Ellie murmured.

Coop regarded her carefully. “It’s not much of a barn, as barns go.”

“I don’t mind.”

And he smiled so brilliantly that she basked in it, that she did not notice how the temperature had dropped even after they were outside and driving to his apartment with the windows rolled down. She sat as close to him as the console would allow, their hands tangled on the stick shift. When they reached his home, Coop turned the key in the lock and pushed open the door, apologizing from the very first moment. “It’s sort of a mess. I didn’t know-”

“It’s all right.” Ellie stepped into the room carefully, as if too heavy a footfall might shatter the magic. She took in the glass of cola, flat, sweating a ring on the glass coffee table; the psychiatric journals littering the floor like lily pads; the running shoes knotted together at the laces and hung over the rungs of a ladderback chair. None of the furniture matched.

“Kelly got most of it,” he said quietly, reading her mind. “These were the things she didn’t want.”

“I think I remember the coffee table from college.”

Ellie walked to the bookshelf, to the state-of-the-art stereo system. “They say you can tell a lot about a person from their CD collection,” Coop said. “You trying to figure me out?”

“Actually, I’m looking at the wires. It’s been a while since I’ve seen so many of them.” She touched her finger to a small photograph, one that showed Ellie hanging upside down from the limb of an apple tree, a limb above the one Coop himself had been sitting on to take the photo. “I remember this from college, too,” she said softly. “You still have it?”

“I dug it out, recently.”

“You kept telling me to stop laughing,” Ellie murmured. “And I kept telling you to take the damn picture before my shirt crept up again and I flashed the world.”

Coop grinned. “And I said-”

“‘What’s the matter with that?’” Ellie interrupted. “What was the matter, Coop?”

“I’ve thought about it,” he said, loosely linking his arms behind her. “And for the life of me, El, I can’t remember.” He slid his hands up her sides. His kiss, open-mouthed, breathed fire into her. Ellie tugged his shirt from the back of his pants and skimmed her palms over the muscles of his back, pushing closer and closer until she felt his heart balanced just above hers.

They fell together onto the couch, scattering a stack of papers. His hands tangled in her hair, pulling her down, as she worked at his belt and zipper. Coop tightened his embrace. “Can you feel that?” he whispered. “My body remembers you.”

And just like that, she was eighteen again, pinned like a butterfly beneath Coop’s confidence. Back then, she’d loved him so much and so well that it took months to realize that what Coop made her feel was not necessarily what she wanted. Back then, she had told him a lie to let him down easy, one that hurt all the more because it was so far from the truth: that she did not love him enough. “I can’t do this,” she said out loud, the words that she didn’t have the strength to utter when she was in college. She pushed at Coop’s chest, at his legs, so that she was sitting up on the end of the couch, clutching the bodice of her dress together.

Reason came back to him by degrees. “What’s the matter?”

“I can’t.” Ellie couldn’t even look at him. “I’m so sorry. I ought to just . . . go.”

His jaw tightened. “What’s the excuse this time?”

“I have to get back to Katie.”

“It’s not me you need to keep your distance from, it’s your little Amish client. You’re her lawyer, Ellie. Not her mother.” Coop snorted. “You’re not scared of some judge or bail contingency. You’re terrified that for once in your life you’ll start something, and you won’t get it right.”

“You don’t know anything about-”

“For Christ’s sake, Ellie, I know more about you than you do. Straight A’s, dean’s list, Phi Beta Kappa. You’ve turned cartwheels to get the toughest cases, and you’ve won nearly every one-even the ones that make you sick to think about. You never got married, just stayed in a relationship you should have gotten out of years ago, because you didn’t really care enough about it to give a shit if it got screwed up. You’re perfectly willing to leave me with blue balls as long as it means you don’t risk getting in over your head, because then you’d have a vested interest in the outcome, and frankly, we don’t have a successful track record. You’re a classic type-A perfectionist, and you’re unwilling to go out on a limb because it just might break underneath you.”

By the time Coop finished, he was yelling. Ellie stood and hobbled around, trying to find her heels. Her head hurt, nearly as much as her heart. “Don’t you psychoanalyze me.”

“You know what your problem is? If you never go out on that limb, you’re missing a hell of a view.”

Ellie managed to jam her feet into her shoes and find her purse. “You flatter yourself,” she said evenly.

“Is it just me, Ellie, or do you lead all guys on and then do a complete turnaround? What kind of power did Stephen have over you, to keep you from running away all those years?”

“He didn’t love me!” As the words exploded in the still room, Ellie turned her back on Coop. She had been many things to Stephen-a roommate, a legal sounding board, a sexual partner-but never the one to share his life. And because of that, she’d never felt suffocated. She’d never felt the way she’d felt twenty years earlier, with Coop. “There,” she said, her voice shaking. “Is that what you wanted to hear?” Stricken, Ellie made her way to the door. “Don’t bother getting up. I’ll find my own ride back.”

Coop stared at her, at the pain that seemed to flow from an untapped source, pain that filled the confines of his small apartment long after she’d gone.

Once, before Samuel had been baptized in the church, he’d driven an automobile. One of his friends, Lefty King, had bought one secondhand and kept it hidden behind his father’s tobacco shed, where the old man pretended it didn’t exist every time he came across it. Samuel had marveled at the fluid ride, at the amazing fact that you could idle in neutral without the car running toward the edge of the road to graze.

He was thinking of that car tonight, as he took Mary Esch home in his courting buggy. There was but a slice of moon, the kind Mam used to say looked like a cookie almost all eaten up, which gave him the perfect cover for what he had in mind.

Thing about Mary was, she didn’t stop talking. She was his third cousin, so it hadn’t seemed too strange when he’d come and asked her to go for an ice cream. And Samuel guessed she was pretty enough, with hair as dark and rich as a newly plowed field and a tiny ribboned bow of a mouth. But the reason Samuel had picked her, out of all the others, was that she was Katie’s best friend, and this was the closest he could come to her.

Himmel, she was chattering on now about her little brother Seth, who’d fallen into the pig trough that afternoon when he was trying to tightrope-walk on the fence that edged the pen. Samuel clucked to his horse and pulled gently on the reins, so that the buggy stopped at a small turnaround at the top of the hill.

Mary was talking so fast and furious it took her a minute to see that they weren’t moving. “Why did you stop?” she asked.

Samuel shrugged. “Thought it was a nice night.”

She looked at him a little strangely, and for good reason. The sky was a thick, cloudy soup, the only visible light coming from that tiny bite of moon. “Samuel,” she said, her gaze going all milky the way girls’ eyes sometimes could, “is it that you need someone to talk to?”

He felt his heart swelling like the blacksmith’s bellows, fit to burst from his chest. Do it now, he told himself, or you never will. “Mary,” he said, and then he hauled her into his arms, grinding his mouth hard against hers.

She wasn’t Katie, that was his only thought. She didn’t taste like Katie, like vanilla, and the size of her was all wrong in his arms, and when he pushed harder the enamel of their teeth scraped. He groped for her breast, aware that she was trying to shove him back and getting frightened, but also aware that at least once, someone had done this and more to his Katie.

“Samuel!” Mary broke away from him with a mighty effort and scrambled to the far end of the courting buggy. “What on earth has gotten into you?”

Her face was blotched, her eyes wide and terrified. Good God, had he done that to her? Was this what he’d been brought to?

“I’m . . . I’m sorry . . .” Samuel hunched around his shame, hugging his arms to his chest. “I didn’t mean . . .” He buried his face in his shirt and tried to keep the tears from coming. He was not a good Christian, not at all. Not only had he just attacked poor Mary Esch; he could not accept Katie’s confession. Forgive her? He couldn’t even get past the bare facts of it.

Mary’s soft hand lit on his shoulder. “Samuel, let’s just go home.” He felt the buggy jostle as she jumped down and switched places with him, so that she could drive.

Samuel wiped hastily at his eyes. “I’m not feeling so wonderful gut,” he admitted.

“No kidding,” Mary said with a little smile. She reached over and patted his hand. “You’ll see,” she said with sympathy. “Everything is going to be all right.”

Superior Court Judge Phil Ledbetter turned out to be female.

It took Ellie nearly a full thirty seconds to absorb that fact, as she sat in the judge’s chambers with George Callahan for the pretrial hearing. Phil-or Philomena, as her brass nameplate said-was a small woman with a tight red perm, a no-nonsense pinch to her mouth, and a voice with a chirp to it. Her broad desk was littered with photos of her children, all four of whom had the same trademark red hair. This was not, on the whole, good for Katie. Ellie had been banking on a male judge, a judge who would know nothing about childbirth, a judge who would feel vaguely uncomfortable skewering a young girl being tried for neonaticide. A female judge, on the other hand, who knew what it was like to carry a child and hold it in your arms the minute it came into the world, would be more likely to hate Katie at first sight.

“Ms. Hathaway, Mr. Callahan, why don’t we get started?” The judge opened the file on the desk in front of her. “Is discovery complete?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said George.

“Do either of you have any motions to file? Ah, here’s one from you, Ms. Hathaway, about barring the press from the courtroom. Why don’t we deal with this one right now?”

Ellie cleared her throat. “It’s contrary to my client’s religion to be in court at all, Your Honor. But even out of the sphere of the courtroom, the Amish are averse to photography. It’s their way of taking the Bible to the letter,” she explained. “‘You shall not make for yourself a graven image or a likeness of anything.’ Exodus 20:4.”

George interrupted. “Your Honor, didn’t we separate church and state about two centuries ago?”

“It’s more than that,” Ellie continued. “The Amish think that if a photograph is taken of you, you might take yourself too seriously or try to make a name for yourself, which goes against their spirit of humility.” She looked hard at the judge. “My client is already compromising her religious principles to come to trial, Your Honor. If we have to go through this farce at all, we can at least make it comfortable for her.”

The judge turned. “Mr. Callahan?”

George shrugged. “Heck, yes. Let’s make it comfortable for the defendant. And while we’re at it, why not give the prisoners in the State Pen featherbeds and a gourmet chef? With all due respect to Ms. Hathaway, and to her client’s religion, this is a public trial, a public murder. The press has first-amendment rights to report it. And Katie Fisher gave up certain constitutional rights when she violated some of the major ones.” He turned to Ellie. “Forget graven images-what about ‘Thou shalt not kill’? If she didn’t want notoriety, she shouldn’t have committed murder.”

“No one’s proved that she has,” Ellie shot back. “Frankly, Your Honor, this is a religious matter, and Mr. Callahan is walking a fine line between derision and defamation. I think-”

“I know what you think, counsel; you’ve made yourself painfully clear. The press will be allowed into the courtroom, but cameras and video equipment will be barred.” The judge turned a page in the file. “Something else leaps out at me, Ms. Hathaway. There’s obvious speculation, due to the nature of the alleged crime, that you might be considering a plea of insanity. As I’m sure you know, the deadline’s passed for noticing up a defense.”

“Your Honor, those deadlines can be extended for good cause, and I need a forensic psychiatrist to look at my client before I consider any theories of defense at all. However, you haven’t yet ruled on my motion for services other than counsel.”

“Oh, yes.” The judge lifted a piece of paper edged with rosebuds down the margins-bubble-jet printer stationery that Leda apparently used to print the file from Ellie’s disk. “I must say, this is the prettiest motion I’ve ever had filed.”

Ellie groaned silently. “I apologize for that, Your Honor. My current working conditions are . . . less than ideal.” At George’s snicker, she turned resolutely toward the judge. “I need the State to pay for an evaluation before I notice up anything.”

“Hey,” George said, “if you get a forensic shrink, then I get a forensic shrink. I want the girl evaluated for the State.”

“Why? I’m just asking for the money to pay a psychiatrist, so that I can come to a conclusion about how to defend my client. I’m not saying I’m running an insanity defense yet. All I’m admitting to is that I’m an attorney, not a psychiatrist. If I decide to go with insanity, I’ll turn over the reports and you can have your own shrink look at my client, but as it stands, I won’t let her be seen by any state psychiatrist until I notice up that defense.”

“You can have your psychiatrist,” the judge said. “How much do you need?”

Ellie scrambled to recall a typical fee. “Twelve hundred to two thousand.”

“All right. Consider yourself funded with a two-thousand-dollar cap, unless I hear cause for more than that. If there are any other motions due, I want them within thirty days. We’ll have our final pretrial in six weeks. Does that give you two enough time?”

Ellie and George murmured their assent, and the judge rose. “If you’ll excuse me, I’m due in court.” She breezed past, leaving them alone in chambers.

Ellie shuffled her papers together while George clicked his pen and hooked it back inside his suit jacket pocket. “So,” he said, smirking. “How’s the milking going?”

“You oughtta know, farm boy.”

“I may be a country lawyer, Ellie, but I got my degree in Philly, just like you.”

Ellie stood. “George, do me a favor and find someplace to go. I’ve seen enough horse’s asses in the past few weeks.”

George laughed and picked up his portfolio, then held the door open for Ellie. “If I had as shitty a case as you do, I guess I’d be in a foul mood, too.”

Ellie walked past him. “Don’t guess,” she said. “You’re bound to be wrong.”

Coop had asked Katie to walk him through the days leading up to the birth, hoping to jar a memory, although in an hour’s time there had been no major breakthroughs. He leaned forward. “So you were doing the wash. Tell me what it felt like when you bent down to reach into that basket of wet clothes.”

Katie closed her eyes. “Good. Cool. I took one of my Dat’s shirts and rubbed it on my face, because I was so hot.”

“Was it hard to bend down?”

She frowned. “It hurt my back. I felt a crick in it, like I sometimes do before it’s my time of the month.”

“How long had it been since your time of the month?”

“A long time,” Katie admitted. “I thought about that when I hung my drawers up to dry.”

“You knew that skipping menses was a sign of pregnancy,” Coop said gently.

“Ja, but I’d been late before.” Katie picked at the hem of her apron. “I kept telling myself that.”

Coop’s eyes narrowed. “Why?”

“Because . . . because I . . .” Katie’s face contorted, reddened.

“Tell me,” he urged.

“When I first missed my time,” Katie said, tears streaming down her cheeks, “I told myself not to worry about it. And then I stopped worrying, for a little while. But I was so tired, I could barely stay awake after dinner. And when I put on my apron, I had to work hard to make the straight pins go through the same holes as always.” She took a shuddering breath. “I thought-I thought I might be-but I wasn’t big like my Mam with Hannah.” Her hands moved to her belly. “This was nothing.”

“Did you ever feel something moving inside you? Kicking?”

Katie was silent for so long Coop was about to ask another question. Then, suddenly, her voice came, quiet and sad. “Sometimes,” she confessed, “it would wake me up at night.”

Coop lifted her chin, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Katie, on that day you hung the laundry, on that day your back hurt so much, what did you know?”

She looked into her lap. “That I was pregnant,” she breathed.

Coop stilled at the admission. “Did you tell your mother?”

“I couldn’t.”

“Did you tell anyone?”

She shook her head. “The Lord. I asked Him to help me.”

“What time that night did you wake up with cramps?”

“I didn’t.”

“All right,” Coop said. “Then when did you go out to the barn?”

“I didn’t.”

He rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Katie, you knew you were pregnant when you went to sleep that night.”

“Yes.”

“Did you think you were pregnant the next morning?”

“No,” Katie answered. “It was gone. I just knew all of a sudden.”

“Then something must have happened between that night and the next morning. What happened?”

Katie blinked back fresh tears. “God answered my prayers.”

By silent agreement, neither Ellie nor Coop spoke of the fiasco in his apartment a few nights earlier. They were colleagues, polite and professional, and as Ellie listened to Coop talk about his session with Katie, she tried not to feel as if something was missing.

In the privacy of the barn, Coop watched the wheels turn in Ellie’s mind as she analyzed Katie’s admission of pregnancy. “She cried?”

“Yeah,” Coop answered.

“That would be evidence of remorse.”

“She cried, but not about the baby-about the mess she’d gotten into. Plus, she’s still amnesiac about how she became pregnant. And instead of a birth, we have divine intervention.”

Ellie smiled a little. “Well, that would be a novel defense.”

“What I’m saying, Ellie, is that you shouldn’t be throwing a victory party just yet. She hid a pregnancy, and today she admitted to it. First off, that’s shady. Often amnesia victims present false memories-the story they’ve heard from the press and from the family, and worse, once they tell it they believe this new story fiercely, when it may not be accurate at all. But, just for the hell of it, let’s say that Katie’s on the square here, and truly did just remember being pregnant. Maybe there will be more admissions, as her defense mechanisms break down. But maybe there won’t be. What just happened is therapeutic for Katie, but not for you and your defense-no one ever doubted that she had the baby, except for Katie herself. And hiding a pregnancy isn’t normal, but it’s not outside the range of the law, either.”

“I know what she’s on trial for,” Ellie snapped.

“I know you do,” Coop said. “But does she?”

Adam stood behind her, his hands fisted over her own on the dowsing rods. “You ready?” he whispered, as a barn owl cried. They stepped forward, walking the perimeter of the pond, their shoes crunching on the dry field grass. Katie could feel Adam’s heart pounding, and she wondered why he too seemed on edge; wondered what on earth he had to lose.

The rods began to shake and jump, and Katie instinctively drew back against Adam. He murmured something she did not hear, and together they fought to hold onto the sticks. “Take me back there,” he said, and Katie closed her eyes.

She imagined the cold of that day, how you could pinch together your nostrils and feel them stick, how when you removed your mittens to lace up your skates, your fingers grew thick and red as sausages. She imagined the whoop of delight Hannah had let out when she skated off to the center of the pond, shawl flying out behind her. She imagined her sister’s bright blond hair glinting through her kapp. Most of all, she remembered the feel of Hannah’s hand in hers when they walked down the slippery hill to the pond, small and warm and utterly trusting in Katie’s ability to keep her from falling.

The pressure on the dowsing rods stopped, and Katie opened her eyes when Adam sucked in his breath. “She looks just like you,” he whispered.

Hannah skated away from them, making figure eights about six inches above the surface of the water. “The pond was higher then,” Adam said. “That’s why she seems to be floating.”

“You see her,” Katie murmured, her heart lifting. She dropped the dowsing rods and threw her arms around Adam. “You can see my sister!” Belatedly suspi cious, she drew back to quiz him. “What color are her skates?”

“Black. And they look like hand-me-downs.”

“And her dress?”

“Kind of green. Light, like sherbet.”

Adam led her to the bench at the edge of the pond. “Tell me what happened that night.”

Katie painted with words: Jacob’s escape to the barn, the spangles on the figure-skating champion she’d been dreaming about, the scrape of Hannah’s blades on the thin patches of ice. “I was supposed to be looking out for her, and instead all I could think of was me,” she said finally, miserably. “It was my fault.”

“You can’t think that. It was just something horrible that happened.” He touched Katie’s cheek. “Look at her. She’s happy. You can feel it.”

Katie lifted her face to his. “You’ve already told me that the ones who come back, the ones who become ghosts, have pain left behind. If she’s so happy, Adam, why is she still here?”

“What I told you,” Adam gently corrected, “is that the ones who come back have an emotional connection to the world. Sometimes it’s pain, sometimes it’s anger . . . but Katie, sometimes it’s just love.” His words rose softly between them. “Sometimes they stay because they don’t want to leave someone behind.”

She remained perfectly still as Adam bent toward her. She waited for him to kiss her, but he didn’t. He stopped just a breath away, fighting for the willpower to keep from touching her.

Katie knew he would be leaving the next day, knew that he moved in a world that would never be her own. She placed her palms on his cheeks. “Will you haunt me?” she whispered, and met his lips halfway.

Katie was cleaning the tack used by the mules and by Nugget when a voice startled her.

“They made you pick up my chores,” Jacob said sadly. “I never even thought to ask you about it.”

Her hand at her throat, she whirled around. “Jacob!”

He opened his arms, and she flew into them. “Does Mam know-”

“No,” he said, cutting her off. “And let’s keep it that way.” He hugged her tightly and then held her at arm’s length. “Katie, what’s happened?”

She buried her face against his chest again. He smelled of pine and ink, and was so solid, so strong for her. “I don’t know,” she murmured. “I thought I did, but now I can’t be sure.”

She felt Jacob distance himself again, and then his eyes dipped down to her apron. “You had . . . a baby,” he said uneasily, then swallowed. “You were pregnant when you last saw me.”

She nodded and bit her lower lip. “Are you awful mad about it?”

He slid his hand down her arm and squeezed her hand. “I’m not mad,” he said, sitting down on the edge of a wagon. “I’m sorry.”

Katie sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder. “I am too,” she whispered.

Mary Esch came visiting on Sunday, wearing Rollerblades and bearing a Frisbee. Ellie could have run up and hugged the girl. It was just what Katie needed in light of these newfound recollections about the baby-a moment to just be a teenager again, without any responsibilities. While Ellie washed the dishes from lunch, Mary and Katie ran around the front yard, their skirts belling as they leaped into the air to snatch the neon disc.

Hot and winded, the girls collapsed on the grass outside the kitchen window, which Ellie had opened to catch the faint breeze. She could hear snatches of conversation drifting up over the rush of the faucet: “. . . seen the fly that landed on Bishop Ephram’s nose,” “. . . asked about you,” “. . . not so lonely, not really.”

Mary closed her eyes and rubbed the cold glass of a root beer bottle against her forehead. “I think it’s hotter than any summer I ever remember,” she said.

“No.” Katie smiled. “You just put things out of your mind when they’re not right in front of you, is all.”

“Still, it’s awful hot.” She put down the bottle and fluted her skirt over her bare toes, unsure of what else to say.

“Mary, has it got so bad that all we can talk about is the weather?” Katie said quietly. “Why don’t you ask me what you really want to ask?”

Mary looked into her lap. “Is it awful, being shunned?”

Katie shrugged. “It’s not so bad. The mealtimes are tough, but I have Ellie with me, and my Mam tries to make it all work out okay.”

“And your Dat?”

“My Dat isn’t so good at trying to make it all work out,” she admitted. “But that’s how he is.” She took her friend’s hand. “In six weeks, it’ll all go back to being the way it was.”

If anything, this made Mary look even more upset. “I don’t know about that, Katie.”

“Well, sure you do. I’ve made my things right. Even if Bishop Ephram asks me to step down at communion time, I won’t have to be under the bann.”

“That’s not what I mean,” Mary murmured. “It’s the way others might act.”

Katie slowly turned. “If they can’t forgive my sin, they shouldn’t be my friends.”

“For some people, it’s going to be harder to pretend nothing happened.”

“It’s the good Christian thing to do,” Katie said.

“Ja, but it’s hard to be Christian when it was your girl,” Mary answered quietly. She fiddled with the strings of her kapp. “Katie, I think Samuel might want to see someone else.”

Katie felt the air go out of her, like a pillow punched in the middle. “Who told you that?”

Mary did not answer. But the red burn in her friend’s cheeks, the obvious discomfort at bringing up the very private notion of a beau, made Katie realize exactly what had happened. “Mary Esch,” she whispered. “You wouldn’t.”

“I didn’t want to! I pushed him away after he tried to kiss me!”

Katie got to her feet, so angry she was shaking. “Some friend you are!”

“I am, Katie. I came here so you wouldn’t have to hear it from someone else.”

“I wish you hadn’t.”

Mary nodded slowly, sadly. She pulled her socks from the bellies of her Rollerblades and buckled the skates onto her feet. Gliding smoothly out of the driveway, she did not look back.

Katie held her elbows tight at her sides. Any movement, she thought, and she might fly apart in a thousand different pieces. She heard the screen door open and slam, but she remained staring over the fields, where Samuel was working with her father.

“I heard,” Ellie said, touching her shoulder from behind. “I’m sorry.”

Katie tried to keep her eyes wide, so wide that the tears in them couldn’t quite trickle over the edges. But then she turned and threw herself into Ellie’s arms. “It’s not supposed to be like this,” she cried. “It wasn’t supposed to happen this way.”

“Ssh. I know.”

“You don’t know,” Katie sobbed.

Ellie’s hand fell, cool, on the back of her neck. “You’d be surprised.”

Katie desperately wanted Dr. Polacci to like her. Ellie had said that the psychiatrist was being paid a great deal of money to come to the farm and meet with her. She knew that Ellie believed whatever Dr. Polacci had to say would be extremely useful when it came time for trial. She also knew that ever since she had told Dr. Cooper about the pregnancy, he and Ellie had been too stiff with each other, and Katie thought it was all somehow tied together.

The psychiatrist had puffy black hair and a face like the moon and a wide ocean of body. Everything about her urged Katie to jump, knowing that no matter how she landed, she’d be safe.

She smiled nervously at Dr. Polacci. They were sitting in the living room, alone. Ellie had fought to be there, but Dr. Polacci suggested that her presence might keep Katie silent. “I’m someone she confides in,” Ellie had argued.

“You’re one more person to confess in front of,” the psychiatrist answered.

They talked in front of her like she was stupid, or a pet dog-like she had no opinion whatsoever about what was happening to her. In the end, Ellie had left. Dr. Polacci had made it clear that she was here to help Katie get acquitted. She’d said that Katie should tell her the truth, because she surely didn’t want to go to jail. Well, Dr. Polacci was right on that count. So pretty much, Katie had spent the past hour telling her everything that she had told Dr. Cooper. She was careful about her choice of words-she wanted the most precise recollection. She wanted Dr. Polacci to go back to Ellie and say, “Katie’s not crazy; it’s all right for the judge to let her go.”

“Katie,” Dr. Polacci asked now, drawing her attention, “what was going through your mind when you went to bed?”

“Just that I felt bad. And I wanted to go to sleep so that I could wake up and be better.”

The psychiatrist marked something down on her notepad. “Then what happened?”

She had been waiting for this, for the moment when the small flashes of light that had been bursting in her mind these past few days would fly from her mouth like a flock of scattering starlings. Katie could almost feel the cut of the pain again, slicing like a scythe from her back to her belly with such a sharp, reaching pull from inside that she found herself knotted in a ball by the time she could breathe again. “I hurt,” she whispered. “I woke up and the cramps were bad.”

Dr. Polacci frowned. “Dr. Cooper told me that you haven’t been able to remember labor pains, or the birth of the baby.”

“I haven’t,” Katie admitted. “The first thing that came to me was that I was pregnant-I told Dr. Cooper how I remembered trying to bend down and feeling something stuck in the middle there that I had to work my way around. And since then, I keep remembering things.”

“Like what?”

“Like that the light in the barn was already on, when it was way too early for the milking.” She shuddered. “And how I was trying and trying to hold it in, but I couldn’t.”

“Did you realize that you were giving birth?”

“I don’t know. I was awfully scared, because it hurt so much. I just knew that I had to be quiet, that if I yelled out or cried someone might hear.”

“Did your water break?”

“Not all at once, like my cousin Frieda’s did when she had little Joshua, right in the middle of the barn-raising lunch. The ladies sitting on both sides of her on the bench got soaked. This was more like a trickle, every time I sat up.”

“Was there blood?”

“A little, on the insides of my legs. That’s why I went outside-I didn’t want it to get on the sheets.”

“Why not?”

“Because I wash ’em, but my Mam takes them off the beds. And I didn’t want her to know what was happening.”

“Did you know you were going to go to the barn?”

“I didn’t plan it, exactly. I never really got to thinking about what would happen . . . when it was time. I just knew that I had to get out of the house.”

“Did anyone in the household wake up as you left?”

“No. And there was no one outside, or in the barn. I went into the calving pen, because I knew it had the cleanest hay put out for the expecting cows. And then . . . well, it was like I wasn’t there for a little while. Like I was somewhere else, just watching what was happening. And then I looked down, and it was out.”

“By ‘it’ you mean the baby.”

Katie looked up, a little dazed to think of the result of that night in those terms. “Yes,” she whispered.

“Approximately two hundred to two hundred and fifty neonaticides occur each year, Ms. Hathaway. And those are only the ones that are reported.” Teresa Polacci walked beside Ellie along the stream that bordered the farm. “In our culture, that’s reprehensible. But in certain cultures, such as the Far East, neonaticide is still acceptable.”

Ellie sighed. “What kind of woman would kill her own newborn?” she asked rhetorically.

“One who’s single, unmarried, pregnant for the first time with an unwanted baby conceived out of wedlock. They’re usually young, between the ages of sixteen and nineteen. They don’t abuse drugs or alcohol, or have run-ins with the law. No, they’re the girls who walk the neighbor’s dog as a favor when they’re on vacation; the ones who study hard to get good grades. Often they’re overachievers, oriented toward pleasing their parents. They are passive and naïve, afraid of shame and rejection, and occasionally come from religious backgrounds where sex is not discussed.”

“I take it from your comments that you think Katie fits the mold.”

“In terms of the profile, and her religious upbringing, I’ve rarely seen a closer case,” Dr. Polacci said. “She certainly had more reason than most girls in this day and age to face shame and persecution both within her family and without if she admitted to premarital sex and pregnancy. Hiding it became the path of least resistance.”

Ellie glanced at her. “Hiding it suggests a conscious decision to cover up.”

“Yes. At some point she knew she was pregnant-and she intentionally denied it. Curiously enough, she wasn’t the only one. There’s a conspiracy of silence-the people around the girl usually don’t want her to be pregnant, either, so they ignore the physical changes, or pretend to ignore them, which just plays into the system of denial.”

“So you don’t believe that Katie went into a dissociative state.”

“I never said that. I do believe it’s psychologically impossible to be in a dissociative state for the entire term of a pregnancy. Katie-like many other women I’ve interviewed who have committed neonaticide-consciously denied her pregnancy, yet then unconsciously dissociated at the time of the birth.”

“What do you mean?” Ellie asked.

“That’s when the moment of truth occurs. These women are extremely stressed. The defense mechanism they’ve had in place-denial-is shattered by the arrival of the infant. They have to distance themselves from what’s occurring, and most of these women-Katie included-will tell you it didn’t feel like it was happening to them, or that they saw themselves but couldn’t stop it-a true out-of-body experience. Sometimes the appearance of the baby even triggers a temporary psychosis. And the more out of touch with reality the women are at that moment, the more likely they are to harm their newborns.

“Let’s look at Katie, specifically. Thanks to her brother’s experience, she’s been living with a very primitive survival script in her head, believing that if Mom and Dad find out her secret, she’ll be excommunicated and forced out of the household. So there’s this covert idea in her mind that it’s somehow okay to get rid of your children. Then she goes into labor. She can’t deny the baby’s existence anymore-so she does to the baby what she’s afraid will happen to her-she throws it out. The dissociative state lasts long enough for the birth and the murder, and then she reverts to using denial as a defense mechanism, so that when she’s confronted by the police, she immediately says she didn’t have a baby.”

“How can you tell that she dissociated at all?”

“When she speaks about giving birth, she shuts down a little. She doesn’t rely on other defense mechanisms-for example, denial, or something more primitive.”

“Wait a second,” Ellie said, stopping. “Katie admitted to giving birth?”

“Yes, I have it on tape.”

Ellie shook her head, feeling oddly betrayed. “She didn’t fold when Coop pressed her.”

“It’s not unusual for a client to admit something crucial to a forensic psychiatrist that she hasn’t admitted to a clinical psychiatrist. After all, I’m not talking to her to make her feel comfortable, but to keep her from going to jail. If she lies to me, she’s hurting herself. It’s my job to uncover the can of worms; it’s the clinical psychiatrist’s job to help stuff them back in.”

Ellie glanced up. “She told you about killing the infant too?”

The psychiatrist hesitated. “Actually, no. She says she still can’t remember two specific points: the conception of the baby, and the murder.”

“Could she have been in a dissociative state both times?”

“It’s entirely possible that she dissociated during the birth of the baby and during the killing. In fact, since her recollections don’t match entirely with the forensic records you’ve given me, the discrepancy flags just that. But as for the sex . . . well, that’s not something these women usually forget.”

“What if it was traumatic for her?” Ellie asked.

“You mean a rape? It’s possible, but usually women admit to being raped, unless they’re protecting someone. My gut feeling is that there’s more to Katie’s story on that particular point.”

Ellie nodded. “And the killing?”

“Katie recounted in great detail the night before the delivery, the actual birth, and falling asleep with the infant in her arms. She says the baby was gone when she woke up, along with the scissors she used to cut the umbilicus.”

“Did she look for the baby?”

“No. She went back to her room to sleep, entirely consistent with women who commit neonaticide-the problem’s out of sight, out of mind.”

Ellie’s head was spinning. “How long was she unconscious in the barn?”

“She said she doesn’t know.”

“It couldn’t have been long, based on the police reports,” Ellie mused aloud. “What if-”

“Ms. Hathaway, I realize what you’re thinking. But remember-up until now, Katie didn’t recall the birth of the baby. Tomorrow, who knows? She may recall in excruciating detail how she smothered it. As much as we might want to think she didn’t kill that infant, we have to take her recollections with a grain of salt. By the mere definition of dissociation, there are gaps of time and logic missing for Katie. Chances are awfully good that she did indeed kill the baby, even if she’s never able to verbally admit to it.”

“So you believe that she’s guilty,” Ellie said.

“I believe that she fits the profile of many other women I’ve interviewed who killed their newborns while in a dissociative state,” the psychiatrist corrected. “I believe that her pattern of behavior is consistent with what we know of the phenomenon of neonaticide.”

Ellie stopped walking along the stream’s edge. “Is my client sane, Dr. Polacci?”

The psychiatrist exhaled heavily. “That’s a loaded question. Are you talking medically sane, or legally sane? Medical insanity suggests that a person is not in touch with reality-but a person in a dissociative state is in touch with reality. She looks and appears normal while in a totally abnormal state. However, legal insanity has nothing to do with reality-it hinges on cognitive tests. And if a woman commits murder while in a dissociative state, she most likely will not understand the nature and quality of the act, or know that what she’s doing is wrong.”

“So I can use an insanity defense.”

“You can use whatever you want,” Polacci said flatly. “You’re really asking if an insanity defense can get your client off. Frankly, Ms. Hathaway, I don’t know. I will tell you that juries usually want to know practical issues: that the woman is safe, and that this won’t happen again-both of which are affirmative for most women who commit neonaticide. Best-case scenario? My testimony can give the jury something to hang their hats on-if they want to acquit, they will, as long as there’s something they can point to to rationalize their actions.”

“Worst-case scenario?”

Dr. Polacci shrugged. “The jury learns more about neonaticide than they ever wanted to know.”

“And Katie?”

The psychiatrist fixed her gaze on Ellie. “And Katie goes to jail.”

Katie felt like the green twig that she was mangling in her own hands-bent double backward, nearly ready to break. She fought the urge to stand up and start pacing, to look out the hayloft window, to do anything but speak to her attorney right now.

She understood the point of the drill-Ellie was trying to get her ready for what would certainly be an unpleasant grilling by the forensic psychiatrist who’d been hired by the State. Ellie had said Dr. Polacci believed Katie was holding back about how the baby was conceived. “And,” she’d finished, “I’ll be damned if you spill the beans to the prosecution’s expert.”

So now they were in the hayloft-she and Ellie, who’d somehow become so ruthless and unforgiving that every now and then Katie had to turn and make sure her face was familiar.

“You don’t remember having sex,” Ellie said.

“No.”

“I don’t believe you. You said you didn’t remember the pregnancy or the birth, and lo and behold, three days later, you’re a veritable font of information.”

“But it’s true!” Katie felt her hands sweating; she wiped them on her apron.

“You had a baby. Explain that.”

“I already did, to Dr.-”

“Explain how it was conceived.” At Katie’s prolonged silence, Ellie wearily propped her head in her heads. “Look,” she said. “You’re bluffing. The psychiatrist knows it and I know it, and Katie, you know it too. We’re all on the same goddamned side, here, but you’re making it twice as hard for us to defend you. I know of one Immaculate Conception, and yours wasn’t it.”

With resignation Katie’s gaze fluttered to her lap. What would it mean, to come clean? To confess, as she had for the bishop and the congregation? “Okay,” Katie said finally, softly. She swallowed hard. “I was visiting my brother, and we went to a graduation party at one of the fraternity houses. I didn’t want to go, but Jacob did, and I didn’t want him to feel badly for having me there like . . . what is it you say? Like a fifth wheel. We went to the party, and it was very crowded, very hot. Jacob went to get us something to eat and didn’t come back for a while. In the meantime, a boy came up to me. He gave me a glass of punch and said I looked like I needed it. I told him I was waiting for someone, and he laughed, and said, ‘Finders, keepers.’ Then he started to talk to me.”

Katie walked to the rear of the hayloft, fingering the spikes on a rake propped against the far wall. “I must have drunk some of the punch while he was talking, without really thinking about it. And it made me feel just awful-all sick to my stomach, and my head spinning like a top. I stood up to try to see Jacob in the crowd, and the whole room tilted.” She bit her lip. “The next thing, I was lying on a bed I didn’t recognize, with my clothes all . . . and he was . . .” Katie closed her eyes. “I . . . I didn’t even know his name.”

She bent her head to the wooden wall, feeling the rough plane of the board against her forehead. Her entire body was shaking, and she was afraid to turn and see Ellie’s expression.

She didn’t have to. Ellie embraced her from behind. “Oh, Katie,” she soothed. “I’m so sorry.”

Katie turned in her arms, this safe place, and burst into tears.

This time, when Katie finished telling the story, she was grasping Ellie’s hand for support. If she was aware of the tears streaming over her cheeks, she made no mention of it. Ellie itched to wipe them away, to catch Katie’s eye and smile and tell her she’d done a great job.

Dr. Polacci, who’d been called back for the confession, looked from Katie to Ellie, and back again. Then she lifted her hands and began clapping, her expression impassive. “Nice story,” she said. “Try again.”

“She’s lying,” Dr. Polacci said. “She knows exactly where and when she conceived that baby, and that charming little date rape story wasn’t it.”

Ellie bristled at the thought that Katie was lying; at the thought that Katie had been lying deliberately to her. “We’re not talking about an average teenager who fabricates excuses for her parents and spends the night horizontal in the back of her boyfriend’s four-by-four.”

“Exactly. This story was just too good. Too calculated, too rehearsed. She was telling you what you wanted to hear. If she’d been raped, she would have admitted to it by now in her sessions with the clinical psychiatrist, unless she was protecting the rapist, which her tale didn’t support. And then there’s the small matter of the graduation party held three months after a June graduation-I’m assuming she conceived in October, based on the medical examiner’s report.”

It was that glaring inconsistency that finally broke through Ellie’s defenses. “Shit,” she muttered. At a sudden thought, Ellie glanced up. “If she’s lying about not remembering having sex, is she lying about not remembering the murder?”

The psychiatrist sighed. “My gut feeling still tells me no. When I pushed her on conception, she got fuzzy on me-said things are just sort of out of reach in her mind. When I pushed her about the murder, I got a flat denial of the crime, and that hard break-she fell asleep holding the infant; she woke up and it was gone. The two amnesic episodes differ-which leads me to believe she’s consciously denying one, and subconsciously dissociating about the other.”

Dr. Polacci patted Ellie’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t take this too hard. Actually, it’s sort of a compliment. Katie feels so close to you that she wants to live up to your expectations, even if it means coming up with a false recollection. In some ways, you’ve become a parent figure.”

“Living up to parental expectations,” Ellie huffed. “Isn’t that what got her here in the first place?”

Dr. Polacci chuckled. “In part. That, along with some guy. Some guy who’s got a hold on her like I’ve never seen.”

The night was so warm that Ellie had climbed outside the quilt and was now lying on top of it with her nightgown hiked to her thighs. She stayed perfectly still, trying to listen for Katie’s breathing, wondering how long it would take for the two of them to fall asleep.

It made no sense to Ellie, this new obsession she had with the truth. As a defense attorney she usually had to stick her fingers in her ears to keep from hearing an admission she did not legally want to hear. But she would have traded her twelve-volt inverter for ten minutes inside Katie Fisher’s head.

Then she heard it, the faintest of sighs. “I’m sorry,” Katie said quietly.

Ellie did not bother to look at her. “What is the apology for, exactly? The baby’s murder? Or the more mundane crime of making me look like an idiot in front of my own witness?”

“You know what I’m sorry for.”

There was a long silence. “Why did you do it?” Ellie finally asked.

She could hear Katie rolling onto her side. “Because you needed to hear it so badly.”

“What I need is for you to stop lying to me, Katie. About this, and about what happened after that baby was born.” She passed a hand down her face. “What I need is to turn the clock back, so this time I can refuse your case.”

“I only lied because you and Dr. Polacci were so sure I knew something,” Katie said, her voice thick with tears. “I don’t, Ellie. I promise I don’t. I’m not crazy, like you think . . . I just can’t remember. About how the baby got made, or how it got killed.”

Ellie didn’t say a word. She heard the quiet creak of the bed as Katie curled on her side and cried. She clenched her fists to keep from going to the girl, then crawled beneath her own blanket and counted the minutes it took for Katie to fall asleep.

Samuel wiped the sweat off his brow and yanked another bull calf off its feet. After all these years helping Aaron, he had castration down to a science. He waited until the animal had gotten the urge to kick out of him, then slipped the rubber ring of the elestrator around the scrotum and let it constrict. Within seconds the two-month-old calf was up on its feet, casting an aggrieved, sidelong look at Samuel before heading out to pasture again.

“He’s a sturdy one,” a voice said, startling Samuel.

He turned to find Bishop Ephram standing on the other side of the fence. “Ja, he’ll bring Aaron enough beef.” Smiling at the older man, Samuel let himself out through the gate. “If you’re looking for Aaron, I think he’s in the barn.”

“Actually, I was looking for you.”

Samuel hesitated, wondering what charge the bishop might want to lay against him this time, then berating himself for even thinking such a thing. He’d had plenty of visits from the bishop in his life, and he’d never associated a single one with shame or wrongdoing. Until everything had gone wrong with Katie.

“Komm,” Ephram said. “Walk a ways.” Samuel fell into step beside him. “I remember when your father got you your first calf.”

It wasn’t an extraordinary gift for an Amishman to his son: the proceeds from the sale of the meat were put into a bank account for the boy’s later use, when he wanted to purchase his own home or farm. Samuel smiled, recalling the bull calf that had gained a thousand pounds in a year.

He still had the money the beef had brought in, as well as other calves that had followed. He’d been saving it, or so he thought, for his life with Katie.

“Your technique’s a little better these days,” Ephram said. “As I recall, that first bull kicked you but good, in a place that don’t take to kicking.” He grinned through the snow of his beard. “It was touch and go there, for a while, who exactly was gonna be castrated.”

Samuel’s face burned with the memory, but he laughed. “I was nine years old,” he reasoned. “The bull weighed more than me.”

Ephram stopped walking. “Whose fault was it?”

“Fault?”

“The kick. The fact that you got hurt at all.”

Frowning, Samuel shrugged. “The bull’s, I suppose. I sure didn’t do it to myself.”

“No. But if you’d been holding it tighter, what do you think might have happened?”

“It wouldn’t have been able to get in a wild blow, you know that. Certainly, I learned my lesson. I’ve never been kicked again.” Samuel exhaled. He had work to do for Aaron. He didn’t have the patience for Ephram’s ramblings today. “Bishop,” he said, “you didn’t come here to talk to me about that bull.”

“Didn’t I?”

He jammed his hat on his head. “Aaron will be needing me by now.”

Bishop Ephram put his hand on Samuel’s arm. “You’re right, Brother. Why should we talk about ancient history, after all? Once that bull kicked you, you got rid of it right away.”

“No, I didn’t. You remember how big he got. He was a fine steer.” Samuel scowled. “By the time I put the money into the bank, I barely remembered that he’d kicked me at all.”

The old man peered at him. “No. But when you were lying on your back in the pasture that day, howling and grabbing your privates, I bet you never would have guessed things could turn out so good in the end.”

Samuel slowly swung his head toward the bishop. “You didn’t come here to talk about that bull,” he repeated softly.

Bishop Ephram raised his brows. “Didn’t I?”

Dr. Brian Riordan traveled by private jet, accompanied by two men who looked like football linebackers past their prime and a tiny mouse of a girl who jumped whenever he beckoned her to carry through some task on his behalf. He was well known in forensic psychiatry circles as being one of the foremost critics of the insanity defense, particularly when used to acquit murderers. He’d made his very strong beliefs known in trials all over the United States, and in fact kept a map in his office covered with brightly colored pins, signifying the court systems in which he’d had a hand in putting away a criminal who might otherwise have gotten off on pure sympathy.

He also looked patently out of place on a farm.

Compared to Dr. Polacci, Dr. Riordan was a formidable species. Even from the doorway of the kitchen, where Ellie could observe the interview, she could see Katie trembling.

“Ms. Fisher,” Riordan said, after introducing himself, “I’ve been retained by the prosecution. What that means is that whatever you say to me will go to court. You cannot say something off the record; there’s no confidentiality. Do you understand?”

Ellie listened as Riordan walked Katie through the birth, asking her to recount the events in the present tense. “It’s lying there,” Katie said softly, “right between my legs.”

“Is it a boy or a girl?”

“A boy. A tiny, tiny boy.” She hesitated. “It’s moving around.”

Ellie felt her face grow warm. She turned away, fanning herself with one hand.

“Is it crying?” Riordan asked.

“No. Not till I cut the cord.”

“How do you cut it?”

“My Dat keeps a pair of scissors hanging on a peg outside the calving pen. That’s what I use. And then there’s blood, all over the place, and I’m thinking that I won’t be able to clean this up, ever. I push down on the end of the cord, and tie it off . . . with twine, I think. Then it starts crying.”

“The baby?”

“Ja. It starts crying loud, real loud, and I try to hold him up against me to keep him quiet, but that doesn’t help. I rock it tight and give it my knuckle to suck on.”

Ellie leaned against the wall. She pictured this fragile infant, rooting around the bodice of Katie’s nightgown. She imagined the little face, the translucent eyelids, and suddenly there was a weight in her arms, heavy as a lost opportunity. How could anyone’s actions, in this case, be defended? “Excuse me,” she announced, bustling into the kitchen. “I need a glass of water. Anyone else?”

For her interruption, Riordan gave her a dirty look. Ellie concentrated on filling a glass without her hand shaking, on drinking just a little before she had to hear her client recount this baby’s death.

“What happens next, Katie?” Riordan asked.

Katie squinted, shook her head, then sighed. “I don’t know. I wish I did, I wish like you can’t imagine. But one minute I’m praying for the Lord to help me, and the next minute I’m waking up. The baby is gone.” Ellie bowed her head over the sink. “A miracle,” Katie added.

Riordan stared at her. “You’re kidding, right?”

“No.”

“How long were you passed out in the barn?”

“I don’t know. I guess about ten, fifteen minutes.”

The psychiatrist folded his hands in his lap. “Did you kill the baby during that time?”

“No!”

“You’re sure?” She nodded emphatically. “Then what did happen to him?”

No one had ever asked Katie before; as Ellie watched the girl struggle for an answer, she realized how shortsighted this had been. “I . . . don’t know.”

“You must have an idea. Since someone killed that baby, and it wasn’t you.”

“M-m-maybe it just died,” Katie stammered. “And someone hid it.”

Ellie silently groaned. And maybe that was Katie’s subconscious doing a voluntary confession. “Do you think that’s what happened?” Riordan asked.

“Someone could have come in and killed it.”

“Does that seem likely to you?”

“I-I’m not sure. It was sort of early . . .”

“Middle of the night, I’d figure,” Riordan interjected. “Who would have known you were there giving birth?” He watched her wrestle with the question. “Katie,” he said firmly, “what happened to the baby?”

Ellie watched the girl’s disintegration: the trembling lower lip, the welling eyes, the shaking spine, as Katie shook her head and repeatedly denied criminal responsibility. She waited for Riordan to do something to comfort Katie, but then realized that he’d already aligned his sympathies elsewhere. He’d been retained by the prosecution; it would be unethical for him to offer comfort when he’d been called in for the express purpose of helping to lock Katie away.

Ellie approached her client and knelt. “Do you think we could take a minute?”

She didn’t wait for Riordan’s response. Instead she slipped an arm around Katie’s shoulders, trying to ignore the way the girl had balled up her apron and now sat huddled over it, cradling it in her arms as if it were an infant.

Riordan batted his eyes and adopted an impassioned falsetto. “Katie Fisher wasn’t there at the time of the baby’s death. Her body, maybe, but not her mind. At the time that infant died, she was in a mental fortress made of her own guilt.” He lowered his voice to his own natural tones and grinned at the county attorney. “Or something along those lines.”

George laughed. “Does that psychoanalytic bullshit actually work at trials?”

Riordan took a mint from a jar on the desk. “Not if I have anything to say about it.”

“You’re sure that when Hathaway noticed up insanity, she was thinking of dissociation?”

“Trust me, it’s the designer defense tailored to neonaticide. Psychologically, the discrepancies between Katie’s story and the forensic evidence can be explained either by dissociation, or flat-out lying-and you can figure out which of those two options the defense is going to seize upon. But brief episodes of dissociation do not constitute insanity.”

Riordan shrugged, popping a mint into his mouth. “The other thing about dissociative states is that if you give Ms. Hathaway enough rope, she’ll hang herself. There’s no way for her expert to prove that the dissociation was caused by the mental stress of giving birth, rather than the mental stress of committing murder. It’s a chicken-and-egg thing.”

“I can go somewhere with this.” George grinned and leaned back in his chair.

“Straight to the state prison.”

George nodded. “Do we need to cover any of the psychological ramifications of being Amish?”

Riordan stood, buttoned his jacket. “Why?” he said. “Murder’s murder.”

As he kissed her, leaves rained down over them, spotting his back with the rich reds of the maples and the guinea gold of the oaks. Her shawl was spread over the crab grass like the wingspan of a great black hawk, providing a makeshift blanket. Katie moved her hands from Adam’s hair to his shoulders as he began to unfasten her dress. He gently speared each straight pin into the bark of the tree behind them, and she loved him for that-for being thoughtful enough to consider what this would be like for her, after.

The apron came off, and her dress fell open. Katie closed her eyes, embarrassed, but then felt Adam bend to her breast, drawing on her through the fine cotton of her underwear. She held his head there; she imagined that he was drinking from the bowl of her heart.

He had not said he loved her, but that did not matter. It was how he acted, how he treated her, that was a truer measure than any words he could say-deeds were the proof of affection for her people, not three little syllables that signified nothing. Adam would tell her when it was over; when it would not cheapen what was happening between them.

Then he shed his own clothes. Just by looking now, you could not say that one was Plain and one was not. That was the last conscious thought Katie had, and then Adam pressed his body full against hers, the heat of his skin taking away her speech, her fears.

He was heavy and full between her legs. With one hand, he lifted her knee, so that her body made a cradle for him. Then Adam looked down at her, his expression grave. “We can stop,” he whispered. “Right now, if you want.”

Katie swallowed. “Do you want to stop?”

“About as much as I’d like to be drawn and quartered.”

She lifted her hips, an invitation, and felt him losing himself in her, stretching her so that it made her eyes smart. She thought of all the tourists who stood beneath the crossroads sign about five miles east, the one that said INTERCOURSE, PA, and how they’d giggle and point up at it while someone snapped their picture. She thought of her flesh giving way to Adam’s, the sweetest yielding of all. And then Adam reached between them and touched her. “Come with me,” he whispered.

She thought he meant tomorrow, when he left for Scotland. She thought he meant forever. But then she felt her body spinning tighter and tighter, and scattering like the bright white seeds of a milkweed. As she caught her breath, more leaves fell on them, a benediction. Adam lay by her side, smiling and stroking her hip. “You okay?”

Katie nodded. If she spoke, she would tell him the truth: she was not okay at all, but horribly empty, now that she knew what it was like to be filled.

He wrapped her in her shawl, and it made her feel physically ill. “No.” She pushed at his hands, shimmying away from the light wool. “I don’t want it.”

Sensing the change in her, Adam drew her closer. “Listen, now,” he said firmly. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

But Katie knew it was a sin, had known from the moment she made the decision to lie with Adam. However, the transgression wasn’t making love without the sanction of marriage. It was that for the first time in her life, Katie had put herself first. Put her own wants and needs above everything and everyone else.

“Katie,” Adam said, his voice rough, “talk to me.”

But she wanted him to speak. She wanted him to carry her far away from here, and hold her close all over again, and tell her that two worlds could be bridged with a look, with a touch. She wanted him to say that she belonged to him, and that he belonged to her, and that in the grand scheme of things that was really all that mattered.

She wanted him to tell her that when you loved someone so hard and so fierce, it was all right to do things that you knew were wrong.

Adam remained silent, searching her face. Katie felt the heat of him, of them, seeping between her thighs. They would not be going to Scotland together. They would not be going anywhere. She reached for her shawl and pulled it around her shoulders, knotting it just below the spot where her heart was breaking. “I think,” she said softly, “you’d better leave.”

Katie was finding it harder and harder to fall asleep. In those floating moments just before she drifted off, she would feel the scratch of hay under her thighs, or smell fear, or see the moon glinting off the stretched skin of her belly. She would think of the things she had told Dr. Polacci and Dr. Riordan and feel ill. And then she’d roll onto her side, to watch Ellie sleep, and feel even worse.

She hadn’t expected to like Ellie. At first, Katie had been furious to find herself stuck with a jailer who didn’t trust her, to boot. But as uncomfortable as Katie might have found the situation, Ellie must have found it even more uncomfortable. This was not her home; these were not her people-and as she had pointed out several times, now, usually in fits of anger, this was not a situation of her own making.

Well, it isn’t my fault, either, Katie thought. And yet she had seen that baby wrapped in the horse blankets. She had watched its coffin lowered into the ground. It was someone’s fault.

Katie had not killed the baby, she knew this as well as she knew the sun would come up in the morning. But then, who had?

There was once a homeless man who’d taken up shelter inside Isaiah King’s tobacco shed. But even if a vagrant had been in the barn that morning, he’d have no cause to take a newborn out of Katie’s arms, kill it, and hide it. Unless he was crazy, like Ellie was making her out to be.

Katie knew that she would have sensed if someone else was in the barn that morning. And even if she hadn’t, the animals would have. Nugget would have been whinnying for a treat, like he always did when a person came to call; the cows would have been lowing in anticipation of milking. From the little bits and pieces Katie could recall, there had only been calm.

Which meant someone had slipped in after her.

She had racked her brain over and over, wishing for something she could give to Ellie on a silver platter, some piece of evidence so strong that it would make everything clear. But who would have cause to be up at that hour?

Her father. The very thought shamed Katie. Her Dat sometimes came down to check on the cows due to deliver-but he was there to help give life, not take it away. Had he found Katie lying with a newborn-well, he would have been shocked, even angry. But justice for him would come from the church, not from his own hands.

Samuel. If he’d come early for the milking, he might have found her asleep in the barn with the newborn. For sure, he’d have every right to be upset. Could he have hurt the baby before he realized what he’d done? Impossible, Katie thought, not Samuel. Samuel didn’t jump to conclusions; he thought slowly. And he was too honest to lie to the police. Suddenly Katie brightened, remembering another alibi for Samuel: he always brought along Levi. He wouldn’t have been alone in the barn long enough to commit a crime.

But that left no one else-no one but Katie herself. And here, in the very deepest part of the night, she pulled the quilt tighter around herself and let herself wonder if Dr. Polacci and Ellie might be right after all. If you didn’t remember something happening, was it because it never had happened? Or because you wished it hadn’t?

Katie rubbed her temples. She drifted off to sleep, borne along on the memory of the high, thin cry of a baby.

The flashlight shining in her eyes woke Ellie. “For God’s sake,” she muttered, flinging a look at Katie, fast asleep, and then crossing to the window. If Samuel had come to tender an apology, it would have been nice for him to pick a time other than one in the morning. Ellie peered out the window, ready to give him a piece of her mind, and then realized that the man standing out in front of the house was Coop.

After dressing quickly in the shirt and shorts she’d had on the previous day, Ellie hurried down to meet him. She put her finger to her lips when she stepped onto the porch, and walked a distance from the house. Folding her arms across her chest, she nodded at the flashlight. “Samuel tip you off to that trick?”

“Levi,” Coop said. “The kid’s a real corker.”

“Did you come to show me that you understand Amish courting rituals?” As soon as she said it, she wanted to take it back. As if, after the way things had gone the other night, Coop might want to include her in anything even marginally resembling a courting ritual.

He sighed. “I came to say I’m sorry.”

“In the middle of the night?”

“I would have called, but damn if I couldn’t find a listing for the Fishers. I had to find my handy-dandy flashlight and attend to the matter in person.”

Ellie felt a smile twitch at her lips. “I see.”

“No, you don’t.” He reached for her hand, pulling her down the path toward the pond. “I am truly sorry that things didn’t work out for you with Stephen. I never meant to humiliate you.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“You hurt me once, El. Badly. I guess on some level I wanted to make you feel as rotten as I did back then.” He grimaced. “Not very enlightened of me.”

Ellie faced him. “I wouldn’t have asked you to help with Katie’s case if I’d known you were still carrying a grudge, Coop. I thought after twenty years you would have moved past that.”

“But if I’d moved past that,” Coop reasoned, “it would mean I’d moved past you.”

Ellie could feel the night closing in around her. Crazy, she thought, a pulse hammering at her throat. This is crazy. “I noticed up insanity,” she blurted out.

Coop nodded, accepting the quick change of subject, and Ellie’s need for it. “Ah.”

“What does that mean?”

He stuffed the flashlight under his arm and tucked his hands in his pockets, striking off again as Ellie followed. “You know what it means, because you’ve probably thought it through yourself. Katie’s not insane. Then again, I suppose as her attorney you can tell the jury she’s Queen Elizabeth, if that’s bound to get her acquitted, and we all know she hasn’t got a drop of royal blood in her, either.”

“What’s harder to swallow, Coop: that a young, frightened girl snapped and smothered her baby without realizing what she was doing-or that a stranger came into the barn at two in the morning, after a girl had given birth two months shy of her due date, and murdered the baby while she was asleep?”

“Insanity defenses rarely win, El.”

“Neither does reasonable doubt, when it looks absolutely unreasonable.” They had reached the pond, and Ellie sank down onto the iron bench and drew up her knees. “Even if she didn’t kill that baby, the best way to get her to walk is to convince the jury that she did, without cognitively knowing what she was doing. It’s the most sympathetic defense I’ve got.”

“Hell, lawyers lie all the time,” Coop said.

She snorted. “You don’t have to tell me. I’ve done it . . . God, I can’t even count by now.”

“You’re damn good at it, too.”

“Yeah,” Ellie said. “That I am.”

Coop reached for her hand. “Then how come it’s eating you up inside?”

She let the façade drop, the one she’d been holding in place since explaining to Katie that they were going to use the insanity defense to get her off, even though she wasn’t insane.

“You want me to tell you why it’s killing you?” Coop said easily. “Because pleading insanity means Katie did it, even if she was cognitively off on Mars. And deep down, you just like Katie too much to want to admit that.”

Ellie sniffed. “You’re way off base. You know what a client relationship is like-personal feelings don’t enter into it. I’ve managed to keep a straight face while I told a jury that a child molester was a pillar of the community. I’ve made a serial rapist look like a choirboy. It’s what I do. What I personally feel about my clients has nothing to do with what I say to defend them.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

That stopped Ellie flat. “I am?”

“Yeah. The issue here is that a long time ago, Katie stopped being a client. Maybe from the very start, even. She’s related to you, however distantly. She’s likable, young, confused-and you’ve fallen into the role of surrogate mother. But your feelings for her are a mystery, because for all intents and purposes she discarded something you’d kill to have-a child.”

Ellie squared her shoulders, ready to laugh this observation off, but found that no smart comment sprang to her lips. “Am I so easy to read?”

“No need,” Coop murmured. “I already know you by heart.”

“So how do I fix it? If I don’t separate my personal relationship with her from my professional one, I’m never going to win her case.”

Coop smiled. “When are you going to learn that there are all kinds of ways to win?”

“What do you mean?” she asked, wary.

“Sometimes when you think you’ve lost, you actually wind up coming out far ahead.” He grasped her chin in his hand, and kissed her lightly. “Just look at me.”

Ellie did. She saw the remarkable Caribbean green of his eyes, but more importantly, the history in them. She saw the little scar beneath his jaw that he’d gotten in a bicycle fall at age six. And the crease in his cheek that would cave into a dimple at the slightest hint of a smile.

“I’m sorry for what I said to you the other night,” Coop said. “And I think I’ll even cover my ass by apologizing for what I just told you now, too.”

“I probably needed to hear it. And every now and then, to be slapped up the side of the head, most likely.”

“I should warn you now, I’m not that kind of man.”

She leaned toward him. “I know.”

Their kisses were frantic and close, as if they were intent on getting inside each other’s skin. Coop’s hands roamed over her back and her breasts. “God, I’ve missed you,” he breathed.

“It’s only been five days.”

Coop stopped abruptly, then touched her face. “It’s been forever,” he said.

With her eyes closed, she believed him. She could imagine the music of the Grateful Dead crackling across the courtyard, wafting through the open window of her dorm room, where she and Coop lay tangled on the narrow bed. She could still see the curtain of beads that hung in the doorway of the closet, a crystalline rainbow, and the beady eyes of the squirrel who perched on the windowsill, watching them.

She felt him peel off her shirt and unsnap her shorts. “Coop,” she said, suddenly nervous. “I’m not twenty anymore.”

“Damn.” He continued to push her shorts down. “I guess that means I’m not, either.”

“No, really.” She took his hand from the waistband of her shorts and brought it to her mouth. “I don’t look like I used to look.”

He nodded sympathetically. “It’s that scar, isn’t it-the one from your pacemaker surgery?”

“I didn’t have pacemaker surgery.”

“Then what are you worried about?” He kissed her lightly. “El, if you weighed two hundred pounds and had grown hair on your chest, I wouldn’t care. When I look at you, no matter what I should be seeing, I’m picturing a girl who’s still in college-because the minute I fell in love with you, time stopped.”

“I don’t weigh two hundred pounds.”

“Not an ounce over one-eighty,” Coop agreed, and she hit him on the arm. “Are you gonna keep distracting me, or are you going to let me make love to you?”

Ellie smiled. “I don’t know. Let me think on it.”

Grinning, he kissed her. Her arms twined around his neck, and she pulled him closer. “You know,” he said, the words hot against her skin, “you weren’t twenty when I undressed you the other night, either.”

“No, but I was drunk.”

Coop laughed. “Maybe I ought to try that. Because this damn bench is hard enough to make me feel every single one of my thirty-nine decrepit years.” In a quick move, he pulled her off the seat, rolling so that he’d bear the brunt of the fall as they went down on the grass.

Ellie landed on top of him, her legs sprawled, her face an inch from Coop’s. “Are you gonna keep distracting me,” she murmured, “or are you going to let me make love to you?”

Coop’s arms tightened on the small of her back. “I thought you’d never ask,” he said, and touched his lips to hers.

Katie was sitting at the table, nursing a glass of fresh milk from the ubiquitous pitcher in the refrigerator, when Ellie crept into the house like a teenager. Seeing the light, she poked her head into the kitchen. “Oh,” she said, surprised to find Katie there. “Why are you up?”

“Couldn’t sleep,” Katie said. “How about you?” But she knew, from the moment she’d seen Ellie, where she had been and what she’d been doing. The grass in her hair; the color in her cheeks. She smelled of sex.

For a moment Katie was so jealous she felt it rise inside her like a tide, and she couldn’t take her eyes off Ellie because all she wanted was to feel what Ellie was feeling now. It was marked on her, as sure as if his touch still glowed fluorescent on her skin.

“I went for a walk,” Ellie said slowly.

“And you fell.”

“No . . . why?”

Katie shrugged. “How else would you have gotten leaves in your hair?”

Self-conscious, Ellie reached up. “What are you,” she said with a smile, “my mother?”

Katie thought of Ellie, being touched and held and kissed. She thought of Adam, and instead of the soft swelling she usually felt in her lower stomach there was just a bitter ball. “No. And you’re not my mother, either.”

Ellie stiffened. “That’s true.”

“You think you are. You want me to crawl up on your lap and cry my heart out so you can make it all better. But you know what, Ellie? Mothers don’t have the power to make it all better, no matter what you think.”

Stung, Ellie narrowed her eyes. “This coming from a true expert on motherhood.”

“I know more than you,” Katie shot back.

“The difference between you and me,” Ellie said evenly, “is that I would give anything to have a baby, and you couldn’t wait to get rid of one.”

Katie’s eyes widened, as if Ellie had slapped her. Then, in a lightning change, they filled with tears that she wiped away with the backs of her hands. “Oh, God,” she said, keening, her arms crossed over her middle. “Oh, God, you’re right.”

Ellie stared at her. “Did you kill the baby, Katie?”

She shook her head. “I fell asleep. I fell asleep, I swear to you and to God, holding it.” Her face contorted with pain. “But I might as well have killed it, Ellie. I wished it away. I wished for months and months that it would just disappear.”

She was doubled over now, sobbing so hard that she could not catch her breath. Ellie swore softly and embraced Katie tightly. “That’s just wishing,” she soothed, stroking the bright fall of the girl’s hair. “Wishing doesn’t make it happen.”

Katie pressed her burning cheek against Ellie’s chest. “You’re not my mother . . . but sometimes I wish you were.” She felt what she expected to: Ellie’s arms closing around her with even greater force. Katie shut her eyes and imagined being held not by Ellie, but by Adam-her smile in his eyes, her name on his lips, her heart tight with the knowledge of being loved, no matter what.