et me just make this perfectly clear: I can’t sew. Give me a needle and thread and a pair of trousers to be hemmed, and I am more likely than not to stitch the fabric to my own thumb. I throw out socks that get holes in the heels. I’d rather diet than let a seam out, and that’s really saying something.

This is all a way of prefacing that when Sarah invited me to the quilting session she was holding in the living room, I wasn’t suitably excited. Things had been strained between us since the previous night. This morning she had wordlessly handed Katie a long strip of white muslin to bind herself. An invitation to quilt was a concession of sorts, a welcome into her world that had previously not been extended. It was also a plea to just let last night pass for what it was.

“You don’t have to sew,” Katie told me, pulling me by the wrist into the other room. “You can just watch us.”

There were four women plus the Fishers: Levi’s mother, Anna Esch; Samuel’s mother, Martha Stoltzfus; and two cousins of Sarah’s, Rachel and Louise Lapp. These women were younger, and brought along their smallest children-one an infant still swaddled, the other a toddler who sat on the floor at Rachel’s feet and played with scraps of fabric.

The quilt was spread across the table with spools of white thread scattered over its top. The women looked up as I entered the room. “This is Ellie Hathaway,” Katie announced.

“Sie schelt an shook mit uns wohne,” Sarah added.

Out of deference to me, Anna responded in English. “How long will she be staying?”

“As long as it takes for Katie’s case to come to trial,” I said. As I sat down, Louise Lapp’s little girl tottered to a standing position and lunged for the bright buttons on my blouse. To keep her from falling, I caught her up in my arms and swung her onto my lap, running my fingers up her belly to make her smile, reveling in the sweet, damp weight of a child. Her sticky hands grasped my wrists, and her head tipped back to reveal the whitest, softest crease in her neck. Too late, I realized that I was being overly friendly with the child of a woman who most likely did not trust me with her daughter’s care. I looked up, prepared to apologize, and found all the women now regarding me with considerable esteem.

Well, I wasn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. As the women bent to their stitches, I played with the little girl. “Do you care to sew?” Sarah asked politely, and I laughed.

“Believe me, you’d rather I didn’t.”

Anna’s eyes sparkled. “Tell her about the time you stitched Martha’s quilt to your apron, Rachel.”

“Why bother?” Rachel huffed. “You do a wonderful gut job telling the story yourself.”

Katie idly threaded a needle and bowed her head over a square of white batting, making small, even stitches without the benefit of a ruler or a machine. “That’s amazing,” I said, honestly impressed. “They’re so tiny, they almost seem to disappear.”

“No better than anyone else’s,” Katie said, her cheeks reddening at the praise.

The sewing continued quietly for a few moments, women gracefully dipping toward and lifting from the quilt like gazelles coming to drink from a pool of water. “So, Ellie,” Rachel asked. “You are from Philadelphia?”

“Yes. Most recently.”

Martha snipped off the end of a piece of thread with her teeth. “I was there, once. Went in by train. Whole lot of people hurrying around to go nowhere fast, if you ask me.”

I laughed. “That’s pretty much right.”

Suddenly a spool of thread tumbled from the table and landed square on the head of the infant, sleeping in a small basket. He flailed and began to cry, loud, unstoppable sobs. Katie, who was closest, reached out to quiet him.

“Don’t you touch him.”

Rachel’s words fell like a stone into the room, stilling the hands of the women so that their palms floated over the quilt like those of healers. Rachel secured her needle by weaving it through the fabric and then lifted her son against her chest.

“Rachel Lapp!” Martha scolded. “What is the matter with you?”

She would not look at Sarah or Katie. “I just don’t think I want Katie around little Joseph right now, is all. Much as I care for Katie, this here is my son.”

“And Katie’s my daughter,” Sarah said slowly.

Martha rested her arm on Katie’s chair. “She’s very nearly my daughter, too.”

Rachel’s chin lifted a notch. “If I’m not welcome here-”

“You’re welcome, Rachel,” Sarah said quietly. “But you are not allowed to make my Katie feel unwelcome in her own house.”

I sat breathless on the edge of my chair, the hot damp weight of Louise’s sleeping girl on my chest, waiting to see who was going to come out the winner. “You know what I think, Sarah Fisher,” Rachel began, her eyes flashing, and before she could finish the rest of the sentence, she was interrupted by a loud ringing.

The women, startled, began to look around them. With a sinking feeling I shifted the child to my left arm and pulled my cell phone out of my pocket with my free hand. The women watched, wide-eyed, as I punched a button and held the phone to my ear. “Hello?”

“Good God, Ellie, I’ve been trying to reach you for days. Don’t you keep this thing on?”

I was amazed the battery was even working after so long. And sort of hoping it would just quit, so that I wouldn’t have to speak to Stephen. The Amish women stared, their feud temporarily forgotten. “I have to take this call,” I said apologetically, and set the sleeping child into her mother’s arms.

“A telephone?” Louise gasped, just as I left the room. “In the house?”

I did not hear Sarah’s explanation. But by the time I was speaking to Stephen in the kitchen, I heard the wheels of the Lapp sisters’ buggy crunching out of the driveway.

“Stephen, this isn’t the best time for me to talk.”

“Fine, we don’t have to stay on long. I just need to know something, Ellie. There’s a ridiculous rumor running around town that you’re acting as a public defender for some Amish kid. And that the judge has you living on a farm.”

I hesitated. Stephen would never have let himself get into a position like this. “I wouldn’t call myself a public defender,” I said. “We just haven’t negotiated a fee yet.”

“But the rest? Christ, where are you, anyway?”

“Lancaster. Well, just outside Lancaster, in Paradise Township.”

I could picture the large blue vein in Stephen’s forehead, swelling visibly right now. “So this is what you call taking a breather?”

“It was completely unexpected, Stephen-a family obligation I needed to take care of.”

He laughed. “A family obligation? Would the Amish be second cousins, twice removed, or would I be confusing them with the Hare Krishnas on your mother’s side of the family? Come on, Ellie. You can tell me the truth.”

“I am,” I gritted out. “This isn’t a ploy to get attention; it couldn’t be anything farther from that. In a long and convoluted way, I’m defending a relative of mine. I’m on the farm because it’s part of the bail agreement. That’s all.”

There was a beat of silence. “I have to say, Ellie, it hurts that you felt like you had to keep this case a secret, instead of telling me what you were up to. I mean, if you were trying to build your reputation as a lawyer for sensational cases-and I do mean sensational in all definitions-I could have offered you advice, suggestions. Maybe even a leg up into my firm.”

“I don’t want a leg up into your firm,” I said. “I don’t want sensational cases. And frankly, I can’t believe that you’ve turned this whole thing into a personal affront against you.” Glancing down, I noticed that my hand had curled itself into a fist. Finger by finger, I relaxed.

“If this is the case I think it’s going to be, you’re going to need help. I could come out there as co-counsel; bring the firm on board.”

“Thanks, Stephen, but no. My client’s parents barely approved one lawyer, much less a whole building full of them.”

“I could come out anyway, and let you bounce some ideas off. Or we could just sit on the porch swing and drink lemonade.”

For a moment, I was swayed. I could picture the freckles on the nape of Stephen’s neck, and the angle at which he cocked his wrist when he was brushing his teeth. I could almost smell the scent of him, coming from the closets and the dressers and the bedclothes. There was something so easy about it, so familiar-and the world I had moved myself into was foreign at every turn. Stopping at the end of the day to see something I recognized, someone I had loved, would put my business with Katie back into the place it was supposed to be: my work, rather than my life.

I tightened my hand around the small phone and closed my eyes. “Maybe,” I heard myself whisper, “we ought to just wait and see what happens.”

I found Sarah sitting alone in the living room, her head bowed over the quilt. “I’m sorry. For the phone.”

She waved away my apology. “That was nothing. Martha Stoltzfus’s husband has one in his own barn, for business. Rachel was just getting on her high horse.” With a sigh, she came to her feet and began to gather the spools of thread. “Might as well tidy up here.”

I took two corners of the fabric to help her fold it. “The quilting session seemed awfully short. I hope I wasn’t the cause of it.”

“I think it would have been short today no matter what,” Sarah answered briskly. “I sent Katie out to hang the wash, if you’re looking for her.”

I knew a dismissal when I heard one. I started out, but hesitated at the doorway that led to the kitchen. “Why would Rachel Lapp doubt Katie?”

“I’d think you ought to be able to figure out that one.”

“Well, I meant beyond the obvious. Especially since your bishop stood up for her . . .”

Sarah set the quilt onto a shelf and turned to me. Although she was doing an admirable job of hiding her feelings, her eyes burned with shame that her friends had snubbed her own daughter. “We look alike. We pray alike. We live alike,” she said. “But none of these things mean we all think alike.”

Great white sails snapped in the wind as they were secured to the laundry line. The sheets wrapped their wide arms around Katie as she tried to hang them, her apron flying out behind her as she muttered with a mouthful of clothespins and beat them back. When she saw me, she stepped away from the clothesline, tossing the extra pins into a pail. “Sure, you get here just when I’m done,” she complained, sitting down on the stone wall beside me.

“You did fine without me.” On one line hung a rainbow of shirts and dresses: dark green, wine, lavender, lime. Beside these danced the black legs of men’s trousers. Sheets were stretched over the third clothesline, puffing out their swelled bellies. “My mother used to hang our laundry,” I said, smiling. “I remember poking sheets with a stick, pretending I was a knight.”

“Not a princess?”

“Hardly. They don’t have any fun.” I snorted. “I wasn’t going to wait around for some prince, when I could very well save myself.”

“Hannah and me, we used to play hide-and-seek in the sheets. But we’d kick up the dirt, and they’d get streaked, and we’d have to wash them all over again.”

Tipping my head back, I let the wind play over my face. “I used to believe that you could smell the sun on the sheets when you brought them in and made the beds.”

“Oh, but you can!” Katie said. “The fabric soaks it up, in place of all the damp. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”

Newton’s laws of physics seemed a bit advanced for an eighth-grade education, which was when Katie, like most Amish children, had stopped attending organized school. “I didn’t know physics was part of the curriculum here.”

“It’s not. It’s just something I heard.”

Heard? From who? The local Amish scientist? Before I could ask her, she said, “I need to tend the garden.”

I followed, then settled down to watch her snap off the beans and gather them into her apron. She seemed thoroughly absorbed in her work, so much so that she jumped when I spoke. “Katie, do you and Rachel usually get along?”

“Ja. I watch little Joseph all the time for her. At quilting, sometimes even during church.”

“Well, she sure didn’t treat you like the favored family baby-sitter today,” I pointed out.

“No, but Rachel’s always one to listen to what other folks say, instead of finding out for herself.” Katie paused, her fingers wrapped around the stem of a bean. “I don’t care what Rachel says, because truth always comes to light sooner or later. But it makes me feel bad to think that I might have something to do with making my mother cry.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, Rachel’s words hurt her more than me. I’m all my Mam’s got, now. It’s up to me to be perfect.”

Katie stood, the bounty in her apron sagging with its weight. She turned toward the house, only to see Samuel striding toward her.

He took off his hat, his blond hair matted down by sweat. “Katie. How are you today?”

“Wonderful gut, Samuel,” she said. “Just getting the beans for lunch.”

“It’s a good crop you’ve got there.”

I listened, standing at a distance. Where was the talk of intimacy? Or even a light touch at the elbow or back? Surely Samuel had heard about the argument at the quilting; surely he was here to comfort Katie. I did not know if this was how courting was done in their world; if Samuel was holding back because I was present; or if these two young people truly had nothing to say to each other-something odd, if in fact they had created a baby together.

“Something came for you,” Samuel said. “If you want to take a look.”

Ah, this was more like it-a private assignation. I lifted my eyes, waiting to hear what Katie had to say, and realized that Samuel had been speaking to me, not her.

“Something came for me? No one even knows I’m here.”

Samuel shrugged. “It’s in the front yard.”

“Well. All right.” I smiled at Katie. “Let’s go see what my secret admirer shipped this time.” Samuel turned, taking Katie’s arm to lead her to the front of the house. Walking behind them, I watched as Katie very gently, very slowly, slipped from his grasp.

A squat corrugated cardboard box sat on the packed dirt in front of the barn. “The police brought it,” Samuel said, staring at the covered carton as if he expected it to contain a rattlesnake.

I hefted it into my arms. The discovery from the prosecutor was not nearly the volume of other cases I’d had in the past-this one small box contained everything the police had gathered, up to this point. But then again, you didn’t need a lot of proof for an open-and-shut case.

“What is it?” Katie asked.

She stood beside Samuel, that same sweet, bewildered look on her face. “It’s from the prosecution,” I told her. “It’s all the evidence that says you killed your baby.”

Two hours later, I was surrounded by statements and documents and reports, none of which cast my client in a favorable light. There were holes in the case-for example, DNA testing had yet to prove that Katie was indeed the mother of the child, and the prematurity of the fetus cast doubt on its ability to survive outside the womb-but for the most part, the overwhelming evidence pointed to her. She’d been placed at the scene of the crime; she’d been tagged as someone who’d recently given birth; her blood was even found on the dead infant’s body. The secrecy with which she’d tried to give birth made the prospect of someone else coming along and killing the baby seem ludicrous. On the other hand, it did offer up a motive for the prosecution: when you try so diligently to hide the act of birth, you’re probably going to go to great lengths to hide the product of that act, as well. Which left the question of whether or not Katie was in her right mind when she’d committed the murder.

The first thing I needed to do was file a motion for services other than counsel. The court could pay for a psychiatric professional, someone far less likely than me to take Katie on pro bono; and the sooner I wrote up the motion, the sooner I’d have that check in my hand.

Getting off the bed, I knelt to reach beneath it for my laptop. The sleek black case slid along the polished wood floor, so wonderfully heavy with technology and synthetic fabric that it made me want to weep. I set it on the bed and unzipped it, lifting the hinged head of the computer and pressing the button to turn it on.

Nothing happened.

Muttering a curse, I rummaged in the pockets for the battery pack, and slipped it into the hardware. The computer booted up, beeped to alert me that the battery needed to be recharged, and then foundered to a bare, black screen.

Well, it wasn’t the end of the world. I could work near an outlet until the battery recharged. An outlet . . . which didn’t exist anywhere in Katie’s house.

Suddenly I realized what it meant to me, a lawyer, to be working on an Amish farm. I was supposed to create a defense for my client without any of the normal, everyday conveniences accessible to attorneys. Furious-at myself, at Judge Gorman-I grabbed for my cell phone to call him. I managed to dial the first three numbers, and then the phone went dead.

“Jesus Christ!” I threw the phone so that it bounced off the bed. I didn’t even have a battery for it; I’d have to recharge it through the cigarette lighter on a car. Of course, the nearest car was Leda’s, a good twenty miles away.

Leda’s. Well, that was one solution; I could do all my legal work over there. But it was a difficult solution, since Katie was not supposed to leave the farm. Maybe if I wrote the motion out by hand . . .

Suddenly, I stilled. If I wrote the motion out by hand, or if I managed to get my phone working again and called the judge, he’d tell me that the conditions for bail weren’t working, and that Katie could cool her heels in jail until the trial. It was up to me to find a way out of this.

With determination, I stood up and headed downstairs, toward the barn.

From Katie I’d learned that the cows were not let out every day in the summer, it was too hot. So when I walked into the barn, the Holsteins chained to their stanchions lowed at me. One lurched to her feet, her udder huge and painfully pink, making me think of Katie the night before. Turning away, I walked between the two rows of cows, ignoring the occasional splash of urine into the grates behind them, hoping to find a way to make my computer work.

I had noticed that if any rules were relaxed on an Amish farm, it was due to economic necessity. For example, in the pristine milk room, a twelve-volt motor stirred the milk in the refrigerated bulk tank; and the vacuum milking machines were powered by a diesel engine that ran twice a day. These “modern conveniences” were not worldly as much as practical; they kept the Amish in a competitive league with other suppliers of milk. I didn’t understand much about diesel fuel or engines, but who knew? Maybe one could be adapted to run a Thinkpad.

“What are you doing?”

At the sound of Aaron’s voice, I jumped, nearly striking my head on one of the steel arms of the bulk tank. “Oh! You scared me.”

“You have lost something?” he asked, frowning at the corner where I’d been peering.

“No, actually, I’m trying to find something. I need to charge a battery.”

Aaron took off his hat and rubbed his forehead on the fabric of his shirt. “A battery?”

“Yes, for my computer. If you want me to represent your daughter adequately in court, I’m going to have to prepare for her trial. That involves writing several motions beforehand.”

“I write without a computer,” Aaron answered, walking away.

I fell into step beside him. “You may, but that’s not what the judge will be expecting.” Hesitating, I added, “I’m not asking for an outlet in the house; or even for Internet access or a fax machine-both of which I use excessively before trial. But you must understand that it’s not fair to ask me to prepare in an Amish way, when the event I’m getting ready for is an English one.”

For a long time, Aaron stared at me, his eyes dark and fathomless. “We will speak to the bishop about it. He is coming here today.”

My eyes widened. “He is? For this?”

Aaron turned away. “For other things,” he said.

Without a word, Aaron herded me into the buggy. Katie was already waiting in the back, her expression a signal that she didn’t understand what was happening either. Aaron sat down on Sarah’s right side and picked up the reins, clucking to the horse to set it trotting.

Another buggy pulled out behind us-the open carriage that Samuel and Levi drove to work. In a caravan we turned onto roads I had never traveled upon. They wound through fields and farms where the men were still working, and finally came to a stop at a small crossroads that was dotted with several other buggies.

The cemetery was neat and small, each marker the same approximate size, so that the very oldest ones were differentiated from the newest only by the chiseled dates. A small group of Amish stood in the far corner, their black dresses and trousers brushing the earth like the wings of crows. As Sarah and Aaron stepped from the buggy, they moved in unison, in greeting.

Too late, I realized that the Fishers were only their first stop. They circled me and Katie, touching her cheek and her arm and patting her shoulder. They murmured words of loss and sorrow, which sound the same in any language. In the distance, Samuel and Levi carried something from their wagon; the small, unmistakable shape of a coffin.

Stunned, I broke away from the little group of relatives to stand beside Samuel. Toes to the edge of the grave, he stood looking down at the tiny wooden box. I cleared my throat, and he met my gaze. Why is no one sympathizing with you? I wanted to ask, but the words stuck fast.

A car pulled slowly to a stop behind the carriages, and Leda and Frank got out, dressed in black. I looked down at my own jeans and T-shirt. If someone had mentioned to me that we’d be attending a funeral, I could have changed. But from the looks of things, no one had bothered to tell Katie this, either.

She accepted the sympathies of her relatives, flinching slightly every time someone spoke to her, as if suffering a physical blow. The bishop and the deacon, men I recognized from the church service, came to stand beside the open grave, and the small group gathered around.

I wondered what sense of responsibility had made Sarah and Aaron retrieve the body of an infant that they would not admit aloud was their grandchild. I wondered how Samuel felt to be standing on the fringe. I wondered what Katie made of all this, given her denial of the pregnancy altogether.

With her mother firmly holding her hand, Katie stepped forward. The bishop began to pray, and everyone bowed their heads-everyone except Katie. She looked straight ahead, then at me, then at the buggies-anywhere but in that grave. Finally, she turned her face to the sky like a flower, and smiled softly, inappropriately, as the sun washed over her skin.

But as the bishop invited everyone to silently recite the Lord’s Prayer, Katie suddenly pulled away from her mother and sprinted to the buggy, climbing inside and out of sight.

I started after her. No matter what Katie had said up to this point, something about this funeral had apparently struck a chord. I had taken a step in her direction when Leda grasped my hand and stopped me with a brief shake of her head. To my surprise, I remained standing beside her. I found myself mouthing the words of the prayer; words I had not said in years; words I had forgotten I even knew. Then before Leda could stop me again, I hurried to the buggy and climbed in. Katie was huddled in a lump on the seat, head buried beneath her hands. Hesitantly, I stroked her back. “I can imagine how hard this is for you.”

Slowly, Katie sat up, her spine poker-straight. Her eyes were dry; her lips curved the slightest bit. “He’s not mine, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She repeated, “He’s not mine.”

“All right,” I conceded. “He’s not yours.” I felt Aaron and Sarah climb into the buggy, turn the horse toward home. And with every rhythmic step I asked myself how Katie, who professed ignorance, had known that the infant was a boy.

Sarah had prepared a meal for the relatives who’d come to the funeral. She set platters of food and baskets of bread on a trestle table that had been moved onto the porch. Unfamiliar women hurried in and out of the kitchen, smiling shyly at me whenever they passed.

Katie was nowhere to be found, and even more strange, no one seemed to find this disturbing. I settled myself on a bench with a plate of food, eating without really tasting anything. I was thinking of Coop, and how long it would be before he got here. First the milk coming in, and now the burial of a tiny body-how much longer could Katie deny the birth of a baby before breaking down?

The bench creaked as a large, elderly woman sat down beside me. Her face was lined like the inner rings of a great sequoia, her hands heavy and swollen at the knuckles. She wore the same black horn-rimmed glasses I remembered my grandfather wearing in the 1950s. “So,” she said. “You’re the nice lawyer girl.”

I could count on one hand the number of times in my career I’d heard the words nice and lawyer in the same sentence, much less the reference to my thirty-nine-year-old self as a girl. I smiled. “That would be me.”

She reached across her plate and patted my hand. “You know, you’re very special to us. Standing up for our Katie this way.”

“Well, thank you. But it’s my job.”

“No, no.” The woman shook her head. “It’s your heart.”

Well, I didn’t know what to say to that. What mattered here was getting Katie acquitted, which had virtually nothing to do with my own opinion of her. “If you’ll excuse me,” I said, standing, planning on a quick escape. But no sooner had I turned than I ran into Aaron.

“If you would come with us,” he said, gesturing to the bishop beside him. “We can talk about that matter from earlier today.”

We walked to a quiet spot in the shade of the barn. “Aaron tells me you have a problem with your legal case,” Ephram began.

“I wouldn’t call it a problem with the case. It’s more like a difficulty in logistics. You see, part of my job requires me to be plugged into technology. I need the tools of my trade to prepare the motions I’ll be sending to the judge, as well as depositions that will come later on. If I hand the judge a handwritten legal text, he’ll laugh me out of court-right after he puts Katie into jail, saying that the bail conditions aren’t working out.”

“You are talking about using a computer?”

“Yes, specifically. Mine will run on batteries, but they’re dead.”

“You can’t get more of these batteries?”

“Not at the local Turkey Hill,” I said. “They’re expensive. I could recharge them, but that requires an outlet.”

“I will not have an outlet on my property,” Aaron interrupted.

“Well, I can’t go into town and charge the battery for eight hours and leave Katie alone here, either.”

The bishop stroked his long, gray beard. “Aaron, you remember when Polly and Joseph Zook’s son had the asthma? You remember how much more important it was for the child to have oxygen than to adhere to the strict letter of the Ordnung? I think this is the same thing.”

“This is not the same at all,” Aaron countered. “This isn’t life or death.”

“Ask your daughter about that,” I shot back.

The bishop held up his hands. At that moment, he looked exactly like every judge I’d ever stood up to in a courtroom. “The computer is not yours, Aaron, and I do not doubt your personal commitment to our ways. But like I told the Zooks, the ends justifies the means, in this case. For as long as the lawyer needs it, I will allow an inverter on this farm, to be used only by Miss Hathaway for the electric.”

“An inverter?”

He turned to me. “Inverters convert twelve-volt current into onehundred ten volt. Our businessmen use them to power cash registers. We can’t use electric straight from a generator, but an inverter, it runs off a battery, which is okay by the Ordnung. Most families can’t have inverters, because there’s too much temptation. You see, the electric goes from diesel to generator to twelve-volt battery to inverter to any appliance-such as your computer.”

Aaron looked appalled. “Computers are forbidden by the Ordnung. And inverters-they’re on probation,” he said. “You could plug a lightbulb into one!”

Ephram smiled. “You could . . . but Aaron, you wouldn’t. I will have someone bring Miss Hathaway an inverter today.”

Clearly miffed, Aaron looked away from the bishop. I was completely confounded by the bargain that had been struck, but grateful all the same. “This will certainly make a difference.”

The bishop’s warm hands enveloped mine, and for a moment, I felt my whole self settle. “You have made adjustments for us, Miss Hathaway,” Ephram said. “Did you think we would not make the same compromises for you?”

I don’t know why the thought of bringing electricity onto the Fishers’ land made me feel a little queasy, as if I were Eve holding out that apple with a come-hither grin. It wasn’t as if I was going to find Katie off in the barn playing Nintendo, for God’s sake. The inverter would probably collect dust between the times I booted up my Thinkpad to do work. Still, I found myself wandering aimlessly away from the barn and the house after the bishop’s decision.

I heard Katie’s voice before I even realized I’d walked to the pond. She sat among a high brace of cattails, almost hidden, her bare feet submerged in the water. “I’m watching,” she said, her eyes fixed on a spot in the middle of the pond where there was absolutely nothing to see. She smiled and clapped, the single audience member for a show of her own making.

Okay, so maybe she was crazy.

“Katie,” I said quietly, startling her. She jumped to her feet, splashing me.

“Oh, I’m sorry!”

“It’s hot. I could use a little spray.” I sat down on the bank. “Who were you talking to?”

Her cheeks flamed. “No one. Just myself.”

“Your sister again?”

Katie sighed, then nodded. “She skates.”

“She skates,” I repeated, deadpan.

“Ja, about six inches above where the water is now.”

“I see. Isn’t she having a little trouble without any ice?”

“No. She doesn’t know it’s summer; she’s just doing what she was doing before she died.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “She doesn’t seem to hear me, either.”

I looked at Katie for a long moment. Her kapp was slightly askew, a couple of loose tendrils curled about her ears. Her knees were drawn up, arms crossed loosely over them. She was not agitated or confused. She was just staring at the pond, at this alleged vision.

I picked a cattail and twisted the stem. “What I don’t understand is how you believe something you can’t even see, but adamantly refuse to believe something that other people-doctors, and coroners, and my God, even your parents-all know for a fact happened.”

Katie lifted her face. “But I do see Hannah, clear as day, wearing her shawl and her green dress and the skates that got passed down to her from me. And I never saw that baby, until it was already in the barn, wrapped up and dead.” Her brow furrowed. “Which would you believe?”

Before I could answer, Ephram appeared with the deacon. “Miss Hathaway,” the bishop said, “Lucas and I must speak to our young sister here, for a moment.”

Even with the distance between us, I could feel Katie trembling, and the sharp scent of fear rising from her skin. She was shivering in a way that she hadn’t even when a charge of murder was being hung around her neck. Her hand scrabbled over the matted reeds to find mine and slip beneath it. “I would like my lawyer to be present, then,” she said, her voice no more than a whisper.

The bishop looked surprised. “Well, Katie, what for?”

She could not even raise her eyes to the older man. “Please,” she murmured, then swallowed hard.

The deacon and the bishop looked at each other, and Ephram nodded. The trembling, submissive creature beside me was nothing like the girl who’d looked me in the eye and told me there was no baby. She was nothing like the girl who’d spoken to me minutes before about what was visible to one person not being crystal clear to another. But she did bear a striking resemblance to the child I’d seen in court the moment I first arrived, the child who had been ready to let the legal system steamroll her rather than mount a defense.

“It’s like this,” Ephram said uncomfortably. “We know how hard things are, right now, and only bound to be getting more tangled. But there was a baby, Katie, and you being not married . . . well, you need to come to church, and make your things right.”

It was slight, but Katie inclined her head.

With a nod to me, the two men struck off across the field again. It took a full thirty seconds for Katie to get control of herself, and when she did, her face was as pale as a new moon. “What was that about?” I asked.

“They want me to confess to my sin.”

“What sin?”

“Having a baby out of wedlock.” She started walking, and I hurried to keep up with her.

“What will you do?”

“Confess,” Katie said quietly. “What else can I do?”

Surprised, I turned and blocked her path. “You could start by telling them what you told me. That you didn’t have a baby.”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I couldn’t tell them that; I couldn’t.”

“Why not?”

Katie shook her head, her cheeks bright. She ran into the waving sea of corn.

“Why not?” I yelled after her, my frustration rooting me to the ground.

The men who brought the inverter set it up for me in the barn. Attached to the generator beside the calving pen, it gave me a lovely view of the police tape still securing the crime scene, just in case I needed any inspiration to fight Katie’s charges. Shortly after four o’clock I carried my files and my laptop out to the barn and began to act like a lawyer.

Levi, Samuel, and Aaron were milking the cows at their stanchions. Levi seemed resigned to the Amish equivalent of scut work-shoveling manure, scooping out grain-while the two older men wiped down the udders of the cows with what seemed to be the pages of a telephone book, and then hooked them up in pairs to a suction pump powered by the same generator that was indirectly running my computer. From time to time, Aaron would carry the container into the milk room and pour it into the bulk tank with an audible splash.

I watched them for a while, taken by their graceful routine and the kindness of their hands as they stroked the side of a cow’s belly or scratched behind her ears. Smiling, I gingerly plugged in my laptop, made a quick and fervent prayer that this wouldn’t surge and destroy my hard drive, and booted it up.

The screen rolled open in a wash of color, spotted with icons and toolbars. My screen saver came next, a computer graphic of sharks at the bottom of the ocean. I reached for one of the manila files I’d received from the prosecutor and spread it open on the hay. Leafing through its contents, I tried to formulate in my mind a motion for services other than counsel.

When I glanced up, Levi was gaping at the laptop from across the barn, his shovel propped forgotten at his side until Samuel walked over and cuffed him. But then Samuel looked himself, eyes widening at the burst of color and the realism of the sharks. His hand twitched, as if he was trying hard not to reach out and touch what he saw.

Aaron Fisher never even turned his head.

A cow bawled at the far end of the stanchions. The sweet hay and even sweeter feed tickled the inside of my nose. The tug-suck, tug-suck of the milking pump became a backbeat. Closing out this world, I focused and began to type.