Plain Truth Read online

  Plain Truth

  Jodie Picoult

  A shocking murder shatters the picturesque calm of Pennsylvania's Amish country, and tests the heart and soul of the lawyer who steps in to defend the young woman at the centre of the storm...

  The discovery of a dead infant in an Amish barn shakes Lancaster County to its core. But the police investigation leads to a more shocking disclosure: circumstantial evidence suggests that eighteen year old Katie Fisher, an unmarried Amish woman believed to be the newborn's mother, took the child's life.

  When Ellie Hathaway, a disillusioned big-city attorney comes to Paradise, Pennsylvania to defend Katie, two cutures collide, and, for the first time in her high-profile career, Ellie faces a system of justice very different from her own.

  Delving deep inside the world of those who live 'plain', Ellie must find a way to reach Katie on her terms. And as she unravels a tangled murder case, Ellie also looks deep within, to confront her own fears and desires when a man from her past re-enters her life.

  Plain Truth

  Jodi Picoult

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Once again, I find myself indebted to so many people: Dr. Joel Umlas, Dr. James Umlas, and Dr. David Toub for their medical expertise; Dr. Tia Horner and Dr. Stuart Anfang for their explanations of forensic psychiatry and clinical interviews; Dr. Catherine Lewis and Dr. Neil Kaye, for helping me understand neonaticide; my father-in-law, Karl van Leer, who never once blinked when I called and asked about inseminating cows; Kyle van Leer, who saw a “cookie moon” and let me borrow it; Teresa Farina for the fast transcriptions; Dr. Elizabeth Martin, for finding listeria and leading me through autopsies; Steve Marshall, who took me ghost hunting; Brian Laird, for the troll story; Allegra Lubrano, for finding obscure legal statutes whenever I called frantically to ask “a quick question”; Kiki Keating, attorney extraordinaire, for making the time to come with me to Lancaster and spending all those nights hunched over the tape recorder, brainstorming testimony; and Tim van Leer, for everything. Thanks also to Jane Picoult, who wanted her own sentence this time, for her insight and guiding comments. Thanks to Laura Gross for the same, and for possibly being the only person in the publishing business who wants me to write faster. To Emily Bestler and Kip Hakala-here’s to the start of a beautiful relationship. And to Camille McDuffie-the third time’s a charm. I am indebted to the works of John Hostetler and Donald Kraybill, and to the people I met in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, without whom this book could not have been written: Maribel Kraybill, Lt. Renee Schuler, and especially Louise Stoltzfus, a wonderful writer herself, whose contributions here were invaluable. Finally, many thanks to the Amish men, women, and children I met, who graciously opened their homes and their hearts and let me into their world for a little while.

  I.

  I must be a Christian child

  Gentle, patient, meek and mild;

  Must be honest, simple, true

  In my words and actions too . . .

  Must remember, God can view

  All I think, and all I do.

  -Amish school verse

  ONE

  She had often dreamed of her little sister floating dead beneath the surface of the ice, but tonight, for the first time, she envisioned Hannah clawing to get out. She could see Hannah’s eyes, wide and milky; could feel Hannah’s nails scraping. Then, with a start, she woke. It was not winter-it was July. There was no ice beneath her palms, just the tangled sheets of her bed. But once again, there was someone on the other side, fighting to be free.

  As the fist in her belly pulled tighter, she bit her bottom lip. Ignoring the pain that rippled and receded, she tiptoed barefoot into the night.

  The barn cat yowled when she stepped inside. She was panting by now, her legs shaking like willow twigs. Lowering herself to the hay in the far corner of the calving pen, she drew up her knees. The swollen cows rolled their blue moon eyes in her direction, then turned away quickly, as if they knew better than to bear witness.

  She concentrated on the hides of the Holsteins until their black spots shimmied and swam. She sank her teeth into the rolled hem of her nightgown. There was a funnel of pressure, as if she were being turned inside out; and she remembered how she and Hannah used to squeeze through the hole in the barbed wire fence by the creek’s edge, pushing and angled, all knees and grunts and elbows, until by some miracle they’d tumble through.

  It was over as suddenly as it had begun. And lying on the matted, stained hay between her legs was a baby.

  • • •

  Aaron Fisher rolled over beneath the bright quilt to stare at the clock beside the bed. There had been nothing, no sound to wake him, but after forty-five years of farming and milking, the smallest things could pull him out of sleep: a footfall in the corn, a change in the pattern of the wind, the rasp of a mother’s tongue roughing a newborn calf.

  He felt the mattress give as Sarah came up on an elbow behind him, the long braid of her hair curling over her shoulder like a seaman’s rope. “Was ist letz?” What’s the matter?

  It was not the animals; there was a full month before the first cow was due to deliver. It was not a robber; there was too little noise. He felt his wife’s arm slip around him, hugging his back to her front. “Nix,” he murmured. Nothing. But he did not know if he was trying to convince Sarah, or himself.

  She knew enough to cut the cord that spiraled purple to the baby’s belly. Hands shaking, she managed to reach the old scissors that hung on a peg near the pen’s door. They were rusty and coated with bits of hay. The cord severed in two thick snips, and then began spurting blood. Horrified, she pressed her fingers to the ends, pinching it shut, wildly looking around for something to tie it off.

  She rummaged in the hay and came up with a small length of baling twine, which she quickly tied around the cord. The bleeding slowed, then stopped. Relieved, she sank back on her elbows-and then the newborn started to cry.

  She snatched the baby up and rocked it tightly. With her foot, she kicked at the hay, trying to cover the blood with a clean layer. The baby’s mouth opened and closed on the cotton of her nightgown, rooting.

  She knew what the baby wanted, needed, but she couldn’t do it. It would make this real.

  So she gave the baby her pinkie finger instead. She let the small, powerful jaws suckle, while she did what she had been taught to do in times of extreme stress; what she had been doing for months now. “Lord,” she prayed, “please make this go away.”

  The rustle of chains awakened her. It was still dark out, but the dairy cows’ internal schedule had them rising at their individual stalls, their bags hanging blue-veined and round with milk, like full moons caught between their legs. She was sore and tired, but knew she had to get out of the barn before the men arrived to do the milking. Glancing down, she realized that a miracle had come to pass: the blood-soaked hay was fresh now, except for a small stain beneath her own bottom. And the two things she’d been holding when she fell asleep-the scissors and the newborn-were gone.

  She pulled herself to her feet and glanced toward the roof, awed and reverent. “Denke,” she whispered, and then she ran out of the barn into the shadows.

  Like all other sixteen-year-old Amish boys, Levi Esch no longer attended school. He’d gone through the eighth grade and was now in that limbo between being a child and being old enough to be baptized into the Amish faith. In the interim, he was a hired hand for Aaron Fisher, who no longer had a son to help him work his dairy farm. Levi had gotten the job through the recommendation of his older cousin Samuel, who’d been apprenticing with the Fishers now for five years. And since everyone knew that Samuel was probably going to marry the Fishers’ daughter soon and set up his own farm, it meant Levi would be getting a promotion.

  His workday s
tarted at 4:00 A.M., as on all other dairy farms. It was still pitch-dark, and Levi could not see Samuel’s buggy approach, but he could hear the faint jingle of tack and traces. He grabbed his flat-brimmed straw hat and ran out the door, then jumped onto the seat beside Samuel.

  “Hi,” he said breathlessly.

  Samuel nodded at him but didn’t turn, didn’t speak.

  “What’s the matter?” Levi teased. “Katie wouldn’t kiss you good-bye last night?”

  Samuel scowled and cuffed Levi, sending his hat spinning into the back of the buggy. “Why don’t you just shut up?” The wind whispered at the ragged edge of the cornfield as they drove on in silence. After a while, Samuel pulled the buggy into the Fishers’ front yard. Levi scuffed the toe of his boot into the soft earth and waited for Samuel to put the horse out to pasture before they headed into the barn.

  The lights used for milking were powered by a generator, as were the vacuum pumps hooked up to the teats of the cows. Aaron Fisher knelt beside one of the herd, spraying the udders with iodine solution and then wiping them dry with a page ripped from an old phone book. “Samuel, Levi,” he greeted.

  He did not tell them what to do, because by now they already knew. Samuel maneuvered the wheelbarrow beneath a silo and began to mix the feed. Levi shoveled out the manure behind each cow, periodically looking at Samuel and wishing he was already the senior farmhand.

  The barn door opened, and Aaron’s father ambled in. Elam Fisher lived in the grossdawdi haus, a small apartment attached to the main building. Although Elam helped out with the milking, Levi knew the unwritten rules: make sure the old man carried nothing heavy; keep him from taxing himself; and make him believe that Aaron couldn’t do without him, although Aaron could have, any day of the week. “Boys,” Elam boomed, then stopped in his tracks, his nose wrinkled above his long, white beard. “Why, we’ve had a calf.”

  Puzzled, Aaron stood. “No. I checked the pen.”

  Elam shook his head. “There’s the smell of it, all the same.”

  “More like it’s Levi, needing a bath,” Samuel joked, emptying a fresh scoop of feed in front of the first cow.

  As Samuel passed him with the wheelbarrow, Levi came up swinging and slipped on a slick of manure. He landed on his bottom in the ditch built to catch the refuse and set his jaw at Samuel’s burst of laughter.

  “Come on now,” Aaron chided, although a grin tugged at his mouth. “Samuel, leave him be. Levi, I think Sarah left your spare clothes in the tack room.”

  Levi scrambled to his feet, his cheeks burning. He walked past Aaron, past the chalkboard with the annotated statistics on the cows due to calve, and turned into the small cubby that housed the blankets and bridles used for the farm’s workhorses and mules. Like the rest of the barn, it was neat as a pin. Braided leather reins crossed the wall like spiderwebs, and shelves were stacked with spare horseshoes and jars of liniment.

  Levi glanced about but could see no clothing. Then he noticed something bright in the pile of horse blankets. Well, that would make sense. If Sarah Fisher had washed his things, they had probably been done with the other laundry. He lifted the heavy, striped blanket and recognized his spare trousers and jewel green shirt, rolled into a ball. Levi stepped forward, intending to shake it out, and found himself staring down into the tiny, still face of a newborn.

  “Aaron!” Levi skidded to a stop, panting. “Aaron, you’ve got to come.” He ran toward the tack room. Aaron exchanged a glance with his father, and they both started after the boy, with Samuel trailing.

  Levi stood in front of a stool piled high with horse blankets, on top of which rested a sleeping baby wrapped in a boy’s shirt. “I . . . I don’t think it’s breathing.”

  Aaron stepped closer. It had been a long time since he’d been around a baby this small. The soft skin of its face was cold. He knelt and tipped his head, hoping that its breath would fall into the cup of his ear. He flattened his hand against its chest.

  Then he turned to Levi. “Run to the Schuylers and ask to borrow their phone,” he said. “Call the police.”

  “Get out,” Lizzie Munro said to the officer in charge. “I’m not going to check an unresponsive infant. Send an ambulance.”

  “They’re already there. They want a detective.”

  Lizzie rolled her eyes. Every year that she’d been a detective-sergeant with the East Paradise Township police, the paramedics seemed to get younger. And more stupid. “It’s a medical call, Frank.”

  “Well, something’s out of kilter down there.” The lieutenant handed her a slip of paper with an address on it.

  “Fisher?” Lizzie read, frowning at the surname and the street. “They’re Amish?”

  “Think so.”

  Lizzie sighed and grabbed her big black purse and her badge. “You know this is a waste of time.” In the past, Lizzie had occasionally dealt with Old Order Amish teenagers, who’d gather together in some guy’s barn to drink and dance and generally disturb the peace. Once or twice she’d been called to take a statement from an Amish businessman who’d been burglarized. But for the most part, the Amish had little contact with the police. Their community existed unobtrusively within the regular world, like a small air bubble impervious to the fluid around it.

  “Just take their statements, and I’ll make it up to you.” Frank held the door open for her as she left her office. “I’ll find a nice, fat felony for you to sink your teeth into.”

  “Don’t do me any favors,” Lizzie said, but she was grinning as she got into her car and headed to the Fisher farm.

  The Fishers’ front yard was crowded with a squad car, an ambulance, and a buggy. Lizzie walked up to the house and knocked on the front door.

  No one answered, but a voice behind Lizzie called out a greeting, the cadences of the woman’s dialect softening her consonants. A middle-aged Amish woman wearing a lavender dress and a black apron hurried toward Lizzie. “I am Sarah Fisher. Can I help you?”

  “I’m Detective-Sergeant Lizzie Munro.”

  Sarah nodded solemnly and led Lizzie into the barn’s tack room, where two paramedics knelt over a baby. Lizzie hunkered down beside one EMT. “What have you got?”

  “Newborn, emphasis on the new. No pulse or respirations when we got here, and we haven’t been able to revive him. One of the farmworkers found him wrapped up in that green shirt, underneath a horse blanket. Can’t tell if it was stillborn or not, but someone was trying to hide the body all the same. I think one of your guys is around by the milking stalls, he might be able to tell you more.”

  “Wait a second-someone gave birth to this baby, and then tried to conceal it?”

  “Yeah. About three hours ago,” the paramedic murmured.

  Suddenly the simple medical response call was more complicated than Lizzie had expected, and the most likely suspect was standing four feet away. Lizzie glanced up at Sarah Fisher, who wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. “The baby . . . it’s dead?”

  “I’m afraid so, Mrs. Fisher.”

  Lizzie opened her mouth to ask another question, but was distracted by the distant sound of equipment being moved about. “What’s that?”

  “The men, finishing up the milking.”

  Lizzie’s brows shot up. “The milking?”

  “These things . . .” the woman said quietly. “They still have to be done.”

  Suddenly, Lizzie felt profoundly sorry for her. Life never stopped for death; she should know that better than most. She gentled her voice and put her hand on Mrs. Fisher’s shoulder, not quite certain what sort of psychological state the woman was in. “I know this must be very difficult for you, but I’m going to have to ask you some questions about your baby.”

  Sarah Fisher raised her eyes to meet Lizzie’s. “It’s not my baby,” she said. “I have no idea where it came from.”

  A half hour later, Lizzie leaned down beside the crime scene photographer. “Stick to the barn. The Amish don’t like having their pictures taken.” The man nodded,
shooting a roll around the tack room, with several close-ups of the infant’s corpse.

  At least now she understood why she’d been called down. An unidentified dead infant, an unknown mother who’d abandoned it. And all this smack in the middle of an Amish farm.

  She had interviewed the neighbors, a Lutheran couple who swore that they’d never heard so much as raised voices from the Fishers, and who couldn’t imagine where the baby might have come from. They had two teenage daughters, one of whom sported a nose and navel ring, who had alibis for the previous night. But they had agreed to undergo gynecological exams to rule themselves out as suspects.

  Sarah Fisher, on the other hand, had not.

  Lizzie considered this as she stood in the milk room, watching Aaron Fisher empty a small hand tank of milk into a larger one. He was tall and dark, his arms thick with ropes of muscle developed by farming. His beard brushed the second button of his shirt. As he finished, he set down the tank and turned to give Lizzie his full attention.

  “My wife was not pregnant, Detective,” Aaron said.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Sarah can’t have more children. The doctors made it that way, after she almost died birthing our youngest.”

  “Your other children, Mr. Fisher-where were they when the baby was found?”

  A shadow passed over the man’s face, disappearing as quickly as Lizzie had marked it. “My daughter was asleep, upstairs. My other child . . . is gone.”

  “Gone, like down the road to her own home?”

  “Dead.”

  “This daughter who was asleep is how old?”

  “Eighteen.”

  At that, Lizzie glanced up. Neither Sarah Fisher nor the paramedics had mentioned that there was another woman of childbearing age who lived on the farm. “Is it possible that she was pregnant, Mr. Fisher?”

  The man’s face turned so red that Lizzie grew worried. “She isn’t even married.”