Speaking in Tongues

  "You think someone made her do this? Or that it's a prank?" Tate asked.

  "I don't know. She might've been drinking again. I checked the bottles at home and they didn't look emptier but . . . I don't know."

  "That's not much to go on," her ex-husband said.

  Suddenly she turned to him and spoke. "It's not a hundred percent thing we've got, Megan and me. There're problems. Of course there are. But our relationship deserves more than this damn letter. More than her running out . . ." She crossed her arms, gazed into the fields again. She repeated, "Something's wrong."

  "But what? Exactly? What do you think?"

  "I don't know."

  "Well, what should we do?"

  "I want to go look for her," Bett said determinedly. "I want to find her."

  Which is exactly what he'd seen in her purple eyes a few moments earlier. This is what he'd known was coming.

  Yet now that he thought about it he was surprised. This didn't sound like Bett McCall at all. Bett the dreamer, Bett the tarot card consulter. Passive, she'd always floated where the breezes took her. Forrest Gump's feather . . . The least likely person imaginable to be a mother. Children needed guidance, direction, models. That wasn't Bett McCall. When he'd heard from Megan that Bett had become engaged last Christmas Tate was surprised only that it had taken her so long to accept what must have been her dozenth proposal since they'd divorced. When they'd been married she'd been charming and flighty and wholly ungrounded, relying on him to provide the foundation she needed. He'd assumed that once they'd split up she'd quickly find someone else to play that role.

  He wondered if he was standing next to a Betty Susan McCall different from the one he'd been married to (and wondered too if she was thinking the same about him).

  "Bett," he said to reassure her, "she's fine. She's a mature young woman. She vented some steam and's going off for a few days. I did it myself when I was about her age. Remember?" He doubted that she did but, surprising him, she said, "You made it all the way to Baltimore."

  "And I called the Judge and he came to get me. A two-day runaway. Look, Megan's had a lot to deal with. I think the soap dish is the key."

  "The dish?"

  "You're right--nobody'd buy a present and a card and then not give them to you. She'll be back for your birthday. And know what else?"

  "What?"

  "There's a positive side to this. She's brought up some things that we can talk about. That ought to be talked about." He nodded--toward the house, where his letter rested like a bloody knife.

  Logic. Who could argue with it?

  But Bett wasn't convinced.

  "There's something else I have to tell you." She chewed on her narrow lower lip the way he remembered her doing whenever she'd been troubled. She gripped the porch banister and lowered her head.

  Tate Collier, intercollegiate debate champion, national moot court winner, expert forensic orator, recognized the body language of an impending confession.

  "Go ahead," he said.

  "The night of the water tower thing--I was . . . out."

  "Out?"

  She sighed. "I mean, I didn't get home. I was at Brad's in Baltimore. I didn't plan on it; I just fell asleep. Megan was really upset I hadn't called."

  "You apologized?"

  "Of course."

  "Well, it was one of those things. An accident. She'd know that."

  Bett shook her head dismissingly. "I think maybe that's what started her drinking before she climbed up the tower. It didn't help that she doesn't like Brad much."

  The girl had described Bett's fiance as a nerd who parted his hair too carefully, thought sweaters with reindeer on them were stylish and spent too much time in front of the TV. Tate didn't share these observations with Bett now.

  "It takes a little while to get used to stepparents. I see it all the time in my practice."

  "I held off going over to his place for a while after that. But last night I went there again. I asked her if she minded and she said she didn't. I dropped her at Amy's on my way to Baltimore."

  "So, there." Tate smiled and caught her eye as she glanced his way.

  "What?"

  He lifted his palms. "It's just a little payback. She's over at somebody's house, going to let you sweat a bit."

  So, no need to worry.

  You go your way and I'll go mine.

  "That may be," Bett said, "but I'll never forgive myself if I just forget it and something happens to her."

  Tate's phone buzzed. He answered it.

  "Counselor," Konnie's gruff voice barked.

  "Konnie, what's up?"

  "Got good news."

  "You found her?"

  Bett's head swiveled.

  The detective said, "She's on her way to New York."

  "How do you know?" Tate asked.

  "I put out a DMV notice and a patrol found her car at the Vienna Metro station. On the front seat was an Amtrak schedule. She'd circled Saturday trains to Penn Station. Manhattan." The Metro would take her from Vienna to Union Station in downtown D.C. in a half hour. From there it was three hours to New York City. Konnie continued. "You know anybody up there she'd go to visit?"

  Tate told this to Bett, who took the news cautiously. He asked about where she might be going.

  She shook her head. "I don't think she knows a soul up there."

  Tate relayed the answer to Konnie.

  "Well, at least you know where she's going. I'll call NYPD and have somebody meet the trains and ask around the station. I'll send 'em her picture."

  "Okay. Thanks, Konnie." He hung up. Looked at his ex-wife. "Well," he said. "That's that."

  But the violet eyes disagreed.

  "What, Bett?" he asked.

  "I'm sorry, Tate. I just don't buy it."

  "What?"

  "Her going off to New York."

  "But why? You haven't told me anything specific."

  Her palms slapped her hips. "Well, I don't have anything specific. You want evidence, you want proof. I don't have any." She sighed. "I'm not like you."

  "Like me?"

  "I can't convince you," she said angrily. "I don't have a way with words. So I'm not even going to try."

  He started to say something more, to cinch his argument, to end this awkward reunion, to send her back out of his life. But he considered what she'd just said and recalled something--what the Judge had said after Tate had finished an argument before the Supreme Court in Richmond in a death penalty case, which Tate later won. His grandfather had been in the audience, proud as could be that his offspring was handling the case. Later, over whiskeys at the ornate Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, the somber old man had said, "Tate, that was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. They'll rule for you. I saw it in their faces."

  I did too, he'd thought, wondering what else the Judge had in mind. The old man's eyes were dim.

  "But I want you to understand something."

  "Okay," the young man said.

  "You've got it in you to be the most manipulative person on earth."

  "How do you mean, sir?"

  "If you were greedy you could be a Rockefeller. If you were evil you could be a Hitler. That's what I mean. You can talk your way into somebody's heart and get them to do whatever you want. Judge or jury, they won't have a chance. Words, Tate. Words. You can't see them but they're the most dangerous weapons on earth. Remember that. Be careful, son."

  "Sure, sir," Tate had said, paying no attention to the old man's advice, wondering if the court's decision would be unanimous. It was.

  What he does, he cannot doubt.

  Bett gazed at him and in a soft voice--sympathetic, almost pitying--she said, "Tate, don't worry about it. It's not your problem. You go back to your practice. I can handle it."

  She fished in her purse, pulled out her car keys.

  He watched her walk away. Then he called, "Come on in here." She hesitated. "Come on," he said and wandered into the barn, the original one--built in the 1920s. Reluctantly s
he followed. It was a grimy place, the barn, filled with as much junk as farm tools. He'd played here as a boy, had a ream of memories: horses' tails twitching with muscular jerks on hot summer afternoons, sparks flying as the Judge edged an axe on the old grinding wheel. He'd tried his first cigarette here. And learned much about the world from the moldy stacks of National Geographics. He also got his first glimpse of naked women--in the Playboys the sharecroppers had stashed here.

  He slipped off his suit jacket, hanging it up on a pink, padded coat hanger. What was that doing here? he wondered. A former girlfriend, he believed, had left it after they'd taken a trip to the Caribbean.

  Bett stood near him, holding on to a beam that powder-post beetles had riddled. Tate rummaged through a box. Bett watched, remained silent.

  He didn't find what he was looking for in one box and turned to another. He glanced up at her then continued to rummage. He finally found the old beat-up leather jacket. He pulled it on, took off his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt.

  Then he righted a battered old cobbler's bench, dropped down onto it and took off his oxford wing tips and socks. He massaged his feet.

  His eyes fell again on the picnic bench, visible just outside the door. Thinking again of the night of the funeral. Megan in bed. Bett, unhooking the Japanese lantern, the November night still oddly balmy. She seemed to float like a ghost in the dim air above the bench. He'd come up next to her. Startled her by speaking to her in a heartrending whisper.

  I have something to tell you.

  Now he shoved that hard memory away and pulled on white work socks and his comfortable boots.

  She looked at him in confusion, shook her head. "What're you doing?"

  "You did it after all," he said with a faint laugh.

  "What?"

  "You convinced me." He laced the boots up tight. "I think you're right. Something happened to her. And we're going to find out what. You and me."

  II

  THE

  INCONVENIENT

  CHILD

  Chapter Seven

  The rain had started up again.

  They were inside now, sitting at the old dining room table, dark oak and pitted with wormholes.

  Tate poured wine, offered it to Bett.

  She took the glass and cradled it between both hands the way he remembered her doing when they'd been married. In their first year of marriage, because he was a poor young prosecutor and Bett hadn't yet found her career, they couldn't afford to go out to dinner very often. But at least once a week they'd try to have lunch at a nice restaurant. They'd always ordered wine.

  She sipped from the glass, set it on the table and watched the sheets of rain roll across the brown fields.

  "What do we do, Tate?" she asked. "Where do we start?"

  Prosecutors know as much about criminal investigations as cops do. But those gears in Tate's mind hadn't been used for a long time. He shrugged. "Let's start with her therapist. Maybe she said something about running away, about where she'd go. What's his name?" Tate felt he should have remembered.

  "Hanson," Bett said. "He had to cancel the session today--an illness or something. I hope he's in town." She looked up the number in her address book and dialed it. "It's his service," she whispered to Tate. "What's your cell number?"

  She gave the doctor's answering service both of their mobile numbers and asked him to return the call. She said it was urgent.

  "Try that friend again," Tate suggested. "Amy. Where she spent the night." He tried to picture Amy. He'd met her once. He'd counted nine earrings in the girl's left ear but only eight in her right. He'd wondered if the disparity had been intentional or if she'd merely miscounted.

  Troubled, he thought again about her boyfriend. Well, she was seventeen. Why shouldn't she go out? But with a college senior? Tate's prosecutorial mind thought back to the Virginia provisions on statutory rape.

  Bett shifted and cocked the phone closer to her ear. Apparently someone was now home.

  "Amy? It's Megan's mother. Honey, we're trying to find her. She didn't show up for lunch. Do you know where she went this morning after she left you and your mom's?"

  Bett nodded as she listened and then asked if Megan had been upset about anything. Her face was grim.

  Tate was half listening but mostly he was studying Bett. The tangles of auburn hair, the striking face, the prominent neck bones, the complexion of a woman who looked ten years younger than her age. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen her. Maybe it was Megan's sweet sixteen party. An odd evening . . . For a fleeting moment, as he stood beside the girl and her mother, delivering what everyone declared to be a brilliant toast, he'd had a sense of them as a family. He and Bett had shared a momentary smile. But it had faded fast and the instant they'd stepped out of the spotlight they'd returned to their separate lives. When he'd seen her after that, Tate couldn't remember.

  He thought: She's less pretty now but more beautiful. More confident, more assured, her sunset-sky eyes were narrowed and not flitting around--coy and ethereal--the way they'd habitually done fifteen years ago.

  Maybe it's maturity, Tate reflected. And he wondered again what her impression of him might be.

  Bett put her hand over the receiver and said, "Amy said Megan left about nine-thirty this morning and wouldn't tell her where she was going. She was secretive about it. She left her book bag there. I thought it might have something in it that'd give us a clue where she went. I said we'd be by to pick it up later."

  "Good."

  Bett listened to Amy again. She frowned in concern. "Tate . . . She said that Megan told her somebody'd been following her."

  "Following? Who?"

  "She doesn't know."

  Okay, hard evidence. The latent prosecutor in Tate Collier awakened a bit more. "Let me talk to her."

  Tate took the phone. "Amy? This is Megan's father."

  A pause. The girl finally said, "Um, hi. Is Megan, like, okay?"

  "We hope so. We just want to find out where she is. What's this about somebody following her?"

  "She was, like, pretty freaked."

  Not real helpful, he thought and asked, "Tell me exactly what happened."

  "I mean, her and me, we were sitting around watching this movie, I don't know, on Wednesday, I guess, and it was about a stalker and she goes, 'I don't want to watch this.' And I'm like, 'Why not?' And she's like, 'There's this car with some older guy in it and I think he's been following me around.' And I go, 'No way.' But she's like, 'Yeah, really.' "

  "Where?" Tate asked.

  "Around school, I think," Amy said.

  "Any description?"

  "Of the guy?"

  "Or the car."

  "Naw. She didn't tell me. But I'm like, 'Right, somebody following you . . .' And she's like, 'I'm not bullsh--I'm not fooling.' And she goes, 'It was there yesterday. By the field.' "

  "What field?"

  "The sports field behind the school," Amy answered.

  "That was this last Tuesday?"

  "Um, yeah."

  "Did you believe her?"

  "I guess. She looked pretty freaked. And she says she told some people about it."

  "Who?"

  "I don't know. Some guys. She didn't tell me who. Oh, and she told Mr. Eckhard too. He's an English teacher at the middle school and he coaches volleyball after school and on the weekends. And he said if he saw it he'd go talk to the driver. And I'm like, 'Wow. This is totally fuck--totally weird.' "

  "His name's Eckhard?"

  "Something like that. I don't know how to spell it. But if you want to, like, talk to him there's usually volleyball practice on Saturday afternoon, only I don't know when. Volleyball's for losers, you know."

  "Yeah, I know," Tate said. It had been the only sport he'd played in college.

  "You think something, like, happened to her? That's way lame."

  "We'd just feel a little better knowing where she is. Listen, Amy, we'll be around to pick up her book bag in the n
ext couple of hours. If you hear from her give us a call."

  "I will."

  "Promise?" he asked firmly.

  "Yeah, like, I promise."

  As soon as Tate pushed the End button on Bett's phone it buzzed again. He glanced at her and she nodded for him to answer it. He pushed Receive.

  "Hello?"

  "Um, is this Megan's father?" a man's voice asked.

  "That's right."

  "Mr. McCall . . ."

  "Actually it's Collier."

  "That's right. Sure. Sorry. This is Dr. Hanson."

  "Doctor, thanks for calling . . . I have to tell you, it looks like Megan's run away."

  There was a pause. "Really?"

  Tate tried to read the tone. He heard concern and surprise.

  "We got some . . . well, some pretty angry letters from her. Her mother and I both did. And then she vanished. Is there any way we can see you?"

  "I'm in Leesburg now. My mother's had an accident."

  "I'm sorry to hear that. But if Bett and I drove up could you spare a half hour?"

  "Well . . ."

  "It's important, Doctor. We're really concerned about her."

  "I suppose so. All right." He gave them directions to the hospital.

  Tate looked at his watch. It was noon. "We'll be there in an hour or so."

  "Actually," Hanson said slowly, "I think we should talk. There were some things she told me that you ought to know."

  "What?" Tate asked.

  "I want to think about them a little more. There are some confidentiality issues . . . But it's funny--I'd expect any number of things from Megan, but running away? No, that seems odd to me."

  Tate thanked him. It was only after hanging up that he felt a disturbing twist in his belly. What were the "any number of things" Megan was capable of? And were they any worse than her running away?

  *

  His precious cargo was in the trunk. But while Aaron Matthews would have liked to meditate on Megan McCall and on what lay ahead for both of them he was instead growing increasingly anxious.

  The fucking white car.

  He was cruising down I-66. He'd planned to stop at the house he'd rented last year in Prince William County--only two or three miles from Tate Collier's farm--and pick up some things he wanted to take with him to the mountains.

  But he couldn't risk leading anyone to that house, and this car was just not going away.