Jeffery Deaver - Speaking In Tongues

His foot eased up on the gas… Good idea, get off at the next exit. Quit acting like a lovesick loser It’s embarrassing. Go home. Read your Melville. You’ve got a presentation due a week from Monday…

The Mercedes pulled ahead.

Then the thought burst within him: Bullshit. I’m going to deconstruct motifs in some fucking story about a big-ass whale while my girlfriend's in bed whispering into her therapist’s ear?

He jammed his foot to the floor

Would Poitier do this?

You bet.

And so LeFevre kept his sweating hands on the wheel of the car, straining forward, and sped after the woman whom he loved and, he believed somewhere in a portion of his sloppy heart, who loved him still.

“She’s run away?” Bett whispered.

The four of them were in the living room, like strangers at a cocktail party, knees pointed at one another, sitting upright and waiting to become comfortable. Konnie continued, “But y’all should consider that good news. The profile is most runaways come back on their own within a month.”

Bett stared out the window at the misty darkness. “A month,” she announced, as if answering a trivia question. “No, no. She wouldn’t leave. Not without saying anything.”

Konnie glanced at Beauridge. Tate caught the look.

“I’m afraid she did say something.” Konnie handed Bett and Tate what he’d found upstairs. “Letters to both of you. Under her pillow.”

“Why there?” Bett asked. “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“So you wouldn’t find ‘em right away,” Konnie explained. “Give her a head start. I’ve seen it before.”

Beauridge asked, “Is that her handwriting?”

Konnie added, “There’s a buddy of mine, FBI document examiner, Parker Kincaid. Lives in Fairfax. We could give him a call.”

But Bett said it was definitely Megan’s writing.

“‘Bett,’ “ she read aloud then looked up. “She called me Bett. Not Mom. Why would she do that?” She started again and read in a breathless, ghostly voice, “‘Bett-I don’t care if it hurts you to say this… I don’t care how much it hurts…’”

She looked helplessly at her ex-husband then read to herself. She finished, sat back in the couch and seemed to shrink to the size of a child herself. She whispered, “She says she hates me. She hates all the time I spent with my sister. I Mystified, hurt, she shook her head and fell silent.

Tate looked down at his note. It was stained. With tears? With rain? He read:

Tate:

The only way to say it-I hate you for what you’ve done to me! You don’t listen to me. You talk, talk, talk and Bett calls you the silver-tongued devil and you are but you never listen to me. To what I want. To who I am. You bribe me, you pay me off and hope I’ll go away. I should of run away when I was six like I wanted to. And never come back.

I’ve wanted to do that all along. I still want to. Get away from you. It’s what you want anyway, isn’t it? To get rid of your inconvenient child?

His mouth was open, his lips and tongue dry, stinging from the air that whipped in and out of his lungs. He found he was staring at Bett.

“Tate. You okay?” Konnie said.

“Could I see that again, Mrs. McCall?” Beauridge asked.

She handed the stiff sheet over.

“You’re sure that’s her writing paper?”

Bett nodded. “I gave it to her for Christmas.”

In a low voice Bett answered questions no one had asked. “My sister was very sick. I left Megan in other people’s care a lot. I didn’t know she felt so abandoned… She never said anything.”

Tate noted Megan’s careless handwriting. In several places the tip of the pen had ripped through the paper. In anger, he assumed.

Konnie asked Tate what he’d found in his own room.

He was so stunned it took him a minute to focus on the question. “She took four hundred dollars from my bedside drawer.”

Bell blurted, “Nonsense. She wouldn’t take…

“It’s gone,” Tate said. “She’s the only one who’s been here.”

“What about credit cards?” Konnie asked.

“She’s on my Visa and MasterCard,” Bett said. “She’d have them with her.”

“That’s good,” Konnie offered. “It’s an easy way to trace runaways. What it is we’ll set up a real-time link with the credit card companies. We’ll know within ten minutes where she’s charged something.”

Beauridge said, “We’ll put her on the runaway wire. She’s picked up anywhere for anything on the eastern seaboard, they’ll let us know Let me have a picture, will you?”

Tate realized that they were looking at him.

“Sure,” he said quickly and began searching the room. He looked through the bookshelves, end-table drawers. He couldn’t find any photos.

Beauridge watched Tate uncertainly; Tate guessed that the young officer’s wallet and wall were peppered with snapshots of his own youngsters. Konnie himself, Tate remembered from some years ago, kept a picture of his ex-wife and kids in his wallet. The lawyer rummaged in the living room and disappeared into the den. He returned some moments later with a snapshot-a photo of Tate and Megan at Virginia Beach two years ago. She stared unsmilingly at the camera. It was the only picture he could find.

“Pretty girl,” Beauridge said.

“Tate,” Konnie said, “I’ll stay on it. But there isn’t a lot we can do.”

“Whatever, Konnie. You know it’ll be appreciated.”

“Bye, Mrs. Coll-McCall.”

But Bett was looking out the window and said nothing.

The white Toyota was staying right behind the Mercedes, Aaron Matthews noted. He wondered if it was the same auto he’d seen in the Vienna Metro lot when he was switching cars. He wished he’d paid more attention.

Matthews believed in coincidence even less than he believed in luck and superstition. There were no accidents, no flukes. We are completely responsible for our behavior and its consequences even if we can’t figure out what’s motivating us to act.

The car behind him now was not a coincidence.

There was a motive, there was a design.

Matthews couldn’t understand it yet. He didn’t know how concerned to be. But he was concerned.

Maybe he’d cut the driver off and the man was mad, Road rage.

Maybe it was someone who’d seen him heft a large bundle into the trunk of the Mercedes and was following out of curiosity

Maybe it was the police.

He slowed to fifty.

The white car did too.

Sped up.

The car stayed with him.

Have to think about this. Have to do something.

Matthews slid into the right lane and continued through the mist toward the mountains in the west. He looked back as often as he looked forward.

As any good therapist will advise his patients to do.

The rain had stopped but the atmosphere was thick as hot blood.

In her stylish shoes with the wide, high heels, Bett McCall came to Tate’s shoulder. Neither speaking, they stood on the back porch, looking over the back sixty acres of the property.

The Collier spread was more conservative than most Piedmont farms: five fields rotating between soy one year and corn and rye the next. A classic northern Virginia spread.

“Listen to me, Tate,” the Judge would say.

The boy always listened to his grandfather.

“What’s a legume?”

“A pea.”

“Only a pea?”

“Well, beans too, I think.”

“Peas, beans, clover, alfalfa, vetches… they’re all legumes. They help the soil. You plant year after year of cereals, what happens?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Your soil goes to hell in a hand basket.”

“Why’s that, Judge?”