Speaking in Tongues (34 page)

“Aaron, you can’t change things,” Tate continued. “You can’t make it the way it was. You can’t bring Peter back. So will you just let us go?”

“Specific request within the opponent’s power to grant,” Matthews recited, “requiring only an affirmative or negative response. Your skills are still in top form, Collier. My answer, however, is neg-a-tive.”

“You tell me you’re after justice.” Tate shrugged. “But I wonder if it’s not really something else.”

A flicker in the doctor’s eyes.

“Have you really thought about why you’re doing this?” Tate asked.

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“I—”

Tate said quickly, “It’s to take the pain away, isn’t it?”

Matthews’s lips moved as he carried on a conversation with himself, or his dead wife, or his dead son. Or perhaps no one at all.

What a man hears, he may doubt.

What a man sees . . .

Tate leaned toward him, ignoring the agony in his head. He whispered urgently, “Think about it, Aaron.
Think.
This is very important. What if you get it wrong? What if killing Megan makes the pain
worse?”

“Nice try,” Matthews cried. “Setting up straw men.”

“Or what if it has no effect at all? What if this is your one chance to make the pain go away and it doesn’t work? Did you ever
consider
that?”

“You’re trying to distract me!”

“You lost someone you loved. You lie on your back for hours, paralyzed with the pain. You wake up at two
A.M.
and think you’re going mad. Right?”

Matthews fell silent. Tate saw he’d touched a nerve.

“I know all about that. It happened to me.” Tate leaned forward and, without feigning, matched the agony he saw in Matthews’s face with pain of his own. “I’ve been there.
I
lost someone I loved more than life itself. I lost my wife. I can see it in your face. These aren’t tricks, Aaron. I
do
know what I’m talking about. That’s all you want—the pain to go away. You’re not a lust killer, Aaron. You’re not an expediency killer. You’re not a hired killer. You only kill when there’s a
reason.
And that reason is to make the pain go away!”

And to Tate’s astonishment he heard a woman’s voice beside him. A smooth contralto. Megan, gazing into Matthews’s eyes, was saying, “Even those patients you killed here, Aaron . . . You didn’t
want
to kill them. I was wrong. It wasn’t a game at all. You just wanted to help them stop hurting.”

Excellent, Tate thought, proud of her.

“The pain,” the lawyer took over. “That’s what this is all about. You just want it to go away.”

Matthews’s eyes were uncertain, even wild. How we hate the confusing and the unknown, and how we flock to those who offer us answers simple as a child’s drawing.

“I’ll tell you, Aaron, that I’ve lived with your son’s death every day since the Department of Corrections called and told me what happened. I feel that pain too. I know what you’re going through. I—”

Suddenly Matthews leapt forward and grabbed Tate’s shirt, began slugging him madly, knocking him to the floor. Megan cried out and stepped toward them but the madman shoved her to the floor again. He screamed at Tate, “You
know?
You know, do you? You have no fucking idea! All the days, the weeks and weeks that I haven’t been able to do anything but lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, thinking about the trial. You know what I see? I don’t see Peter’s face. I see your
back.
You, standing in the courtroom with your back to my son. You sent him to die but you didn’t even
look
at him! The jury were the only people in that room, weren’t they?”

No, Tate reflected, they were the only people in the universe. He said to Matthews, “I’m sorry for you.”

“I don’t want your fucking pity.” Another wave of fury crossed his face and he lifted Tate in his powerful hands and shoved him to the floor again, rolled him on his back. He took a knife from his pocket, opened it with a click and bent down over Tate.

“No!” Megan cried.

Matthews slipped the blade past Tate’s lips into his mouth. Tate tasted metal and felt the chill of the sharp point against his tongue. He didn’t move a muscle.
Then Matthews’s eyes crinkled with what seemed to be humor. His lips moved and he seemed to be speaking to himself. He withdrew the blade.

“No, Collier, no. Not you. I don’t want you.”

“But why not?” Tate whispered quickly. “Why not? Tell me!”

“Because you’re going to live your life without your daughter. Just like I’m going to live mine without my son.”

“And that’ll take the pain away?”

“Yes!”

The lawyer nodded. “Then you have to let her go.” He struggled to keep the triumph from his voice—as he always did in court or at the debate podium. “Then you have to let her go and kill me. It’s the only answer for you.”

“Daddy,” Megan whimpered. Tate believed it was the first time he’d heard her say the word in ten years.

“Only answer?” Matthews asked uncertainly.

Tate had known that eventually it would come to this. But what a time, what a place for it to happen.

All cats see in the dark.

Therefore Midnight can see in the dark.

He leaned his head against the girl’s cheek. “Oh, honey . . .”

Megan asked. “What is it?
What?”

Unless Midnight is blind.

Tate began to speak. His voice cracked. He started again. “Aaron, what you want makes perfect sense. Except that . . .” It was Megan’s eyes he gazed into, not their captor’s, as he said, “Except that I’m not her father.”

Matthews seemed to gaze down at his captives but he was backlit by dawn light in the picture window and Tate couldn’t see where his eyes were turned.

Megan, pale in the same oblique light, clasped her injured face. A pink sheen of blood was on her cheeks and hands. She was frowning.

Matthews laughed but Tate could see that his quick mind was considering facts and drawing tentative conclusions.

“I’m disappointed, Collier. That’s obvious and simpleminded. You’re lying.”

“When you were stalking Megan and me how often did you see us together?” Tate asked.

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“You followed us for how long?”

A splinter of doubt, like a faint cloud obscuring the sun momentarily. Tate had seen this in the eyes of a thousand witnesses.

Matthews answered, “Six months.”

“How many weekends was she with me?”

“That doesn’t—”

“How many?”

“Two, I think.”

“You broke into my house to plant those letters. How many pictures of her did you see?”

“Dad . . .”

“How many?” Tate asked firmly, ignoring the girl.

Matthews finally said, “None.”

“What did her bedroom look like?”

Another hesitation. Then: “A storeroom.”

“How much affection did you ever see between us? Did I
seem
like a father? I’ve got dark, curly hair and eyes. Bett’s auburn. And Megan’s
blond,
for God’s sake. Does she even look like me? Look at the eyes. Look!”

He did. He said uncertainly, “I still don’t believe you.”

“No, Daddy! No!”

“You went to see my wife,” Tate continued to Matthews, squeezing Megan’s leg to silence her.

The doctor nodded.

“Well, you’re a therapist. What did you see in Bett’s face when you were talking to her? What was there when she was telling you about us and about Megan?”

Matthews reflected. “I saw . . . guilt.”

“That’s right,” Tate said. “Guilt.”

Matthews looked from one of his captives to the other.

“Seventeen years ago,” Tate began slowly, speaking to Megan, finally revealing the truth they’d kept from her for all these years, “I was prosecuting cases, making a name for myself. The
Washington Post
called me the hottest young prosecutor in the commonwealth. I’d take on every assignment that came into the office. I was working eighty hours a week. I got home to your mother on weekends at best. I’d go for three or four
days in a row and hardly even call. I was trying to be my grandfather. The lawyer-farmer-patriarch. I’d be a local celebrity. We’d have a huge family, an old manse. Sunday dinners, reunions, holidays . . . the whole nine yards.”

He took a deep breath. “That was when your aunt Susan had her first bad heart attack. She was in the hospital for a month and mostly bedridden after that.”

“What are you saying?” Megan whispered.

“Susan was married. Her husband, you remember him.”

“Uncle Harris.”

“You were right in your letter, Megan. Your mother
did
spend a lot of time caring for her sister. Harris and your mother both did.”

“No,” Megan said abruptly. “I don’t believe it.”

“They’d go to the hospital together, Harris and Bett. They’d have lunch, dinner. Go shopping. Sometimes Bett cooked him meals in his studio. Helped him clean. Your aunt felt better knowing he was being looked after. And it was okay with me. I was free to handle my cases.”

“She told you all this?” Megan asked. “Mom?”

His face was a blank mask as he said slowly, “No. Harris did. The day of his funeral.”

Tate had been upstairs on that eerily warm November night years ago. The funeral reception, at the Collier farm, was over.

Standing at a bedroom window, Tate had looked out over the yard. Felt the hot air, filled with leaf dust. Smelled cedar from the closet.

He’d just checked on three-year-old Megan, asleep
in her room, and he’d come here to open windows to air out the upstairs bedrooms; several relatives would be spending the night.

He’d looked down at the backyard, gazing at Bett in her long black dress. She hiked up the hem and climbed onto the new picnic table to unhook the Japanese lanterns.

Tate had tried to open the window but it was stuck. He took off his jacket to get a better grip and heard the crinkle of paper in the pocket. At the funeral service one of Harris’s attorneys had given him an envelope, hand-addressed to him from Harris, marked
Personal,
apparently written just before the man had shot himself. He’d forgotten about it. He opened the envelope and read the brief letter inside.

Tate had nodded to himself, folded the note slowly and walked downstairs, then outside.

He remembered hearing a Loretta Lynn song playing on the stereo.

He remembered hearing the rustling of the hot wind over the brown grass and sedge, stirring pumpkin vines and the refuse of the corn harvest.

He remembered watching the arc of Bett’s narrow arm as she reached for an orange lantern. She glanced down at him.

“I have something to tell you,” he’d said.

“What?” she’d whispered. Then, seeing the look in his eyes, Bett had asked desperately: “What, what?”

She’d climbed down from the bench. Tate came up close, and instead of putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders, as a husband might do late at night in a house of death, he handed her the letter.

She read it.

“Oh my. Oh.”

Bett didn’t deny anything that was contained in the note: Harris’s declaration of intense love for her, the affair, his fathering Megan, Bett’s refusal to marry him and her threat to take the girl away from him forever if Harris told Bett’s sister of the infidelity. At the end the words had degenerated into mad rambling and his chillingly lucid acknowledgment that the pain was simply too much.

Neither of them cried that night as Tate had packed a suitcase and left. They never spent another night under the same roof.

Despite the presence of a madman now, holding a knife, hovering a few feet from them, Tate’s concentration was wholly on the girl. To his surprise her face blossomed not with horror or shock or anger but with sympathy. She touched his leg. “And you’re the one that got hurt so bad. I’m sorry, Daddy. I’m sorry.”

Tate looked at Matthews. He said, “So that’s why your argument doesn’t work, Aaron. Taking her away from me won’t do what you want.”

Matthews didn’t speak. His eyes were turned out the window, gazing into the blue dawn.

Tate said, “You know the classic reasons given for punishing crimes, Aaron? To condition away bad behavior—doesn’t work. A deterrent—useless. To rehabilitate—that’s a joke. To protect society—well, only if we execute the bad guys or keep them locked up forever. No, you know the real reason why we punish? We’re ashamed to admit it. But, oh, how we
love it. Good old biblical retribution. Bloody revenge is the only honest motive for punishment. Why? Because its purpose is to take away the victim’s pain.

“That’s what you want, Aaron, but there’s only one way you’ll have that. By killing me. It’s not perfect but it’ll have to do.”

Megan was sobbing.

Matthews leaned his head against the window. The sun was up now and flashed on and off as strips of liver-colored clouds moved quickly east. He seemed diminished and changed. As if he were beyond disappointment or sorrow.

“Let her go,” Tate whispered. “It doesn’t even make sense to kill her because she’s a witness. They know about you anyway.”

Matthews crouched beside Megan. Put the back of his hand against her cheek, lifted it away and looked at the glistening streak left by her tears on his skin. He kissed her hair.

“All right. I agree.”

Megan started to protest.

But Tate knew that he’d won. Nothing she could say or do at this point would change his decision.

“I’ll call the dogs to the run. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

“Is it true?” she asked, tears glistening on her cheeks.

“Oh, yes, honey, it’s true.”

“You never said anything.”

“Your mother and I decided not to. Until after Susan died. You know how close Bett is to your aunt. She wanted her never to find out about the affair—it would’ve been too hard for her. The doctors only gave her a year or two to live. We were going to wait to tell you until she’d passed away.”

“But . . .” Megan whispered.

He smiled wanly. “That’s right. She’s still alive.”