Speaking in Tongues

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, asleepin 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 welove 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