Speaking in Tongues

long drive, the car had sped out again and they’d driven to the Vienna Metro parking lot. They’dswitched cars—taking the German shrinkmobile—and headed west on I-66.
    What was it all about? Had she picked up some clothes from her father’s place? Was she going away for the weekend?
    LeFevre was crazed. He had to do something.
    But what would Sidney Poitier do? The script had changed.
    Wait till they got to the doctor’s house? The inn they were going to? Confront them there?
    No, that didn’t seem right.
    Oh, hell, he should just go home . . . Forget this crap. Be a man.
    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, likestrangers 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, 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 severalplaces 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