Speaking in Tongues

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 hadsaid, “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 she 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 muscularjerks 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 Geographic s. He also got his first glimpse of naked women—in the Playboy s 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