Speaking in Tongues

place it hurts.”
    “Tate said . . .” Megan felt faint. She struggled tocontrol the tears. “He called me . . . They were talking about me. And my daddy said . . .” She took deep gulps of air, which turned to fire in her lungs and throat. The doctor blinked in surprise as she screamed, “My daddy shouted, ‘It would all’ve been different without her, without that damn inconvenient child up there. She ruined everything!’ ”
    Megan lowered her head to her knees and wept. The doctor put his arm around her shoulders. She felt his hand stroke her head.
    “And how did you feel when you heard him say that?” He brushed away the stream of her tears.
    “I don’t know . . . I cried.”
    “Did you want to run away?”
    “I guess I did.”
    “You wanted to show him, didn’t you? If that’s what he thinks of me I’ll pay him back. I’ll leave. That’s what you thought, isn’t it?”
    Another nod.
    “You wanted to go someplace where people weren’t greedy, where people loved you, where people had children’s books for you, where they read and talked to you.”
    She sobbed into a wad of Kleenex.
    “Tell him, Megan. Write it down. Get it out so you can look at it.”
    She wrote until the tears grew so bad she couldn’t see the page. Then she collapsed against the doctor’s chest, sobbing.
    “Good, Megan,” he announced. “Very good.”
    She gripped him tighter than she’d ever gripped a lover, pressing her head against his neck. For amoment neither of them moved. She was frozen here, embracing him fiercely, desperately. He stiffened and for a moment she believed that he was feeling the same sorrow she was. Megan started to back away so that she could see his kind face and his black eyes but he continued to hold her tightly, so hard that a sudden pain swept through her arm.
    A surge of alarming warmth spread through her body. It was almost arousing.
    Then they separated. Her smile faded as she saw in his face an odd look.
    Jesus, what’s going on?
    His eyes were cold, his smile was cruel. He was suddenly a different person.
    “What?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”
    He said nothing.
    She started to repeat herself but the words wouldn’t come. Her tongue had grown heavy in her swollen mouth. It fell against her dry teeth. Her vision was crinkling. She tried once again to say something but couldn’t.
    She watched him stand and open a canvas bag that was resting on the floor behind his desk. He put away a hypodermic syringe. He was pulling on latex gloves.
    “What’re you? . . .” she began, then noticed on her arm, where the pain radiated, a small dot of blood.
    “No!” She tried to ask him what he was doing but the words vanished in comic mumbling. She tried to scream.
    A whisper.
    He walked to her and crouched, cradling her head, which sagged toward the couch.
    Crazy Megan is beyond crazy. She loves him, she’s terrified of him, she wants to kill him.
    “Go to sleep,” he said in a voice kinder than her father’s ever sounded. “Go to sleep.”
    Finally, from the drug, or from the fear, the room went black and she slumped into his arms.

Chapter Three
    One hundred and thirty years ago the Dead Reb had wandered through this field.
    Maybe shuffling along the very path this tall, lean man now walked in the hot April rain.
    Tate Collier looked over his shoulder and imagined that he saw the legendary ghost staring at him from a cluster of brush fifty yards away. Then he laughed to himself and, crunching through rain-wet corn husks and stalks, the waste from last year’s harvest, he continued through the field, inspecting hairline fractures in an irrigation pipe that promised far more water than it had been delivering lately. It’d have to be replaced within the next week, he concluded, and wondered how much the work would cost.
    Loping along awkwardly, somewhat stooped, Tate was in a Brooks Brothers pinstripe beneath a yellow sou’wester and outrageous galoshes, having come here straight from his strip mall law office in Fairfax, Virginia, where he’d just spent an hour explaining to Mattie Howe that suing the Prince William Advocate for libel because the paper had accurately reported her drunk-driving arrest was a lawsuit doomed to failure.He’d booted her out good-naturedly and sped back to his two-hundred-acre farm.
    He brushed at his unruly black hair, plastered around his face by the rain, and glanced at his watch. A half hour until Bett and Megan arrived.