Speaking in Tongues

ramshackle farmhouses, abandoned barns, the black pits that opened into the network of caverns that laced the earth beneath the Shenandoahs and the Blue Ridge.
    They sped past walls of ominous forest—the stark pines, the scrub oak, the sedge, the young kudzu and Virginia creeper. Tate imagined dozens of eyes peering at them and he thought of the Dead Reb once again.
    Ten minutes later, well into the Blue Ridge, Tate pulled Bett’s Volvo into an all-night gas station. The elderly attendant glanced at them cautiously when he asked about the mental hospital.
    “That old place? Phew.” The man cast a dark look westward.
    “Where is it?”
    “You get back on the interstate and go one more exit . . .”
    “We’d rather stick to back roads, if we can.” The state troopers would be looking for him on the highway, a fact Tate didn’t share.
    The man cocked his head, shrugged. “Well, that road there. Route one seventeen? Take it west ten, twelve miles till you see a Buy-Rite gas station. Then go left on Palmer and just keep going.”
    “We’ll see the hospital?”
    “Oh, you’ll see it. Can’t miss it. But I’d wait till sunup. You don’t wanna go there this time of night, no sir. But you asked for directions, not opinions.”
    Tate handed him a twenty and they sped off down the road.
    They’d driven several miles when a no-nonsense siren burst to life a quarter mile behind them. It was a county trooper. The light bar flashed explosively in Tate’s rearview mirror. He accelerated hard.
    “You think he knows it’s us?” Bett asked.
    “If he doesn’t he will when he calls in your tags.” Tate’s foot wavered. “What do I do?”
    “Drive like hell,” Bett muttered. “Try to lose him.”
    He did.
    For about two miles it looked as if they’d get away. The Swedes make a good car but it was no match for the souped-up engine of the pursuing Plymouth. “Can’t make it,” he told her.
    He eased up on the gas. “I’ll talk to him. Maybe he’ll at least send a car to the hospital.”
    “No,” Bett said. “Pull over.”
    “What?” Tate asked, jockeying the skidding car onto the gravel shoulder and braking.
    Bett ripped her purse open and dug inside. She paused, took a deep breath, then sat upright, staring in the rearview mirror at herself, stroking her cheek as Tate had seen her do so often.
    What’s she up to? he wondered.
    “Bett!” he cried as she lifted the nail file to her face and dragged it hard across her skin.
    Blood poured from a gash deep in her cheek.
    “Oh,” Bett wheezed. “It hurts.”
    Tate stared at the blood, running more black than red down her neck and falling onto her chest in delicate paisleys.
    •   •   •
    “Get out of the car!” reverberated the metallic voice through the rectangular mouth of the PA speaker atop the car.
    The young trooper stood beside the open door of his squad car. His blue-black pistol, dwarfed by the lawman’s huge hand, was aimed at Tate’s head.
    “Get out of that vehicle! Keep your hands up.”
    For a moment neither of them moved.
    Then Bett’s door opened so fast Tate thought that another deputy had snuck up behind them unseen and pulled her out. But, no, she was moving on her own. She screamed shrilly as she rolled onto the grassy shoulder of the road. The leather strap of her purse was wound around her wrists as if she were tied up. Without the use of her hands she fell hard and dust mixed with the blood covering her face.
    “Help me!” she cried. “He kidnapped me!”
    “Don’t move. Nobody move!” the trooper called, swinging the muzzle toward Bett. Tate sat perfectly still, hands on the wheel.
    Bett scrabbled toward the cop.
    “He’s got a knife!” she cried. “Help me, please. He cut me. I’m bleeding. Help me!” She put the harrowing wail of a frightened child into her voice as she stumbled forward. “He was going to rape me! Get me away from him! Oh, please . . . Oh . . .”
    The trooper gave in to his instincts. “Over here, miss. You’ll be all right. He’s that fella from Prince William, isn’t he? The one killed that girl? Where’s the knife?”
    “In his belt. He picked me up at a rest stop,” she cried. “He kidnapped me!”
    “Put your hands up!” the trooper called over the microphone. “And I mean now!”
    Tate did.
    “What happened?” the cop asked Bett, who was stumbling closer.
    “Cut me . . . I need a doctor . . .” The words were lost in the sobbing.
    “You