Speaking in Tongues (6 page)

Joshua LeFevre shifted his muscular, trapezoidal body in the skimpy seat of his Toyota and pressed down harder on the gas pedal. The tiny engine complained but slowly edged the car closer to the Mercedes.

Come on, Megan, what the hell’re you up to?

He squinted again and leaned forward as if moving eight inches closer to the Merce were going to let him see more clearly through his confusion. He assumed the man, not Megan, was driving though he couldn’t be sure. This gave him a sliver of comfort—for some reason the thought of this guy tossing Megan the keys to his big doctor’s car and saying, “You drive, honey,” riled the young man beyond words. Made him furious.

He nudged the car faster.

Sidney Poitier . . . What would you do?

LeFevre had seen
In the Heat of the Night
when he’d been ten. (On video, of course—when the film had originally come out, in the sixties, the man who would be his father was doing basic training pushups in Fort Dix and his to-be mother was listening to Smokey Robinson and Diana Ross while she worked on her 4.0 average at National Cathedral School.)
The film had affected him deeply. The Poitier character, Detective Tibbs, ended up stuck in the small Southern town, butting horns with good-oldboy sheriff Rod Steiger. Moving slow, solving a local murder, step by step . . . Not getting flustered, not getting pissed off in the face of all the crap everybody in town was giving him.

Sure, the movie didn’t have real guts, it was
Hollywood’s
idea of race relations, more softball than gritty, but even at age ten Joshua LeFevre understood the film wasn’t really about black or white—it was about being a man and being persistent and not taking no when you believed yes.

It choked him up, that flick—the way important movies always do, those films that give us our role models, whether it’s the first time we see them or the hundredth.

Oh yes, Joshua Nathan LeFevre—an honors English major at George Mason University, a tall young man with his father’s perfect physique and military bearing and with his mother’s brains—had a sentimental side to him thick as a mountain. (The week that students in his nineteenth-century-lit seminar were picking apart a Henry James novel like crows, LeFevre had slunk back to his apartment with a very different book hidden in a brown paper bag. He’d locked his door and read the entire novel in one sitting, crying unashamedly when he came to the last page of
The Bridges of Madison County.)

Sentimental, a romantic. And accordingly, Sidney Poitier—rather than Samuel L. Jackson or Wesley Snipes—appealed to him.

So, what would
Mr.
Tibbs do now?

Okay, he was saying to himself, let’s analyze it. Step by step. Here’s a girl’s got a bad home life. None of that talk-show abuse, no, but it’s clearly a case of Daddy don’t care and Momma don’t care. So she drinks more than she ought and hangs with a bad crowd—until she meets LeFevre. And seems to get her act together though she falls off the normal wagon every once in a while. And then one night she climbs up to the top of a water tower (and why didn’t she call me, dammit, instead of guzzling a fifth of Comfort with Donna and Brittany, the Easy Sisters?). And once she’s up there she does a little dance on the scaffolding and the cops and fire department come to get her down.

And she goes to see this shrink . . .

Who tells her she’s got to break up with him.

And so she does.

“Why?” LeFevre had asked her a few weeks ago as they sat in his car, parked in front of her house, on what turned out to be their last date.

“Why?”

“It’s not the differences . . .” Meaning the age, meaning the race. It was . . . what the hell was it? He replayed Megan’s little speech.

“It’s just that I’m not ready for the same kind of relationship you want.”

And what kind is that? I don’t remember proposing. I don’t think we’ve even
talked
about our relationship. We just have fun together.

“Oh, Josh, honey, don’t cry . . . I need to see things, do things. I feel, I don’t know, all tied down or something . . . Living with Bett’s like living with
a roommate. You know, her date for Saturday’s the biggest deal in the world. All she worries about is her skin getting old.”

Old skin? I like your mom. She’s pretty, smart, offbeat. I don’t get it. What’s her skin got to do with breaking up? LeFevre had been very confused as he sat in his tiny car beside the woman he loved.

“Oh, honey, I just need to get away. I want to travel, see things. You know.”

Travel? Where was
this
coming from? I’ve got a trust fund, Mom and Dad’re loaded. I’ve lived in Jeddah, Cyprus, London and Germany. I speak three languages. I can show you more of the world than the Cunard Line.

“Okay. What it is is this therapist. Dr. Hanson? See, he thinks it’s not a good idea for me to be in a relationship with you right now.”

Then we’ll back off a bit. See each other once a week or so. How’s that?

“No, you don’t
understand,”
Megan had said brutally, pulling away from him as he tried to take the Southern Comfort bottle out of her hand. And she’d climbed out of the passenger seat and run into her house.

Cruising down I-66 now, LeFevre leaned over and sniffed the headrest to see if he could smell her perfume. Heartbreakingly, he couldn’t. He pushed the accelerator harder, edging up on the gray Mercedes.

“No, you don’t understand.”

No, he sure as hell hadn’t.

Joshua LeFevre had waited a tormented three
weeks then—this morning—woke up on autopilot. He hadn’t been able to take the girl’s silence and the suffocating frustration anymore. He’d driven to Hanson’s office around the time Megan’s appointment would be over. He’d parked up the street, waiting for her to come out. Josh LeFevre could bench-press 220 pounds, he could bicycle 150 miles a day. But he wasn’t going for intimidation. Oh no. He was going to Poitier the man, not Snipes him.

Why, he was going to ask the doctor, did you talk her into breaking up with me? Isn’t that unethical? Let’s sit down together. The three of us. Josh had a dozen arguments all prepared. He believed he could talk his way back into her heart.

“No, you don’t understand.”

But
now
he did.

God, I’m an idiot.

The doctor had her break up because he wanted to fuck her.

No psychobabble here. No inner child. Nope. The shrink wanted to play the two-backed beast with LeFevre’s girlfriend. Simple as a shot in the head.

From where he’d been parked near the office he hadn’t been able to see clearly but suddenly, before the appointment was supposed to be over, Megan’s Tempo was pulling out of the lot—with the shrink himself driving, it seemed, and heading north.

He’d followed the car to Manassas—to Megan’s dad’s farm—where LeFevre’d waited for about twenty minutes. Then, just when he’d been about to pull into the long drive, the car had sped out again and they’d driven to the Vienna Metro parking lot. They’d
switched 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, like
strangers 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 several
places 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 hundred dollars from my bedside drawer.”

Bett blurted, “Nonsense. She wouldn’t take . . .”

“It’s gone,” Tate said. “She’s the only one who’s been here.”

“What about credit cards?” Konnie asked.

“She’s on my Visa and MasterCard,” Bett said. “She’d have them with her.”

“That’s good,” Konnie offered. “It’s an easy way to trace runaways. What it is we’ll set up a real-time link with the credit card companies. We’ll know within ten minutes where she’s charged something.”

Beauridge said, “We’ll put her on the runaway wire. She’s picked up anywhere for anything on the eastern seaboard, they’ll let us know. Let me have a picture, will you?”

Tate realized that they were looking at him.

“Sure,” he said quickly and began searching the room. He looked through the bookshelves, end-table drawers. He couldn’t find any photos.

Beauridge watched Tate uncertainly; Tate guessed that the young officer’s wallet and wall were peppered with snapshots of his own youngsters. Konnie himself, Tate remembered from some years ago, kept a picture of his ex-wife and kids in his wallet. The lawyer rummaged in the living room and disappeared into the den. He returned some moments later with a
snapshot—a photo of Tate and Megan at Virginia Beach two years ago. She stared unsmilingly at the camera. It was the only picture he could find.

“Pretty girl,” Beauridge said.

“Tate,” Konnie said, “I’ll stay on it. But there isn’t a lot we can do.”

“Whatever, Konnie. You know it’ll be appreciated.”

“Bye, Mrs. Coll—McCall.”

But Bett was looking out the window and said nothing.

•   •   •

The white Toyota was staying right behind the Mercedes, Aaron Matthews noted. He wondered if it was the same auto he’d seen in the Vienna Metro lot when he was switching cars. He wished he’d paid more attention.

Matthews believed in coincidence even less than he believed in luck and superstition. There were no accidents, no flukes. We are completely responsible for our behavior and its consequences even if we can’t figure out what’s motivating us to act.

The car behind him now was not a coincidence.

There was a motive, there was a design.

Matthews couldn’t understand it yet. He didn’t know how concerned to be. But he
was
concerned.

Maybe he’d cut the driver off and the man was mad. Road rage.

Maybe it was someone who’d seen him heft a large bundle into the trunk of the Mercedes and was following out of curiosity.

Maybe it was the police.

He slowed to fifty.

The white car did too.

Sped up.

The car stayed with him.

Have to think about this. Have to do something.