Speaking In Tongues

A flicker in the doctor’s eyes.

“Have you really thought about why you’re doing this?” Tate asked.

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“I-”

Tate said quickly, “It’s to take the pain away, isn’t it?”

Matthews’s lips moved as he carried on a conversation with himself, or his dead wife, or his dead son. Or perhaps no one at all.

What a man hears, he may doubt.

What a man sees…

Tate leaned toward him, ignoring the agony in his head. He whispered urgently, “Think about it, Aaron. Think. This is very important. What if you get it wrong? What if killing Megan makes the pain worse?”

“Nice try,” Matthews cried. “Setting up straw men.”

“Or what if it has no effect at all? What if this is your one chance to make the pain go away and it doesn’t work? Did you ever consider that?”

“You’re trying to distract me!”

“You lost someone you loved. You lie on your back for hours, paralyzed with the pain. You wake up at two AM. and think you’re going mad. Right?”

Matthews fell silent. Tate saw he’d touched a nerve.

“I know all about that. It happened to me.” Tate leaned forward and, without feigning, matched the agony he saw in Matthews’s face with pain of his own. “I’ve been there. l lost someone I loved more than life itself. I lost my wife. I can see it in your face. These aren’t tricks, Aaron. I do know what I’m talking about. That’s all you want-the pain to go away. You’re not a lust killer, Aaron. You’re not an expediency killer. You’re not a hired killer. You only kill when there’s a reason. And that reason is to make the pain go away!”

And to Tate’s astonishment he heard a woman’s voice beside him. A smooth contralto. Megan, gazing into Matthews’s eyes, was saying, “Even those patients you killed here, Aaron… You didn’t want to kill them. I was wrong. It wasn’t a game at all. You just wanted to help them stop hurting.”

Excellent, Tate thought, proud of her.

“The pain,” the lawyer took over. “That’s what this is all about. You just want it to go away.”

Matthews’s eyes were uncertain, even wild. How we hate the confusing and the unknown, and how we flock to those who offer us answers simple as a child’s drawing.

“I’ll tell you, Aaron, that I’ve lived with your son’s death every day since the Department of Correction called and told me what happened. I feel that pain too. I know what you’re going through. I-”

Suddenly Matthews leapt forward and grabbed Tate’s shirt, began slugging him madly, knocking him to the floor. Megan cried out and stepped toward them but the madman shoved her to the floor again. He screamed at Tate, “You know? You know, do you? You have no fucking idea! All the days, the weeks and weeks that I haven’t been able to do anything but lie on my back and stare at the ceiling, thinking about the trial. You know what I see? I don’t see Peter’s face. I see your back. You, standing in the courtroom with your back to my son. You sent him to die but you didn’t even look at him! The jury were the only people in that room, weren’t they?”

No. Tate reflected, they were the only people in the universe. He said to Matthews, “I’m sorry for you.”

“I don’t want your fucking pity.” Another wave of fury crossed his face and he lifted Tate in his powerful hands and shoved him to the floor again, rolled him on his back. He took a knife from his pocket, opened it with a click and bent down over Tate.

“No!” Megan cried.

Matthews slipped the blade past Tate’s lips into his mouth. Tate tasted metal and felt the chill of the sharp point against his tongue. He didn’t move a muscle. Then Matthews’s eyes crinkled with what seemed to be humor. His lips moved and he seemed to be speaking to himself He withdrew the blade.

“No, Collier, no. Not you. I don’t want you.”

“But why not?” Tate whispered quickly “Why not? Tell me!”

“Because you’re going to live your life without your daughter. Just like I’m going to live mine without my son.”

“And that’ll take the pain away?”

“Yes!”

The lawyer nodded. “Then you have to let her go.” He struggled to keep the triumph from his voice-as he always did in court or at the debate podium. “Then you have to let her go and kill me. It’s the only answer for you.”

“Daddy,” Megan whimpered. Tate believed it was the first time he’d heard her say the word in ten years.

“Only answer?” Matthews asked uncertainly.

Tate had known that eventually it would come to this. But what a time, what a place for it to happen.

All cats see in the dark.

Therefore Midnight can see in the dark.

He leaned his head against the girl’s cheek. “Oh, honey..

Megan asked. “What is it? What?”

Unless Midnight is blind.

Tate began to speak. His voice cracked. He started again. “Aaron, what you want makes perfect sense. Except that…“ It was Megan’s eyes he gazed into, not their captor’s, as he said, “Except that I’m not her father.”

30

Matthews seemed to gaze down at his captives but he was backlit by dawn light in the picture window and Tate couldn’t see where his eyes were turned.

Megan, pale in the same oblique light, clasped her injured face. A pink sheen of blood was on her cheeks and hands. She was frowning.

Matthews laughed but Tate could see that his quick mind was considering facts and drawing tentative conclusions.

“I’m disappointed, Collier. That’s obvious and simpleminded. You’re lying.”

“When you were stalking Megan and me how often did you see us together?” Tate asked.

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“You followed us for how long?”

A splinter of doubt, like a faint cloud obscuring the sun momentarily Tate had seen this in the eyes of a thousand witnesses.

Matthews answered, “Six months.”

“How many weekends was she with me?”

“That doesn’t-”

“How many?”

“Two, I think”

“You broke into my house to plant those letters. How many pictures of her did you see?”

“Dad…

“How many?” Tate asked firmly, ignoring the girl.

Matthews finally said, “None.”

“What did her bedroom look like?”

Another hesitation. Then: “A storeroom.”

“How much affection did you ever see between us? Did I seem like a father? I’ve got dark, curly hair and eyes. Beth auburn. And Megan’s blond, for God’s sake. Does she even look like me? Look at the eyes. Look!”

He did. He said uncertainly, “I still don’t believe you.”

“No, Daddy! No!”

“You went to see my wife,” Tate continued to Matthews, squeezing Megan’s leg to silence her.

The doctor nodded.

“Well, you’re a therapist. What did you see in Bett’s face when you were talking to her? What was there when she was telling you about us and about Megan?”

Matthews reflected. “I saw… guilt.”

“That’s right,” Tate said. “Guilt.”

Matthews looked from one of his captives to the other.

“Seventeen years ago,” Tate began slowly, speaking to Megan, finally revealing the truth they’d kept from her for all these years, “I was prosecuting cases, making a name for myself. The Washington Post called me the hottest young prosecutor in the commonwealth. I’d take on every assignment that came into the office. I was working eighty hours a week. I got home to your mother on weekends at best. I’d go for three or four days in a row and hardly even call. I was trying to be my grandfather The lawyer-farmer-patriarch. I’d be a local celebrity. We’d have a huge family, an old manse. Sunday di

He took a deep breath, “That was when your aunt Susan had her first bad heart attack. She was in the hospital for a month and mostly bedridden after that.”

“What are you saying?” Megan whispered.