Speaking in Tongues (14 page)

She sobbed, gasping for breath, brushing her palms over her skin frantically to make sure none of them
clung to her. After five minutes she’d calmed. Slowly she stepped back to the vent and listened.
Squick squick squick . . .
More scuttling, more twitters. She slammed the grille against the vent opening. The rest of the rats vanished up the wall. An angry hiss sounded from the hole.

God . . .

She found some stacks of newspapers, removed the grille, wadded up the papers and stuffed them inside the wall to keep the creatures trapped inside.

She collapsed back on the floor, trying to push away the horrible memory of the probing little paws, filthy and damp.

Looking into the dim corridor, cold and yellow, windows barred, filthy, she happened to glance up at a sign on the wall.

PATIENTS SHALL BE DELOUSED ONCE A WEEK.

That sign—a few simple words—brought the hopelessness home to her.

Don’t worry about it,
Crazy Megan tries to reassure.

But Megan wasn’t listening. She shivered in fear and disgust and curled up, clutching her knees. Hating this place. Hating her life, her pointless life . . . Her stupid, superficial friends. Her sick obsession with Janis, the Grateful Dead and all the rest of the cheerful, lying, fake-ass past.

Hating the man who’d done this to her, whoever he was.

But most of all hating her parents.

Hating them beyond words.

The forty-minute drive to Leesburg took Tate and Bett past a few mansions, some redneck bungalows, some new developments with names like Windstone and The Oaks. Cars on blocks, vegetable stands selling—at this time of year—jars of put-up preserves and relishes.

But mostly they passed farmland.

Looking out over just-planted land like this, some people see future homes or shopping malls or town houses and some see rows of money to be plucked from the ground at harvest time. And some perhaps simply drive past seeing nothing but where their particular journey is taking them.

But Tate Collier saw in these fields what he felt in his own farmland—a quiet salvation. Something he did, yet not of his doing, something that would let him survive, if not prosper, graciously: the silence of rooted growth. And if at times that process betrayed him—hail, drought, tumbling markets—Tate could still sleep content in the assurance that there was no malice in the earth’s heart. And that, the former criminal prosecutor within him figured, was no small thing.

So even though Tate claimed, as any true advocate would, that it made no nevermind to him whether he was
representing the plaintiffs or defendants in the Liberty Park case, say, his heart was in fact with the people who wanted to protect the farmland from the roller coasters and concession stands and traffic.

He felt this even more now, seeing these rolling hills. And he felt, too, guilt and a pang of impatience that he was distracted from his preparations for the Liberty Park hearing. But a look at Bett’s troubled face put this discomfort aside. There’d be time to hone his argument. Right now there were other priorities.

They passed the Oatlands farm and as they did the sun came out. And he sped on toward Leesburg, into old Virginia. Confederate Virginia.

There weren’t many towns like this in the northern part of the state; most people in Richmond and Charlottesville didn’t really consider most of northern Virginia to be in the commonwealth at all. Tate and Bett drove through the city limits and slowed to the posted thirty miles per hour. Examining the trim yards, the white clapboard houses, the incongruous biker bar in the middle of downtown, the plentiful churches. They followed the directions Tate had been given to the hospital where Dr. Hanson was visiting his mother.

“Can he tell us much?” Bett wondered. “Legally, I mean.”

She’d be thinking, he guessed, of the patient-doctor privilege, which allowed a doctor to keep secret the conversations between a patient and his physician. Years ago, when they’d been married, Tate had explained this and other nuances of the law to her. But she often grew offended at these arcane
rules. “You mean if you don’t read him his rights, the arrest is no good? Even if he
did
it?” she’d ask, perplexed. Or: “Excuse me, but why should a mother go to jail if she’s shoplifting food for her hungry child? I don’t get it.”

He expected that same indignation now when he explained that Hanson didn’t
have
to say anything to them. But Bett just nodded, accepting the rules. She smiled coyly and said, “Then I guess you’ll have to be extra persuasive.”

They turned the corner and the white-frame hospital loomed ahead of them.

“Well, busy day,” Bett said, assessing the front of the hospital as she flipped up the car’s mirror after refreshing her lipstick. There were three police cars parked in front of the main entrance. The red and white lights atop one of them flashed with urgent brilliance.

“Car wreck?” Bett suggested. Route 15, which led into town, was posted fifty-five but everybody drove it at seventy or eighty.

They parked and walked inside.

Something was wrong, Tate noted. Something serious had happened. Several nurses and orderlies stood in the lobby, looking down a corridor. Their faces were troubled. A receptionist leaned over the main desk, gazing down the same corridor.

“What is it?” Bett whispered.

“Not a clue,” Tate answered.

“Look, there he is,” somebody said.

“God,” someone else muttered.

Two policemen were leading a tall, balding man
down the corridor toward the main entrance. His hands were cuffed behind him. His face was red. He’d been crying. As he passed, Tate heard him say, “I didn’t do it. I
wouldn’t
do it! I wasn’t even
there!”

Several of the nurses shook their heads, eyeing him with cold expressions on their faces.

“I didn’t do it!” he shouted.

A moment later he was in a squad car. It made a U-turn in the driveway and sped off.

Tate asked the receptionist, “What’s that all about?”

The white-haired woman shook her head, eyes wide, cheeks pale. “We nearly had an assisted suicide.” She was very shaken. “I don’t believe it.”

“What happened?”

“We have a patient—an elderly woman with a broken hip. And it looks like he”—she nodded toward where the police car had been—“comes in and talks to her for a while and next thing we know she’s got a syringe in her hands and’s trying to kill herself. Can you imagine? Can you just
imagine?”

“But they saved her?” Tate asked.

“The Lord was watching over her.”

Bett blinked. “I’m sorry?”

The receptionist continued, “A nurse just happened by. My goodness. Can you imagine?”

Bett shook her head, very troubled. Tate recalled that she felt the same about euthanasia as she did about the death penalty. He thought briefly of her sister’s husband’s death. Harris. He’d used a shotgun to kill himself. Like Hemingway. Harris had been an artist—a bad one, in Tate’s estimation—and he’d shot
himself in his studio, his dark blood covering a canvas that he’d been working on for months.

Absently he asked the receptionist, “That man. Who is he? Somebody like Kevorkian?”

“Who
is
he?” the woman blurted. “Why, he was the poor woman’s
son!”

Tate and Bett looked at each other in shock. She said in a whisper, “Oh, no. It couldn’t be.”

Tate asked the woman, “The patient? Was her name Hanson?”

“Yes, that’s the name.” Shaking her head. “Her own son tried to talk her into killing herself! And I heard he was a therapist too. A doctor! Can you
imagine?”

•   •   •

Tate and Bett sat in the hospital cafeteria, brooding silence between them. They’d ordered coffee that neither wanted. They were waiting for a call from Konnie Konstantinatis, whom Tate had called ten minutes ago—though the wait seemed like hours.

Tate’s phone buzzed. He answered it before it could chirp again.

“ ’Lo.”

“Okay, Counselor, made some calls. But this is all unofficial. There’s still no case.
Got
it? Are you
comfortable
with that?”

“Got it, Konnie. Go ahead.”

The detective explained that he had called the Leesburg police and spoken to a detective there. “Here’s what happened. This old lady, Greta Hanson, fell and broke her hip last week. Fell down her back stairs. Serious but not too serious. She’s eighty. You know how it is.”

“Right.”

“Okay, today she’s tanked up on painkillers, really out of it, and she hears her son—
your
Dr. Hanson—hears him telling her that it looks like the end of the road, they found cancer, she only has a few months left. Yadda, yadda, yadda. The pain’s gonna be terrible. Tells her it’s best to just finish herself off, it’s what everybody wants. He’s pretty persuasive, sounds like. Leaves her a syringe of Nembutal. She says she’ll do it. She sticks herself but a nurse finds her in time. Anyway, she’s pretty doped up but tells ’em what happened and the administrator calls the cops. They find the son in the gift shop buying a box of candy. Supposedly for her. They collar him. He denies it all, of course. What else is he going to say? So. End of story.”

“And this all happens fifteen minutes before Bett and I are going to talk to him about Megan? It’s no coincidence, Konnie. Come on.”

Silence from Fairfax.

“Konnie. You hear me?”

“I’m telling you the facts, Counselor. I don’t comment otherwise.”

“She’s sure it was her son who talked to her?”

“She said.”

“But she was drugged up. So maybe it was somebody
else
talking to her.”

“Maybe. But—”

“We can talk to Hanson?”

“Nope. Not till the arraignment on Monday. And he’s probably not gonna be in any mood even then.”

“All right. Answer me one question. Can you look up what kind of car he drives?”

“Who? Hanson? Yeah, hold on.”

Tate heard typing as he filled Bett in on what Konnie’d said.

“Oh, my,” she said, hand rising to her mouth.

A moment later the detective came back on the line. “Two cars. A Mazda nine two-nine and a Ford Explorer. Both this year’s models.”

“What colors?”

“Mazda’s green. The Explorer’s black.”

“It was somebody else, Konnie. Somebody was following Megan.”

“Tate, she took the train to New York. She’s going to see the Statue of Liberty and hang out in Greenwich Village and do whatever kids do in New York and—”

“You know the Bust-er Book?”

“What the hell is a buster book?” the detective grumbled.

“Kids at Jefferson High are supposed to write down anybody who comes up and offers them drugs or candy or flashes them.”

“Oh, that shit. Right.”

“A friend of Megan’s said there’d been a car following her. In the Bust-er Book, some kids reported a gray car parked near the school in the afternoon. And Megan herself reported it last week.”

“Gray car?”

“Right.”

A sigh. “Tate, lemme ask you. Just how many kids go to that school of hers?”

“I’m not saying it’s a
good
lead, Konnie—”

“And just how many parents in gray cars pick ’em up?”

“—but it
is
a lead.”

“Tag number? Make, model, year?”

Tate sighed. “Nothing.”

“Look, Counselor, get me at least one of the above and we’ll talk . . . So, what’re you thinking, somebody snatched her? The Amtrak schedule is bogus?”

“I don’t know. It’s just fishy.”

“It’s not a case, Tate. That’s the watchword for today. Look, I gotta go.”

“One last question, Konnie.
Does
she have cancer? Hanson’s mother?”

The detective hesitated. “No. At least it’s not what they’re treating her for.”

“So somebody talked her into believing she’s dying. Talked her into trying to kill herself.”

“Yeah. And that somebody was her son. He could have a hundred motives. Gotta go, Counselor.”

Click.

He relayed to Bett the rest of his conversation with Konnie.

“Megan was seeing a therapist who tried to kill his mother? God.”

“I don’t know, Bett,” he said. “You saw his face. Did he look guilty?”

“He looked caught,” she said.

Tate glanced at his watch. It was two-thirty. “Let’s get back to Fairfax and find that teacher. Eckhard.”

•   •   •

Crazy Megan finally gets a chance to talk.

Listen up, girl. Listen here, kiddo. Biz-nitch, you listening? Good. You need me. This is serious . . . You’re not sneaking cigarettes in the Fair Oaks mall parking
lot. You’re not flirting with a George Mason junior to get him to buy you a pint of Comfort or Turkey. You’re not sitting in Amy’s room, snarfing wine, hating it and saying it’s great, while you’re like, “Sure, I come every time Josh and I fuck . . .”

Leave me alone, Megan thought.

But C.M. won’t have any of her
attitude.
She snaps,
You hate the world. Okay. What you want—

A family is what I want, Megan responded. That’s all I wanted.

Oh. Well, that’s precious,
her crazy side offers, nice and sarcastic.
Who the fuck doesn’t? You want Mommy and Daddy to wave their magic wand and get you out of here? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. Well, ain’t going to happen, girl. So get off your fat ass and get out.

I can’t move, Megan thought. I’m scared, I’m tired.

Up, girl. Up. Look, he—

And who
is
he?

Crazy Megan is in good form today.
What difference does it make? He’s the bogeyman, he’s Jason, he’s Leatherface, he’s Freddy Krueger, he’s your father—

All right, stop it. You’re like so . . . tedious.

But C.M.’s wound up now.
He’s everything bad, he’s your mother giving Brad a blow job, he’s the barn at your father’s farm, he’s an inconvenient child, he’s a whispering bear—

“Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Megan screamed out loud.