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.”

Bell 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.

Matthews slid into the right lane and continued through the mist toward the mountains in the west. He looked back as often as he looked forward.

As any good therapist will advise his patients to do.

6

The rain had stopped but the atmosphere was thick as hot blood.

In her stylish shoes with the wide, high heels, Bett McCall came to Tate’s shoulder. Neither speaking, they stood on the back porch, looking over the back sixty acres of the property.

The Collier spread was more conservative than most Piedmont farms: five fields rotating between soy one year and corn and rye the next. A classic northern Virginia spread.

“Listen to me, Tate,” the Judge would say.

The boy always listened to his grandfather.

“What’s a legume?”

“A pea.”

“Only a pea?”

“Well, beans too, I think.”

“Peas, beans, clover, alfalfa, vetches… they’re all legumes. They help the soil. You plant year after year of cereals, what happens?”

“Don’t know, sir.”

“Your soil goes to hell in a hand basket.”

“Why’s that, Judge?”

The man had taught the boy never to be afraid to ask questions.

“Because legumes take nitrogen from the air. Cereals take it from the soil.”

“Oh.”

“We’ll plant Mammoth Brown and Yellow for silage and Virginia soy too. Wilson and Haerlandts are good for seed and hay How do you prepare the land?”

“Like you’re planting corn,” the boy had responded. “Sow them broadcast with a wheat drill.”

Out of the blue the Judge might glance at his grandson and ask, “Do you cuss, Tate?”

“No sir.”

“Here. Read this.” The man thrust into Tate’s hand a withered old bulletin from the Virginia Department of Agriculture and Immigration. A dog-eared chapter bemoaned the rise of young farmers’ profanity. Even some of our girls have taken to this deplorable habit.

“I’ll keep that in mind, Judge,” Tate had said, remembering without guilt how he’d sworn a blue streak at Junior Foote at school just last Thursday.

Gazing at his fields, the Judge had continued, “But if you do find it necessary to let loose just make sure there’re no womenfolk around, Almost time for supper. Let’s get on home.”

Tate stayed at his grandparents’ house in Fairfax as often as at his parents’. Tate’s father was a kind, completely quiet man, best suited to a life as, say, a court reporter-a career he’d never dared pursue, of course, given the risk that he’d be assigned to transcribe one of his father’s trials. The Judge had agonized over whether or not to leave the farm to his only son and had concluded the man just didn’t have the mettle to handle a spread of this sort. So he deeded it over to Tate while the other kin got money. (Ironically, as Tate learned during one of the few frank conversations he’d ever had with his father, the man had been dreading the day that the Judge would hand over the farm to him. His main concern seemed to be that running the farm would interfere with his passion of collecting Lionel electric trains.) Tate’s timid, ever-tired mother suited her husband perfectly and Tate could remember not a single word of dissension, or passion, between the two. Little conversation either.

Which is why, given his druthers, adolescent Tate would hitch or beg a ride to his grandparents’ house and spend as much time as he could with them.

As the Judge had presided at the head of the groaning board table on Sunday afternoons Tate’s grandmother might offer in a whisper, “The only day to plant beans is Good Friday”

“That’s a superstition, Grams,” young Tate had said to her, a woman so benign that she took any conversation directed toward her, even in disagreement, as a compliment. “You can plant soy all the way through June.”