Her palms slapped her hips. “Well, I don’t have anything specific. You want evidence, you want proof. I don’t have any.” She sighed. “I’m not like you.”

“Like me?”

“I can’t convince you,” she said angrily. “I don’t have a way with words. So I’m not even going to try.”

He started to say something more, to cinch his argument, to end this awkward reunion, to send her back out of his life. But he considered what she’d just said and recalled something-what the Judge had said after Tate had finished an argument before the Supreme Court in Richmond in a death penalty case, which Tate later won. His grandfather had been in the audience, proud as could be that his offspring was handling the case. Later, over whiskeys at the ornate Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, the somber old man had said, “Tate, that was wonderful, absolutely wonderful. They’ll rule for you. I saw it in their faces.”

I did too, he’d thought, wondering what else the Judge had in mind. The old man’s eyes were dim.

“But I want you to understand something.”

“Okay,” the young man said.

“You’ve got it in you to be the most manipulative person on earth.”

“How do you mean, sir?”

“If you were greedy you could be a Rockefeller. If you were evil you could be a Hitler. That’s what I mean. You can talk your way into somebody's heart and get them to do whatever you want. Judge or jury, they won’t have a chance. Words, Tate. Words. You can’t see them but they’re the most dangerous weapons on earth. Remember that. Be careful, son.”

“Sure, sir,” Tate had said, paying no attention to the old man’s advice, wondering if the court’s decision would be unanimous. It was.

What he does, he cannot doubt.

Bett gazed at him and in a soft voice-sympathetic, almost pitying- she said, “Tate, don’t worry about it. It’s not your problem. You go back to your practice. I can handle it.”

She fished in her purse, pulled out her car keys.

He watched her walk away. Then he called, “Come on in here.” She hesitated. “Come on,” he said and wandered into the barn, the original one-built in the 1920s. Reluctantly she followed. It was a grimy place, the barn, filled with as much junk as farm tools. He’d played here as a boy, had a ream of memories: horses’ tails twitching with muscular jerks on hot summer afternoons, sparks flying as the Judge edged an axe on the old grinding wheel. He’d tried his first cigarette here. And learned much about the world from the moldy stacks of National Geographics. He also got his first glimpse of naked women-in the Playboys the sharecroppers had stashed here.

He slipped off his suit jacket, hanging it up on a pink, padded coat hanger. What was that doing here? he wondered. A former girlfriend, he believed, had left it after they’d taken a trip to the Caribbean.

Bett stood near him, holding on to a beam that powder-post beetles had riddled. Tate rummaged through a box. Bell watched, remained silent.

He didn’t find what he was looking for in one box and turned to another. He glanced up at her then continued to rummage. He finally found the old beat-up leather jacket. He pulled it on, took off his tie and unbuttoned the top button of his dress shirt.

Then he righted a battered old cobbler’s bench, dropped down onto it and took off his oxford wing tips and socks. He massaged his feet.

His eyes fell again on the picnic bench, visible just outside the door. Thinking again of the night of the funeral. Megan in bed. Bett, unhooking the Japanese lantern, the November night still oddly balmy. She seemed to float like a ghost in the dim air above the bench. He’d come up next to her. Startled her by speaking to her in a heartrending whisper.

I have something to tell you.

Now he shoved that hard memory away and pulled on white work socks and his comfortable boots.

She looked at him in confusion, shook her head. “What’re you doing?”

“You did it after all,” he said with a faint laugh.

“What?”

“You convinced me.” He laced the boots up tight. “I think you’re right. Something happened to her. And we’re going to find out what. You and me.”

II. THE INCONVENIENT CHILD

7

The rain had started up again.

They were inside now, sitting at the old dining room table, dark oak and pitted with wormholes.

Tate poured wine, offered it to Bett.

She took the glass and cradled it between both hands the way he remembered her doing when they’d been married. In their first year of marriage, because he was a poor young prosecutor and Bett hadn’t yet found her career, they couldn’t afford to go out to dinner very often. But at least once a week they’d try to have lunch at a nice restaurant. They’d always ordered wine.

She sipped from the glass, set it on the table and watched the sheets of rain roll across the brown fields.

“What do we do, Tate?” she asked. “Where do we start?”

Prosecutors know as much about criminal investigations as cops do. But those gears in Tate’s mind hadn’t been used for a long time. He shrugged. “Let’s start with her therapist. Maybe she said something about running away, about where she’d go. What’s his name?” Tate felt he should have remembered.

“Hanson,” Bett said. “He had to cancel the session today-an illness or something. I hope he’s in town” She looked up the number in her address book and dialed it. “It’s his service,” she whispered to Tate. “What’s your cell number?”

She gave the doctor’s answering service both of their mobile numbers and asked him to return the call. She said it was urgent.

“Try that friend again,” Tate suggested. “Amy. Where she spent the night.” He tried to picture Amy. He’d met her once. He’d counted nine earrings in the girl’s left ear but only eight in her right. He’d wondered if the disparity had been intentional or if she’d merely miscounted.

Troubled, he thought again about her boyfriend. Well, she was seventeen. Why shouldn’t she go out? But with a college senior? Tate’s prosecutorial mind thought back to the Virginia provisions on statutory rape.

Bell shifted and cocked the phone closer to her ear. Apparently someone was now home.

“Amy? It’s Megan’s mother. Honey, we’re trying to find her. She didn’t show up for lunch. Do you know where she went this morning after she left you and your mom’s?”

Bett nodded as she listened and then asked if Megan had been upset about anything. Her face was grim.

Tate was half listening but mostly he was studying Bett. The tangles of auburn hair, the striking face, the prominent neck bones, the complexion of a woman who looked ten years younger than her age. He tried to remember the last time he’d seen her. Maybe it was Megan’s sweet sixteen party. An odd evening… For a fleeting moment, as he stood beside the girl -and her mother, delivering what everyone declared to be a brilliant toast, he’d had a sense of them as a family. He and Bett had shared a momentary smile. But it had faded fast and the instant they’d stepped out of the spotlight they’d returned to their separate lives. When he’d seen her after that, Tate couldn’t remember.

He thought: She’s less pretty now but more beautiful. More confident, more assured, her sunset-sky eyes were narrowed and not flitting around-coy arid ethereal-the way they’d habitually done fifteen years ago.

Maybe it’s maturity; Tate reflected. And he wondered again what her impression of him might be.

Bett put her hand over the receiver and said, “Amy said Megan left about nine-thirty this morning and wouldn’t tell her where she was going. She was secretive about it. She left her book bag there. I thought it might have something in it that’d give us a clue where she went. I said we’d be by to pick it up later.”