They all faded from his life and, yes, most nights he was lonely. “I keep pretty busy,” he said. “You?”

She said quickly, “I’m busy too. Everybody needs interior design.”

“Sure,” he agreed. “Things working out well with Brad?”

“Oh, Brad’s a dear. He’s a real gentleman. You don’t see many of them. You were one. I mean, you still are.” She laughed. “You know, I keep expecting to see you on Court TV,” she said. “Prosecuting serial killers or terrorists or something. Channel Nine loved you. You gave great interviews.”

“Those were the days.”

“Why’d you quit practice?”

He kept his hands at ten to two on the wheel and his eyes straight ahead.

“Tate?” she repeated.

“Prosecuting’s a young man’s game,” he said. Thinking he was the epitome of credibility.

But Bell said, “That’s an answer. But not the answer.”

“I didn’t quit practice.”

“You know what I mean. You were the best in the state. Remember those rumors that you’d get that job you wanted?”

Solicitor general-the lawyer who represented the government in cases before the Supreme Court-the most important forensic orator in the country. Tate’s grandfather had always hoped his grandson might get that job. And Tate himself had for years had his sights on that job.

“I wanted to spend more time on the farm.”

“Bullshit.” Well, this was definitely a new Bell McCall. The ethereal angel had come to earth with muddy cheeks. ‘Why won’t you tell me?”

“Okay. I lost my taste for blood,” he explained. “I prosecuted a capital case. I won. And I wished I hadn’t.”

Bett had been deeply ashamed that while they were married Tate had sent six men to death row in Jarratt, Virginia. Her horror at this achievement had always seemed ironic to him for she believed in the immortality of souls and Tate did not.

“He was innocent?” she asked.

“No, no. It was more complicated than that. He killed the victim. There was no question about that. But he was probably only guilty of manslaughter at best. Criminally negligent homicide, most likely. The defense offered a plea-probation and counseling. I rejected it and went for lethal injection. The jury gave him life imprisonment. The first week he was in prison, he was killed by other inmates. Actually”-his voice caught-”he was tortured and then he died.”

“God, Tate.”

What a man hears, he may doubt…

“I talked him to death, Bett. I conjured the jurors. I had the gift on my side, not the law. And he’s dead when he shouldn’t be. If he’d been out of prison, had some help, he’d be alive now and probably a fine person.”

But what he does, he cannot doubt.

He waited for her disgust or anger.

But she said only, “I’m sorry.” He looked at her and saw not pity or remorse but simple regret at his pain. “They fired you? The commonwealth's attorney’s office?”

“Oh, no. No. I just quit.”

“I never heard about it.”

“Small case. Not really newsworthy. The story died on the Metro page.”

Staring at the road, Tate confessed, “You know something?”

He felt Bett’s head turn toward him.

He continued, “I wanted to tell you about what happened. When I heard that he’d died I reached for the phone to call you-before any-body else. Even before Konnie. I hadn’t seen you in over a year. Two years maybe. But you were the one I wanted to tell.”

“I wish you had.”

He chuckled. “But you hated me taking capital cases.”

There was a long pause. She said, “Seems to me you’ve served enough time over that one. ‘Most everybody gets a parole hearing, don’t they?” As Tate signaled to make the turn for Bett’s exit she said, “Could we just drive a bit? I don’t feel like going home.”

His hand wavered over the signal stem. He clicked it off.

17

Tate piloted his Lexus back through Centreville, which some of the redder of the rednecks around these parts disparagingly called New Calcutta and New Seoul-because of the immigrants settling here. He made a long loop around Route 29 and turned down a deserted country road.

The sun was low now but the heat seemed worse. The sour, sickly aroma of rotting leaves from last year’s autumn was in the air.

“Tate,” Bett asked slowly, “what if nothing happened?”

“Nothing happened?”

“What if nobody kidnapped her? What if she really did run off? Because she hates us.”

He glanced at her, She continued, “If we find her-”

“When we find her,” he corrected.

“What if she’s so mad at us that she won’t come home?” “We’ll convince her to,” he told her.

“Could you do it, do you think? Talk her into coming back home?”

Can I? he wondered.

There’s a transcendent moment in debate when your opponent has the overwhelming weight of logic and facts on his side and yet still you can win. By leading him in a certain direction you get him to build his entire argument on what appears to be an irrefutable foundation, the logic of which is flawless. But which you nonetheless destroy at the same time as you accept the perfection of his argument.

It’s a moment, Tate tells his classes, just like in fencing, when the red target of a heart is touched lightly with the button of the foil while the fencer’s attention is elsewhere. No flailing away, no chops or heavy strokes, but a simple, deadly tap the opponent never sees coming.

All cats see in the dark.

Midnight is a cat.

Therefore Midnight can see in the dark.

Irrefutable. The purest of logic.

Unless… Midnight is blind.

But what kind of argument could he make to convince Megan to return home?

He thought about the two letters she’d written and he didn’t have any thoughts at all; he saw only her perfect anger.

“We’ll get her back,” he told Bett. “I’ll do that. Don’t worry”

Bett pulled down the makeup mirror in the sun visor to apply lipstick. Tate was suddenly taken back to the night they met-at that party in Charlottesville. He’d driven her home afterward and had spent a passionate half hour in the front seat of the car removing every trace of her pink Revlon.

Five weeks later he’d suggested they move in together.

A two-year romance on campus. He’d graduated from law school the year Bell got her undergraduate degree. They left idyllic Charlottesville for the District of Columbia and his clerkship at federal District Court; Bell got a job managing a New Age bookstore. They lived the bland, easy life that Washington offered a young couple just starting out. Tate’s consolation was his job and Bell’s that she finally was close to her twin sister, who lived in Baltimore and had been too ill to travel to Charlottesville,

Married in May

His antebellum plantation built the next spring.

Megan born two years later

And three years after that, he and Bett were divorced.

When he looked back on their relationship his perfect memory was no longer so perfect. What he recalled seemed to be merely sharp peaks of an island that was the tip of a huge undersea mountain range. The wispy, ethereal woman he’d seen at the party, singing a sailor’s mournful song of farewell. Walks in the country. Driving through the Blue Ridge toward Massanutten Mountain. Making love in a forest near the Luray Caverns. Tate had always enjoyed being out of doors- the cornfields, the beach, backyard barbecues. But Bett’s interest in the outside arose only at dusk. “When the line between the worlds is at its thinnest,” she’d told him once, sitting on the porch of an inn deep in the Appalachians.

“What worlds?” he asked.

“Shhh, listen,” she’d said, enchanting him even while he knew it was an illusion. Which was, he supposed, irrefutable proof of her ability to cast a spell. Betty Sue McCall, devoted to her twin sister, with whom she had some mystical link that unnerved even rationalist Tate, reedy folk singer, collector of the unexplained, the arcane, the invisible… Tate had never figured out if her sublime mystique magnified their love falsely or obscured it, or indeed if it was the essence of their love.