Speaking in Tongues Read Online Free PDF

until the animal fell asleep tonight then throw the damn thing out.
    He walked to the basement stairs, which led down to the recreation room Tate had built for the family parties and reunions he’d planned on hosting—people clustered around the pool table, lounging at the bar, drinking blender daiquiris and eating barbecued chicken. The parties and reunions never happened but Megan often disappeared down to the dark catacombs when she spent weekends here.
    He descended the stairs and made a circuit of the small dim rooms. Nothing. He paused and cocked his head. From upstairs came the sound of the dog’s growl once more. Urgent and ominous.
    “Megan, is that you?” his baritone voice echoed powerfully.
    He was angry. Megan and Bett were already twenty minutes late. Here he’d gone to the trouble of invitingthem over, doing his fatherly duty, and this was what he got in return . . .
    The growling stopped abruptly. Tate listened for footsteps on the ground floor but heard nothing. He climbed the stairs and stepped out into the drizzle once more.
    He made his way to the old barn, stepped inside and called Megan’s name. No response. He looked around the spooky place in frustration, straightened a stack of old copies of Wallace’s Farmer, which had fallen over, and glanced at the wall—at a greasy framed plaque containing a saying from Seaman Knapp, the turn-ofthe-century civil servant who’d organized the country’s agricultural extension services program. Tate’s grandfather had copied the epigram, for inspirational purposes, in the same elegant, meticulous lettering with which he filled in the farm’s ledgers and wrote legal memos for his secretary to type.
    What a man hears, he may doubt. What he sees, he may possibly doubt. But what he does, he cannot doubt.
    “Megan?” he called again as he stepped outside.
    Then his eye fell on the old picnic bench and he thought of the funeral.
    No, he told himself. Don’t go thinking about that. The funeral was a thousand years ago. It’s a memory deader than the Dead Reb and something you’ll hate yourself for bringing up.
    But think about it he did, of course. Pictured it, felt it, tasted the memory. The funeral. The picnic bench,Japanese lanterns, Bett and three-year-old Megan . . . He pictured the cluster of week-old Halloween candy lying in grass, a hot November day long ago . . .
    Until Bett had shown up at his door nearly two months ago with the news of Megan and the water tower he hadn’t thought of that day for years.
    What he does, he cannot doubt . . .
    The rain began in earnest once again and he hurried back to the house, climbed to the second floor and looked in her bedroom. Then the others.
    “Megan?”
    She wasn’t here either.
    He walked downstairs again. Reached for the phone. But he didn’t lift the receiver. Instead he sat on the living room couch and listened to the muted sound of the dog’s teeth cracking the bone in the next room.
    •   •   •
    Dr. Peters—well, Dr. Aaron Matthews—sped away from Tate Collier’s farm in Megan’s Ford Tempo. His hands shook and his breath came fast.
    A close call.
    He didn’t know why Collier had returned home this morning. He always kept Saturday hours at his office. Or had, every Saturday for the past three months. Ten to four. Clockwork. But not today. When Matthews had driven to Collier’s farm—with Megan in the trunk, no less—he’d found, to his shock, that the lawyer had returned. Fortunately he was heading out into the fields. When he was out of sight Matthews had parked in a cul-de-sac of brush beside Collier’s driveway, fifty feet from the house, had snuck into the large structureusing Megan’s keys. He’d tossed the Dalmatian a beef bone to keep it busy while he did what he’d come for.
    He’d managed to escape to the Tempo just as Collier was returning.
    Still, it unnerved him. It was bad luck. And although he was a Harvard-trained psychotherapist and did not,