The Virgin of Small Plains

  When the Econo Lodge reported full, he called the bed-and-breakfast.

  “They’ve got a first-floor room for you!” He beamed down at her, happy to be of service to the suffering. “What’s your name?”

  “Caitlin Washington.”

  He was so busy giving that information to the owner of the B&B that he didn’t hear her whisper, “Or, Catie. My friends call me Catie.”

  “They’ll fix you up just fine,” the manager told her when he got off the phone. “Want some help getting back out to your van?”

  She nodded, tears of gratitude appearing in her blue eyes.

  As he pushed her chair from behind, she turned her head so she could ask him, “Can you please tell me how to find her grave?”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Mid-morning, Abby walked into her parents’ house and yelled, “Dad?”

  “I’m in the kitchen,” her father yelled back.

  She walked into the cheerful, spacious room where her mother had once ruled with a magic spatula and a frying pan, and found him seated at the table in his bathrobe, staring at the screen of the laptop computer he had set up there.

  “Whatcha doing?” she asked him.

  It being a holiday, this was one of the few times in the year when he wasn’t working. Unless an emergency called, of course, in which case his holiday would be over.

  “Reading The New York Times online,” he said.

  “Oh, sure,” she teased him. “You can’t fool me. I know what you’re really reading. TV Guide. Checkin’ up on your soaps.”

  Her father never watched TV. She would have been willing to bet that he hadn’t had any of their sets on for anything but the weather since her mother died. Before computers, he had amused himself by reading books and medical journals. Now he was as addicted to the Internet as any teenager could be.

  “Aren’t we having dinner at your sister’s tonight?” he asked her, with a brief glance up.

  “Yeah, but I thought I’d stop by.” She walked over to his coffeepot and touched the side of it. “Is this coffee old enough to vote yet?”

  “It was fresh yesterday.”

  Abby poured a bit of it into a cup, looked at it, sniffed it, and said, “Yes, it was.”

  She turned her back on the coffee, leaned against the counter, and said, “Dad? Remember the night the Virgin died?”

  “Mm,” he said, through closed lips, and without looking up from his screen.

  “You know Mitch was here that night, right?”

  “Mm. Your mother told me.”

  Abby looked at him, feeling irritated that he wasn’t looking at her. “Dad? Do you mind? Could you pay attention to me for a minute?”

  It had come out sounding harsher…and more full of latent meaning…than she had meant it to, but her dad didn’t appear to have heard anything amiss in it. He merely responded by finally looking directly at her.

  “Yes, Abby,” he said. “What is it?”

  She stared at her stout, gray-haired father, her very smart, very hardworking, very respected doctor-father, and felt so much love for him in that instant that she nearly burst into tears. However remote he had become over the years, it didn’t erase the sixteen years of love that had come before, when he had been a funny, affectionate dad to both of his girls, and perhaps especially to his younger one. The words, “I miss you, Dad,” almost burst out of her mouth at that moment, but she clamped down on them, not yet ready to deal with whatever might come after them.

  “Why are you asking me about that girl, Abby?”

  She shrugged a little. “Because I never have before?”

  He smiled a little. “Are you asking me?”

  “No.” Abby smiled a little, too. “That’s why I’m bringing it up, I guess. Because we’ve never talked about it, and now I want to.”

  “All right.”

  He sounded cautious, but Abby didn’t feel like being cautious. “That night. I want to tell you what I remember.” When he didn’t say anything, she went on. “Mitch and I were in my room. You and mom were in yours. At some point, Mitch went downstairs in the dark to get something.” She had a feeling her father knew what that was, so she hurried over that part. “After he left my room I heard your emergency phone ring in your bedroom and right after that I heard you walk down the hall.”

  She paused, and he nodded as if to say, Okay, go on.

  “I ran out and asked you what was going on, but you just told me to go on back to bed, and you went on downstairs.”

  He nodded again. “I think I remember that.”

  “Dad, that was the last time I ever saw Mitch.”

  He looked down and for a moment she thought she had lost him to the computer screen again. But he shifted his gaze toward the window and stared out of it at the beautiful Memorial Day weather.

  “Did you see him, Dad? In the house that night? Or afterward?”

  “No, Abby, the last time I saw Mitch must have been earlier on that day.”

  “Oh, and there’s something else I remember,” Abby said. “After I went back into my room, I saw headlights coming up our driveway and I heard a car, or a truck. Was that her, Dad? I mean, was that Nathan bringing her up to your office?”

  “I imagine it was.”

  “What happened then, Dad? Did he carry her in by himself? Was it Nathan who called you on the phone? Did you know he was coming and did you know they’d found a dead girl in their pasture?”

  “The answer to all of that is yes, Abby.” Her father cleared his throat. “If you want to know what happened next, I’ll tell you what I remember. I had him put her in one of my examining rooms, but we both already knew she was dead. He had already established that, of course. So all I could do was have him lay her down and then leave her there until morning, when we could get McLaughlin’s to pick her up.”

  Her father stopped speaking.

  “That’s all?” she asked him. “That’s all that happened?”

  “That’s all that happened, Abby. Why, do you think there was something else?”

  For the second time, she felt tears backing up in her throat and behind her eyes and she fought them back. “I don’t know, Dad, I guess I just wondered if maybe Mitch might have seen it, and it upset him, and I don’t know…”

  Her father looked puzzled.

  “I guess I’m still looking for a reason for why he left,” she admitted. “It sounds crazy when I say it to you, though. I mean, it would be terrible to see a murdered person, of course, but that wouldn’t make somebody leave their home and never come back.”

  “I wouldn’t think so,” her father said, sounding cautious again.

  “Dad, you know I didn’t drive him away, don’t you? Whatever Nadine said about me, you know it wasn’t ever true?”

  “Abby.” He looked pained, embarrassed. “Of course I know that.”

  She turned around and started making a fresh pot of coffee to hide her face from him. It was ridiculous, she told herself, that she should still feel so emotional about the whole thing after so much time. When she had the pot washed out and a fresh filter and new grounds inserted and the pot turned on, she turned around to face him again.

  “Do you remember anything about her, Dad?”

  “Like what?”

  “She was young…”

  “Yes, probably not much older than you.”

  “What color was her hair, was it long or short?”

  “Abby, I don’t remember that.”

  “You don’t? Was she thin or fat? Do you think she was pretty?”

  He took a deep breath, thought for a moment, and then said, “My memory of her is that she was rather tall for a girl, and she had long dark hair, and she wasn’t thin, but she wasn’t fat, either. I’m afraid it was impossible to tell if she was pretty.”

  The horror of that sentence hung between them.

  “Was it hard for you, Dad?”

  Something in her father’s eyes at that moment frightened her. It was something that sharpene
d his gaze, something hard, like pain or anger. For a moment she feared she had tread too far.

  But his answer was mild. “I’m a doctor, Abby.”

  She supposed he meant that to explain everything, as if a doctor would never be upset by any condition of any patient, but Abby knew that was far from the truth, and that he got very involved with his patients—angry at them when they didn’t follow his advice, angry at diseases he couldn’t defeat, sad when he lost somebody, delighted with recoveries and babies. Doc Reynolds may have drawn away from his family, but he had, if possible, drawn even closer to his patients over the years.

  The coffee finished perking and Abby stayed to drink a cup of it.

  When she said good-bye to him and let herself out, her father barely looked up to say, “I guess I’ll see you tonight,” before returning his gaze to his computer again. She was surprised, then, to look up from inside her car and see the edge of the living room curtains fall. It seemed that her father had actually gotten up from his computer, walked to the window, and watched her leave.

  Chapter Fifteen

  He didn’t know where his mother was buried, a fact that left him feeling strangely unmoored. Even if he hadn’t seen her in years, he had always known where she was. Now he could only make an educated guess. He parked on the cemetery road halfway between her family’s plots and his father’s family, or at least where he thought he remembered they were. Assuming his father would have put her in the Newquist section, Mitch got out of the Saab and was starting to hike over the grass in that direction when he looked a little way up the hill and saw something disturbing. A young woman was attempting to get out of a van, but it looked to Mitch as if she was having some kind of difficulty doing it.

  He watched her, until he was positive she was in trouble.

  Then he jogged the few yards up the hill to where she clung with one hand to the door handle on the driver’s side of her van and the other hand on the car seat. As he got close he could see the handles of a wheelchair folded behind the driver’s seat. But she looked as if she was attempting to walk without it.

  “Can I help you?” Mitch called out to her.

  “No,” she said in a breathless voice. “I can do it.”

  No, you can’t, was Mitch’s thought as he saw her take her hand off the door handle, then sway and grab for it again. She didn’t look even thirty years old, more like twenty-five, and she wore the telltale head scarf of the chemo patient. When she looked at him her eyes were big and dark in her face. He read both fear and determination in them.

  “I’m walking that way, myself,” he said, drawing close enough to see how her muscles looked like strained and trembling ropes in her forearms as she tried to stand and balance. “Grab hold of my arm and I’ll take you where you want to go.”

  “No thanks, really, I can make it.”

  She took, or tried to take, a step, but immediately stumbled and had to reach for support again. This time when she looked at him he saw that she was close to bursting into tears. And this time, when he put out his right arm to her, she didn’t argue, but instead grabbed onto him as to a life preserver.

  “I thought…” she started to say apologetically.

  “I know.” He grinned down at her. “I’m stubborn, too.”

  That forced a little smile from her and a little warmth into her eyes.

  She was so light he barely felt her pressure on his right arm. He started to walk her away from her van but then discovered that that wasn’t going to work, either. She could barely shuffle one foot in front of the other.

  “You really need to get over there?” he asked her.

  “I have to. I have to.”

  “Okay. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to pick you up and carry you.”

  Her eyes widened even more. “Oh, no. You’ll hurt yourself.”

  He smiled. “I doubt it.”

  She didn’t object as he reached down, put one arm under her knees and the other under her back, and gently hoisted her up to a level at which he could carry her.

  “You okay?” he checked with her.

  She bit her bottom lip and nodded.

  “Okay, then just point me to where we’re going.”

  She lifted one thin arm and pointed to an old-fashioned upright tombstone that had a pinkish tint. Mitch shut her van door with one foot and then he carried her where she wanted to go.

  “Put me on the grass,” she told him.

  “On your feet?” he asked, doubtfully.

  “No,” she whispered. “So I can sit.”

  With her in his arms, he bent his knees until he could gently transfer her to the ground. She propped herself up with her own arms then, reminding him of the spindly woman in a famous old Andrew Wyeth painting called “Christina’s World.”

  “I could prop you against the stone,” he suggested.

  For a moment she looked taken aback, but then she seemed to accept that she was going to need some support in order to sit upright. She nodded and he picked her up again and put her down again, this time with her thin back against the solid comfort of the pink granite.

  “I’ll be over there,” he said, pointing vaguely toward the Newquist plots.

  “Okay,” she said, gazing up at him. “Thank you.”

  “When you’re ready to go, give me a wave.”

  “I will.”

  It wasn’t until he walked away and then turned around to check on her that Mitch looked at the stone above the grave she was so determined to visit. She had managed to adjust her position so that she was leaning her right side against one edge, with her right arm pressed up against it, her left hand splayed against the bottom of it, and a single line of engraving visible above that hand.

  Peace Be Unto You, the engraving said, but there wasn’t any name, only a year: 1987.

  Mitch hadn’t known what he would feel when he finally stood at his mother’s grave, but he hadn’t expected it to be restlessness. He found he couldn’t stand there at all, he had to move, and so he began strolling around the cemetery, periodically glancing back to see if the sick girl needed him.

  It was only when he happened upon Margie Reynolds’s grave that he actually felt the emotions he had wondered if he would feel for his mother. First of all, he was shocked. Mrs. Reynolds died? Then came anger that he hadn’t been told about her, and then sadness for a woman he had liked a whole lot better than he had liked his own mother. He checked the dates of her birth and death and figured out that Abby had been twenty-eight when Margie had died. They’d had a close and loving relationship.

  It must have nearly killed you, he thought, of Abby.

  Before he even consciously realized what he was doing he was pulling his wallet out of his back pocket and opening it to a small photograph inside. His six-year-old son grinned up at him, and Mitch smiled back down at the picture, feeling a sudden sharp pang of missing the boy, who was with his mother for the week.

  Mitch held his wallet out to Margie Reynolds’s grave.

  “This is Jimmy,” he said softly. “My son.”

  He found himself telling her more. “We have joint custody. I guess it works okay. Better than only getting him on weekends. You’d probably like my ex-wife. I know she’d like you. I probably could have tried harder, but it just didn’t work out for us. I thought I loved her enough to marry her, but then I’ve thought a lot of things that didn’t turn out to be true…”

  Mitch folded the wallet closed and slipped it back into his pocket.

  “Anyway. That’s Jimmy. I’m sorry you won’t get to see him.”

  It killed him to think that Jimmy was born a whole year before Margie Reynolds died. If there had been some way to bring his son down to meet her…

  Hers was a funeral he might have come to, Mitch thought, but then he realized, no, there was no way he could have done that and faced Abby. And no way he could have walked into the Reynolds’s home for the first time with a son that he’d had with another woman. With that thought, and t
he memory of seeing Abby together with Patrick, Mitch felt a rise of grief that nearly staggered him. For a moment, he thought he was going to need somebody to hold him up, like he had supported the sick girl. But there wasn’t anybody who could do that. He forced himself to tamp down the sorrow and the devastating disappointment.

  There’d been a place inside him where he had still held out hope.

  Suddenly Mitch felt the rise of the old anger again, a red, vicious, pulsating fury, accompanied by the cry that had echoed in his skull for seventeen years: I didn’t do anything wrong. I don’t deserve this. This was my town, too.

  Something in his peripheral vision caught his attention.

  He looked up the hill. The young woman was waving at him, a limp, slight wave, but it got her message across.

  Fueled by the energy of his anger, Mitch walked quickly up the hillside to her.

  “Ready to go?”

  She nodded and even held up her arms to him, like a child, to be picked up. This time when he did it, she smelled of grass.

  As he did it, he asked, “Who’s buried here?”

  “The Virgin,” she said.

  “Excuse me? Who?”

  “The Virgin.” When she didn’t see comprehension in his face, she said, “Don’t you know who the Virgin is?”

  “Never heard of her.” He thought she felt even lighter in his arms, if that was possible.

  “She’s a girl who was murdered a long time ago. A horrible murder, and nobody knew who she was. She had been beaten so badly that they couldn’t even identify her. Her face was all beaten in.”

  Mitch stumbled on a clod of dirt, causing her to shift in his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, barely able to get the words out.

  He thought he was going to be sick.

  “That’s okay,” she said, though she had gone even paler and there was sweat beading her upper lip now. Still, she kept on telling him the story. “So, what happened was, the people of this town gave her a funeral and they buried her in that grave. And they say that out of gratitude she heals people and helps them.”