The Virgin of Small Plains

  “You’re hiding from your family?” he asked her.

  She nodded her head. “Please, please don’t give me away.”

  “I wouldn’t!” he promised her, feeling terribly protective. He felt horrified for her. For a girl to have to hide out from her own family like this—from her father—it could only be something horrible, like beatings, or…worse. Rex thought, incest, but couldn’t bear to hold the word in his head for longer than an instant. He didn’t know who her father was, but whoever he was, Rex already hated the man and would have gladly killed him for her.

  “Does Mitch know?” he asked her. Rex could hardly believe that his best friend could know something like this, and never spill the beans. He hastened to assure her, “If he does, he never told me, and he tells me everything.”

  “Mitch doesn’t know I’m here, at least, I don’t think he does.”

  “Really? I guess that’s possible. We don’t use this place. Him and his friends, I mean. His folks would kill us if we ever did any damage to it.”

  It amazed him that the Newquists had given their party house to anybody, much less to a girl who only cleaned for them. Rex had never thought of Mitch’s folks as being that generous, or sensitive to other people’s troubles, but he could see that he had badly misjudged them. When push came to shove, as it maybe literally had with Sarah, unfortunately, it seemed that the judge and his wife were okay.

  It was funny. Now he was going to be the one to keep this secret from Mitch, and it was Mitch’s own house, so to speak. Rex kind of liked having a secret that Mitch ought to have known, but didn’t. But he also thought he was going to have a hell of a hard time keeping it. Or at least he thought so until Sarah looked at him with her strange, beautiful, pleading eyes, and said in a near whisper, “If you tell anybody I’m here, you could get me killed. I’m not kidding. They’ll come after me, and I don’t know what they’ll do. Please, please, you’ve got to promise me never to tell Mitch, or anybody else.”

  Of course, he swore on his life that he would never do that.

  It was only when he was on his way home, just moments later, that Rex realized that his brother must know. She trusted Patrick not to tell anybody? Obviously, she didn’t know his brother very well, or she’d know that Patrick drunk was an even bigger blowhard than Patrick sober.

  At first, it really worried him to think of Patrick entrusted with such a secret.

  It was only later, a couple of days later after the glow had worn off a little, that Rex began to feel the first tug of doubt. How secret could something be if Patrick knew it? And how likely was it, really, that Mitch’s mom, who wouldn’t give a spare sandwich to a bum if he was starving to death on her doorstep, would turn her precious ranch house over to a “mere” cleaning girl? But if all of that was unlikely, then so was Sarah’s story, and if that wasn’t true, then what the hell was she doing out there?

  Still, he said nothing to Mitch, or to anyone else, just in case it was true.

  He started going out there every few days to check on her, to see if she needed anything, to try to figure out the truth of the mystery of her being there. And he tried a few other gambits that wouldn’t give anything away.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  “Mom,” Rex asked Verna, in his first foray into checking out the truth of Sarah’s story. “How come you guys don’t party at the Newquists’ place in the country anymore?”

  His mother looked over from the counter where she was mashing potatoes for supper, with a surprised expression on her plump, pleasant face. “What in the world made you think of that, Rex?”

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged, walked closer, stuck a finger down into the potatoes, dangerously close to the whirring blades, and got his hand slapped for his trouble. He still managed to emerge with a grin and a fingertip-full of potato, which he sucked off. After he swallowed, he said, “I just got to thinking about it the other day, how much fun we used to have when we’d all hang out there. You and Dad, Doc and Abby’s mom, the judge and Mrs. Newquist, and all of us kids. I thought that was almost like your favorite place to be with your friends.”

  “I’m sure we’ll do it again sometime.”

  “Why did you stop?”

  “Stop? We didn’t stop, Rex, it’s just…you know how Nadine is, if she can’t have something perfect, then she doesn’t want to have it at all.”

  “What’s not perfect?”

  “According to her,” his mother said, with a comically sarcastic twist to the pronoun, a twist that made him think of her other friend, Margie Reynolds, “the house isn’t fit for company anymore. She says she’s not having anybody out there ever again until Tom lets loose with enough money to fix it up the way she wants it done. And you know what that means.”

  Rex laughed, thinking of Tom the tightwad and Nadine the perfectionist. “Never gonna happen?”

  “Probably not in my lifetime,” his mother said, grinning. “Maybe in yours.”

  “Hey, Mrs. Newquist,” he said the next time he was in their house. “How come you guys don’t use the ranch house anymore?”

  Mitch’s mother took her time answering him. Finally, she looked up from the newspaper she was reading in the den, and said, in her cool, precise way, “I’m having it redone, Rex.”

  “Redone? Like, how?”

  “I am having a new foundation put in, new roof, painting inside and out, new furnishings, and we’re putting a gazebo in the backyard.”

  “Sweet,” he said. “So it’s all torn up right now?”

  He watched her hesitate, though he wouldn’t have called it that if he hadn’t been watching for it. He would have just thought it was one of her controlling moments, when Nadine answered people when she, and only she, damn well pleased. “Yes. I don’t want anyone out there while the work is in progress.”

  It almost jibed with what his mother had told him, except for one thing—from what he had seen at the ranch house, there wasn’t any work going on at all. It appeared to him that Mrs. Newquist had told his mother one story and now was telling him a slightly different one, but they both added up to the same thing: hiding the fact that the Newquists were giving shelter to a girl who didn’t want to be found.

  Mitch’s mom went up in his estimation in that moment.

  Not only was she a pretty damned good liar, much better than he had ever given her credit for being, but she was doing a good deed without getting any credit for it from her friends and neighbors. His mother and Abby’s mom would be amazed if they knew about it. Which they weren’t going to, because he wasn’t going to tell them.

  “Hey,” he said to Mitch while they waited for Abby and his own date to come back from the bathroom at the movies. “Remember that hot chick who used to work for your mom? Sarah, I think her name was? What the hell was her last name, can you remember? And where was she from, anyway?”

  “Sarah?” Mitch turned toward him, with a lascivious grin. “Ah, Sarah.”

  Annoyed, Rex thwacked his friend’s sack of popcorn so kernels flew out.

  “Hey!” Mitch objected. “Why’d you do that?”

  “Do you remember her last name, or don’t you? I was trying to think of it the other day, and I can’t remember it, and it’s driving me crazy.”

  Mitch picked popcorn off his lap and dropped it onto the floor. “Um, I dunno. Oh, wait. Yeah, I do know.” He reached over and grabbed a huge handful of Rex’s popcorn and put it in his own sack.

  “Hey!” Rex objected.

  “Francis,” Mitch said. “I remember it was two first names, and her last name was like the town she was from. Sarah Francis from Franklin. That’s how I remember it.”

  Rex moved his feet so Abby could walk by him. His own date sat down on his right.

  “Why do you want to know her name?” Mitch asked him, too loudly.

  “Whose name?” Rex’s date immediately wanted to know.

  “Our second-grade teacher,” Rex said.

  “You’re kidding!” His date gave him a
disbelieving look. “You forgot Miss Plant’s name? How could you forget Miss Plant’s name? She looked just like a rhododendron.”

  All four of them started to laugh.

  “I don’t even know what that means,” Mitch said, almost choking on the popcorn he had been swallowing when she said it, “but you’re right, she did.”

  “Not nice,” Abby reproved them, but her giggles undercut her disapproval.

  After the movie started, Mitch leaned in close and said in a lower voice, “So. You gonna look her up?”

  “Who?”

  “Don’t give me who. You know who. You going to look her up?”

  “No way. I just couldn’t remember her last name, that’s all.”

  Even in the dark he could sense his best friend’s suspicious grin. “Yeah? As I recall, Sarah Francis doesn’t look like a rhododendron.”

  “No,” Rex had to admit, “she does not. Did not. Now shut up.”

  “She looks like a rose, a beauteous, blossoming, ripe and luscious, fragrant—”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  Mitch subsided, chuckling to himself, which made Abby turn her face to look at him quizzically. He answered her by darting toward her and planting a quick kiss on her lips, which made her smile over at Rex, and then subside back into her seat.

  On the pretext of needing some shaving cream, Rex stopped by the Rexall Drug Store where one of his high school history teachers worked behind the counter between school sessions.

  “Rex,” she said, “what are you up to this summer? Helping your dad at the ranch?”

  “Mostly.” He passed the shaving cream over to her, adding a pack of chewing gum to it at the last minute. “Hey, Mrs. Aldrich, aren’t you originally from over near Franklin?”

  “I am,” she said, looking surprised and pleased. “How did you ever remember that?”

  He grinned at her. “Every time we played your old high school, you’d tell us about your mixed feelings.”

  “Oh, dear,” she laughed. “I’ll bet that got old fast.”

  “No, no, it was okay. But I wondered, did you ever know a family named Francis over there?”

  “Francis?” She nearly rolled her eyes at him. “I’ll say I knew them. Everybody knows that family. I’ll tell you a secret, Rex. All by themselves, the Francis family is a good reason to teach school in this county instead of that one.”

  “No kidding. They’re that bad?”

  She shuddered. “Rex, I have opinions about those children that teachers aren’t supposed to have about their students.” She smiled at him again, passing over his change and his items in a sack. Then she winked at him. “Don’t tell anybody.”

  He grinned back at her. “I won’t. Are they all like that?”

  She squinted, in thought. “Almost. There’s an older sister who’s a nice girl, or at least she was the last I knew of her, which is some years ago. I substitute taught in their grade school the year I was pregnant, and she was in my class. Pretty child, maybe not an Einstein, but she tried hard, and she was very sweet. I never had to deal with her parents, thank goodness, because they never came to school to check on their kids, but her younger siblings were already raising hell. Even the sister was a mess. How that girl came out of that bunch, I’ll never know. I remember thinking at the time, if she’s smart, she’ll get as far away from them as she possibly can.” She leaned over the counter and said in a whisper, “I don’t say this easily about anybody, Rex, but they’re trash, nothing but trash, from their worthless parents on down to the littlest child, God help him.”

  “Except that one daughter.”

  Mrs. Aldrich shrugged, a little sadly. “I don’t know how she turned out.” Then it finally occurred to her ask the obvious question. “Why’d you ask me about them, Rex?”

  He shrugged right back at her, and made a face as if it was no big deal. “I heard a couple of boys from that family might be looking for part-time ranch work, and—”

  ”Don’t even think about hiring them, Rex.”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Aldrich. I won’t. I’ll tell my dad.”

  “I doubt you’ll be telling your father anything he doesn’t already know,” she said, looking cynical. “I’ll bet sheriffs all over the state know the name Francis by heart.”

  One last stop, and he was finished pursuing the story she’d told him.

  The next Saturday, after morning football practice, and on a day when his father had released him from work at home, Rex fended off his friends who wanted him to drive around with them, and he drove alone to Franklin, twenty-five miles away.

  He hadn’t had a reason to be there in years, and he was a little shocked to see how much the tiny town had declined since then. There never had been more than a handful of jobs there, and a scattering of houses. It was barely even a town. But it was in even worse condition now, with hardly a sign of life on the bedraggled-looking, two-block Main Street. Immediately, he understood why Sarah Francis had regularly driven all the way to Small Plains to find work cleaning houses, and it didn’t have anything to do with status in her hometown. It had to do with survival, from what he could see.

  He hadn’t been able to find out where her family lived, not without drawing attention to the question, so he hadn’t asked. Now he realized it didn’t really matter. There wasn’t a decent house in the town. It appeared that every resident lived on the edge of poverty, or deep down in it. Add that to a bad family, and a girl wouldn’t need any other reasons to want to run away. So maybe Sarah hadn’t sounded totally convincing to him when she had explained her presence at the Newquists’ place, but then maybe that was only because she was ashamed of where she’d come from and what she was going through.

  I should have believed her, he thought, feeling bad about it.

  He turned around and drove back home. Two days later, he worked up the nerve to go back out to see her again.

  “I just wondered, is there anything you need that I could bring you?”

  “Well, Mrs. Newquist makes sure I have groceries, but…yeah, there’s some stuff I don’t really want to ask her for.”

  She gave him a short list, mostly expensive snack foods, which he happily filled at a grocery store in yet another town, where nobody would know him, and where nobody would ask why the sheriff’s son was buying women’s magazines and frozen diet dinners, among other things. Doing it made him feel happy and needed, and the nature of the things she asked him to get gave him the feeling of intimacy with her. When he handed them over to her, and she forgot to ask him how much they cost, he didn’t mind. After what he had seen in Franklin that day, he was happy to help her in any way she might need help. After that, he began to think of his trips to stores for her as favors that she was doing him, by allowing him to be of service.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  May 31, 2004

  Randie raised her head, and looked around Sam’s Pizza, where the friends sat at a big round wooden table. “Am I going blind, or did it suddenly get dark in here?”

  “It’s not you,” Abby told her. “Look outside, guys.”

  Obediently, they turned to stare out the picture windows facing the main street. Cars were driving with their headlights on, even though the sun hadn’t gone down yet. Right at that moment, pings against the glass told them that rain had started falling.

  “Looks like we got in just before the downpour,” Ellen observed.

  One large pizza sat on the table in front of them—loaded with everything, thin crust, double cheese, sprinkled with hot pepper by Cerule’s liberal hand. The three women who weren’t either a mayor or a funeral director had beers in front of them. For Ellen and Susan, who might get called out by emergencies at any time, there was iced tea. The women were halfway finished eating when the lights in the restaurant suddenly seemed to glow a whole lot brighter than before.

  “Ooo,” Susan said, “I just love the weather when it gets like this.”

  “You would,” Cerule said, with a derisive snort. “You love morgues
, too.”

  “No, seriously,” Susan insisted. “Don’t you just love it when the air gets all dark and spooky like this? I think it’s exciting, like anything could happen.”

  “Yeah, like we could all get blown away at any moment,” Cerule retorted.

  With perfect timing, the manager of the restaurant stopped by their table. “We’re under a tornado watch, ladies. If it turns into a warning, we can head to the basement.” She smiled at them. “If you don’t mind sitting on cases of tomato sauce.”

  When she moved on to the next table, Randie said, “If a tornado hits us and breaks all that tomato sauce, they’ll think there’s been a massacre.” After a laugh went around the table she returned them to their prior hot topic of conversation. “What do you think he’s been doing with himself all these years?”

  “I heard he’s a lawyer,” Cerule said.

  “You did?” Abby stared across the table at her. “I never heard that.”

  “I heard real estate,” Susan offered.

  “Well,” Ellen said, “we know he got married and had a kid, right Abby?” Nadine had made sure their mother knew that much. “A son, the year before Mom died. And we know he settled in Kansas City at some point. And we know he still looks better than he has any right to.”

  It was the consensus of the women that any man who wouldn’t come back for his mother’s funeral was an unfeeling, selfish, no-good son of a bitch, no offense intended to Nadine. They were so busy dissecting him that none of them paid any attention to the worsening weather.

  At 7:10, the sheriff’s department got word from an amateur storm spotter of a funnel cloud sighted half a mile west of U.S. 177, near state road 12. Five minutes later, it was reported “on the ground.” It was timed moving on the ground for sixteen seconds before it lifted back up into the air.

  The spotter followed it in his van, keeping in touch by cell and short-wave radio.