The Virgin of Small Plains

  “You wouldn’t be the first person to feel that way.”

  “Uh, Sheriff, doesn’t your brother know we got visiting hours?”

  “Rules have never stopped my brother, Deputy.”

  The deputy laughed again. “Stopped him this time.”

  Rex soon clicked the phone dead and then got up to put frozen shredded potatoes in a skillet of bacon grease to fry along with a thick slice of ham. As he moved the ham around while he waited for his deputy to call back, he poked at it viciously with a two-pronged cooking fork as if he were taking vicious pokes at his brother’s gut.

  Shortly before midnight, Abby heard Patrick’s truck pull up in her driveway.

  A few moments later she heard her front doorknob rattle softly, and then again, a little more noisily.

  He was accustomed to finding her doors unlocked, but they weren’t tonight. Would he knock, she wondered?

  The doorbell rang, making her jump a foot.

  When Patrick wanted something, he wanted it, she thought, as she got out of bed and pulled a light blanket around her shoulders. She padded barefoot to the front door and opened it to find him standing with his cowboy hat in his hands on her front stoop.

  “A little late,” she observed.

  “But better than never,” he said, and grinned down at her.

  “How was Emporia?” she asked him.

  “Empty without you.”

  “Get all your work done with your accountant?”

  “Pretty much. Took a lot longer than I expected. You going to let me in?”

  Abby smiled at him. They were not married. They were not even engaged. She had no formal commitment to him, nor he to her. He could do whatever he wanted to do, including lying to her about where he was going and why. But she didn’t have to like it. And she was no longer sure she believed him about the sunglasses. “I don’t think so, Patrick.”

  “Why not?” He looked surprised enough to nearly make her laugh.

  “Because I don’t have to,” Abby said, and closed the door in his face.

  She didn’t remain on the other side of the front door to hear if he stood there for a while or if he walked away immediately, but it must have taken him a few moments of thinking it over, because it was a good five minutes by her clock before she heard his truck backing down her driveway toward the road.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  On the Wednesday morning following Memorial Day, Randie Anderson signed for that day’s delivery of newspapers and magazines to Anderson’s Grocery from the distributor’s truck driver. Rather than calling for a stock boy to open the see-through wrapped packages, she picked up a pair of scissors and cut through the white plastic cords herself. She was eager to get hold of the daily newspaper from Kansas City to see if there were any sales at the big box stores to make it worth her while to grab Cerule and drive all the way up there this weekend. Maybe, she thought, they could even persuade Abby to take a break from the storm cleanup and go with them.

  Randie lifted a stack of The Kansas City Star and set a paper aside for herself.

  Then she looked straight down into the far-more-garish front page of a tabloid, and grinned at what she saw. The aliens were pregnant again. Brad Pitt was in love with somebody new. Big Foot was alive and well in Indiana. And a tornado had rained miracle flowers on a sick woman in…

  “Small Plains?!”

  Randie grabbed a copy and stared at the fuzzy dark picture on the cover.

  It was impossible to tell if it was a picture of what it said it was, though it was sure dark enough to be a tornado. There was light in the middle and little dots of something. Quickly, Randie turned to the rest of the story inside.

  There’d been a miracle cure of somebody with cancer, she read. It had occurred in the middle of a tornado at the grave of a young woman who was mysteriously murdered many years ago. Nobody knew her name or anything about her, except that she could cure anything that ailed you, including, it was suggested, bad credit, warts, and, as proven by the miracle, cancer. And when there was a cure, the heavens released an angelic sign, like flowers mysteriously dumped out of a twister.

  “Small Plains?” Randie exclaimed again.

  My God, they were talking about the Virgin!

  And where did that photo come from, and who got cured, and how’d they ever hear about her hometown? She checked again, looking for local names, and finally found one: Photo and story tip from Jeffrey M. Newquist of Small Plains, KS. Randie’d sneaked peeks at enough tabloids in her time to know they paid actual money for tips on stories.

  “That little twerp got paid for a photo that you can’t even see!”

  Tabloid in one hand and cell phone in the other, Randie started making calls.

  She quickly found out she wasn’t always the first with the news. Several people had already heard the story about the Virgin and the miracles and the flowers that fell out of a tornado from radio talk shows that featured story tips from listeners.

  It appeared that Jeffrey M. Newquist had been one very busy teenager.

  “And I’ll bet he got paid for every single one of them,” Randie said to Susan McLaughlin when she got her on the phone. “Sam’s Pizza ought to send him a bill for all those candy bars he stole.”

  “Patrick asked me to marry him, Ellen.”

  Abby and her older sister were crouched beside a large flowerpot on Main Street, where Ellen was giving Abby a hand with repairing the damage done to the downtown flowerpots by the storm. They had bags of potting soil and new plants beside them and a garden hose running out from a spigot in the bathroom of the store just behind them.

  “He didn’t!” Ellen stared over the pot, wide-eyed. “You wouldn’t!”

  “Might keep me out of trouble,” Abby said, trying to keep it light.

  “Oh, sure. Any woman who’d marry Patrick Shellenberger is going to stay out of trouble, all right,” Ellen retorted. “She’ll never have a day’s worry in her life.” Then, getting serious, she said, “You’re not even considering it, are you?”

  “I told him I’d think about it.”

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “I’m not getting any younger, Ellen.”

  Her sister snorted. “And not any smarter, either, from the sound of it.”

  “What’s so wrong with Patrick Shellenberger now, Ellen?”

  Grudgingly, her sister said, “Well, I guess he has improved some. He seems pretty stable, at least compared to how he always was. But, Abby, he’s still Patrick, and he’ll always be Patrick.” Shrewdly, she asked, “What does Rex think of this?”

  “Rex doesn’t know,” Abby admitted.

  “Aha. And if he knew…”

  “He’d kill me.”

  “No, more likely he’d kill Patrick, but it amounts to the same thing. His own brother doesn’t want you to marry him.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s easy for all of you to say! It’s not like I have any choices! This town is not exactly crawling with other men I can date.”

  “There are some perfectly nice men here! You just won’t look at them.”

  Abby shot her sister an evil glare.

  “Well, you won’t! You never have, not since…”

  Abby glared at her again, daring her to say the name.

  The sisters’ argument was interrupted by another woman’s voice.

  “Mayor! Abby! Good morning!”

  Both of them looked up in the direction of the chirping voice. It was the middle-aged owner of a local fabric store, and she was beaming down on them as if she had invented sunshine. “Isn’t this the most beautiful day?”

  “I guess,” Abby said sourly, as she punched a petunia down into the dirt.

  “Hi, Terianne,” Ellen said, with a quick smile. “you get through the storm okay?”

  “I got through it just great,” the woman said. “Pretty flowers.”

  Ellen gave her a closer look. “What’s up?” The fabric store owner was not normally known for having a bubbling persona
lity. “You look as if you just inherited a million dollars. Did you win the lottery?”

  The woman looked startled, and blushed. “Me? No, no.”

  “Come on, you can tell us.” Ellen rested her wrists on the edge of the big flowerpot and squatted back on her cowboy boots, squinting up into the other woman’s round, happy face. “You won it, right?”

  The woman laughed and looked even more flustered. But then she burst forth in an excited whisper. “Can you girls keep a secret?”

  “Of course!” Ellen promised her, crossing her heart over her cowboy shirt.

  “I just have to tell somebody, but I swore I wouldn’t, so you both have to promise you won’t.” She looked around, checking for eavesdroppers, and then sidled closer to them. “You really won’t tell?”

  “Come on, Terianne, give,” Ellen urged.

  “After the storm?” the woman said in a dramatic near-whisper. “You know how my front window got busted? And there was glass all over my front displays? I swear, Ellen, it was the last straw, it really was. I just wanted to give up. I thought I’d just sit down on the floor and cry.”

  Ellen murmured something sympathetic, which Abby echoed.

  The woman’s fabric store had been for sale for months now.

  “Well, I was feeling so bad,” Terianne told them, “and I had a broom in my hand, and I was just standing there, sweeping up a little bit, and not feeling like doing even that much, when this man walks in the front door! He just walked in and volunteered to help me clean up! It was the nicest thing. A total stranger like that, just walking in and picking up a broom and offering to help. How often does that happen?”

  “Uh huh,” the mayor encouraged her. “And then what happened?”

  “Well, we got to talking while we worked, and I told him I was going to give up, just close the door, and lock it, and never come back. And do you know what he said, Ellen? He said, ‘Don’t do that. I’ll buy it.’”

  Abby exclaimed, “He said what?”

  “He said he’d buy my store!”

  Abby’s mouth dropped open, but her sister’s eyes narrowed a bit.

  The shop owner’s eyes gleamed with tears.

  “And that’s what he did! I told him the sale price, and I warned him that it’s ‘As Is,’ because I can’t afford to fix anything, and he said that was fine, and he wrote me a check on the spot!”

  Abby’s mouth dropped open a little more.

  “My God, Terianne, that’s wonderful,” she said.

  Ellen’s eyes only narrowed even more. She pursed her lips and said nothing.

  “Ellen, didn’t you hear what I said? I sold my store! Somebody bought my store! Now I can start over!”

  “Who?” Ellen demanded. “Who bought it, Terianne?”

  That simple question produced the deepest blush yet in the other woman. “Well, I don’t exactly know his name.”

  “You don’t know his name?” Using the big flowerpot, Ellen pushed and pulled herself to a standing position until she was eye to eye with the shop owner. “He bought your store and you don’t know his name? What’s the name on his check?”

  Abby stared up at her sister, whose tone was uncharacteristically sharp. Ellen spoke bluntly to her own family, as Abby well knew, but when it came to the voters, she was usually as tactful as a politician had to be.

  “It’s for a corporation, and I can’t read his signature.”

  “Didn’t he introduce himself? Didn’t you ask?”

  The other woman appeared embarrassed, but defensive.

  “You don’t understand, it all happened so fast! The storm came and my store got damaged and I was just ready to give up. And then a miracle happened! A man walked in my door with a miracle. You just don’t question miracles, Ellen. He even bought my fixtures and everything in the store! All I have to do is sign over the title and then I can cash the check.”

  “You don’t even know if his check is any good!”

  “It will be, Ellen. I’m telling you, he’s a really nice man. I know it will be.”

  “What does this guy look like?” Abby asked, suddenly very curious herself.

  “Oh, he’s handsome! Tall, dark blond hair. And really nice eyes.”

  A nauseating feeling of unease, a low dull feeling of dread, hit Abby’s chest when she realized the woman might have accurately described Mitch Newquist, the adult, all-grown-up Mitch Newquist.

  Her own mouth clamped shut, but her sister snapped, “How old is this hero?”

  “Maybe thirty-five, maybe forty.”

  Abby forced herself to say something. “Do you remember what he was wearing?”

  “Remember! I’ll never forget. He’s so good-looking.” The former fabric store owner smiled happily. “Or maybe he just seemed beautiful because he saved me.”

  “What was he wearing, Terianne?” This time it was Abby who snapped at her and Ellen who glanced over at her sister.

  “Wearing? He had on jeans, I think, and a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up.”

  Mitch.

  “You know why this has happened, don’t you?” the woman asked them.

  “Because you hung on until it could?” Ellen replied sensibly.

  “No.” The triumphant whisper turned reverential. “I was out at the grave over the weekend. I told the Virgin I was desperate for money. I told her I couldn’t survive if somebody didn’t buy my store. I asked her to help me. She brought that man to me. It’s a miracle.”

  The sisters, one standing and the other still kneeling, on either side of the pot, went silent.

  Finally, Ellen said, “Why is all this a secret, Terianne?”

  “Because! He told me he wants to buy a lot of properties, Ellen! Isn’t that great? For the town, I mean. He said if word got around the prices would go up and he didn’t want other people to get more money for their property than I got for mine. Isn’t that wonderful of him? It’s going to be a miracle for the whole town, I can feel it, can’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Ellen said in the same dark tone in which she had earlier referred to Patrick Shellenberger. “It’s unbelievable, all right.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  After the owner of the fabric store walked away, still beaming with wonder and joy, Ellen crouched down by the pot again and took up her trowel to dig. But Abby stopped her from getting back to work again by saying, “You think it was Mitch, don’t you?”

  Ellen looked over at her. “Who bought her store? Yeah. Don’t you?”

  “Well, the way she described him,” Abby said, “that’s what he was wearing when I saw him.”

  Ellen looked startled. “You saw Mitch?”

  Quickly, and without quite lying, Abby said, “You know! Before you all came out of Sam’s. When I was across the street with that old man. I saw Mitch get out of his car and go inside.”

  “Oh.” Ellen laughed a little, as if in relief. It was a reaction that told Abby a lot about her family and friends’ concern for a reunion nobody thought was any good for her. If she had felt even slightly tempted to confide in Ellen, Abby squelched it then.

  “Right,” her sister said. “I forgot. And you don’t think he saw you?”

  “Nope.”

  They both glanced over to where the pizza restaurant was still in the dark. It had been the most heavily damaged of any building save Abby’s barn/greenhouse.

  “You knew something was up even before she described him, though,” Abby said, a little accusingly. “What else do you know, Ellen?”

  Her sister drew her upper lip in between her teeth and worried it, a habit she’d had since childhood, which Abby translated to mean that Ellen knew something and wasn’t sure whether to tell her.

  “What?” Abby demanded. “It’s about Mitch, isn’t it?”

  Ellen shrugged a little. “I’m not sure. But Terianne isn’t the only person who has been telling me about somebody poking around town inquiring about properties for sale. When we were in the Wagon Wheel this morning?” The sisters h
ad met there for coffee. “I heard a rumor that Joe Mason sold that little shacky office of his—just like that, on the spot—to some unnamed buyer who also sounded a lot like Mitch.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “It was just a rumor, Abby.”

  “You’ve got to tell me what you hear about him!”

  Ellen looked surprised at her sister’s sudden vehemence, but she said appeasingly, soothingly, “Okay.”

  Abby backed off a little, not wanting her sister to suspect that something irrevocable had already happened. She wasn’t going to tell anybody, not her sister, not any of her friends, ever, that she had already fallen into bed with Mitch. Like the tornado that had blown through her life, in Abby’s view that night had been a one-time, extraordinary occurrence that was totally over and that would never happen again.

  “What do you think he’s doing?” Abby asked in a fretful tone.

  “I don’t know.” When she saw Abby’s skeptical look, Ellen protested, “I don’t!”

  “He’s only supposed to be visiting. He’s not supposed to be doing anything that means he has to come back. So why is he buying properties all over town?”

  “Well, so far it’s not all over town, it’s just downtown.”

  “I didn’t mean it literally, Ellen! I just meant it—”

  “Okay.”

  Abby gave her sister a shamefaced look. “I’m sorry, it’s just—”

  “It’s okay, Abs, really.”

  With a struggle, Abby managed to ask more calmly, “So what do we think he’s up to?”

  “There’s only one way I know to find out,” Ellen said. “What the hell, I’m the mayor, I’ll just ask him.”

  “No!” Abby panicked at the idea of her sister talking to Mitch, because what if he gave away their awful secret, that they had slept together? She didn’t think he’d actually tell Ellen, but her sister might read undercurrents. “I’ll do it! I’ll ask him.”

  “You will? Abby, you don’t have to do this. I can do it.”