The Virgin of Small Plains

  They never spoke of it, not even to each other, again.

  Quentin always thought that Nathan paid for it with the excruciating pain of his arthritis. Nathan always thought that Quentin paid for it in the loss of his closeness to his daughters. Filled with the guilt of what had been done to an innocent girl close to Ellen and Abby’s age, Quentin Reynolds had never again allowed himself the pleasure of being close enough to his girls to feel loved by them.

  But they went on with their “friendship” with Tom and Nadine. Because they had all known each other all their lives, because their wives didn’t know anything about what had happened, and because it was a small town where relationships had to be mended in order for people to live together so closely, and because the sheriff, even the sheriff, and the town’s doctor were afraid of the judge and of what he and his vicious wife could do to their own wives and children.

  In the fraught silence that followed Nathan’s recital, Mitch looked around the living room.

  “Where’s Jeff?” he said suddenly, breaking the mood. He stood up. “Where’d my brother go?”

  Rex also jumped to his feet and looked over his father’s head into the kitchen. The kitchen table was empty. Jeff Newquist had slipped away, taking his father’s pistol with him.

  He was gone, but somebody else had come into the house while Nathan was telling his story and had propped himself against a wall to listen along with everybody else.

  Patrick looked from Abby to Mitch and back again.

  And then he said, “What happened at your dad’s house, Abby? I saw the judge walk over there with a rifle.”

  Chapter Forty-one

  The judge had observed his older son’s car parked at the curb of Doc’s house and then he had watched as his younger son followed Mitch inside. Push had come to shove again. He had lied to his son Mitch in many ways, but the pertinent one at the moment was the lie that claimed that he, Tom, had told Quentin and Nathan that Mitch had witnessed what they did to the girl’s body. He had never told them any of that. They had no idea Mitch had been hiding in the supply closet that night or that he had seen the whole thing. They had never known, never threatened Mitch in any way.

  But he had told Mitch they did, to justify getting him out of town.

  And now Mitch was going over there, possibly to confront Quentin, who wouldn’t know what the hell he was talking about but who might decide now was the time to tell certain other secrets.

  Tom hurried to the gun case in his office.

  He unlocked it and then pulled out Mitch’s first rifle.

  He might be able to get Mitch off of a murder charge, he told himself, but what he couldn’t do was allow Quentin to talk about what he had known for the last seventeen years.

  It was a quiet street with few cars on it at any time.

  He knew that half of success in life was walking confidently and that witnesses saw what they wanted to see. If he walked with a sure stride across the street to Quentin’s home and if he was carrying a rifle at his side, and if any neighbors saw him, they would see only who they wanted to see: Tom, their neighbor, the judge. And if they saw more than that, then it was their word against his and nobody’s word ever stood up against his.

  At the front of the house, the screen door was closed but the wooden door was open.

  From within, he heard Mitch’s voice raised in anger.

  Tom stepped quietly through into the living room.

  They were in the kitchen, arguing.

  He heard Quentin saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “The hell you don’t!” Mitch retorted, and then he said, “Maybe Nathan Shellenberger will have a better memory than you do.”

  Tom stepped out of sight as his oldest son stormed through from the kitchen and slammed his way out of the house. He was followed by Jeffrey, who ran after him, yelling, “Mitch! Wait for me!”

  Tom stepped around the corner, into the kitchen, before Quentin could go back into his clinic.

  “What did you tell him?” he asked.

  “Nothing.” Quentin saw the rifle, then raised alarmed eyes to his old friend.

  Tom nodded, believing him. But Mitch might not stop until he had answers, and Quentin was the only living person who could still provide them. Tom had already made sure that the only other person who knew about Sarah…his own wife…had been silenced. With a touch of poetic justice that he liked, he had led Nadine by the hand into the blizzard and watched her wander off, as lost and confused as that girl had been the night that Nadine took her, naked, into that other snowstorm. In Nadine’s dementia, she had been starting to say things, little remembered things, that harked back to days that shouldn’t be recalled or spoken of, so Tom had taken care of it by letting nature render judgment on her.

  But nobody was going to render judgment on him.

  He hadn’t done anything wrong. The girl had wanted to have sex with him. She had wanted to have the baby. He had paid her fairly, taken care of her as well as Nadine would allow him to. And God knows, he had raised the troublesome child when he could have told her to have it aborted, or forced her to adopt it out to strangers.

  He was, in his own mind, not guilty of anything.

  Nadine had killed the girl, not him.

  And Quentin was forcing him to take these measures, when God knew, he would rather not have raised the rifle and held it on his oldest friend.

  “Lock the door to your office, Quentin.”

  The doctor did so. “Tom, you don’t really—”

  It was all he got a chance to say.

  The judge put the rifle on the floor, took off the gloves he’d worn to carry and shoot it, and carried them out the front door with him. Then he walked with confident strides back across the street and into the house.

  He noticed a red truck parked down the street, but paid no attention to it.

  People saw what they were expecting to see. And his word was law.

  It was only when he walked into his house that he found himself surprised by something. Or rather, by someone.

  “Hey, Judge,” said the disheveled-looking drunk who had walked in the front door that the judge, for once in his life, had left unlocked. “Remember me? You put me in jail a few times, right? Made me pay a few fines, right? Well, not this time. This time, I’m the one’s come to collect from you.”

  Marty Francis stood weaving on the fine Persian carpet on the floor of the judge’s living room. When Tom was able to figure out that the man was there to blackmail him to keep secret the identity of the girl in the grave, Tom said, “I don’t have that much money in the house. Let’s take a drive together and I’ll get it from the bank for you.”

  Docile as a lamb being led by its own greed to slaughter, Marty followed the judge out to the black Cadillac in the driveway.

  Once they were inside of it, the judge locked the doors.

  He backed down his driveway and drove rapidly down the street.

  When he reached the corner he turned left toward the highway instead of right toward downtown.

  “There ain’t no bank out this way,” Marty objected.

  “I keep my checkbook out at a little ranch we have.”

  A ranch where a person could be shut into a storm cellar and never be seen again.

  “Oh,” his passenger said agreeably. “Okay. But hey, slow down! You’re kind of a crazy driver, Judge, you know that?”

  Patrick was already gone.

  He had been following Marty, wanting to see what the man would do next. When he guessed what Marty was going to do—try to blackmail the judge instead of spreading suspicions about Mitch—he knew his own plans were finished. The judge would never stand for blackmail. He would have Marty charged and tossed in jail, Marty would tell the story of how he had come to have the information about his sister, somebody would put two and two together, and Abby would find out that he had tried to betray Mitch.

  Patrick drove into town and got a beer, and then he drove out to
his parents’ house to tell them he was sick of ranch work and he was leaving town again.

  Chapter Forty-two

  It was hard to drive when she felt so awful, but Catie was determined to make one last trip to see the Virgin. She hadn’t realized she would feel quite this bad, but then it had been a couple of days since she had even attempted to drive her van. During all that time she had eaten almost nothing. Now she had pain and she had a fever that had been rising higher for the last day or so, but she felt light as air, ethereal, angelic. It was a beautiful night and Catie would have liked to be able to lean her face out the window and look up at it, but it was increasingly all she could do to hold the van on the highway.

  She was veering across the center line, she knew she was, but she couldn’t do anything about that. There wasn’t much traffic and she always managed to pull the van back onto her side of the road when a car passed her going the other way. Catie didn’t want to be a danger to anybody, she told herself; she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just wanted to park in the cemetery one more time and crawl, if she had to, up to the grave and lie on her back again and tell the Virgin how grateful she was for the gift of peace.

  It hurt to turn the steering wheel when she made the turn onto Highway 177.

  Once she got the van going straight again, it hurt a little less.

  In another couple of miles, she would be there.

  Catie felt excited…and also calm…at the thought of what she was doing. It just felt right. It was going to be the perfect ending to a miraculous trip. And then she could drive home and get into bed and stay there until she died, if that’s the way things worked out. Or maybe she would have a miraculous cure of her body to match the one she’d already had of her heart, and then she would be able to flounce into her doctor’s office and laugh and say, “Look at me!” She would even call that reporter back and say, “I told you so!”

  In the moment when she first saw the cemetery she also saw something else.

  “Oh!” she breathed, her palms relaxing on the steering wheel.

  It was so beautiful…she was so beautiful…the vision Catie saw of a beautiful dark-haired girl who was smiling at her, just ahead of her. Catie knew immediately that it was the Virgin. She didn’t know how she could be so lucky, but for some reason she was being blessed again…

  As the vision filled her eyes, Catie’s foot relaxed its pressure on the gas pedal; her hands dropped off the steering wheel entirely and fell into her lap. She just stared at the Virgin, smiling back into the beautiful face that was blessing her. The big van traveled straight down one side of the highway for quite a way, cresting one hill and then picking up speed on the other side. Halfway down the long hill, the van began to swerve toward the other side of the road, where a black Cadillac was coming from the other direction. But Catie didn’t see the two men staring in horror at her in the front seat of the Cadillac. All she saw before she died was the most beautiful light she had ever seen, surrounding a beautiful dark-haired girl whose image vanished as the light accepted Catie into its warmth and glory.

  Chapter Forty-three

  Mitch stepped out of his car onto Abby’s driveway with a birdcage in his hand.

  When she saw who he had with him, she yelled for joy and came running. Mitch had already told her about finding J.D. in his father’s yard and they hadn’t even argued about which one of them would get to keep him. “He needs company,” Mitch had admitted. “And Gracie misses him,” Abby had said. “And, besides,” Mitch had added, “it isn’t as if I’ll never get to see him again…is it?”

  “It certainly is not,” Abby had agreed with so much passion they had both grinned.

  Now, with her running full-speed toward him, just to be on the safe side Mitch put the birdcage with the parrot in it down on the ground and braced himself. Sure enough, she didn’t stop, but threw herself straight at him, nearly knocking him over, so that Mitch had to wrap his arms around her and lift her off her feet and steady his legs so they didn’t both go tumbling to the ground and tear themselves up on the gravel.

  And then Mitch found that in order to properly keep their balance he had to find her mouth and kiss it and that she understood the necessity of maintaining balance and so she kissed him back so hard they nearly melded into one body standing right there in her driveway. Mitch felt his desire for her rise, and this time there wasn’t going to be anything stopping it, and no misunderstandings about it, and no bad feelings or secrets afterward, there was only going to be loving Abby forever and ever, just as he was always supposed to do.

  “Can you carry J.D., too?” she asked him breathlessly.

  “No problem,” he lied, but then they both laughed and she got down and walked, but she grabbed his arm that wasn’t being used to hold the birdcage and she held on to it as if she were never going to let him go, which was just fine with Mitch. It was a damned good thing, he thought as they walked into her house together—with J.D. suddenly starting to squawk until their ears rang and her other bird, inside the house, starting to holler back at him—it was a damned fine thing that he had already started buying property in Small Plains so that his plan of moving back and helping to keep his hometown alive was well on its way to fruition. Granted, he had once thought he was doing it out of revenge, to take over the town his father’s friends thought they owned, but it seemed revenge could turn into something else entirely, something more like hope and love, for a town and a woman…

  “And a bird,” he said out loud.

  “What?” Abby asked, looking up at him and smiling.

  “Nothing.” He kissed her. “You’re going to love my son.”

  “I know I will.”

  The twinge of pain in her heart when he said that didn’t last but a second before it turned to feelings that Abby recognized as the same ones she’d had as a young girl. Hope and love, that’s what they were. The ache in her heart over her father’s death was a more permanent pain, one that only Mitch could ever really understand, because he had lost his parents, too. Of the two of them, Abby knew she was the “fortunate” one, because she had always had her mother’s love and she’d known her father’s love, as well, before his own acts changed him. Mitch had only had other people’s parents to truly love him.

  And he’d also had Rex, Abby thought.

  “And me,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She smiled up at him. “And your son will love me.”

  “Cocky, aren’t you?”

  “I have reason to believe,” she said with confidence, and then Abby ran ahead into her bedroom, pulling Mitch along with her.

  Rex crouched beside the grave and laid a dozen white roses in front of the stone.

  A new gravestone was on order. Abby was paying for it. She’d insisted, saying she had promised it to Sarah. It would have Sarah’s full name in big bold lettering, along with the dates of her birth and death. But it wouldn’t be ready for several weeks, and Rex couldn’t wait that long to come and say hello and good-bye.

  “I guess I loved you, Sarah,” he told her.

  Maybe Abby had been right. Maybe he had been stuck ever since Sarah’s death, but now that she was free, he thought maybe he could be, too.

  “There’s a lot of cleaning up to do,” he told her.

  His knees didn’t like crouching, so he stood up, took off his hat, and held it in his hands while he talked to her one more time. “Abby and Ellen have to clear up their dad’s estate and figure out what to do with the house. They’re hoping to be able to attract a young doctor to town to buy the house and Doc’s practice. Personally, I think they’ll give it away if they have to, just to make sure we have a physician around here.” He smiled a little. “They—Abby and Ellen—have this idea it should be a woman doctor.”

  He shifted from one foot to the other.

  “I guess you know the judge is dead. And your brother. Your worthless brother, if you don’t mind my saying so. Patrick thinks your brother was…” He stop
ped. “Oh, never mind. I suspect none of that worries you anymore, so I won’t, either. My mom says you’ve been good to my dad, although I can’t imagine why, so maybe you’ll want to know there won’t be any charges brought against him for covering everything up. Or against any of us, for that matter. The statute of limitations covers up a lot of things, too. And that poor sick girl took care of punishing Tom for what he did to you and other people.”

  Rex didn’t like talking about that part of it, so he moved on.

  “Mitch and Abby are back together again,” he announced, with pleasure. “I know you may have mixed feelings about that, since you were pretty hot for him, but I think it’s destiny, with them, I really do. Nobody else ever had a chance with either one of them. Oh, and Patrick’s left town, which I hope is as okay with you as it is with me and Abby. She’s convinced now that he tried to kill all of her birds. I guess we’ll never know for sure, but of course I think it sounds exactly like something my brother would do. I think Abby’s mostly embarrassed now that she ever had anything to do with him, but, hell, she was lonely, and it’s not like she could ever let herself fall for anybody but Mitch. Pat was just a poor substitute, because that’s all Abby ever had until Mitch came back.

  “Speaking of whom—” Rex laughed. “You know his diabolical scheme to buy up downtown Small Plains? Turns out all he wanted to do was take it away from our fathers. I guess he had some nasty idea of letting the buildings go to hell, but I doubt he’d ever have been able to do it. Now he’s ready to move back and live here and bring the properties back up to lookin’ good. The mayor is thrilled, as you can imagine.”

  He remembered something else he wanted to tell her.

  “With Patrick gone, that leaves the ranch in a bind, and I’m thinking maybe I should get out of sherriffing and take over for my folks. I wouldn’t mind doing that. Hell, what am I saying, I’d love to do that. The only reason I didn’t do it earlier was because I didn’t want to have to work for my dad and be arguing with him all the time. But if he could trust Patrick to run it, he can sure as hell trust me.”