The Virgin of Small Plains

  I am way too tired for this shit, Rex thought. He shrugged. “Sure.”

  When his father looked unconvinced, Rex forced himself to add, “Absolutely!”

  “All right, then. I hope to God you mean that.”

  “Dad!” He heard his own voice grating with weariness. “I told you. I do.”

  “Then listen to me. And this time, really listen. For five minutes, don’t be a goddamned teenager who listens with half a brain to what his parents say. Are you listening?”

  “Yes! Jesus, Dad…”

  “This may be the most important thing I ever tell you. I’m serious now. I am trying to prepare you for something. You need to know that you’re going to hear some things about that girl’s death that you aren’t expecting to hear.”

  Rex’s body jerked involuntarily. His heart hammering, he blurted, “Like what?”

  For the first time, his father’s gaze slid away from him.

  “You’ll hear soon enough. All you need to know right now is that I’m telling you to keep your mouth shut about it, no matter what you hear. You are never…and I mean never… to talk to anybody about last night. Ever. Not Mitch, not Abby, not anybody. If you have anything to say about it, you’ll say it to me.”

  “Fine with me,” Rex said, but his father talked right over him.

  “If anybody asks you about it, you tell them it’s an active homicide investigation and your father won’t allow you to discuss it. Period. End of story. Can I trust you to do that, Rex?”

  Rex had looked off into the distance, but now there was a silence that brought his attention back to his father. He realized the old man was staring at him, waiting for something.

  “What do you want me to say, Dad?”

  “I told you. I asked if I can trust you.”

  Rex nodded his head solemnly, as he knew his father wanted him to do. He said, “Yes,” in the serious voice he knew his father wanted to hear. But inside, he was thinking, This is bullshit. Nobody has to shut me up, no matter what weird things I hear. The last thing he ever wanted to do as long as he lived was to talk about it, to talk about her.

  “What about Pat?” he asked.

  “Pat’s going back to college.”

  “How? He flunked out.”

  “There are other schools.”

  Not for this family, there has never been, Rex thought. He felt almost as shocked at this news as he was at everything else. His family was K-State from the git-go. It had been a major blowup when Patrick flunked out; it was taken for granted it was where Rex would go next year, just as he had taken it for granted that Patrick would, somehow, end up back there again.

  “And that’s something else,” his father said to him.

  “What is?”

  “Patrick. Who knows he’s been home?”

  Rex started to shrug, but even that made his hand hurt, so he stopped. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, who have you told?”

  “Nobody.”

  “Nobody? Are you sure? What about Mitch?”

  “No, I never told anybody. It’s not like I want to brag about it.”

  His father’s face darkened a little, and he seemed to wince. “I want you to forget he was here this week. You and I found that girl’s body, just the two of us, nobody else. Patrick is still at K-State.”

  “Huh? Why?”

  And then, suddenly, Rex didn’t want to know why.

  Which was just as well, since his father didn’t give him any reasons.

  The world was tilting, throwing everything off-kilter.

  It shifted even further that morning when his mother got so sick that Quentin Reynolds told them they needed to get her to the hospital in Emporia, because it sounded like pneumonia. And it blew Rex clear out of the known universe when he got home hours later and picked up the phone. It was his friend Matt Nichols on the line, saying in an excited rush, “Man! Where have you been? Everybody’s been trying to find you! We heard you found that murdered girl on your ranch last night, and she was beaten up so bad you can’t even tell she has a face left! Is that true? Do you know who she is? And, hey, what do you know about Mitch Newquist leaving town all of a sudden like that, and supposedly never coming back?”

  It all blew at him so fast, so unexpectedly, that it panicked and confused him, and he totally forgot the warning his father had given him. The pain medication they had shot into him at the hospital when they set a cast up to his elbow was making him dopey, too. So instead of saying, “It’s an active homicide case,” he blurted, “My mom’s in the hospital, Matt. I can’t talk now.”

  “Oh! Hey, I hope she’s okay. Call me.”

  The next time he got asked, he was ready for it, even though every word of what he had to say hurt him like a stab in the gut: It’s an open homicide investigation, and my dad won’t let me talk about it. I don’t know who she was. And I don’t know where the fuck Mitch is. He never said a word to me.

  A few weeks after Mitch left, on a day when Tom and Nadine had gone to Kansas City, Abby grabbed the keys to their house that Mitch had once given her, and sneaked into their home.

  She ran upstairs to his room, and found it just the same as it had been.

  Her photo wasn’t on his dresser where it always was, but she figured that could mean anything. Maybe he had taken it with him, which would be a good sign, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe Nadine got rid of it after he left.

  Abby obsessively searched every drawer in his room.

  She looked on every surface, checked under his mattress, and under his bed.

  She went through the pockets of all the remaining clothes in his closet, looking for a secret note he might have left her, an explanation, a solution to the awful mystery of his absence. She didn’t find that, but in the pocket of his best dress suit, she found a wrapped chocolate mint, which she unwrapped and ate. Then she buried her face in his clothing, breathing in his scent until she couldn’t bear to smell it anymore. On the bed, she lay on her back, then her side, then her stomach, trying to feel where he had lain.

  Abby didn’t find any note to her. She hadn’t had any mail from him, either.

  All of his yearbooks were still there. He hadn’t taken them, with their many photos of her in school activities, and of the two of them, caught in snapshots as a couple. In one, her favorite, they were in winter coats. Mitch had his arms around her in a bear hug, and they were both grinning at the camera, looking as if they could be happy forever.

  She had gone there, to his home, hoping to find something, some clue to why he left, or some indication that he had taken his love for her with him when he went, and that he still treasured her.

  She didn’t find anything like that, but when she slowly descended the stairs to the first floor, she found Mitch’s pet parrot, J. D. Salinger, in his cage. Mitch and Rex had named J.D. after the author of Catcher in the Rye, their favorite book their junior year, because they thought it was a hilarious name for a parrot. Abby was shocked to see that the poor bird had pecked half of its feathers out. She was shocked, but she understood it. If she’d had feathers, she’d have plucked them all out by now, too, out of her uncontrollable craving for the boy she couldn’t have.

  When she saw the awful state J.D. was in, Abby felt really angry at Mitch, so angry that she hated him. It felt really good to hate him. It felt good to see that there was another creature on earth who was suffering, as she was, and for the exact same reason. She didn’t want J.D. to hurt, but seeing him like that made her feel a little less crazy. Maybe she was only as sane as a half-bald parrot, but at least she knew that another creature was taking it as hard as she was. From that moment, Abby swore to rescue the parrot and love him back to happiness. Three weeks later, she got her chance, and stole him off the Newquists’ screened-in porch. It took a long time to bring J.D. around, but eventually his feathers began to grow back, his eyes lit up again, and his appetite came back. On a day when he nuzzled her hair and gently nibbled her earlobe without drawing blood, she knew it
was going to be okay.

  The only thing about the bird that changed permanently was that he never squawked again, as he had used to do when Mitch was around. The parrot had a squawk that could rouse roosters from their perches, the judge had always said, but now the big red bird only made quiet noises, as if he was afraid of offending.

  “I don’t know what I did wrong, either,” Abby told him.

  When Abby went back to high school after the blizzard, she felt like a frozen girl, barely able to remember how to smile back at people, or to pick up a tray in the cafeteria line, much less to eat the food on it. In class, it was too hard to raise her hand to ask a question, though she answered when she was called on. When somebody came up behind her and said her name—“Abby!”—she jumped. She walked in dread of hearing his name, and quietly walked away when there was talk of him. There was a gold heart necklace he had given her; she stuck it deep into a pocket of whatever she was wearing on any given day and rolled it around in her fingers where nobody could see.

  When Ellen came home from KU, Abby hid in her room. When her girlfriends dropped by to try to see her, she fended them off, even her best friends Cerule and Randie. Now and then she picked up the phone to call Rex, or started to talk to him in the halls, but he seemed to be avoiding her, and she was mad at Rex anyway, because he hadn’t called her. Every time she was tempted to try to talk to him, she got mad all over again, and hung up before anybody answered. She wondered if Rex was feeling bad, too. He had been Mitch’s best friend forever. But then, maybe Rex knew why Mitch had left the way he did. Maybe Rex wasn’t calling her, because he didn’t want to tell her anything.

  Well, the hell with him, then, she thought.

  The hell with everybody.

  They all thought Mitch had left town because of her, because his mother had made sure to tell them so.

  Eventually, Abby caught on to how to do natural things again.

  She began to be able to hear other people say his name.

  One day she accidentally left the heart necklace in some shorts she was washing. When she heard it rattling around inside the clothes dryer she took it out and put it in the bottom drawer of her jewelry case.

  A detached part of her understood how lucky she was: she was pretty, she was well-liked, there were boys who wanted to try to be with her now that Mitch was out of the picture, and there were girls who felt closer to her now that she had been dumped like anybody else could be. Slowly, lured out of her loneliness by other kids, she came to life again. But it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t the same. She was a girl who had lost the boy she loved for reasons she believed she would never understand, and she felt estranged from her other best male friend, Rex, and she’d been accused of things she hadn’t done, and even her father seemed to be distancing himself from her, and now her best friend was a big red South American parrot.

  The distance between her and Rex continued through the following lonely summer, and then he went off to college. Each time they saw each other after that, it was a little easier to be in each other’s company. By the time they had both graduated from college, they were back on steady ground. A few times Abby tried to talk to him about Mitch, but Rex wouldn’t do it. She finally gave up the effort. But Abby always suspected that Rex felt like she did, like a triangle with one side missing.

  Chapter Seven

  January 23, 2004

  There had been a bad wreck east of Small Plains—a tractor-trailer had overturned in the blizzard—and then there were motorists for Rex Shellenberger and his deputies to help out of ditches. Now that the sun was up, more or less, he was tired from fighting the storm, and starving for a big breakfast in town. But before he could even begin to fantasize about bacon and eggs, his cell phone rang.

  It was Judge Tom Newquist, transferred to Rex’s cell phone in his SUV and sounding frantic because he couldn’t locate Nadine.

  “Where do you think she went, Judge?”

  Rex felt all of his police senses go on high alert again.

  No rest for the wicked, he thought. Or eggs or bacon, for that matter.

  “If I knew where she went, I’d find her!” Tom Newquist sounded angry, like a desperate man. “In her condition, she could go anywhere. There’s no point looking for logic in it.”

  “But you think she’s outside the house?”

  Rex drove with one bare hand on the steering wheel, feeling the cold plastic under his fingers, the other holding the metallic phone to his ear. As slick as it was out, as thick as it was still coming down, he’d a whole lot rather have had both hands on the wheel.

  “I know she’s not inside.” The judge’s tone was sharp, unhappy. “I found the kitchen door open. Snow was blowing in.”

  Shit, Rex thought, but didn’t say out loud. An Alzheimer’s patient, out in this weather?

  “Go look outside again, Judge. See if you see any footprints leading in some direction.”

  “I already did that.” The judge was no fool. “There’s nothing to see.”

  Double-dip shit, Rex thought. That meant she’d left some time ago, long enough for fresh snow to fill in any tracks she left. “I’m on my way,” he promised the judge. “Please don’t you go looking for her, all right? Nobody with any sense would go out on a day like this.” He realized what he had just said, and regretted it. “I’m sorry, Judge. I didn’t mean to say that.”

  “I thought she was doing better,” the judge said, ignoring the tactless comment. “Enough so that I sent her nurse home last night. She was making sense when she talked. She was walking around okay, taking care of herself. She wasn’t crying all the time like she has been. I thought it was safe to let her sleep in her room by herself.”

  On second thought, maybe the judge was a fool, Rex thought. Alzheimer’s patients roamed at night, worse than they did in the daytime. Anybody who’d ever known one well knew that. If the judge couldn’t handle that basic fact, he should have put her in a nursing home long ago.

  “Is Jeff there?” Rex asked him.

  Jeffrey was their other child, the one who had come along eighteen years after Mitch’s birth, the adopted child whom some people called their substitute son. Ordinarily, Rex wouldn’t have felt the need to inquire if a kid had stayed home on a school night while a blizzard raged, but Jeff was a high school senior, a breed that Rex didn’t trust any farther than he could throw them. Mainly, because he remembered his own final year of high school. But either he had whitewashed his own memory, or Jeff was worse than he or any of his friends had been at that age, and more given to copping an attitude, too. It didn’t help that his mother had gone mental, and that the judge was still the oblivious workaholic he’d always been. There had been too many times already when Rex had picked Jeff up someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, and delivered him home to his parents, who hadn’t even realized he was gone.

  The judge assured him that Jeff was asleep in his room.

  Rex refrained from asking, “Have you actually opened his door to make sure?” The judge didn’t need one more family member to worry about this morning. If Jeff was out someplace he would likely survive, which was more than could be said of the chances for his mother.

  “How soon can you be here?” the judge demanded.

  “I’ll cut through the cemetery.”

  “You’re not coming here first?”

  The judge sounded as if he was ready to argue about it.

  “I’m taking the fastest route from where I am now,” Rex said to calm him.

  The Newquists’ place backed up to the cemetery, so there was a good chance Nadine had gone that way.

  Another call came through while he was on the phone with the judge, but Rex ignored it. By the time he hung up, his mind was focused on finding Nadine. Forgetting about the second call, he laid his cell phone back down on the seat beside him in order to concentrate on his driving. As bad as the conditions were, they weren’t bad enough to take his mind off an awful irony that confronted him. He wondered if the judge was aware
of it, too: It was January 23, and he was going out searching in a blizzard. It wasn’t the first time he’d ever done that on this date. He could only hope that it ended better this time than it had the time before.

  It took him more than twenty minutes to draw near to the cemetery.

  “My God—”

  He spotted a black Ford pickup truck, wedged deep and damaged in a drainage ditch across the highway. Scrawled across its passenger-side door was a logo written in white script letters: Abby’s Lawn & Landscape, with a phone number and a website address.

  “No!” Rex yelled the word as he slid to a stop as close as he could get to the truck. No!

  To his horror, he saw a body slumped against the window on the driver’s side.

  Rex felt his heart begin to break, just as it had once before, a long time ago. He had never been in love with Abby, except for one brief time when he was seven and she was five. Even then she’d had long curly blond hair, just as she still did, and big blue eyes, and she’d been easy to love. And that was even before she had developed the figure that looked so good in tight jeans and snug shirts. But he had transferred his affection to a little red-haired girl who moved to town, and then to a series of other girls who mostly hadn’t loved him back. And so it had fallen to Mitch to love Abby, a job at which he had proved himself to be piss-poor.

  Rex tore out of his SUV, grabbing his gloves, and leaving the door hanging open behind him.

  He half-slid, half-ran toward the wrecked pickup truck, yelling and praying all the way. He loved Abby like a sister, and he didn’t think he could stand it if she was dead. Losing Mitch had been bad enough, but this would be so much worse. When he got to the truck he jerked the driver’s-side door open.

  “Abby!”

  At the sound of Rex’s voice, she started to come to. She saw a white sky through a windshield that was tilted, for some strange reason, upward. She saw that she was inside the cab of her own truck, held in place by her seat belt. The outside of her left arm and the left side of her head hurt. A lot. She was so cold she felt numb all over. When she turned to see who was saying her name, the view spun sickeningly for a moment. With effort, she recognized the handsome-homely face that was staring at her as if she was some kind of horrifying sight to see, as if he had just come across Godzilla in a pickup truck.