The Virgin of Small Plains

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.

“Abby, talk to me! Your eyes are open…Tell me how many butt-ugly sheriffs you see standing in front of you.”

“Three.”

He looked even more horrified, until she smiled.

“Kidding. There could only be one of you, ever.”

“Whew. Don’t scare me like that. What happened to you?”

Abby put her left hand cautiously up to her forehead, and when she pulled it down to examine it, she saw blood on her glove. Feeling stiff as a corpse, she reached up her right hand to lower the visor and lift the cover of the mirror there. What she saw scared her, too-how pale she looked, how blood was trickling from underneath her black wool cap. Her pupils looked big and black, which must account for how much her eyes hurt, she thought. She grabbed sunglasses from the seat beside her, and gently eased them onto her face. Then she snatched the cap off to see her own smashed blond curls, now tinted red and pink.

“I look punk,” she said weakly. “All I need is a safety pin through my eyebrow.”

“Put your hat back on before you catch pneumonia.”

“Yes, Dad.” Despite her sarcasm, she did as he said, even though the pain when she lifted her left arm made her suck in her breath. When she saw that her coffee had all spilled out, she realized she couldn’t smell it and wondered for a panicky moment if her nose had frozen. When Rex leaned in to examine her face, she was relieved to smell the leather of his jacket.

“You scared the shit of me, Abby,” he said, accusingly. “When I saw your truck in the ditch…”

The window wasn’t cracked, and neither was her head, she guessed, though the skin was definitely split up there. The pain of disturbing her own wounds woke her up some more. She remembered, in a rush, how she had landed there.

“What happened to my truck? Get me out of this seat belt. Have you got Nadine?”

“No. How do you know about Nadine?”

It was Abby’s turn to look horrified. “Didn’t you hear my message?”

“No, I just happened to be coming this way-”

“Oh, my God, Rex! Nadine is in the cemetery! I saw her walking there in her bathrobe-”

He straightened up and looked in that direction. “Jesus,” he said in a low, urgent voice. Quickly, he shoved back the glove on his left wrist and checked his watch. “It’s six thirty-two. Do you know when you crashed?”

Abby was already fighting her way out of the cab of her truck, using Rex’s big, lanky body as leverage to propel herself safely down to the ground, into the deep snow where he stood. The snow was so deep that if he had on boots, she couldn’t see them.

“It had to have been around six,” she told him. “Oh, my God, Mitch, a whole half hour!”

“Mitch?” Rex had looked as if he was ready to leave her there, and go find Nadine. But now he turned back. “You called me Mitch, Abby.”

She stared into the familiar brown eyes that now held a hint of anger.

“I did? I called you Mitch? Well, that’s his mother out there. Who cares, Rex! Does it really matter if I call you Fred or Harvey? Come on, we’ve got to find her. Help me, I’m dizzy-”

“You’re not going. You may have a concussion.”

“Oh, shut up, Rex. I’m freezing, I need to move. I can show you where she was.”

She felt her vision starting to black out, and quickly leaned into him until she could see again.

“Yeah, you’ll be a big help,” he said, still sounding angry.

“Nadine!” she snapped at him, and tugged at his coat to get him to hurry.

He grabbed her to steady her, and then kept tight hold of her as they hurried up out of the culvert and made their way through the snow to his SUV. Three times, one or the other of them slipped, nearly bringing both of them down, but his strength kept them upright, and she was determined not to let him go alone. Abby didn’t trust a man to be able to find anything. Not even Rex, not even to find a sixty-three-year-old woman in a rose-colored bathrobe in the snow.

“She was near there, the first time I spotted her, Rex.”

With a frantically waving finger, Abby pointed to a place about a hundred feet past the front gate.

“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she urged him, even though she knew he couldn’t go any faster. “She wasn’t much farther along the last time I saw her.” Abby’s voice choked on the words. Rex reached over to squeeze her hand, before he put his own back on the wheel. “She has on a bright pink bathrobe, Rex, so we ought to be able to find her.” Hopefully, she said, “Maybe she doesn’t know she’s cold, you know? Maybe she thinks it’s summer. Maybe she thinks she’s just crossing the street to visit my mother.”

“Maybe” was all Rex replied to that fantasy, but at least he didn’t try to squelch it.

That was one of the things she loved best about Rex, Abby realized, that he was a realist, but not a squelcher. People could believe six crazy things to Sunday, and he’d just nod his head in a respectful sort of way, and say, “Interesting.” Of course, he picked up a whole lot of information about people that way, too, which came in handy when he was investigating something or other. Rex wasn’t like Mitch’s mom, who had always been more likely to say something like, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” and hurt somebody’s feelings. Of all her parents’ closest friends, Nadine had always been the only one she didn’t like, and the only one she’d felt afraid of. Rex’s sheriff father was gruff to his boys, and the judge could be intimidating, but both men had always been pussycats to Abby. Nadine was a different story. She had a sharp tongue on her, and strict ideas of how the world ought to be. Alzheimer’s had only made her harder to get along with, as if it had eaten down to the core of her bitter character, revealing the heart of her Inner Bitch. When Abby had complained about Nadine to her own mother, Margie had usually said some version of, “Oh, Abby, I’ve known Nadine all my life, and besides, this town’s not big enough that we can be all that picky about our friends.”

The two of them, Nadine and Margie, would bicker and sometimes stop speaking to each other for a few days-it was weeks after Mitch left before they spoke again-but they had always wound up at the same card tables again. Nadine had been smart, with a sharp, gossipy wit, and Abby’s mom had always said it was wiser to be friends with her than to be her enemy. It wasn’t that Nadine couldn’t ever be kind-she was, sometimes, especially if it boosted her reputation. It was that kindness wasn’t her instinctive reaction, her default position, as it had been with Margie, and still was with Rex’s mom, Verna.

“Rex?” Abby said, as they scanned the white landscape. She was still feeling dizzy, but the cold was bracing her awake. The front half of the cemetery she was searching with her eyes dated to the 1800s, with gravestones worn thin, slick, and plain with time. In the back half, over a high ridge, the elegant old tombstones gave way to flat modern markers. Abby hated the back half, even though it was so much easier for her guys to mow. Everybody hated the back half, but nobody knew how to stop the march of lawn-mowing progress, not even the owner of Abby’s Lawn & Landscape. “She could die without ever seeing Mitch again.”

“We’ll all die without ever seeing Mitch again,” Rex muttered.

Abby started to say, “Maybe she wouldn’t even remember him,” when she spotted a daub of color in the snow. “Rex, there!”

He pulled the SUV as close as he could get, his tires crunching over snow, and they hurried out of it. Holding on to each other again, they slogged through the deep snow to get to her. Nadine Newquist lay on her left side between two ragged lines of gravestones that were nearly up to their tops in white. Snow had already begun to cover her; in another few minutes of the heavy fall, they wouldn’t have been able to see her at all.

Even though Abby was half-expecting this outcome, it was still a shock.

It was so cold, so lonely.

She smelled wood fire from somebody’s chimney, and tasted it on her tongue. The contrast between cozy and comfortless seemed at that moment unbearably cruel.

Rex knelt, touched Nadine, gently turned her over so they could see her eyes were open, staring into the gray-and-white day. For form’s sake, and not because he thought she lived, he bent his ear to her chest, placed fingers on her throat and wrist, checked for a pulse that wasn’t there. She wore a thin white nightgown under the rose bathrobe, prompting Rex to shake his head and say, “Jeez, she was probably already half-frozen by the time she got here.” Her long, thin, bony feet were as bare as the day she’d been born. Her auburn hair-which she had always gone to Kansas City to get fixed, because she hadn’t trusted anybody local to do it-showed roots as white as the ground on which she lay.

“You know what people are going to say, don’t you?” Abby asked, in a shaky voice.

He leaned back and stared up at her. She stood above him with her hands fisted down in her pockets and blood crusted onto the swollen side of her pretty face.

“No, what?”

Abby pointed beyond Nadine to the top of a particular tombstone that poked up over the drifts. The inscription on it was hidden by the snow. “They’re going to say Nadine was trying to get to that grave,” Abby told him, referring to the partly obscured tombstone. “They’re going to say that if Nadine could only have stumbled a few more feet, it might have saved her.”

Rex turned his head to stare at the gravestone that Abby meant.

He knew it well.

It was the burial marker of the girl that he, his father, and brother had found in another blizzard seventeen years ago. Back then, the people of the town of Small Plains had been horrified by her murder and saddened by the fact that nobody claimed her. They had pitched in to pay for her funeral expenses. They had turned out in their best clothes for her burial. And since that time a legend had grown up around her. People claimed that the unidentified murdered girl could heal the sick, that she interceded on behalf of people who needed help, all because she was grateful to the town for caring about her.

“Yeah?” Rex said in a voice that came out harder than he had intended, “Well, people frequently prove themselves to be idiots.”

“Rex!”

He frowned at her. “You don’t believe all that crap, do you?”

“I don’t know-”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He sounded disgusted. “Forget all that. Just come on. I’ll carry her to the car, and we’ll take her home.”

“Okay.” But then she said, “Nadine would hate this, Rex. It’s…undignified.”

“What else can we do?”

“Yeah.”

He looked again at the other gravestone she had pointed out.

“What?” Abby asked, noticing his distraction.

“You know what today is?” Rex said.

“Monday?”

“No, I mean the date. It’s the twenty-third of January.” He looked at Abby, as if expecting something to dawn on her. After a moment, when it didn’t, he said, “Just like on the day we found her.”

Abby frowned, then understood what he was saying. “It is? Oh, God, Rex, I always forget that you found her.”

“Not just me. My dad and…my dad was there, too.”

Abby glanced at the almost-hidden gravestone. “I was barely aware of it, Rex. I know that sounds awful, but I had my mind on other things. You know how it is when you’re sixteen, the whole world is only about you. A meteor could have hit and I wouldn’t have noticed.” She looked at him and he saw her brow furrow above her sunglasses, as if she was puzzled by something. “I don’t remember seeing much of you.”

He nodded. “I think I was hiding, like you.”

“Hiding?” Abby was, at first, uncomprehending, but then in a rush, staring at his face, she got it; after seventeen years she finally understood something she had missed before. “Oh, God, Rex, it was awful for you, wasn’t it? Finding her body. And then Mitch leaving…” Tears stung her eyes. “Rex, I’m sorry. I should have known, I should have said something a long time ago. I was thinking only of myself.”

He waved it off. “Are you kidding? I wasn’t exactly a great friend to you, either.”

She sniffed in the cold air, and said, “Well, I’m sure glad we got over that.”

“Yeah.” He smiled at her, but then his smile faded. “Come on. I don’t want to do this any more than you do, but we’ve got to.”

“Déjà vu, for you.”

“Not so much. I’ve picked up other frozen people in the snow since then.”

“Lucky you. Strange coincidence, though.”

Rex squatted down in the snow, and squinted at the body of his former best friend’s mother. “Yes, it is,” he agreed, in a voice gone suddenly thoughtful and quiet.

“Well, I hear life is strange.”

“No kidding.”

“Maybe my mother killed her,” Abby said.

He jerked around and stared at her. “What?”

Abby touched the sore side of her face, winced, and said, “When Mitch left, Nadine was not very nice to me. My mother said she’d kill her for being so mean to me.” She made an effort to smile a little, but it hurt, so she gave that up and just looked down at him. “Maybe my mother lured her out from the grave and got her revenge.”

“Sometimes,” he said, still staring at her, “you are pretty strange yourself.”

“Yeah, and you’re a fine one to talk.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Oh, nothing.” Abby pointed at something. “What’s that, Rex?”

“What?”

“That thing she has in her hand. What’s she carrying?”

Carefully, Rex turned the thin hand over, revealing what Nadine Newquist had gripped in tight fingers. He could see just enough of it to be able to tell Abby what it was. “It’s a picture of Jeff.”

“Oh!” Abby grabbed the fabric of her coat above her heart. “That’s so sad.”

This one thing had finally brought her to tears. She had felt anxious and scared when they were searching for Nadine, but now, finally, she felt sorrow-even if she did suspect it was more for her mother and other people she had lost than for the woman in the snow before them. Still…Nadine may have had a serpent’s tongue, but she had gone to her death clutching a photograph of her adopted child, her younger son.

Rex lifted the thin, light body, and carried it back like a baby to his car. Abby ran alongside, pulling at the robe and nightgown to make sure Mitch’s mom had some modesty in death.

Rex carried Nadine into the Newquists’ house, through the front door.

At the judge’s suggestion, Rex laid the body down on a double bed in a guest room on the first floor.

“I thought you’d want me to bring her here,” he told Tom Newquist. The judge stood in the bedroom doorway, blocking the view from Abby, who stood behind him. “I thought you’d want to call McLaughlin’s and have them come and pick her up here, rather than have me carry her into the funeral home like this.”

Tom Newquist nodded his head without speaking.

He hadn’t said a word about his wife since they had arrived, except to ask, “Where’d you find her?” He had looked drawn and tired when he opened the door-admitting them into the immaculate, fragrant home his wife had kept for him for many years-but there wasn’t any shock in his eyes. It had never been a situation that was going to end well, and they all knew it.

As Abby looked up at him-at all six feet four of him-from behind, outside the guest room, she saw that his back was stiff as always, his posture suggesting what it always did, that this was a big man capable of shouldering big responsibilities.

She had felt nervous at the front door, as if somehow he’d blame her.

Rex came out of the room, and the judge stepped aside to let him pass.

“You’re famous for always locking your doors,” Abby heard Rex say as the two men moved toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “How in the world did the door come to be open this time?”

She heard the judge say in his deep voice, “One of the damned nurses.”

As she heard the men’s footsteps moving away toward the kitchen at the back of the big house, Abby quietly walked into the bedroom and then over to the side of the bed where her late mother’s friend lay. There was a silky white comforter folded at the foot of the bed. Abby reached for it, pulled it open, releasing its scent of potpourri, and she neatly covered Mitch’s mom with it, up to her shoulders. She took a few moments to straighten and smooth Nadine’s hair, which was still wet from the snow. Rex had closed the eyelids when he had knelt beside her in the cemetery.

The right hand still clutched the photo of her adopted son Jeff.

Abby stood for a moment staring down at the woman she had feared and disliked, but whom she had been raised to treat with courtesy and respect, no matter what. Then she leaned over and-dripping snow, herself-gently kissed the cold forehead. It wasn’t a forgiving kiss, and she knew it. She did it for her own mother, and for Mitch. As she did it, she hated herself for the thought that had occurred to her the moment she knew for sure that Nadine was dead. It wasn’t a thought for Nadine’s final suffering. It wasn’t for the judge. It was the absolutely last thing she ever wanted to think at this moment, but she was powerless over it, and so it came to her anyway…

Maybe he’ll come back for her funeral.