The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Nine

January 23, 1987

By the time Mitch got home that night from Abby’s house, his bare hands were so cold he could hardly get his house key out of his pants pocket and insert it in the door. When he finally got inside, he looked down and saw that his hands and feet were red from the cold. His coat and shoes were back in Abby’s bedroom. Snow coated his clothes; he felt it dripping from his hair, he felt it on his eyelashes.

Nothing on the outside of him matched the freezing shock he felt within.

He lifted his head and slowly looked around, as if seeing his own home for the first time. There was Persian carpet at his feet and climbing the stairs to the second floor. Paintings lined the front hallway. His mother’s favorite potpourri, scattered about the rooms in widemouthed Chinese porcelain bowls, permeated the air in a comforting, suffocating kind of way. He looked left into the living room, then right into the dining room. Everything was immaculate as both of his parents preferred for it to be. He felt glad to step back into an ordered universe, but it also felt unreal to him, as if he had stepped into a fantasy.

A door to his father’s office at the back of the house opened, and suddenly his father stood in the doorway, dressed in pajamas, slippers, and a bathrobe, staring at him. Tom Newquist was a big man; at six feet four, he was four inches taller than his only child. With a jowly face and beefy physique, he cut an imposing figure, whether in the judicial robe of the Sixth Judicial District, or at home in his bathrobe. It wasn’t unusual for him to be working late; he liked to work in the quiet and solitude of his home after his wife and son had gone to bed, and didn’t like it whenever either one of them decided to stay up late for some reason.

“Mitchell! What in the world-”

“Dad.” His lips trembled, his voice shook. “I have to tell you something.”

“You’re barefoot! Where have you been? Are you drunk?”

“No! Dad, listen to me, something’s happened-”

His father stepped forward. “Were you in a car accident? Are you all right? What were you doing out driving in this storm?”

“Dad!” He raised his voice. “I was at Abby’s! I wasn’t in a car! Listen to me!”

His father frowned, unaccustomed to such a tone. “Put on some other clothes first. Get warm. Then come down to my office. And don’t wake up your mother.”

“Dad.” Mitch took a pleading step forward. The single word hung in the air. His voice strained from what felt to him like a superhuman effort to speak in a calm, quiet tone that might compel his father to finally listen to him. Speaking slowly, trying to penetrate his father’s infuriating assumptions, he said, “Do you remember…the girl who used to come and clean for us? Her name was Sarah? She wasn’t from around here. I mean, she was from Franklin.” It was another, much smaller town about twenty-five miles from Small Plains. “Dad, she’s dead. I saw her…I saw…”

His mouth wouldn’t form the words that should come next.

Staring at his father’s face, a face that had gone blank and puzzled, Mitch was struck dumb with the enormity, the awfulness, the sheer weirdness of what he was going to have to say next. Say it! he told himself, screaming at himself inside his head. But he couldn’t, his voice gave out on him, his brain refused to kick in the orders. He was filled with dread at the effect the news he had to give his father might have on the judge. These were his father’s best friends he was going to…to what? Betray was the word that came to him. But that couldn’t be right. He wasn’t betraying anybody, he was only telling about the horrible thing that he had witnessed. It wasn’t his fault that he had seen them do it. It wasn’t something he could just witness and then never talk about to anybody. His father might be their friend, but he was also a judge. Mitch had to tell him, he knew he had to…

His father was frowning, as he might have over some ill-prepared legal briefs that an attorney had submitted to him.

“Who? Was this girl in an accident? What are you saying?”

“Sarah,” Mitch repeated, but then he began to shiver uncontrollably. He couldn’t remember her last name. How awful was that, he berated himself, that he couldn’t even come up with her last name? Through chattering teeth, he managed to say, “I…can’t…talk.” Ten feet away, his father didn’t move. Mitch said, “W-wait for me, okay? I’ll ch-change clothes. I’ll c-come back down…”

He fled to the stairs, and ran up to his room.

When he came back down, he was not only fully dressed in several layers of clothing, including wool socks, but he also had a blanket wrapped around him to try to still his inner, and outer, shivering. But when he sank down on a couch in his father’s office and told the judge what he had witnessed, all he got for his pains, at first, was disbelief.

“First of all,” his father said, sternly, “what were you doing in Quentin’s office?”

“What?”

Mitch froze, taken by surprise by the question. First of all? What kind of stupid “first” question was that? What did it matter? Who cared? Hadn’t his father heard anything he said? A girl was dead! Somebody they knew, somebody who used to work for them, was dead! When Mitch heard his father’s all-too-parental question, he nearly laughed, but stopped himself in time. Caught off guard by a question that felt irrelevant to him, his mind went blank. He felt completely unable to think of a lie.

It seemed his father had a whole litany of questions/demands to spring on him. “Secondly, what were you doing in their house at all at this time of night on a school night? And third, you can’t possibly have seen what you think you did. I think you were drinking, Mitchell. I suspect you may have been taking drugs.”

Mitch threw his head back, and groaned.

“Mitchell!”

This was crazy! Mitch thought, feeling a kind of desperation deep inside. He had just witnessed a barbaric act committed on the dead body of a beautiful girl by one of his father’s best friends, and all his father could do was act like a fucking robot parent!

But then, he thought again, trying to comprehend his father’s strange reactions…of course. He was talking about his father’s best friends, men who were as close to Tom Newquist as Abby and Rex were to him. If his father had come to him with such a story about Rex and Abby, he wouldn’t have believed it, either. Not at first, anyway, and not without some pretty goddamned convincing proof.

Mitch was amazed he could even think so clearly.

He knew he was going to have to slow down again, as if his father was a slow learner, which God knew, he usually was not. But this was different. This wasn’t a criminal case in his courtroom concerning people he didn’t know. This was personal. Mitch felt as if he, himself, had nearly gone into shock when he saw it; he knew his own brain had wanted to reject it, so was it any wonder that his father was being obtuse?

With a sigh of resignation, Mitch realized he was going to have to tell the entire truth, condoms and all. There was a bowl of his mother’s favorite buttermints beside him; he took one of the pale yellow candies and popped it in his mouth, buying a little time while he ate and swallowed it.

Then he started talking.

Twenty minutes later, when he had finished doing that, it was his father who seemed to be shivering. Staring at the judge, Mitch caught a glimpse of how his father would look as an old man.

“My God,” his father said, in a near-whisper. “This is true, Mitch?”

“Gospel, Dad.” He forced himself to ask, “What do we do now?”

His father’s head jerked up. In an instant, the temporary aging fled from his face and body, and he was immediately himself again, straight-backed, intimidating, commanding. “I’ll figure that out. You will go to bed, and you won’t do anything until I tell you what it’s going to be.” His voice and face softened just a little. “Try to get some sleep.”

Mitch felt immense relief to know his father had taken the awful burden from him.

He got to his feet, stumbling a little on the bottom edge of the blanket.

Without another word, suddenly far too exhausted to talk anymore, he did what his father had told him to do. When he was leaving the room, his father had a hand on the telephone.

His mother woke him before the sun was up.

When Mitch dragged his eyes open, he didn’t understand what he saw: His mother had two large suitcases open on the floor of his room. She was pulling his belongings out of his dresser drawers, and putting them in the luggage.

“Mom? What are you doing?”

He was tired, with an exhaustion that made his eyes want to sink back into his skull, that made him feel like throwing up.

His vision cleared enough for him to realize she was upset.

“Mom? What’s going on? What’s the matter?”

“Your father’s taking you out of town.” Her voice sounded strange, as if it were clogged with tears or anger. Was she mad at him? What had he done? He heard her say, “Get up and get dressed, and help me pack your things. Take as much as you can. I’ll pack everything else up and send it to you.”

“Send it to me where? I don’t understand. Are you mad at me?”

She finally turned around so he could see her better. His mom was also tall, also imposing in her way, though her way consisted of elegance of fashion and sharpness of tongue. Mitch was honest with himself-he’d never liked his mother very much, and he wasn’t absolutely sure he even loved her. He knew he was supposed to, because didn’t all sons love their mothers? But she wasn’t any fun, she was a little scary, because nobody ever knew who she was going to cut to the quick next, and she was about the least huggable mom there could be. Not like Margie Reynolds, who he loved almost as much as he loved Abby. Not like Verna Shellenberger, who was practically a walking hug. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he liked his father better. If he could have picked a father, it wouldn’t have been Nathan Shellenberger, though. It would have been Abby’s dad…

His fuzzy brain stopped cold at the words, “Abby’s dad.”

A sickening memory of the previous night came back to him.

Awake now, and filled with foreboding, Mitch looked up at his mother.

“You have to go,” she said, and turned back to emptying his drawers.

“Go where? Why?”

But he got no answer from her, just increasingly peremptory instructions to move, move, move. He tried to hurry, without understanding the reason for the haste. When he stepped outside of his room, he saw his father carrying a suitcase of his own down the hallway. When he saw that, Mitch sensed, with an ever-deepening feeling of sick dread, that all these strange goings-on had something to do with the awful thing he had accidentally seen the night before. He wished-for what would turn out to be the first of a million times in his lifetime-that he had never been at Abby’s house the night before, that he had never sneaked down their stairs, never hidden and watched from the closet.

He could hardly believe they were taking to the roads in such deep snow.

His father put chains on the tires, something Mitch had never seen him do before. The judge seemed as determined as Mitch’s mother was to remove him from home as quickly as they could get him to budge.

Mitch took it as long as he could, until his father drove past the Shellenberger ranch, and then he burst out, “Tell me!”

Without taking his eyes from the road, his father said, “They’re denying what you saw, son. Quentin and Nathan. They claim it never happened the way you said it did. They say she was already beaten when Nathan and Patrick took her in.”

“Dad, no! I saw Quentin use the bat!”

“They say that if you tell that story to anyone, they will point out that she worked for us-”

“She worked for lots of people, Dad!”

The girl, Sarah-whose last name still escaped his memory-had only cleaned for his mother for a few months. He wasn’t even sure how often she had done it. Maybe once a week? That seemed like the usual thing. He was pretty sure she had cleaned other people’s houses on other days. She was older than Mitch, already out of high school, and earning her own money that way because there were probably zero jobs where she came from. He didn’t know what she was earning it for, whether for living or for college, maybe. He didn’t know anything about her family. He knew that all his friends practically swooned every time they caught a glimpse of her. And he knew that he hadn’t paid any attention when she stopped working for his mom. One day there was some other woman doing it, and she wasn’t gorgeous like Sarah had been, that’s all he knew.

“I know she worked for other people,” his father answered him, sounding as deliberate and patient as Mitch had forced himself to be the night before. “Unfortunately, it wasn’t those people who saw what you saw last night. They’ll say that she was young, like you. They’re claiming that everybody knew she had a crush on you-”

“What? She did not-”

He wasn’t sure about that. He remembered her smiles when she had been in their house the times he had come home from school or from football practice. He remembered how his own body had reacted to her body when he saw that smile. He remembered feeling flustered, saying, “Hi,” and then hurrying away again. And he had to admit to himself that a lot of girls supposedly had crushes on him through the years. Shit.

His father was saying, “They will put you under suspicion in her death.”

Mitch was stunned. These were his mother’s and father’s friends they were talking about, these were men whose children were his best friends. This was a man-Quentin Reynolds-whom he had looked forward to having as his father-in-law some day. He had even dreamed that Quentin could be the funny, looser, more likeable dad that his own father could never be. Mitch had thought the men cared about him, the way they cared about Abby and Rex and Patrick. The feeling he had at that moment of stark betrayal carved a dividing line in his heart: before and after.

His father glanced over at him. “They are the sheriff and a doctor, Mitch. It would be your word against theirs.”

“But you’re a judge!”

“And your father, which is why no one will take my word for it, either.”

“They’re your friends!”

His father was silent.

“Why are they doing this, Dad? They know me!”

In a strangely cold tone that made Mitch stare at his father, the judge said, “I think they are no longer sure that they know you very well, Mitch.”

Mitch laid his head back against the seat, feeling stunned and frozen all over again. Did his own father suspect him of something terrible? Was he believing them, instead of his son?

“Dad? You know I’m telling you the truth, right?”

“We’ll get you out of here,” his father said, “and then we’ll find out the truth.”

“What do you mean, find out?” Mitch was so upset he was yelling. “I told you the truth!”

“Stop yelling. I’m only saying, we don’t know everything yet.”

That was true. God knew, that was true. And yet the way his father had said it…did Mitch only imagine the doubt he thought he heard in his father’s voice and saw in his face? Mitch wondered if this was what a defendant in his father’s courtroom felt like when being accused of something terrible that he hadn’t done. Did somebody like that feel as if his whole world was spinning out of control?

“Where are we going?” he asked, in a dull voice.

“Out of this storm track, first. Then we’re going to Chicago, where we will stay until we have you enrolled in a college far away from here.”

“What?” Mitch stared at his father across the car seat.

He wasn’t going to be graduating with his class, his father told him. He wasn’t going to be going to the University of Kansas with his friends. He was going to be sent where nobody could reach him to accuse him of anything he didn’t do.

A great sadness and hopelessness came over Mitch as he heard these things.

He was too confused to be logical, except to follow one terrible train of thought that struck him harder than anything ever had, even harder than what he had seen. I’ll call Abby from our hotel room, he thought at first. And then he realized that not only could he not call her, but that he might never be able to talk to her again.

When that realization struck Mitch, he lost it completely.

He turned his face to the window, and began to cry.

He did it silently, but his broad shoulders shook, and his father said nothing.

It was Abby’s father who had done the terrible thing. It was Doc who was betraying him. It was Rex’s dad who was doing it, too. Mitch couldn’t tell his best friends what their fathers had done without having that horror hanging between them for the rest of their lives. And no matter how much Abby and Rex cared about him, who were they going to believe? Were they going to believe him, or their own fathers, whom they had never had any reason to doubt? Would anybody, even Mitch’s own parents, ever believe him over the word of those two men? With a feeling of utter hopelessness, Mitch thought he knew the answer to that one: No.

I’m never going to marry Abby…

How could she ever choose between him and her own father? How could he ever marry into a family about which he knew such a terrible thing? Her father would never let him back in. Which didn’t matter, because he would never trust Quentin Reynolds again.

It was at that moment that Mitch realized he was never coming home.

“Dad,” he said, after a few miles had passed. “Maybe they killed her. Or…Patrick was there. Maybe Patrick killed her and they’re covering up for him. Maybe she wasn’t really dead when they brought her in. Maybe Doc killed her when he hit her.”

“Mitch! They wouldn’t have done something like that!”

“Right. They’d accuse me of it, but they’re such nice guys, they’d never-”

“Be quiet, Mitch.”

“What happened to her, Dad?”

“I don’t know.”

Later, after still more miles, Mitch said, “What are they covering up?”

His father shot him a glance. “You’re going to have to forget about it.”

“Forget!” He was young, he was overwhelmed by events, he was confused, he was frightened, he was in despair, but he was clear about one thing. Forget? He would never forget, and he would never, ever forgive.

In his second semester at Grinnell College in Iowa, after he hadn’t gone home for Thanksgiving, hadn’t gone home for Christmas, hadn’t gone home at the semester break, he got a letter from his mother that led him to understand that she and his father had not broken off their friendships with the Reynolds and Shellenbergers.

Life in Small Plains was continuing as before, but without him.

Such bitterness began to grow in Mitch that he stopped writing to her, refused his parents’ calls, took only their continuing checks for as long as they were willing to pay them. For most of his undergraduate years, he was more lonely and bitter than he had ever dreamed it was possible to be.

When his mother sent him photographs of the baby boy they had adopted-“Jeffrey Allen,” she wrote-he knew whom they had chosen to believe. He didn’t know exactly what they thought he had done, but he knew he had been replaced, as if he had never lived in their house as their son, as if he had never been.