The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Fourteen

Mid-morning, Abby walked into her parents’ house and yelled, “Dad?”

“I’m in the kitchen,” her father yelled back.

She walked into the cheerful, spacious room where her mother had once ruled with a magic spatula and a frying pan, and found him seated at the table in his bathrobe, staring at the screen of the laptop computer he had set up there.

“Whatcha doing?” she asked him.

It being a holiday, this was one of the few times in the year when he wasn’t working. Unless an emergency called, of course, in which case his holiday would be over.

“Reading The New York Times online,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” she teased him. “You can’t fool me. I know what you’re really reading. TV Guide. Checkin’ up on your soaps.”

Her father never watched TV. She would have been willing to bet that he hadn’t had any of their sets on for anything but the weather since her mother died. Before computers, he had amused himself by reading books and medical journals. Now he was as addicted to the Internet as any teenager could be.

“Aren’t we having dinner at your sister’s tonight?” he asked her, with a brief glance up.

“Yeah, but I thought I’d stop by.” She walked over to his coffeepot and touched the side of it. “Is this coffee old enough to vote yet?”

“It was fresh yesterday.”

Abby poured a bit of it into a cup, looked at it, sniffed it, and said, “Yes, it was.”

She turned her back on the coffee, leaned against the counter, and said, “Dad? Remember the night the Virgin died?”

“Mm,” he said, through closed lips, and without looking up from his screen.

“You know Mitch was here that night, right?”

“Mm. Your mother told me.”

Abby looked at him, feeling irritated that he wasn’t looking at her. “Dad? Do you mind? Could you pay attention to me for a minute?”

It had come out sounding harsher…and more full of latent meaning…than she had meant it to, but her dad didn’t appear to have heard anything amiss in it. He merely responded by finally looking directly at her.

“Yes, Abby,” he said. “What is it?”

She stared at her stout, gray-haired father, her very smart, very hardworking, very respected doctor-father, and felt so much love for him in that instant that she nearly burst into tears. However remote he had become over the years, it didn’t erase the sixteen years of love that had come before, when he had been a funny, affectionate dad to both of his girls, and perhaps especially to his younger one. The words, “I miss you, Dad,” almost burst out of her mouth at that moment, but she clamped down on them, not yet ready to deal with whatever might come after them.

“Why are you asking me about that girl, Abby?”

She shrugged a little. “Because I never have before?”

He smiled a little. “Are you asking me?”

“No.” Abby smiled a little, too. “That’s why I’m bringing it up, I guess. Because we’ve never talked about it, and now I want to.”

“All right.”

He sounded cautious, but Abby didn’t feel like being cautious. “That night. I want to tell you what I remember.” When he didn’t say anything, she went on. “Mitch and I were in my room. You and mom were in yours. At some point, Mitch went downstairs in the dark to get something.” She had a feeling her father knew what that was, so she hurried over that part. “After he left my room I heard your emergency phone ring in your bedroom and right after that I heard you walk down the hall.”

She paused, and he nodded as if to say, Okay, go on.

“I ran out and asked you what was going on, but you just told me to go on back to bed, and you went on downstairs.”

He nodded again. “I think I remember that.”

“Dad, that was the last time I ever saw Mitch.”

He looked down and for a moment she thought she had lost him to the computer screen again. But he shifted his gaze toward the window and stared out of it at the beautiful Memorial Day weather.

“Did you see him, Dad? In the house that night? Or afterward?”

“No, Abby, the last time I saw Mitch must have been earlier on that day.”

“Oh, and there’s something else I remember,” Abby said. “After I went back into my room, I saw headlights coming up our driveway and I heard a car, or a truck. Was that her, Dad? I mean, was that Nathan bringing her up to your office?”

“I imagine it was.”

“What happened then, Dad? Did he carry her in by himself? Was it Nathan who called you on the phone? Did you know he was coming and did you know they’d found a dead girl in their pasture?”

“The answer to all of that is yes, Abby.” Her father cleared his throat. “If you want to know what happened next, I’ll tell you what I remember. I had him put her in one of my examining rooms, but we both already knew she was dead. He had already established that, of course. So all I could do was have him lay her down and then leave her there until morning, when we could get McLaughlin’s to pick her up.”

Her father stopped speaking.

“That’s all?” she asked him. “That’s all that happened?”

“That’s all that happened, Abby. Why, do you think there was something else?”

For the second time, she felt tears backing up in her throat and behind her eyes and she fought them back. “I don’t know, Dad, I guess I just wondered if maybe Mitch might have seen it, and it upset him, and I don’t know…”

Her father looked puzzled.

“I guess I’m still looking for a reason for why he left,” she admitted. “It sounds crazy when I say it to you, though. I mean, it would be terrible to see a murdered person, of course, but that wouldn’t make somebody leave their home and never come back.”

“I wouldn’t think so,” her father said, sounding cautious again.

“Dad, you know I didn’t drive him away, don’t you? Whatever Nadine said about me, you know it wasn’t ever true?”

“Abby.” He looked pained, embarrassed. “Of course I know that.”

She turned around and started making a fresh pot of coffee to hide her face from him. It was ridiculous, she told herself, that she should still feel so emotional about the whole thing after so much time. When she had the pot washed out and a fresh filter and new grounds inserted and the pot turned on, she turned around to face him again.

“Do you remember anything about her, Dad?”

“Like what?”

“She was young…”

“Yes, probably not much older than you.”

“What color was her hair, was it long or short?”

“Abby, I don’t remember that.”

“You don’t? Was she thin or fat? Do you think she was pretty?”

He took a deep breath, thought for a moment, and then said, “My memory of her is that she was rather tall for a girl, and she had long dark hair, and she wasn’t thin, but she wasn’t fat, either. I’m afraid it was impossible to tell if she was pretty.”

The horror of that sentence hung between them.

“Was it hard for you, Dad?”

Something in her father’s eyes at that moment frightened her. It was something that sharpened his gaze, something hard, like pain or anger. For a moment she feared she had tread too far.

But his answer was mild. “I’m a doctor, Abby.”

She supposed he meant that to explain everything, as if a doctor would never be upset by any condition of any patient, but Abby knew that was far from the truth, and that he got very involved with his patients-angry at them when they didn’t follow his advice, angry at diseases he couldn’t defeat, sad when he lost somebody, delighted with recoveries and babies. Doc Reynolds may have drawn away from his family, but he had, if possible, drawn even closer to his patients over the years.

The coffee finished perking and Abby stayed to drink a cup of it.

When she said good-bye to him and let herself out, her father barely looked up to say, “I guess I’ll see you tonight,” before returning his gaze to his computer again. She was surprised, then, to look up from inside her car and see the edge of the living room curtains fall. It seemed that her father had actually gotten up from his computer, walked to the window, and watched her leave.