The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Twenty-two

May 31, 2004

Randie raised her head, and looked around Sam’s Pizza, where the friends sat at a big round wooden table. “Am I going blind, or did it suddenly get dark in here?”

“It’s not you,” Abby told her. “Look outside, guys.”

Obediently, they turned to stare out the picture windows facing the main street. Cars were driving with their headlights on, even though the sun hadn’t gone down yet. Right at that moment, pings against the glass told them that rain had started falling.

“Looks like we got in just before the downpour,” Ellen observed.

One large pizza sat on the table in front of them-loaded with everything, thin crust, double cheese, sprinkled with hot pepper by Cerule’s liberal hand. The three women who weren’t either a mayor or a funeral director had beers in front of them. For Ellen and Susan, who might get called out by emergencies at any time, there was iced tea. The women were halfway finished eating when the lights in the restaurant suddenly seemed to glow a whole lot brighter than before.

“Ooo,” Susan said, “I just love the weather when it gets like this.”

“You would,” Cerule said, with a derisive snort. “You love morgues, too.”

“No, seriously,” Susan insisted. “Don’t you just love it when the air gets all dark and spooky like this? I think it’s exciting, like anything could happen.”

“Yeah, like we could all get blown away at any moment,” Cerule retorted.

With perfect timing, the manager of the restaurant stopped by their table. “We’re under a tornado watch, ladies. If it turns into a warning, we can head to the basement.” She smiled at them. “If you don’t mind sitting on cases of tomato sauce.”

When she moved on to the next table, Randie said, “If a tornado hits us and breaks all that tomato sauce, they’ll think there’s been a massacre.” After a laugh went around the table she returned them to their prior hot topic of conversation. “What do you think he’s been doing with himself all these years?”

“I heard he’s a lawyer,” Cerule said.

“You did?” Abby stared across the table at her. “I never heard that.”

“I heard real estate,” Susan offered.

“Well,” Ellen said, “we know he got married and had a kid, right Abby?” Nadine had made sure their mother knew that much. “A son, the year before Mom died. And we know he settled in Kansas City at some point. And we know he still looks better than he has any right to.”

It was the consensus of the women that any man who wouldn’t come back for his mother’s funeral was an unfeeling, selfish, no-good son of a bitch, no offense intended to Nadine. They were so busy dissecting him that none of them paid any attention to the worsening weather.

At 7:10, the sheriff’s department got word from an amateur storm spotter of a funnel cloud sighted half a mile west of U.S. 177, near state road 12. Five minutes later, it was reported “on the ground.” It was timed moving on the ground for sixteen seconds before it lifted back up into the air.

The spotter followed it in his van, keeping in touch by cell and short-wave radio.

At 7:22, he reported it moving, “in the air, over the cemetery, heading southeast at about fifteen miles an hour.”

When Rex got the first report, he realized the twister had touched down in the approximate location of Abby’s home and greenhouse. When he couldn’t raise her by land or cell phone, he ran to his car and rocketed out of town to check on her. Partway there, he got a report that the tornado had taken a sudden veer in his direction. It was now moving southeast along the same general route where he was going northwest. Southeast? Rex thought incredulously. Tornadoes didn’t go southeast, they went northeast. He saw it when it emerged from clouds that looked about a mile and a half away from him. What the hell was this one doing?

At least it wasn’t on the ground anymore.

It was high up in the air, but to his eyes it looked as if it was dipping lower by the second, and then it split in two, forming twin funnels.

Oh shit, Rex thought.

It might come back together again, or one or both of them might touch ground or they could both vanish harmlessly into the clouds again.

If they were still moving at fifteen miles an hour…

And they were only a mile and a half away…

Less than that now…

There were no highway overpasses handy. There were no side roads going in a safer direction. If he were to drive off into the fields, he was going to have to plow through fences to do it, and there’d be budgetary hell to pay for the damage later. If, on the other hand, the tornado picked up his car and hurled it, not even the county’s insurance agent could argue with that. A human body inside in a car during a tornado was a bad idea, however.

Rex drove his SUV onto the shoulder of the highway.

Just as the first small hail arrived, he flung himself out of his vehicle and down into a culvert at the side of the road, pulling his jacket up over his head to protect himself from the hail, rain, and flying debris.

“This is the real thing, ladies,” the Sam’s Pizza manager told them, and then she raised her voice for all of her customers to hear. “Tornado sighted, coming this way! Everybody follow me! Everybody into the basement, now!”

“Sure, sure,” Randie scoffed, even as a customer said, “Tornado?” in a loud, scared voice. But Randie said only to her friends, dismissively, “How many times have we heard that?” She sliced into a triangle of pizza as casually as if the restaurant manager hadn’t said anything. “You know what I think, I think Rex runs that siren too damned much. Do you guys even take it seriously anymore? I swear, the thing goes off if somebody so much as breathes heavy! Did you all hear it when it went off the other night? It finally woke me up, but all I did was turn over and go back to sleep.”

“I know!” Susan reached for the hot pepper flakes while some customers around them hurried to follow the manager. At a couple of other tables, people just kept eating, like the five friends. “It’s like crying wolf. Someday, we’ll have a real one, and we won’t pay any attention to it, and we’ll all die.”

“Good for business, though,” Cerule teased her.

Susan gave her a repressive look, which earned a wink.

“Rex wouldn’t run the siren,” Abby defended him, “unless there’s a good reason-”

“Whoa,” Cerule interrupted.

They saw that she was staring out one of the big windows near their table, and they all turned to look, too.

“Jeez,” Randie breathed. “Could be a real wolf this time.”

With glances at one another, but without much talk, they put down their food and drinks and started getting up from the table.

Abby hurried over to the window to get a closer look at the conditions outside. They saw her crane her neck to look up, and then look from side to side down the street. In front of her, on the other side of the glass, the evening air had taken on a strange yellow-greenish tint. When she turned around and said, “You ought to see these clouds,” the other four women went over to join her. They saw the oily, boiling look of the black clouds above them. Hail began to ping against the glass.

“Okay, I believe it,” Randie said, and turned to seek shelter.

Abby, Ellen, Susan, and Cerule followed her over to where the restaurant manager stood, waving stragglers like them down the stairs. As they joined the people moving toward the open door, Cerule poked Abby in the ribs. When Abby looked at her, Cerule nodded her head to point to somebody.

Over by the cash register, Abby saw Jeff Newquist, the judge’s teenager, the adopted boy known cruelly around town as “the substitute son.” He was a sharp-featured kid, taller than average, husky, with dark eyes and long dark hair that he wore caught back at the nape of his neck in the kind of ponytail that was sure to get yanked on by every cowboy who walked past it. As the two friends watched him, Abby suddenly drew in her breath in a little gasp, and whispered, “Did he just do what I thought I saw him do?”

Cerule gave her a startled glance, and nodded.

Jeff Newquist, seventeen years old, out for pizza with a couple of his buddies, and heading for the basement along with everybody else, had just lifted several candy bars from a display on top of the cash register counter and slipped them into a pocket of his jacket. He fumbled one of them, which fell to the floor at the feet of his friends. One of them laughed. Jeff looked around the restaurant, and stared straight into Abby’s face. And then suddenly, the three of them turned around and trotted toward the restaurant door.

“Hey!” Cerule yelled to them.

Behind them, the manager yelled, “Boys! Don’t go out there!”

But the kids just laughed, rolled their collars up on their necks, and continued running out of the restaurant and into the street, where the first drops of rain were starting to fall, and the wind was picking up.

At the basement door, Ellen said to the manager, “Do you know those boys stole some candy bars from you?”

The manager sighed and just said, “It wouldn’t be the first time. Must be nice to be a judge’s kid.”

The friends vanished down the staircase, hurrying behind everybody else. There was a rising chatter from the underground shelter, where it seemed as if everybody was reaching for their cell phones at the same time. The women heard snatches of concern, of people trying to check on children, husbands, wives, homes, businesses, and some expressions of scared worry when their calls didn’t go through. In the dim light, they saw they were surrounded by anxious faces. They were all the way to the bottom, and seated on packing cartons, pulling out their own cell phones to try to call their families, when they realized that Abby hadn’t followed them down.

“Abby?” Her sister Ellen stood up just as several things seemed to happen all at once. Thunder rolled so loud it sounded as if it was right above their heads, lightning cracked almost instantly afterward, and the electricity went out, throwing them into total darkness. A crashing noise above their heads made them all jump, and a few women screamed. In the darkness, a child began to cry.

Abby had hurried back to the windows to check on the storm one more time before going to the basement, but then she found that she couldn’t pull herself away from the sight of her town’s main street. There was something magical to her about the moments right before, and then immediately after, a thunderstorm. There was something uncanny and beautiful about the quality of the light and the way everything looked in it.

As she stared, mesmerized, she saw the three boys run to a pickup truck, hop in it, do a U-turn in the middle of the street, and then drive off into the direction of the storm. Her heart pounded when she saw what they were doing; she wanted to grab their rear bumper and haul them back to safety.

A few other cars were still plying the road, and there were even a couple of people out on foot. The rain hadn’t started to pour yet, though it felt to her as if it could at any moment. Then this odd, suspended moment of beauty would be gone.

How could Mitch have stayed away so long?

Abby had thought he loved their hometown as much as she did. She thought they had talked about it, how they wanted to stay here, where their families had roots going back a long, long time.

She was scared to see him again. The very thought of it dried up her mouth and made her feel shaky. She didn’t know what she’d say; she didn’t know how she’d act. Paralyzed, probably. Maybe she should be combative: Why the hell did you do that? Where the hell have you been? But what if she burst into tears, as she was prone to do when she was angry? That would be humiliating.

Maybe she should play it cool.

Yeah, that’s gonna happen, Abby thought, echoing the sarcastic tone that Rex had used with his deputies that morning. Yeah, right, she was going to be cool when she saw Mitch for the first time in seventeen years like Rex was going to send his deputies to Miami for a forensics conference.

Maybe she could avoid him altogether. It was just a visit, her friends had guessed. Visits didn’t last long; people left again, after visits.

Abby looked at how the asphalt glistened on the street outside, she looked through the store windows into the strange clarity of their interiors, able to see shelves and merchandise, colors and forms.

And still she didn’t move, even when she heard the basement door close behind her.

The air darkened even more, changing the feeling of the scene at which she was staring. Now, in the eerie, ominous cast of the greenish light, everything looked hyper-accentuated, as if an artist had outlined every building with a black line, making all of them pop out from the air around them. Abby thought it still looked beautiful in a strange way, like a painting by a demented artist. There were odd angles she had never noticed before, juxtapositions of signs she could swear she had never seen before. The gargoyles on the nineteenth-century bank building on the corner seemed to shift on their pedestals, to flash their bulging eyes.

Her hometown looked vulnerable in the strange light.

Because it is vulnerable, Abby thought, with an inner shudder.

No matter how much better it was doing than a thousand other towns, Small Plains was always just one disaster away from their fate. Most of the stores along this main street were occupied, but that didn’t mean there were no empty storefronts at all. There were, in fact, three of them in a five-block area, counting both sides of the street. Their empty interiors were hidden behind the civic advertisements that Ellen, as mayor, had persuaded the owners to let her put up, so nobody could see the dirt and bleakness within. Their FOR SALE signs were discreetly posted in a lower corner of their front windows.

Three wasn’t much, as such things went, in old towns of this size, but it only counted the vacant ones. For every one of those three that had already failed, Abby knew of a dozen others that were struggling. They were making it, still making it, but barely. She was a small-business owner herself; she knew about struggling to make a go of it. She doubted those particular store owners had sufficient insurance, or any at all. If a tornado swept straight down Main Street, in minutes there would be changes they might not be able to rise above.

One disaster away from disaster…

Something outside caught Abby’s eye.

An old man was coming out of the Wagon Wheel Café, or trying to.

She watched, appalled, as he was struck by a sudden blast of wind, and pushed back against the brick wall of the building. Abby stepped away from the big window and ran toward the door to go help him, just as the hair on the backs of her arms rose and her scalp tingled. In the instant afterward, a lightning bolt hit the electrical transformer half a block away, turning the sky bright green, and throwing downtown into darkness. The bolt ricocheted off the transformer, shot horizontally above Sam’s Pizza, and struck the light pole in front of it. The pole cracked in two, sending the top half through the plate glass window where Abby had just been standing. The power of the lightning blew her against a table, which fell over, taking her to the floor with it. Glass flew like shrapnel behind her. The top half of the pole missed her by less than two feet; splinters from it landed all around her. The crossbars of the pole lay several feet beyond her head. Electrical wire draped the tables. Abby had already accidentally brushed against an exposed end of it before she realized it was dead. She felt astonished to realize she wasn’t dead, or even injured. There was a burned smell all around her, but no fire. When she realized she had just touched an electrical wire of who knew how many thousands of volts, she nearly lost her pizza. Just to be sure it was all dead, she grabbed pieces of pizza and crust from the floor and tossed them onto the wires at various places. When nothing happened, no sparks or crackling, she decided it was safe to move the wires. Using the legs of a wooden chair, she pushed at the wires and moved them out of the way so that they wouldn’t scare people to death when they came back upstairs, and so that nobody would trip over them. Plus, there was no telling if they might suddenly come to life again, and pose a deadly risk.

She ran to the basement door, but a chunk of the light pole had tightly wedged between the door and a permanent counter, and she couldn’t budge it.

At least they’re safe down there, she hoped. For now, anyway.

She tried yelling down to them, but the noise of the storm covered up her voice.

She tried calling Rex to get help, but her call wouldn’t connect.

Abby pushed against the wind to open the front door so she could run to the assistance of the old man down the street.