The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Thirty-two

Verna walked back into her house a lot more slowly than her heart was beating. She figured that to anybody passing by on the highway, or to Nathan happening to peer down from their bedroom, she would have looked just like she always looked, which was to say, like an ordinary ranch woman walking calmly back into her house as if she had nothing to worry about except whether to wash the supper dishes now or later.

The truth was, when Abby had driven off in her truck, the sight of her red rear lights disappearing down the highway had filled Verna with an awful, almost unbearable anxiety.

Was she tense, as she had said to Abby? Tense didn’t even begin to describe it.

She’d been feeling anxious ever since hearing from Rex that Mitch was back.

And now Abby said that Patrick wanted her to marry him.

Verna loved both of Margie’s girls, but she held a special place in her heart for Abby, which was no reflection on Ellen, it was just a fact. There was just something about Abby that hadn’t changed in all these years, a quality of natural goodness she had possessed since the day she was born to Margie and Quentin. Partly it was Abby’s appearance that made people love her, no matter what she did. She was irresistible, with her flyaway hair and her big open smile and the way she stood in front of you with her blue-jeaned legs apart and her hands on her hips and smiling that sweet smile and looking you right in the eye. Partly it was also her way of being mischievous now and then, in ways that startled people, but tended to make them smile, instead of condemn, things that probably nobody but Abby Reynolds could have gotten away with, and maybe not in any place except Small Plains. Like stealing Mitch Newquist’s parrot all those years ago, an act that Margie Reynolds had confided to Verna and that had made them both laugh until they cried at the thought of Nadine overhearing a muffled squawk sometime when she was visiting at the Reynolds’s house.

But it was also more than any of that, it was also how there was a continuing kind of innocence to Abby that time and loss and heartache had not altered very much. It was the look in her blue eyes that told you she could still be shocked, still be hurt, still be trusting, still love somebody wholly with all her heart. It wasn’t right that a girl like that didn’t have anybody better than Patrick to love her…

Oh God. Verna brought her hand to her mouth. She had just thought a terrible thing about her own son…

But it was true. And Patrick could be relentless…ruthless…when he wanted something. Usually he didn’t stop until he got it. It could happen that he would wear Abby down, persuade her at some vulnerable moment when she was feeling lonely, or even play on her desire to have children.

Having Mitch back in town, rubbing salt in those wounds, didn’t help.

It couldn’t happen. Verna couldn’t allow Patrick to have Abby.

What kind of person would she be, Verna was forced to ask herself, if she allowed Margie’s girl, a girl like that, to marry a boy whose own mother couldn’t swear he hadn’t killed somebody?

Until the night the girl’s body was found in their field, Verna had never allowed herself to give serious credence to her greatest fear about her firstborn, which was that Patrick might be capable of anything, might even be one of those people on whom a terrible label is hung, like sociopath. She preferred to think that the very worst that could be said about him was that he was conceited, cocky, thoughtless. Ever since he was a child she had watched him use people, manipulate them, even torment them with his teasing. She had tried her best to instill feeling for other people in Patrick, but over the years Verna had seen precious little evidence that he had a conscience, not like Rex, who was afflicted with almost too much conscience than was good for him. But Verna had also seen that both of her boys were popular, not just Rex; both of them always had friends, had fun, laughed easily…

Her fears had blossomed on the night when she had uttered what she now thought of as fateful words: “What happened, Rex?”

Her youngest had sat on the side of her bed, holding his own poor broken fist, and the words had burst out of him, words she’d had to hear even though she had desperately wanted to put her hands over her ears to block them out. First, he told her that they had come upon the frozen body of a dead girl in a pasture.

“I know her, Mom! I didn’t tell Dad, but I know her. And Pat knows her.”

Then he had told Verna about being mad because Patrick was running away from his work that summer, about getting in his truck and following his older brother, and about finding him in the Newquists’ country house, bare-chested, barefoot, and in the presence of a girl who used to clean houses for families in town. He told her about how he had blackmailed Patrick into staying away, though he couldn’t swear that Patrick did. He told her about how he, himself, had fallen in love with Sarah Francis, about his visits to see her, to take her things, to help her, to keep her company. He told her about their drive in the darkness, and about finding out that the one she really loved was Mitch. And he told her about how he had thrown that fact in Patrick’s face, knowing it would make Pat furious and jealous.

It had been obvious to her that Rex was heartbroken over the girl’s death and that his greatest fear was that in making his brother jealous he had contributed to her death. Rex, stunned, guilty, grief-stricken, and only eighteen years old, thought his brother had killed her in a jealous, possessive rage.

“Pat didn’t tell Dad he knew her, Mom!” Rex had burst out to her.

“Neither did you, honey,” she managed to point out, as she fought to stay calm even in the fog of her fear and her illness.

“That’s different!”

“He’s your brother, Rex.”

“He’s Patrick, Mom,” Rex had shot back at her.

Rex’s self-recriminations and his accusations against Patrick had raised submerged and hideous anxieties in Verna’s heart. She didn’t, she couldn’t believe that any son of hers could hurt a girl, no matter how jealous he might be.

But she didn’t know, she didn’t know…

Verna stared at what was left of the pie on the plate in front of her.

She felt as if she might never have an appetite again.

“Rex,” she had told him all those years ago, “your brother could not have done such a horrible thing to that girl. You must stop thinking such a thing! Put these thoughts away forever, Rex. And don’t ever, ever share them with anybody else. Not even with your father.”

“If such thoughts bother you again,” she had told him, “come to me.”

Rex never had. The subject was never again raised between them.

Verna had never told Nathan about what Rex had said to her. She had let him come into their bedroom much later that night, let him crawl wearily into bed, and whisper to her about finding a body in the field, about taking it to Quentin’s office. And then Nathan had said to her, “She was beaten so bad, Verna, that you could hardly even tell she had a face.”

Verna had felt an electric jolt when he said that, because Rex hadn’t mentioned anything about her being too disfigured to recognize. In fact, he had recognized her, and he seemed to be positive that Patrick had, too. So how did her sons, her teenage sons, recognize a naked dead girl if they couldn’t see her face?

Verna had lain awake until dawn, getting sicker by the second, for many reasons.

There were things she didn’t know. There were things she did not want to know. It had come as a relief when she had been forced to go into the hospital in Emporia, where she could be given drugs that made her sleep, sleep through an investigation that did not include her sons, sleep through the quiet departure of her older boy to another town, another college, and sleep through the funeral and burial of a beautiful girl who’d had a name, who’d had a family, who’d had a life.

At the kitchen table, Verna put her face in her hands.

She thought of the dead girl, realizing that’s who she should have been thinking of first, all along. “Thank you for helping my husband with his pain,” Verna prayed silently. “Please forgive us and help us, Sarah.”