The Virgin of Small Plains

Chapter Thirty-four

At the edge of the town of Franklin, Kansas, Patrick Shellenberger slowed his truck down to call to a couple of teenage boys standing in a yard. One of them was holding a cigarette down by his right knee. They weren’t doing anything, just standing there. Patrick remembered that stance, that frustrating bored feeling of standing around with nothing to do. At that age, he’d had about five minutes’ tolerance for it before he split and found something, anything, to do instead-the “anything” usually involving girls, beer, or a game of pool, or all three. These two would have to drive many miles to find a pool table, and they’d be lucky to get any beer. If there were any girls left in Franklin, Patrick would be surprised, and even if there were, those girls would have to be desperate to give these two a chance.

“Hey!” he called to them. “Does the Francis family still live around here?”

The boys, tall, skinny, looked at each other before staring back at him.

They didn’t move, or walk over to where he had his truck in idle.

“They’re gone,” one of the boys called back to him.

“Except the one brother that’s in jail,” the other one drawled. Patrick doubted they had a two-digit IQ between them. He asked them, “There’s a brother in jail?”

“Yeah,” they both said.

“Which one?”

The shorter boy shrugged. “One of ’em.”

“What’d he go to jail for?”

They looked at each other, laughed, and the second one said, “Drunk, I ’spect.”

“What jail’s he in?”

“County,” the first one said.

“This county?” Patrick asked, with exaggerated patience.

“Naw, he’s in jail over in Small Plains.”

Apparently, it either didn’t occur to them to ask why he wanted to know, or else they didn’t care.

“Cool truck,” one of them observed.

“Bitchin’,” the other one echoed.

Patrick thought he had not heard the word “bitchin’” since he was in high school, and even then it had been several decades past its prime. He turned and raised himself up in the seat so he could reach over and get something from the floor behind him. Then, looking back at them, he said, “Come here.”

They wandered over until they got close enough to see what he was holding out the window and offering to them.

“You givin’ that to us?” the taller one asked him, looking astonished.

Now that they were within a few feet of him, he saw they were younger than he’d originally thought, maybe fourteen or fifteen.

“Take the whole thing,” Patrick said.

The other one grabbed the six pack, and muttered, “Cool. Thanks, mister.”

Patrick left them as he had found them, standing like scrawny statues in the dark, only now they had something to do. They could pop open beer cans. Whoopee. He would have bet any amount of money that they’d find a corner under some dark bushes and drain all the beers, one after another. Tomorrow morning, they might not remember what he had asked them or what they had told him. Even if they claimed to remember, nobody would trust the word of underage boys who got themselves drunk.

Patrick turned his truck around to head back toward Small Plains.

Maybe it wasn’t too late to knock on Abby’s door.

And there were two fewer birds to shit in his boots now.

Patrick smiled as he lifted a cup of coffee from a cup holder to his lips. The sunglasses had been a close call, but he had covered it well, judging by Abby’s reaction. She seemed to have bought it hook, line, and sinker, just as she had believed his story about going to Emporia tonight.

What’s in it for you, Patrick?

That’s what she had asked him the day of the tornado. What was in it for him to marry her? Everything. His future. The rest of his life, although she wasn’t the only part of the equation he was putting together.

Someday his dad would die. Maybe not all that long from now, even though he seemed to be feeling better at the moment. If his mom is still living, she’ll need to turn the ranch over to her sons to run, and Patrick wanted to be in a position where anybody-even Rex-could see that it deserved to be him, because he was the one who’d been running it. If his dad went last, after his mom, Patrick wanted the old man to stipulate that he was to run the ranch.

He had no other future, he knew that.

There was nothing else he could do that would give him anything like the access to land and cash the ranch could give him. He needed to look-he needed to be-respectable, acceptable, for as long as it took to get firmly in control so that then he could do what he wanted to do with the land. Sell it to wind farms, maybe. Lease it to other ranchers. Open it up to oil and gas exploration. Whatever allowed him to take the money and run.

Abby was a necessary ingredient.

His parents already loved her; to them, she’d be the perfect daughter-in-law. His brother would have to come around, for Abby’s sake. The town would figure that any man Abby Reynolds married must, at heart, be all right.

Patrick needed to be that man.

And he didn’t need or want the complication of her fucking long-lost love.

Having satisfactorily completed step one in his plan to get rid of Mitch Newquist without actually having to kill the son of a bitch, Patrick was ready to move on to step two.

Rex made his last calls of the night to check on his department before getting ready to fix his late supper alone in his small house out in the country near his parents’ place: one call to the dispatcher, one to each of his deputies on duty, and a last one to the county jail. It was a lightly staffed department in a lightly populated county. He could be as hands-on as he pleased, even when it didn’t always please them.

There was nothing particularly interesting to hear until he reached the jail.

“Had a visitor just now, Sheriff,” the night deputy informed him.

“This late? Who the hell was it and who did they want to see?”

“Well, it was your brother. And he wanted to see Marty Francis.”

Sarah’s brother. Once he got over the initial instant of shock, Rex felt a slow burn start to rise up his esophagus. “He say why?”

“Nope, but I told him he was too late, ’cause Marty got out today, but that if he waited long enough he’d probably catch him on the rebound.” The deputy’s laugh was a deep, fruity, cynical sound.

“Your prisoner say where he was going when he left?”

“Get a drink he said, damn fool.”

“Does he still live in Franklin?”

“Dunno, Sheriff. Want me to find out for you?”

“Yeah. Call me back. Wait! What did my brother say when you told him that Marty was gone?”

“What’d he say?” the deputy repeated, clearly stalling for time while he tried to remember. “I think he said, well, you can’t say I didn’t try, or something like that. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“You wouldn’t be the first person to feel that way.”

“Uh, Sheriff, doesn’t your brother know we got visiting hours?”

“Rules have never stopped my brother, Deputy.”

The deputy laughed again. “Stopped him this time.”

Rex soon clicked the phone dead and then got up to put frozen shredded potatoes in a skillet of bacon grease to fry along with a thick slice of ham. As he moved the ham around while he waited for his deputy to call back, he poked at it viciously with a two-pronged cooking fork as if he were taking vicious pokes at his brother’s gut.

Shortly before midnight, Abby heard Patrick’s truck pull up in her driveway.

A few moments later she heard her front doorknob rattle softly, and then again, a little more noisily.

He was accustomed to finding her doors unlocked, but they weren’t tonight. Would he knock, she wondered?

The doorbell rang, making her jump a foot.

When Patrick wanted something, he wanted it, she thought, as she got out of bed and pulled a light blanket around her shoulders. She padded barefoot to the front door and opened it to find him standing with his cowboy hat in his hands on her front stoop.

“A little late,” she observed.

“But better than never,” he said, and grinned down at her.

“How was Emporia?” she asked him.

“Empty without you.”

“Get all your work done with your accountant?”

“Pretty much. Took a lot longer than I expected. You going to let me in?”

Abby smiled at him. They were not married. They were not even engaged. She had no formal commitment to him, nor he to her. He could do whatever he wanted to do, including lying to her about where he was going and why. But she didn’t have to like it. And she was no longer sure she believed him about the sunglasses. “I don’t think so, Patrick.”

“Why not?” He looked surprised enough to nearly make her laugh.

“Because I don’t have to,” Abby said, and closed the door in his face.

She didn’t remain on the other side of the front door to hear if he stood there for a while or if he walked away immediately, but it must have taken him a few moments of thinking it over, because it was a good five minutes by her clock before she heard his truck backing down her driveway toward the road.