The Virgin of Small Plains (14 page)

“Well, it was…upsetting, Abby. Why would you want to make him remember?”

“But I’ve never even asked him about it. I’ve never told him I care about how it affected him. Maybe if I did, he’d open up and…”

“People don’t need to open up,” Verna said, with a feeling of desperation that went even deeper than what she’d felt in coming to the grave. “That’s just psychology stuff. People need to get over things and go on with their lives…”

Abby smiled at her, a sweet smile that told Verna that she was being humored.

“Okay,” Abby said in a pacifying kind of way. “Maybe I’d better get on with trimming around the headstones.”

“And I’ve got to get back to fix breakfast for Nathan.” Verna paused before turning to go. After a moment’s hesitation, a moment in which she told herself it would probably be better if she didn’t say anything else, she said, “Why are you so interested in the Virgin
now,
Abby? I’ve never heard you ask about her before. What’s different now from any time during the past seventeen years?”

She watched Abby take a deep breath and let it out like a sigh.

“When Rex and I found Nadine? It was like something inside of me woke up, Verna. It’s like I’ve been asleep all these years, not even realizing how much other people were affected by…her death. It just seems like it’s way past time for me to think about somebody besides myself. I never even thought much about
her.
” Abby nodded toward the Virgin’s grave. “She was young. She could have been somebody I’d seen, or maybe I’d even met her. And I never even thought much about her, I was so wrapped up in myself.”

“I’m sure you didn’t know her. Nobody around here knew her.”

“How can you be sure, Verna, if we don’t know who she was?”

Verna thought Abby Reynolds was one of the least selfish girls she’d ever known, so she didn’t understand at all what Abby meant about thinking of people other than herself. Verna only understood that if Abby was waking up to that crime, the way she had just said she was, then Verna needed to persuade her to go right back to sleep.

“The best thing you can do for her is to let her rest in peace.”

Abby gave her a funny look. “But nobody lets her rest in peace, Verna. Not even you. Everybody wants something from her. And it just seems to me that it’s about time we all gave something back to her.”

“What?” Verna’s heart was pounding. “We gave her a funeral, Abby. And this grave, and that headstone. People cared, they really did. We still do. But what can we possibly give her now?”

“We can give her her name back,” Abby said, in a firm voice that frightened Verna more than any specter walking out of the fog ever could. When either of the Reynolds sisters made up their minds to do something, it tended to get done, come hell or high water. Ellen had wanted to become mayor, and it happened. Abby had decided to run a landscaping business, and she did it. Verna forced herself to pay attention to Abby’s next words, over the deafening pounding of her own blood in her ears. “We can find out who she was, or at least we can try again. There’s new technology. Rex will know. There have to be things he can do now that Nathan couldn’t do back then.”

“Abby,
don’t…
”

But Abby had bent down to clip a handful of grass that her mowers had missed. She didn’t give any indication of having heard Verna’s words, or of recognizing them as the warning they were. Suddenly the smell of the new-mown grass threatened to rise up and suffocate Verna; her chest felt tight, as if she was having an allergic reaction, or even a heart attack. She grabbed the front of her dress with her right hand, but dropped it hastily when Abby stood back up and looked at her again.

“Don’t what?”

“Don’t…” Desperately, Verna searched her mind for a substitute to what she was really thinking. “…forget to come by soon. I’m making blueberry pie today.”

Abby grinned. “I would never forget such a thing.”

After a few moments, Verna slipped away with a quiet “Bye,” and a repeat of her invitation to drop by soon. When she reached her car, she turned to look back and saw that Abby was staring at her.

Abby waved. After a moment’s hesitation Verna waved back.

Abby knelt on the damp grass, clippers in hand, as her old friend’s mother, and her current boyfriend’s mother, drove away. People could be so resistant to change, she thought with both fondness and irritation, even to good changes. What possible harm could it do to finally put a name on a grave? She looked up in time to see Verna turn onto the highway. Rex’s mom looked small behind the wheel of her car, and plump in a way that reminded Abby of a dozen other local women. On this morning, Verna was wearing one of the A-line, cotton shirtwaists she favored, a short-sleeved, print dress belted at her waist that made her plumpness blossom below the belt and above it. It was a style that made her upper arms look full and fleshy, and gave her a pale appearance that belied her actual physical strength. Abby knew that Verna Shellenberger could lift a calf or toss a hay bale across a fence, if she wanted to.

When Abby couldn’t see Verna’s car anymore, she stood up and scanned the horizon.

She could never look out over such a span of prairie without thinking about the Indians who used to live there. Her mother, who had loved facts and dates and history, had made her aware of them from the time she was old enough to look for arrowheads in the dirt. And now Abby found herself thinking about another time and another crime that nobody talked about, just like Verna Shellenberger didn’t seem to want to talk to her about the murder of the Virgin.

Once, the Osage and Kansa tribes had roamed forty-five million acres, including the patch of ground on which she stood. They had shared it with thirty to seventy-five million bison. If she used her imagination, she could almost hear the pounding hooves and see the dark flood of animals pouring over the fields. But the Indians had been chased and cheated down to Oklahoma, including a forced exodus in 1873. The bison had been killed. Abby had friends who owned a bison ranch, and she had toured it, had stared into the fierce eyes of an old bison bull. In search of native grasses to plant and sell, she had also walked onto the land of Potawatomi, Iowa, and Kickapoo reservations that remained in the state. She had a natural affinity for underdogs, and she thought she had at least some small sense of what it must be like to feel helpless in the path of history. She couldn’t solve those million crimes, but she thought that maybe she could help solve one crime.

On her way out of the cemetery, Abby whispered a few words to her mother, and then she touched the Virgin’s gravestone.

“If you’ll tell me who you are,” she promised the dead girl, “I’ll make sure that everybody knows your name.”

Chapter Eleven

After finishing her touch-up work for the cemetery, Abby drove home again, feeling satisfied with her work there and full of resolve about renewing the search for the Virgin’s identity.

Even though it was a holiday, there was still plenty of work for her to do on her own if she wanted to. Flowers to transplant from ground to pots. Beds to dig and fertilize. Orders to process and advertising to plan. But first she walked back into her bedroom, just in time to find Patrick Shellenberger sitting on the edge of her bed pulling one of his socks on. He had on his jeans, but no shirt. The sight of his broad cowboy shoulders and biceps gave her a flutter she wished they didn’t.

“Where’d you go?” he asked her, looking up.

“Cemetery.”

“You’d rather go to a cemetery than wake up with me?”

She smiled at him. “Not a whole lot of difference between the two. You were sleeping like the dead.”

Patrick laughed.

“I saw your mother,” she said, picking up his other sock and handing it to him.

He took the sock but then tossed it over his shoulder and reached for her. With his arms around her waist, Abby sat down, straddling his legs, facing him so their noses were mere inches apart.

“Where?” Patrick asked her, as his hands began to move toward her chest.

“Umm. At the cemetery. She was visiting graves.”

Patrick made a face and faked a shudder. “Whatever turns you on.”

“Nice way to talk about your own mother.”

He leaned forward to kiss her, and murmured into her lips, “I know what would make my mother happy.”

“Hmm? What?”

“Marry me.”

“
Marry
you?” Abby reared back and nearly tumbled off his knees. He grabbed her to keep her from falling, and she stared at him. “I barely even let you sleep here! Why in the world would I want to marry you?”

“Because it makes sense for both of us.”

“It only makes sense for
you,
Patrick.” She got off his knees, batting his hands away when he tried to hold her there, stepped a safe distance away, and wagged a finger at him. “I know what you’re up to. You want to rehabilitate yourself, and you think I’m step two in your plan.”

Patrick grinned at her. “Not really. I’d say, more like step six. No offense.”

“Oh, believe me”—Abby rolled her eyes at him for effect—“when I say, none taken.”

She turned and walked out of the room.

“Hey, where are you going? I just proposed to you!”

Patrick got up, grabbed the sock he’d tossed aside, and his shirt and his cowboy boots, and followed her into her kitchen.

“I’m serious, Abby!”

“You’re seriously crazy,” she retorted, without even turning around.

It was still early, not quite 7:30, and the sun was only gently coming in through her white cotton curtains. She and Patrick were both at the start of the busiest seasons in their respective jobs. For Patrick, on most mornings when he woke up at her house, it meant riding back out to his family’s ranch to round up cattle for weaning, vaccinations, spraying, or whatever other spring work needed doing. For Abby, it meant strolling a few yards from her house to her plant nursery. Usually, some of her employees would be driving out to do yard work or plantings for the city, for businesses, or for private residences. A couple of others would stay at the nursery with Abby, to sell the annuals, perennials, seed, fertilizers, pots, saplings, shrubs, and other assorted gardening supplies she stocked there and even sold online.

But this day, a holiday, Patrick was hanging around.

“Okay, let’s back up a minute,” he said. “You said I’ve got a plan to rehabilitate myself and you’re supposedly one of the steps in this grand plan of mine. So if that’s true, then what was step one?”

Abby turned to study him.

Patrick Shellenberger, older brother of her friend Rex, teasing bane of her childhood and now an unexpected swain, had set his boots down, tossed his shirt and sock onto a chair, and leaned his back against the kitchen doorsill, so that he was suddenly all tousled hair, bare chest, and blue eyes.

“Just out of curiosity,” he added, raising his eyebrows, which gave him an innocent appearance that didn’t fool her for a moment.

“Well,” she said, after giving it a bit of thought, “I’d say that step one must have been coming home and taking over the ranch so your dad could quit working.”

When he nodded to indicate she’d guessed right, Abby said, “If step two isn’t me, what is it?”

“Working hard,” he told her, promptly. “Making a go of it.”

“Uh.” Abby voice took on a grudging tone that suggested she had to admit he had succeeded in both of those steps, thus far. “Step three?”

“Not drinking, and making sure everybody knows I’m not.”

“And step four?”

“Not getting arrested for anything.”

Abby shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe I am actually having a conversation with a man with such a plan. Have I really come to this?”

Patrick laughed as he pushed himself off the doorsill and stood up straight. Suddenly the room seemed much smaller, and Abby instinctively stepped back a little. Patrick reached for the ceiling, stretching luxuriously from his bare toes to his long, tanned fingers, while she watched him.

His jeans slipped down on his hips, revealing the lighter skin where the sun didn’t shine.

He had a great laugh, Abby had to admit, and a sexy, husky voice, and broad shoulders and those blue eyes and in spite of her defenses against him, now and then her body responded to that laugh and those hands in a way that suggested it had a mind of its own. Standing in front of him, Abby concentrated hard on giving none of those feelings away to him. Patrick had taken her to supper in Council Grove the night before, and then he had driven her around his family’s ranch to show her the new cattle pens and other improvements he had been installing there. It had been a beautiful spring night and he’d been sweet to her, especially when he’d nicely asked if he could stay, rather than go home to his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house.