The Virgin of Small Plains (25 page)

I should have believed her,
he thought, feeling bad about it.

He turned around and drove back home. Two days later, he worked up the nerve to go back out to see her again.

“I just wondered, is there anything you need that I could bring you?”

“Well, Mrs. Newquist makes sure I have groceries, but…yeah, there’s some stuff I don’t really want to ask her for.”

She gave him a short list, mostly expensive snack foods, which he happily filled at a grocery store in yet another town, where nobody would know him, and where nobody would ask why the sheriff’s son was buying women’s magazines and frozen diet dinners, among other things. Doing it made him feel happy and needed, and the nature of the things she asked him to get gave him the feeling of intimacy with her. When he handed them over to her, and she forgot to ask him how much they cost, he didn’t mind. After what he had seen in Franklin that day, he was happy to help her in any way she might need help. After that, he began to think of his trips to stores for her as favors that she was doing
him,
by allowing him to be of service.

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.