The Virgin of Small Plains (38 page)

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.”

Chapter Thirty-three

It was dark by the time Mitch pulled up in front of the ranch house and parked his car for the last time that day. He pulled out the oversized birdcage he had finally located after driving back into Kansas City, as well as the bags of seed, and the grocery bags of fresh fruit and vegetables to feed J.D. He hadn’t even tried the stores in Small Plains, knowing it was too small a town in which to find a cage this big. “You better appreciate all this, J.D.,” he said as he walked in and turned on the lights. “I’ve driven about two hundred miles today to get it for you.”

The bird let out a gentle squawk of hello.

Mitch returned to his car for more packages, and that was when he spotted something that made him pause in mid-step.

The door to the storm cellar was wide open.

He thought about just walking over and looking in, but the hair standing up on the back of his neck suggested otherwise. Upon leaving the storm cellar yesterday, he had made sure its only door was closed tight. It had still been shut like that when he had driven away from the house this morning. It was a heavy wooden door that he’d had to work hard to open. No stiff breeze had just happened to blow it ajar.

Quietly, hurrying, Mitch walked into the house and straight into his parents’ bedroom. Once there, he opened the drawer in the table between his parents’ single beds, to see if his father still kept a firearm there.

Yes…there it was, small and deadly, and just what he wanted to see.

He remembered this gun, this specific gun. It had a distinctive black handle and silver barrel, and if he recalled correctly, it had been a birthday gift to his father from Quentin Reynolds and Nathan Shellenberger.

God only knew how recently the gun had been oiled, or whether the barrel was clean enough to fire a bullet without backfiring into his own chest. It could be that the gun—which was more like an old-West pistol, a collector’s item, than a modern gun—had not been fired in twenty years, or more. There were bullets in the chamber, he discovered. Even if it couldn’t shoot straight, it still had the potential for scaring the hell out of somebody, even if it couldn’t kill them.

There were certain things a person never forgot about the country, Mitch thought.

One was how to shoot. Another was the stories of strangers who holed up in empty farm and ranch houses, people for whom any port in a storm would do, especially if it was somebody else’s port. By and large, they were people you didn’t want to mess with. They were, occasionally, escaped convicts passing through. It was a wide, empty, lonely countryside. Help could take hours to arrive.

Mitch quietly walked back outdoors, the pistol at his side.

Though he had shut the storm cellar door, he supposed that its broken lock hanging loose was as good as a “vacancy” sign on a motel. He imagined how pleased and surprised a visitor might be to find the cellar all fixed up like a small apartment. If somebody was in there now, however, they had been sloppy to leave the door open.

Or claustrophobic.

Or it might only mean they had been there and were gone.

Mitch fervently prayed for that to be the case.

The grass beneath his shoes was damp, muffling the sound of his approach.

When he reached the doorway, Mitch took a breath, raised the gun with his right hand, and flipped on the light switch with his left.

The light revealed the room as he remembered it, with one exception.

A teenage boy lay asleep in a bedroll on the floor.

“Up!” Mitch commanded.

The boy stirred, then shot up until he was sitting up. He was tall and skinny, dark-haired, with a thin face and a sour expression on it. “Wha’ the fuck!”

“Get up,” Mitch told him. “Slowly.”

The kid looked more angry than scared. He glared at the gun in Mitch’s hand, then up at Mitch’s face. “Who the fuck are you, and what the fuck you doin’ with my father’s gun?”