The Virgin of Small Plains (43 page)

The arm that shoved it was gone as quick as it had appeared and Marty’s reaction time wasn’t good enough to look around for the rest of the body that went with it, but he could see that the napkin in front of his nose had writing on it.

“Go to the Small Plains Cemetery,” it said in plain block printing, in ink. “There’s $ in it for you.” He read it three times before he could focus on the important part: “$.” Below the words was a roughly drawn map. It took him a while longer, but eventually he deciphered it: Cottonwood Inn to Highway 177 to Small Plains Cemetery, turn left inside the cemetery, go 100 yards, find the grave circled and marked with an X on the napkin.

“Johnny,” he said to the bartender, who was wiping down the counter next to him.

“No,” the bartender said without even looking up. “Six is enough, Marty. Seven is a car wreck.”

“I don’t want another beer, dammit. I want to know something. If somebody told you to go to the cemetery, because there was money in it, would you go?”

“What do you mean, money in it? Like in a grave, or something?”

“I don’t know. It just says there’s money in it.”

“For you?” The bartender sounded skeptical.

Marty held up the napkin and the bartender bent over to look at it.

“This is a joke,” he pronounced. “Or a scam.”

“But it says there’s money in it for me.”

“Where does it say it’s for you?”

Marty stared down at the napkin and noticed for the first time that his initials were there:
M.F.
“Here,” he said, and pointed.

“Hmm,” the barkeep said, after examining it again. Unable to refute the presence of the initials, he said, “And you want to know should you go? Well, do you owe anybody any money, Marty?”

“No, why?”

“Just checking to see if it could be a trick to lure you in to get you beat up. You got anything on you that anybody might want?”

“Not if I leave you a tip.”

“Who gave this to you?”

“I don’t know. It just got put in front of me.”

The bartender smiled a little. “Like an act of God, or something?”

“Why not?”

“Well, me, I wouldn’t trust this any farther than I could throw it, but I guess if you’re telling the truth that nobody’s out to get you, and even if there is—” He paused. “You got a gun, Marty?”

“Isn’t that what glove compartments are for?”

They both smiled a little this time.

“Well, then, if nobody was out to get me, and there wasn’t anything I had that anybody wanted, and I had a gun on me, then I’d go to the cemetery and lie down in a fucking coffin if I thought there might be money in it.”

When Marty got to the cemetery, he discovered that he wasn’t the only one looking for that particular grave. It gave him pause, because what if the mysterious stranger had dropped off similar napkins in other people’s laps?

It took him a while to figure out how to apply the map to the cemetery, but finally he walked up to the right stone.

Peace Be Unto You
were the only words engraved on it, along with
1987.

But somebody had affixed another white bar napkin to the stone, below the words:

Sarah Francis

Born, Franklin, Kansas, 1968

Murdered, Small Plains, Kansas 1987

It took him a moment to put the name and places and dates together and realize it seemed to be describing one of his own sisters.

Feeling confused, he ripped the paper off the stone.

“Hey!” a man standing nearby objected. “What are you doing?”

“Fuck off,” Marty told him and walked back toward his car.

When he got back to it, he found a tall man wearing a Western shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots leaning up against it smoking a cigarette. The man pointed to the crumpled paper in Marty’s hand.

“You know her?”

“I dunno,” Marty mumbled, feeling more confused than ever. “My sister, maybe.”

“Really. That could be worth a lot of money to you.”

“How so?” Marty perked up.

“Don’t you know about this grave?”

Marty shook his head.

“It’s famous,” the man told him. “
She’s
famous, although nobody has ever known who she really is. If that”—he pointed to the napkin with the name on it—“is your sister, there are a lot of people who would pay for her story.”

“What people? What story?”

“Media.” The man gave Marty a puzzled look. “They’d pay for you to tell them who she is, where she grew up, all about her, anything you know.”

“Why the hell would they do that?”

Again, the man gave him a puzzled look. “Don’t you live around here?”

“What do you mean?”

“The girl in this grave is supposed to be able to cure people of diseases—”

“No way!”

“Really. She’s kind of a local saint, you might say.”

“That’s crazy.”

“Maybe, maybe not, people claim some pretty amazing things about her.” The man reached for the napkin, but Marty jerked it away. “Sorry. I just wanted to see her name again. I saw it on the gravestone before you came up here.”

Marty covered the napkin with his hand.

“Who wants to know about her?” he asked the man. “How do I get this story out and get paid for it?”

The man smiled. “Just go into town and start telling people you know who the girl in the grave is. Say it’s your sister. Start demanding they dig her up so she can be identified. Believe me, the people who want the story will come to you.”

Marty, who was feeling more eager and more sober by the moment, listened up.

“And while you’re at it,” the man advised him, “you might want to be sure to ask people why Mitch Newquist left town when she died.”

“Who?”

“Mitch. Newquist.”

“Newquist…I had a judge who—”

“That’s the one. Mitch Newquist is the judge’s son.”

“You’re saying maybe a judge’s son killed my sister?” Marty pulled himself up, feeling indignant. “This Mitch Newquist, he killed my sister?”

“I’m saying there’s a reward for the person who identifies her and another reward for the person who fingers her killer.”

“Reward? From who? Not
my
family.”

Marty laughed a little at the very idea.

“The town, that’s who,” the man said. “For seventeen years, there has been a reward fund just sitting in the bank gathering interest.”

Marty’s eyes shone. “What’s that guy’s name again? The bastard who murdered my poor sister?”

“Mitchell Newquist, the judge’s son.”

It was only when they parted that Marty thought to ask, “Who are you? How come you know so much about my sister?”

“I don’t know anything,” Patrick Shellenberger told him. “I’ve just heard the rumors over the years. All I know is that somebody killed her and nobody has known who she is and there was some suspicion at the time because the judge’s son left town all of a sudden right after they found her body.”

“Did you put her name up there?” Marty asked, suddenly suspicious.

“Me? I was just here visiting my grandparents’ graves.”

“Then who put it up there?”

“Maybe your sister did it.”

“Huh?”

“I told you. They say she works miracles.”

Patrick walked away, leaving Marty standing in the cemetery holding the clue to the identity of the young woman in the grave. Now all Patrick had to do was stay out of town so that Marty couldn’t spot him as the one who had talked to him in the cemetery. All he had to do was lie low, stay out at the ranch, and just wait for Sarah’s greedy brother to do the rest of the work.

If Mitch Newquist wasn’t long gone from Small Plains within twenty-four hours, Patrick would eat his hat.

Marty forgot about the miracles as soon as the stranger walked away from him. His attention was focused on the paper in his hand. He fumbled for a pen in his shirt pocket and wrote down the other name he’d heard, using the top of his car as a table.
Mitch Neukwist.

The judge’s son.

Judges were rich, everybody knew that.

The hell with taking Sarah’s story to a million different people. It wasn’t like he remembered anything about her anyway. In a moment of clarity Marty had a brilliant thought: To make some money, he only needed to talk to one person.

Chapter Thirty-eight

“Sheriff? You’ve got a call.”

“I’ll take it in my office,” Rex told the deputy.

“Shellenberger,” he barked into the phone, feeling out of sorts. He needed to talk to Patrick, but he hadn’t been able to find his brother either last night or this morning. Nor had he located Sarah’s brother, Marty Francis, now that Marty was out of jail. At least Patrick hadn’t spent the night at Abby’s house, Rex had learned when he had called her to ask if his brother was there. In fact, she hadn’t sounded all that pleased with his brother, so at least that was good news.

“Good morning, Sheriff,” a young male voice said on the other end of the phone connection. “This is Bernie Simmons. I’m a reporter with
The Wichita Herald.
”

“All right,” Rex said cautiously. It was rare for a journalist to call.

“I guess you had quite a storm up there?”

“That we did. Nobody hurt, though. Some property damage.”

“Well, that’s good. I mean…”

“I know what you mean.”

“I’m calling about something else.”

“And that would be?”

“That unidentified murdered girl they call the Virgin.”

Indigestion rose in Rex’s esophagus again. “You read the tabloids?”

The reporter laughed. “When the story’s about miracles in Kansas, we do.”

“Not much I can tell you. I wasn’t the sheriff then.”

“Who was?”

Rex silently cursed himself for having begged the obvious question. “That would have been my father.”

“No kidding. That’s interesting, a father-son sheriff’s department. Maybe I’ll do a story on how that happened—”

“It happened,” Rex said dryly, “because he won elections and so do I.”

“I wasn’t suggesting nepotism, Sheriff.”

“No? Most people do, until they hear it’s an elected position.”

“Let’s get back to the girl in the grave.”

Rex realized, too late, that he would have preferred to discuss nepotism. “What can I tell you?”