The Virgin of Small Plains (49 page)

Docile as a lamb being led by its own greed to slaughter, Marty followed the judge out to the black Cadillac in the driveway.

Once they were inside of it, the judge locked the doors.

He backed down his driveway and drove rapidly down the street.

When he reached the corner he turned left toward the highway instead of right toward downtown.

“There ain’t no bank out this way,” Marty objected.

“I keep my checkbook out at a little ranch we have.”

A ranch where a person could be shut into a storm cellar and never be seen again.

“Oh,” his passenger said agreeably. “Okay. But hey, slow down! You’re kind of a crazy driver, Judge, you know that?”

Patrick was already gone.

He had been following Marty, wanting to see what the man would do next. When he guessed what Marty was going to do—try to blackmail the judge instead of spreading suspicions about Mitch—he knew his own plans were finished. The judge would never stand for blackmail. He would have Marty charged and tossed in jail, Marty would tell the story of how he had come to have the information about his sister, somebody would put two and two together, and Abby would find out that he had tried to betray Mitch.

Patrick drove into town and got a beer, and then he drove out to his parents’ house to tell them he was sick of ranch work and he was leaving town again.

Chapter Forty-two

It was hard to drive when she felt so awful, but Catie was determined to make one last trip to see the Virgin. She hadn’t realized she would feel quite this bad, but then it had been a couple of days since she had even attempted to drive her van. During all that time she had eaten almost nothing. Now she had pain and she had a fever that had been rising higher for the last day or so, but she felt light as air, ethereal, angelic. It was a beautiful night and Catie would have liked to be able to lean her face out the window and look up at it, but it was increasingly all she could do to hold the van on the highway.

She was veering across the center line, she knew she was, but she couldn’t do anything about that. There wasn’t much traffic and she always managed to pull the van back onto her side of the road when a car passed her going the other way. Catie didn’t want to be a danger to anybody, she told herself; she didn’t want to hurt anyone. She just wanted to park in the cemetery one more time and crawl, if she had to, up to the grave and lie on her back again and tell the Virgin how grateful she was for the gift of peace.

It hurt to turn the steering wheel when she made the turn onto Highway 177.

Once she got the van going straight again, it hurt a little less.

In another couple of miles, she would be there.

Catie felt excited…and also calm…at the thought of what she was doing. It just felt right. It was going to be the perfect ending to a miraculous trip. And then she could drive home and get into bed and stay there until she died, if that’s the way things worked out. Or maybe she would have a miraculous cure of her body to match the one she’d already had of her heart, and then she would be able to flounce into her doctor’s office and laugh and say, “Look at me!” She would even call that reporter back and say, “I told you so!”

In the moment when she first saw the cemetery she also saw something else.

“Oh!” she breathed, her palms relaxing on the steering wheel.

It was so beautiful…
she
was so beautiful…the vision Catie saw of a beautiful dark-haired girl who was smiling at her, just ahead of her. Catie knew immediately that it was the Virgin. She didn’t know how she could be so lucky, but for some reason she was being blessed again…

As the vision filled her eyes, Catie’s foot relaxed its pressure on the gas pedal; her hands dropped off the steering wheel entirely and fell into her lap. She just stared at the Virgin, smiling back into the beautiful face that was blessing her. The big van traveled straight down one side of the highway for quite a way, cresting one hill and then picking up speed on the other side. Halfway down the long hill, the van began to swerve toward the other side of the road, where a black Cadillac was coming from the other direction. But Catie didn’t see the two men staring in horror at her in the front seat of the Cadillac. All she saw before she died was the most beautiful light she had ever seen, surrounding a beautiful dark-haired girl whose image vanished as the light accepted Catie into its warmth and glory.

Chapter Forty-three

Mitch stepped out of his car onto Abby’s driveway with a birdcage in his hand.

When she saw who he had with him, she yelled for joy and came running. Mitch had already told her about finding J.D. in his father’s yard and they hadn’t even argued about which one of them would get to keep him. “He needs company,” Mitch had admitted. “And Gracie misses him,” Abby had said. “And, besides,” Mitch had added, “it isn’t as if I’ll never get to see him again…is it?”

“It certainly is not,” Abby had agreed with so much passion they had both grinned.

Now, with her running full-speed toward him, just to be on the safe side Mitch put the birdcage with the parrot in it down on the ground and braced himself. Sure enough, she didn’t stop, but threw herself straight at him, nearly knocking him over, so that Mitch had to wrap his arms around her and lift her off her feet and steady his legs so they didn’t both go tumbling to the ground and tear themselves up on the gravel.

And then Mitch found that in order to properly keep their balance he had to find her mouth and kiss it and that she understood the necessity of maintaining balance and so she kissed him back so hard they nearly melded into one body standing right there in her driveway. Mitch felt his desire for her rise, and this time there wasn’t going to be anything stopping it, and no misunderstandings about it, and no bad feelings or secrets afterward, there was only going to be loving Abby forever and ever, just as he was always supposed to do.

“Can you carry J.D., too?” she asked him breathlessly.

“No problem,” he lied, but then they both laughed and she got down and walked, but she grabbed his arm that wasn’t being used to hold the birdcage and she held on to it as if she were never going to let him go, which was just fine with Mitch. It was a damned good thing, he thought as they walked into her house together—with J.D. suddenly starting to squawk until their ears rang and her other bird, inside the house, starting to holler back at him—it was a damned fine thing that he had already started buying property in Small Plains so that his plan of moving back and helping to keep his hometown alive was well on its way to fruition. Granted, he had once thought he was doing it out of revenge, to take over the town his father’s friends thought they owned, but it seemed revenge could turn into something else entirely, something more like hope and love, for a town and a woman…

“And a bird,” he said out loud.

“What?” Abby asked, looking up at him and smiling.

“Nothing.” He kissed her. “You’re going to love my son.”

“I know I will.”

The twinge of pain in her heart when he said that didn’t last but a second before it turned to feelings that Abby recognized as the same ones she’d had as a young girl. Hope and love, that’s what they were. The ache in her heart over her father’s death was a more permanent pain, one that only Mitch could ever really understand, because he had lost his parents, too. Of the two of them, Abby knew she was the “fortunate” one, because she had always had her mother’s love and she’d known her father’s love, as well, before his own acts changed him. Mitch had only had other people’s parents to truly love him.

And he’d also had Rex, Abby thought.

“And me,” she whispered.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She smiled up at him. “And your son will love me.”

“Cocky, aren’t you?”

“I have reason to believe,” she said with confidence, and then Abby ran ahead into her bedroom, pulling Mitch along with her.

Rex crouched beside the grave and laid a dozen white roses in front of the stone.

A new gravestone was on order. Abby was paying for it. She’d insisted, saying she had promised it to Sarah. It would have Sarah’s full name in big bold lettering, along with the dates of her birth and death. But it wouldn’t be ready for several weeks, and Rex couldn’t wait that long to come and say hello and good-bye.

“I guess I loved you, Sarah,” he told her.

Maybe Abby had been right. Maybe he had been stuck ever since Sarah’s death, but now that she was free, he thought maybe he could be, too.

“There’s a lot of cleaning up to do,” he told her.

His knees didn’t like crouching, so he stood up, took off his hat, and held it in his hands while he talked to her one more time. “Abby and Ellen have to clear up their dad’s estate and figure out what to do with the house. They’re hoping to be able to attract a young doctor to town to buy the house and Doc’s practice. Personally, I think they’ll give it away if they have to, just to make sure we have a physician around here.” He smiled a little. “They—Abby and Ellen—have this idea it should be a woman doctor.”

He shifted from one foot to the other.

“I guess you know the judge is dead. And your brother. Your worthless brother, if you don’t mind my saying so. Patrick thinks your brother was…” He stopped. “Oh, never mind. I suspect none of that worries you anymore, so I won’t, either. My mom says you’ve been good to my dad, although I can’t imagine why, so maybe you’ll want to know there won’t be any charges brought against him for covering everything up. Or against any of us, for that matter. The statute of limitations covers up a lot of things, too. And that poor sick girl took care of punishing Tom for what he did to you and other people.”

Rex didn’t like talking about that part of it, so he moved on.

“Mitch and Abby are back together again,” he announced, with pleasure. “I know you may have mixed feelings about that, since you were pretty hot for him, but I think it’s destiny, with them, I really do. Nobody else ever had a chance with either one of them. Oh, and Patrick’s left town, which I hope is as okay with you as it is with me and Abby. She’s convinced now that he tried to kill all of her birds. I guess we’ll never know for sure, but of course I think it sounds exactly like something my brother would do. I think Abby’s mostly embarrassed now that she ever had anything to do with him, but, hell, she was lonely, and it’s not like she could ever let herself fall for anybody but Mitch. Pat was just a poor substitute, because that’s all Abby ever had until Mitch came back.