The Virgin of Small Plains (7 page)

“Nothing.” To take his mind off that pain he touched another one—his sore tongue. “Sorry I didn’t get up in time to feed the calves.”

His father waved it off. “I never got to sleep. Thought I might as well work.”

“Where did you take…her?”

“To Quentin’s office. Nothing else I could do.” He paused a moment, seeming to gather his thoughts. “Son, do you trust me?”

“What?”

“I said, do you trust me?” It came out gruff, impatient, but Rex put that down to the fact that his father looked embarrassed to be saying the words.

“Sure,” he said quickly, wanting to get the excruciating moment over with, so he could escape to something easier than talking to his father. Like shoveling acres of driveway with a broken hand. “You’re my dad. Of course I trust you.”

“Yes, but have I
earned
your trust over the course of your life?”

Rex thought this was becoming a very strange conversation. “Yes, sir.”

“What if I told you to do something you thought was wrong?”

“You wouldn’t do that—”

“What if I did? Would you do it, just because I asked you to?”

Rex was just about to complain, “What are you talking about?” when his father quickly added, “Would you trust me to have everybody’s best interests at heart? Would you believe I might be able to see the larger picture?”

Rex thought the original question was now sufficiently loaded to bring down a bear. What did his dad think he was going to say, anyway? That his own son didn’t trust him? What the hell was this all about?

I am way too tired for this shit,
Rex thought. He shrugged. “Sure.”

When his father looked unconvinced, Rex forced himself to add, “Absolutely!”

“All right, then. I hope to God you mean that.”

“Dad!” He heard his own voice grating with weariness. “I told you. I do.”

“Then listen to me. And this time, really listen. For five minutes, don’t be a goddamned teenager who listens with half a brain to what his parents say. Are you listening?”

“Yes! Jesus, Dad…”

“This may be the most important thing I ever tell you. I’m serious now. I am trying to prepare you for something. You need to know that you’re going to hear some things about that girl’s death that you aren’t expecting to hear.”

Rex’s body jerked involuntarily. His heart hammering, he blurted, “Like what?”

For the first time, his father’s gaze slid away from him.

“You’ll hear soon enough. All you need to know right now is that I’m telling you to keep your mouth shut about it, no matter what you hear. You are never…and I mean
never…
to talk to anybody about last night. Ever. Not Mitch, not Abby, not anybody. If you have anything to say about it, you’ll say it to me.”

“Fine with me,” Rex said, but his father talked right over him.

“If anybody asks you about it, you tell them it’s an active homicide investigation and your father won’t allow you to discuss it. Period. End of story. Can I trust
you
to do that, Rex?”

Rex had looked off into the distance, but now there was a silence that brought his attention back to his father. He realized the old man was staring at him, waiting for something.

“What do you want me to say, Dad?”

“I told you. I asked if I can trust you.”

Rex nodded his head solemnly, as he knew his father wanted him to do. He said, “Yes,” in the serious voice he knew his father wanted to hear. But inside, he was thinking,
This is bullshit. Nobody has to shut me up, no matter what weird things I hear.
The last thing he ever wanted to do as long as he lived was to talk about it, to talk about her.

“What about Pat?” he asked.

“Pat’s going back to college.”

“How? He flunked out.”

“There are other schools.”

Not for this family, there has never been,
Rex thought. He felt almost as shocked at this news as he was at everything else. His family was K-State from the git-go. It had been a major blowup when Patrick flunked out; it was taken for granted it was where Rex would go next year, just as he had taken it for granted that Patrick would, somehow, end up back there again.

“And that’s something else,” his father said to him.

“What is?”

“Patrick. Who knows he’s been home?”

Rex started to shrug, but even that made his hand hurt, so he stopped. “I don’t know.”

“Well, who have you told?”

“Nobody.”

“Nobody? Are you sure? What about Mitch?”

“No, I never told anybody. It’s not like I want to brag about it.”

His father’s face darkened a little, and he seemed to wince. “I want you to forget he was here this week. You and I found that girl’s body, just the two of us, nobody else. Patrick is still at K-State.”

“Huh? Why?”

And then, suddenly, Rex didn’t want to know why.

Which was just as well, since his father didn’t give him any reasons.

The world was tilting, throwing everything off-kilter.

It shifted even further that morning when his mother got so sick that Quentin Reynolds told them they needed to get her to the hospital in Emporia, because it sounded like pneumonia. And it blew Rex clear out of the known universe when he got home hours later and picked up the phone. It was his friend Matt Nichols on the line, saying in an excited rush, “Man! Where have you
been
? Everybody’s been trying to find you! We heard you found that murdered girl on your ranch last night, and she was beaten up so bad you can’t even tell she has a face left! Is that true? Do you know who she is? And, hey, what do you know about Mitch Newquist leaving town all of a sudden like that, and supposedly never coming back?”

It all blew at him so fast, so unexpectedly, that it panicked and confused him, and he totally forgot the warning his father had given him. The pain medication they had shot into him at the hospital when they set a cast up to his elbow was making him dopey, too. So instead of saying, “It’s an active homicide case,” he blurted, “My mom’s in the hospital, Matt. I can’t talk now.”

“Oh! Hey, I hope she’s okay. Call me.”

The next time he got asked, he was ready for it, even though every word of what he had to say hurt him like a stab in the gut:
It’s an open homicide investigation, and my dad won’t let me talk about it. I don’t know who she was. And I don’t know where the fuck Mitch is. He never said a word to me.

A few weeks after Mitch left, on a day when Tom and Nadine had gone to Kansas City, Abby grabbed the keys to their house that Mitch had once given her, and sneaked into their home.

She ran upstairs to his room, and found it just the same as it had been.

Her photo wasn’t on his dresser where it always was, but she figured that could mean anything. Maybe he had taken it with him, which would be a good sign, but maybe he didn’t. Maybe Nadine got rid of it after he left.

Abby obsessively searched every drawer in his room.

She looked on every surface, checked under his mattress, and under his bed.

She went through the pockets of all the remaining clothes in his closet, looking for a secret note he might have left her, an explanation, a solution to the awful mystery of his absence. She didn’t find that, but in the pocket of his best dress suit, she found a wrapped chocolate mint, which she unwrapped and ate. Then she buried her face in his clothing, breathing in his scent until she couldn’t bear to smell it anymore. On the bed, she lay on her back, then her side, then her stomach, trying to feel where he had lain.

Abby didn’t find any note to her. She hadn’t had any mail from him, either.

All of his yearbooks were still there. He hadn’t taken them, with their many photos of her in school activities, and of the two of them, caught in snapshots as a couple. In one, her favorite, they were in winter coats. Mitch had his arms around her in a bear hug, and they were both grinning at the camera, looking as if they could be happy forever.

She had gone there, to his home, hoping to find something, some clue to why he left, or some indication that he had taken his love for her with him when he went, and that he still treasured her.

She didn’t find anything like that, but when she slowly descended the stairs to the first floor, she found Mitch’s pet parrot, J. D. Salinger, in his cage. Mitch and Rex had named J.D. after the author of
Catcher in the Rye,
their favorite book their junior year, because they thought it was a hilarious name for a parrot. Abby was shocked to see that the poor bird had pecked half of its feathers out. She was shocked, but she understood it. If she’d had feathers, she’d have plucked them all out by now, too, out of her uncontrollable craving for the boy she couldn’t have.

When she saw the awful state J.D. was in, Abby felt really angry at Mitch, so angry that she hated him. It felt really good to hate him. It felt good to see that there was another creature on earth who was suffering, as she was, and for the exact same reason. She didn’t want J.D. to hurt, but seeing him like that made her feel a little less crazy. Maybe she was only as sane as a half-bald parrot, but at least she knew that another creature was taking it as hard as she was. From that moment, Abby swore to rescue the parrot and love him back to happiness. Three weeks later, she got her chance, and stole him off the Newquists’ screened-in porch. It took a long time to bring J.D. around, but eventually his feathers began to grow back, his eyes lit up again, and his appetite came back. On a day when he nuzzled her hair and gently nibbled her earlobe without drawing blood, she knew it was going to be okay.

The only thing about the bird that changed permanently was that he never squawked again, as he had used to do when Mitch was around. The parrot had a squawk that could rouse roosters from their perches, the judge had always said, but now the big red bird only made quiet noises, as if he was afraid of offending.

“I don’t know what I did wrong, either,” Abby told him.

When Abby went back to high school after the blizzard, she felt like a frozen girl, barely able to remember how to smile back at people, or to pick up a tray in the cafeteria line, much less to eat the food on it. In class, it was too hard to raise her hand to ask a question, though she answered when she was called on. When somebody came up behind her and said her name—“Abby!”—she jumped. She walked in dread of hearing
his
name, and quietly walked away when there was talk of him. There was a gold heart necklace he had given her; she stuck it deep into a pocket of whatever she was wearing on any given day and rolled it around in her fingers where nobody could see.

When Ellen came home from KU, Abby hid in her room. When her girlfriends dropped by to try to see her, she fended them off, even her best friends Cerule and Randie. Now and then she picked up the phone to call Rex, or started to talk to him in the halls, but he seemed to be avoiding her, and she was mad at Rex anyway, because he hadn’t called her. Every time she was tempted to try to talk to him, she got mad all over again, and hung up before anybody answered. She wondered if Rex was feeling bad, too. He had been Mitch’s best friend forever. But then, maybe Rex
knew
why Mitch had left the way he did. Maybe Rex wasn’t calling her, because he didn’t want to tell her anything.

Well, the hell with him, then, she thought.

The hell with everybody.

They all thought Mitch had left town because of her, because his mother had made sure to tell them so.