The Virgin of Small Plains (8 page)

Eventually, Abby caught on to how to do natural things again.

She began to be able to hear other people say his name.

One day she accidentally left the heart necklace in some shorts she was washing. When she heard it rattling around inside the clothes dryer she took it out and put it in the bottom drawer of her jewelry case.

A detached part of her understood how lucky she was: she was pretty, she was well-liked, there were boys who wanted to try to be with her now that Mitch was out of the picture, and there were girls who felt closer to her now that she had been dumped like anybody else could be. Slowly, lured out of her loneliness by other kids, she came to life again. But it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t the same. She was a girl who had lost the boy she loved for reasons she believed she would never understand, and she felt estranged from her other best male friend, Rex, and she’d been accused of things she hadn’t done, and even her father seemed to be distancing himself from her, and now her best friend was a big red South American parrot.

The distance between her and Rex continued through the following lonely summer, and then he went off to college. Each time they saw each other after that, it was a little easier to be in each other’s company. By the time they had both graduated from college, they were back on steady ground. A few times Abby tried to talk to him about Mitch, but Rex wouldn’t do it. She finally gave up the effort. But Abby always suspected that Rex felt like she did, like a triangle with one side missing.

Chapter Seven

January 23, 2004

There had been a bad wreck east of Small Plains—a tractor-trailer had overturned in the blizzard—and then there were motorists for Rex Shellenberger and his deputies to help out of ditches. Now that the sun was up, more or less, he was tired from fighting the storm, and starving for a big breakfast in town. But before he could even begin to fantasize about bacon and eggs, his cell phone rang.

It was Judge Tom Newquist, transferred to Rex’s cell phone in his SUV and sounding frantic because he couldn’t locate Nadine.

“Where do you think she went, Judge?”

Rex felt all of his police senses go on high alert again.

No rest for the wicked, he thought. Or eggs or bacon, for that matter.

“If I knew where she went, I’d find her!” Tom Newquist sounded angry, like a desperate man. “In her condition, she could go anywhere. There’s no point looking for logic in it.”

“But you think she’s outside the house?”

Rex drove with one bare hand on the steering wheel, feeling the cold plastic under his fingers, the other holding the metallic phone to his ear. As slick as it was out, as thick as it was still coming down, he’d a whole lot rather have had both hands on the wheel.

“I know she’s not
in
side.” The judge’s tone was sharp, unhappy. “I found the kitchen door open. Snow was blowing in.”

Shit,
Rex thought, but didn’t say out loud. An Alzheimer’s patient, out in this weather?

“Go look outside again, Judge. See if you see any footprints leading in some direction.”

“I already did that.” The judge was no fool. “There’s nothing to see.”

Double-dip shit,
Rex thought. That meant she’d left some time ago, long enough for fresh snow to fill in any tracks she left. “I’m on my way,” he promised the judge. “Please don’t you go looking for her, all right? Nobody with any sense would go out on a day like this.” He realized what he had just said, and regretted it. “I’m sorry, Judge. I didn’t mean to say that.”

“I thought she was doing better,” the judge said, ignoring the tactless comment. “Enough so that I sent her nurse home last night. She was making sense when she talked. She was walking around okay, taking care of herself. She wasn’t crying all the time like she has been. I thought it was safe to let her sleep in her room by herself.”

On second thought, maybe the judge
was
a fool, Rex thought. Alzheimer’s patients roamed at night, worse than they did in the daytime. Anybody who’d ever known one well knew that. If the judge couldn’t handle that basic fact, he should have put her in a nursing home long ago.

“Is Jeff there?” Rex asked him.

Jeffrey was their other child, the one who had come along eighteen years after Mitch’s birth, the adopted child whom some people called their substitute son. Ordinarily, Rex wouldn’t have felt the need to inquire if a kid had stayed home on a school night while a blizzard raged, but Jeff was a high school senior, a breed that Rex didn’t trust any farther than he could throw them. Mainly, because he remembered his own final year of high school. But either he had whitewashed his own memory, or Jeff was worse than he or any of his friends had been at that age, and more given to copping an attitude, too. It didn’t help that his mother had gone mental, and that the judge was still the oblivious workaholic he’d always been. There had been too many times already when Rex had picked Jeff up someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, and delivered him home to his parents, who hadn’t even realized he was gone.

The judge assured him that Jeff was asleep in his room.

Rex refrained from asking, “Have you actually opened his door to make sure?” The judge didn’t need one more family member to worry about this morning. If Jeff was out someplace he would likely survive, which was more than could be said of the chances for his mother.

“How soon can you be here?” the judge demanded.

“I’ll cut through the cemetery.”

“You’re not coming here first?”

The judge sounded as if he was ready to argue about it.

“I’m taking the fastest route from where I am now,” Rex said to calm him.

The Newquists’ place backed up to the cemetery, so there was a good chance Nadine had gone that way.

Another call came through while he was on the phone with the judge, but Rex ignored it. By the time he hung up, his mind was focused on finding Nadine. Forgetting about the second call, he laid his cell phone back down on the seat beside him in order to concentrate on his driving. As bad as the conditions were, they weren’t bad enough to take his mind off an awful irony that confronted him. He wondered if the judge was aware of it, too: It was January 23, and he was going out searching in a blizzard. It wasn’t the first time he’d ever done that on this date. He could only hope that it ended better this time than it had the time before.

It took him more than twenty minutes to draw near to the cemetery.

“My God—”

He spotted a black Ford pickup truck, wedged deep and damaged in a drainage ditch across the highway. Scrawled across its passenger-side door was a logo written in white script letters:
Abby’s Lawn & Landscape,
with a phone number and a website address.

“No!” Rex yelled the word as he slid to a stop as close as he could get to the truck.
No!

To his horror, he saw a body slumped against the window on the driver’s side.

Rex felt his heart begin to break, just as it had once before, a long time ago. He had never been in love with Abby, except for one brief time when he was seven and she was five. Even then she’d had long curly blond hair, just as she still did, and big blue eyes, and she’d been easy to love. And that was even before she had developed the figure that looked so good in tight jeans and snug shirts. But he had transferred his affection to a little red-haired girl who moved to town, and then to a series of other girls who mostly hadn’t loved him back. And so it had fallen to Mitch to love Abby, a job at which he had proved himself to be piss-poor.

Rex tore out of his SUV, grabbing his gloves, and leaving the door hanging open behind him.

He half-slid, half-ran toward the wrecked pickup truck, yelling and praying all the way. He loved Abby like a sister, and he didn’t think he could stand it if she was dead. Losing Mitch had been bad enough, but this would be so much worse. When he got to the truck he jerked the driver’s-side door open.

“Abby!”

At the sound of Rex’s voice, she started to come to. She saw a white sky through a windshield that was tilted, for some strange reason, upward. She saw that she was inside the cab of her own truck, held in place by her seat belt. The outside of her left arm and the left side of her head hurt. A lot. She was so cold she felt numb all over. When she turned to see who was saying her name, the view spun sickeningly for a moment. With effort, she recognized the handsome-homely face that was staring at her as if she was some kind of horrifying sight to see, as if he had just come across Godzilla in a pickup truck.

“Abby, talk to me! Your eyes are open…Tell me how many butt-ugly sheriffs you see standing in front of you.”

“Three.”

He looked even more horrified, until she smiled.

“Kidding. There could only be one of you, ever.”

“Whew. Don’t scare me like that. What happened to you?”

Abby put her left hand cautiously up to her forehead, and when she pulled it down to examine it, she saw blood on her glove. Feeling stiff as a corpse, she reached up her right hand to lower the visor and lift the cover of the mirror there. What she saw scared her, too—how pale she looked, how blood was trickling from underneath her black wool cap. Her pupils looked big and black, which must account for how much her eyes hurt, she thought. She grabbed sunglasses from the seat beside her, and gently eased them onto her face. Then she snatched the cap off to see her own smashed blond curls, now tinted red and pink.

“I look punk,” she said weakly. “All I need is a safety pin through my eyebrow.”

“Put your hat back on before you catch pneumonia.”

“Yes, Dad.” Despite her sarcasm, she did as he said, even though the pain when she lifted her left arm made her suck in her breath. When she saw that her coffee had all spilled out, she realized she couldn’t smell it and wondered for a panicky moment if her nose had frozen. When Rex leaned in to examine her face, she was relieved to smell the leather of his jacket.

“You scared the shit of me, Abby,” he said, accusingly. “When I saw your truck in the ditch…”

The window wasn’t cracked, and neither was her head, she guessed, though the skin was definitely split up there. The pain of disturbing her own wounds woke her up some more. She remembered, in a rush, how she had landed there.

“What happened to my truck? Get me out of this seat belt. Have you got Nadine?”

“No. How do you know about Nadine?”

It was Abby’s turn to look horrified. “Didn’t you hear my message?”

“No, I just happened to be coming this way—”

“Oh, my God, Rex! Nadine is in the cemetery! I saw her walking there in her bathrobe—”

He straightened up and looked in that direction. “Jesus,” he said in a low, urgent voice. Quickly, he shoved back the glove on his left wrist and checked his watch. “It’s six thirty-two. Do you know when you crashed?”

Abby was already fighting her way out of the cab of her truck, using Rex’s big, lanky body as leverage to propel herself safely down to the ground, into the deep snow where he stood. The snow was so deep that if he had on boots, she couldn’t see them.

“It had to have been around six,” she told him. “Oh, my God, Mitch, a whole half hour!”

“Mitch?” Rex had looked as if he was ready to leave her there, and go find Nadine. But now he turned back. “You called me Mitch, Abby.”

She stared into the familiar brown eyes that now held a hint of anger.

“I did? I called you Mitch? Well, that’s his mother out there. Who cares, Rex! Does it really matter if I call you Fred or Harvey? Come on, we’ve got to find her. Help me, I’m dizzy—”

“You’re not going. You may have a concussion.”

“Oh, shut up, Rex. I’m freezing, I need to move. I can show you where she was.”

She felt her vision starting to black out, and quickly leaned into him until she could see again.

“Yeah, you’ll be a big help,” he said, still sounding angry.

“Nadine!” she snapped at him, and tugged at his coat to get him to hurry.

He grabbed her to steady her, and then kept tight hold of her as they hurried up out of the culvert and made their way through the snow to his SUV. Three times, one or the other of them slipped, nearly bringing both of them down, but his strength kept them upright, and she was determined not to let him go alone. Abby didn’t trust a man to be able to find anything. Not even Rex, not even to find a sixty-three-year-old woman in a rose-colored bathrobe in the snow.