The Virgin of Small Plains (22 page)

Abby looked at Susan, who nodded to confirm it.

“I don’t think he recognized me,” she said. “But I’m positive it was him.”

For half a second, Abby thought she might get away with saying, “So what? It’s not like I care.” But in the next half of that second, she felt herself slipping down to sit on the kitchen floor, and she heard her own voice whisper, “Shit.”

Almost before she knew it, they were all down on the floor with her, sprawled out on the linoleum, or sitting cross-legged, passing around glasses, with the pitcher of iced margaritas in the middle of their circle.

Even the birds joined them, taking up perches on the friends.

“Why?” Abby asked them. “He didn’t even come back for his own mother’s funeral, so why would he come back now?”

They all shrugged and looked helpless.

“Guilty conscience,” Cerule suggested tartly.

“Better late than never,” Randie sneered.

“I don’t want to see him!” Abby wailed at them.

“Hell, nobody wants to see him,” Randie said. “Fuck him and the horse he rode
out
on.”

“I want to see him,” Cerule admitted, but then added hastily, “but only from a distance. I just want to know what he looks like after all these years. I hope he’s blotchy, bald, and a hundred pounds overweight.” She looked over at Susan. “Is he, Susan? Is he fat and blotchy and ugly?”

The funeral director looked down at her drink. “Well. Not exactly.”

“Well, shoot,” Cerule said. “It’s not bad enough that he’s back, but he has to still be gorgeous, too?”

“ ’Fraid so,” Susan said, with a sigh.

“Why should I care?” Abby said, her voice rising on the last word. “It’s been
years
!”

“You don’t care,” Randie said stoutly. “You’re just surprised, that’s all.”

Abby gave her a weak smile. “Nice try.”

Suddenly Ellen got to her feet and made an announcement. “I think this calls for a large pizza with everything on it.”

“But what about dinner with the family?” Abby asked her.

“This is family, too,” Ellen informed her. “And this is a family emergency if I ever saw one. Emergencies call for pizza.”

Cerule joined her in standing up. “And chocolate ice cream.”

“Gross,” said Randie, also getting up, “but delicious.”

“Can’t we just stay here and drink?” Abby whined, but they wouldn’t let her sit still. Having emptied one pitcher of margaritas between them, they cleaned up her kitchen, secured the birds in the big cage, and then piled into Ellen’s car, because she’d taken only a couple of sips of the alcohol.

At a sedate pace befitting the mayor of Small Plains, they drove into town for supper.

To the west, towering white cumulus clouds were building higher and higher in the muggy air of the early evening. Behind the white clouds, there were other clouds that were turning to gray tinged with black. Even as the friends traveled down the highway, the atmosphere around them seemed to thicken, to get hotter and stickier, as if it were August instead of May.

But the friends weren’t paying any attention to the weather.

As they drew closer to town, Abby realized what they were all trying to hide from one another and especially from her. Every one of them, including herself, was sneaking peeks at the cars and people they passed on the streets, looking for
him.
She wanted to say, “Stop it!” She wanted to roll down a window and scream, “Go back the hell where you came from!” She wanted to whisper,
Why did you leave me?

When they drove by the cemetery Cerule suddenly said, “Hey, Susan, is the Virgin only supposed to cure people? Do you think she ever gives people
bad
luck?”

From the front seat, Susan said, “I don’t know. Why ask me?”

Cerule raised a sardonic eyebrow. “ ’Cause, next time you’re at the cemetery? See if you can get the Virgin to give Mitch Newquist the plague.”

Chapter Nineteen

“You ever seen the jails in Douglas or Johnson County, Sheriff?”

“I have,” Rex answered Deputy Marvel, who walked in front of him down a short row of traditional cells with bars. The air was so heavy that the ancient central air conditioning was laboring like some kind of mechanical behemoth, noisy and distracting. Rex said, “Are you telling me you’re jealous?”

“Man, they’re like state-of-the-art, sir.”

“Not like this, you’re saying?”

They stopped in front of a particular cell, where an inmate in an orange jumpsuit sat on a single bed attached to a wall, looking out at them. Rex detected curiosity, but no fear in the eyes, a fact that suggested to him that his deputies were not abusing their positions. Or, at least this deputy didn’t do that, and he, himself, had no reputation for it. He wondered how much tougher he would have to act if he reigned over a more populated, more violent kind of county. It was something he was probably never going to have to find out. In the meantime, he and his few deputies and their few “guests,” would continue to co-exist in their dim, confined, separated world.

“At the Douglas County Jail,” Marvel said, conversationally including the inmate by making eye contact with him as well as with Rex, “this kind of section looks like a hospital emergency room, instead of a jail, you know? The central command post looks like a nurses’ station, every inmate’s got a private room with a door with a window in it, and it’s all clean enough to eat off the floor.”

They all looked instinctively at the ancient cement floor of the cell, with a drain in the center of it.

“We could use more taxpayers,” Marvel observed.

“Yeah, but then we’d get more crime,” Rex countered.

“And a worse class of criminals,” the man in the cell contributed, with a grin that revealed a lifetime of inadequate dental care.

“I wouldn’t say that,” the deputy joked, opening the cell door.

He stood aside, wiping his sweating forehead with the back of one arm.

Rex stepped inside, allowing Marvel to lock it behind him and then hand him the keys.

“Did Abby Reynolds convince you?” the deputy asked him.

“Of what?” Rex said.

“To reopen that—”

“No!” Rex thundered, before the man could say anything more.

Marvel raised his eyebrows, exchanged a glance with the prisoner, and said, “Okey-dokey.”

He walked off, whistling, down the long corridor.

“Nothing scarier than a cranky lawman,” said the man in the cell.

“Best not to annoy us then,” Rex snapped, before taking a breath to calm himself.

Careful to keep his own shirt and trousers clean, he picked a spot to stand that was close to, but not touching, the dampish cement wall opposite the jailed man. On hot humid evenings like this, the place smelled like a cellar.

Rex would have been tempted to think of the inmate’s presence here, at this time, as a remarkable coincidence, if it were not for the fact that the man had been a fairly frequent “guest” over the years.

“I’m gonna stop drinking,” the man announced, seemingly out of the blue.

“Worth considering,” Rex agreed, poker-faced. “When did you start?”

“Drinking?” The man raised his face toward the ceiling and squinted at the lightbulb in it. “I dunno. I was maybe ten, could have been younger.”

“How long is it since you’ve had a driver’s license, Marty?” Rex inquired.

“Oh, God, three years, going on four. At this rate, I’ll never get it back.”

“That’s certainly possible.”

“How the hell’s a man supposed to make a living when he can’t even drive a truck, and the nearest employment is miles away?”

“I don’t know,” Rex said.

“The court takes away a man’s driver’s license, but if the only way he’s got to make a buck is to drive to it, he’s going to drive a car anyway, you know he is, right?”

Rex nodded, knowing that that was the truth of it.

“Were either of your parents alcoholics, Marty?”

The other man laughed. “Them and every other cousin.”

“You’ve got a couple of brothers, right? How do they do with it?”

“One’s an AA fanatic, the other got killed in a bar fight a few years back.”

“What about sisters, you have any sisters?”

Rex kept his own breathing slow and even, to control his pulse rate as he neared the questions that were the reason for this visit.

The inmate quirked a corner of his mouth in a disgusted kind of way. “A couple. Worthless bitches.”

“Yeah, why so?”

“Well, one of them, younger than me, she married a worse asshole than me, and he beat her to death, but it was hard to blame him. She was a complaining kind of girl, if you know what I mean.”

Rex kept still, listening to the man reveal himself.

“The other one, she was the oldest of all of us. Ran away from home when she was, I dunno, seventeen, maybe—”

Nineteen,
Rex thought, remembering this man’s sister, Sarah.

“She was a looker, believe it or not.”

“Is that right? Where’d she end up, Marty?”

The man shrugged and then finally seemed to grasp that the sheriff of Muncie County was displaying an unusual degree of interest in a drunk-driving offender. “Why you asking me all these questions about my family?”

Rex shrugged, and began to move toward the cell door. “Thinking about instituting a new program for drug and alcohol offenders,” he said, making it up as he went along. “Get a feel for their families, look for root causes, that kind of thing.”

“Fucking social work?”

Rex smiled a little. “Exactly.”

“Would it get me my license back any sooner?”

“Not a chance.”

“Well, fuck it then.”

Rex took the keys the deputy had handed him, reached his hands through the spaces between the bars, and released himself from the cell. Before he departed, he turned to ask one more question.

“Your family ever look for that runaway sister, Marty?”

“My family?” He sounded amazed the question would even occur to the sheriff. The man showed his teeth again. “Nah. We all split for other places, all except me. I’m the only one left around here. Most everybody else is dead, anyway. But I’ll sure as hell look for her—”

Rex’s chest muscles clenched. He thought,
I have made a mistake in raising this.

“—if I find out she married a rich man.”

Sarah’s brother boomed out a laugh that bounced off the cement walls.

Rex relaxed again, and nodded a good-bye to the man in the cell.

He walked alone back down the corridor.

Nobody in her family had bothered to look for her in all these years. Apparently, they hadn’t even questioned her existence. And there was no reason, ever, for them to connect that girl—whose own brother couldn’t even correctly remember her age when she “left”—with a battered body in a grave.

His relieved feeling didn’t last long.

When he emerged into the light of the central office, Edyth Flournoy trotted up to him and said, “You know that rain we might get tonight, Sheriff? Looks like it’s going to get nasty. Funnel clouds sighted in Marion County fifteen minutes ago.”

Marion was one county over from Muncie.

“Any on the ground?”

“None reported.”

“What’s the weather service saying?”

“So far, just a tornado watch for us, warnings out for them.”

“Are we in the path?”

“Yes.”

“How long have we got?”

“Storm’s moving at forty miles an hour. The front edge of it is about ninety miles out from us.”

“A little over two hours then.” Rex thought of something. “Damn.”

“What?”

“It’s Memorial Day. Get out to the cemetery. Clear it, and close it.”

His locals knew what to do in the case of tornado warnings, but visitors might not. Plus, what was he going to do with them if a bad one did strike? In a flash, Rex mentally reviewed all the basements he could remember in town, from churches to schools, the courthouse, and downtown businesses.

Small Plains hadn’t had a really bad hit from any kind of storm for several years. The snowstorm that killed Nadine Newquist last winter had caused a lot of traffic accidents and killed some animals, and an ice storm five years previously had taken down many trees and a lot of roofs with them. But it had been longer than that since a tornado had done any more damage than to lift a few outbuildings off their foundations on outlying farms and ranches. When that happened, it wasn’t unusual to find cattle in the wrong pastures after the storm passed, it having picked them up and deposited them to graze on a neighbor’s grass. But they hadn’t had a tornado go through town in Rex’s lifetime; he couldn’t even remember the last human injury from one. An optimist might have considered that a good sign of the night to come, but Rex thought, as he always did, that they had probably been pushing their luck.