The Virgin of Small Plains (48 page)

“Murder! How do you know she was murdered?”

“Jesus, God, Quentin, are you even listening to me? We found her naked and bloody in the middle of a blizzard. What do you think, that she decided to take a naked walk in the snow? Of course it’s murder, or if not murder then some kind of manslaughter, and what the hell am I going to do?”

“Bring her to me.”

“I’m afraid to ask Patrick anything.”

“Then don’t. We’ll figure this out. Bring her here, Nathan.”

He didn’t tell his old friend what had transpired earlier.

He allowed Nathan to believe that Patrick might have done it.

When they brought her into his examining room he made sure no one could ever identify her and bring all of their lives tumbling down around them. He said nothing while Tom and Nadine arranged an adoption of Tom’s own biological child. He and Nathan both let Verna and Rex worry for years that Patrick might have done it, let other people wonder if Mitch was the guilty one.

And they let Jeffrey Newquist grow up without knowing the truth of his birth or the true nature of the people he believed had adopted him from strangers. In the years that followed, Quentin mentioned it only one time to Tom and once to Nadine.

To Tom, he said, “What did you do to her after I left?”

“I didn’t do anything,” the big man had said indignantly.

“Then what did Nadine do to her?”

Tom’s eyes had narrowed, as if he was annoyed at his wife. “I went into the house to rest. I left Nadine in the storm cellar to watch them. When I woke up and came back out the girl was gone. Nadine said she had fallen asleep and the girl had wandered out into the snowstorm. We couldn’t look for her, not in that weather, you know how bad it was. We couldn’t even move the car.”

Had Nadine fallen asleep and the girl just wandered away?

Escaped was more like it, Quentin thought.

Or had Nadine put her out into the storm to freeze to death?

Quentin could see that Tom didn’t know the answer to that, either.

Either way, they had killed her.

To Nadine, Quentin said, “You locked her in that storm cellar! For God’s sake!”

“She wasn’t there the whole time, Quentin,” Nadine had said, as if he were being unreasonable. “For most of her pregnancy we gave her the house to live in. We provided her with everything she needed! More than she had ever had before in her life, I’m sure. We only had to put her in the storm cellar when we found out that she’d had visitors. We couldn’t allow that, so we put her in there for her own good so that she couldn’t ruin our bargain with her. It was all to her benefit, after all.” Nadine had smiled her cold smile, the one that chilled even her oldest friends. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, Quentin. She was only in there for three months, and we made sure she had everything she needed there, too. She was only there until the baby was born.”

“Did she escape, Nadine, or did you put her out?”

Nadine had given him a look with venom at the back of it, a look that told him all he needed to know about how Sarah Francis came to be found naked in a blizzard after wandering lost, weak, and bleeding from childbirth. And he also understood from that murderous look that Tom and Nadine would do anything, harm anyone, who ever divulged any of their horrible secrets.

Quentin told one person the rest of the story: Nathan.

Together they looked at the damage that had already been done, the damage that could still be done, and they came to the decision to let it be. The families involved were already broken up; telling the truth would only harm them further. The child Jeffrey was being raised by his real father.

They never spoke of it, not even to each other, again.

Quentin always thought that Nathan paid for it with the excruciating pain of his arthritis. Nathan always thought that Quentin paid for it in the loss of his closeness to his daughters. Filled with the guilt of what had been done to an innocent girl close to Ellen and Abby’s age, Quentin Reynolds had never again allowed himself the pleasure of being close enough to his girls to feel loved by them.

But they went on with their “friendship” with Tom and Nadine. Because they had all known each other all their lives, because their wives didn’t know anything about what had happened, and because it was a small town where relationships had to be mended in order for people to live together so closely, and because the sheriff, even the sheriff, and the town’s doctor were afraid of the judge and of what he and his vicious wife could do to their own wives and children.

In the fraught silence that followed Nathan’s recital, Mitch looked around the living room.

“Where’s Jeff?” he said suddenly, breaking the mood. He stood up. “Where’d my brother go?”

Rex also jumped to his feet and looked over his father’s head into the kitchen. The kitchen table was empty. Jeff Newquist had slipped away, taking his father’s pistol with him.

He was gone, but somebody else had come into the house while Nathan was telling his story and had propped himself against a wall to listen along with everybody else.

Patrick looked from Abby to Mitch and back again.

And then he said, “What happened at your dad’s house, Abby? I saw the judge walk over there with a rifle.”

Chapter Forty-one

The judge had observed his older son’s car parked at the curb of Doc’s house and then he had watched as his younger son followed Mitch inside. Push had come to shove again. He had lied to his son Mitch in many ways, but the pertinent one at the moment was the lie that claimed that he, Tom, had told Quentin and Nathan that Mitch had witnessed what they did to the girl’s body. He had never told them any of that. They had no idea Mitch had been hiding in the supply closet that night or that he had seen the whole thing. They had never known, never threatened Mitch in any way.

But he had told Mitch they did, to justify getting him out of town.

And now Mitch was going over there, possibly to confront Quentin, who wouldn’t know what the hell he was talking about but who might decide now was the time to tell certain other secrets.

Tom hurried to the gun case in his office.

He unlocked it and then pulled out Mitch’s first rifle.

He might be able to get Mitch off of a murder charge, he told himself, but what he couldn’t do was allow Quentin to talk about what he had known for the last seventeen years.

It was a quiet street with few cars on it at any time.

He knew that half of success in life was walking confidently and that witnesses saw what they wanted to see. If he walked with a sure stride across the street to Quentin’s home and if he was carrying a rifle at his side, and if any neighbors saw him, they would see only who they wanted to see: Tom, their neighbor, the judge. And if they saw more than that, then it was their word against his and nobody’s word ever stood up against his.

At the front of the house, the screen door was closed but the wooden door was open.

From within, he heard Mitch’s voice raised in anger.

Tom stepped quietly through into the living room.

They were in the kitchen, arguing.

He heard Quentin saying, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The hell you don’t!” Mitch retorted, and then he said, “Maybe Nathan Shellenberger will have a better memory than you do.”

Tom stepped out of sight as his oldest son stormed through from the kitchen and slammed his way out of the house. He was followed by Jeffrey, who ran after him, yelling, “Mitch! Wait for me!”

Tom stepped around the corner, into the kitchen, before Quentin could go back into his clinic.

“What did you tell him?” he asked.

“Nothing.” Quentin saw the rifle, then raised alarmed eyes to his old friend.

Tom nodded, believing him. But Mitch might not stop until he had answers, and Quentin was the only living person who could still provide them. Tom had already made sure that the only other person who knew about Sarah…his own wife…had been silenced. With a touch of poetic justice that he liked, he had led Nadine by the hand into the blizzard and watched her wander off, as lost and confused as that girl had been the night that Nadine took her, naked, into that other snowstorm. In Nadine’s dementia, she had been starting to say things, little remembered things, that harked back to days that shouldn’t be recalled or spoken of, so Tom had taken care of it by letting nature render judgment on her.

But nobody was going to render judgment on him.

He hadn’t done anything wrong. The girl had wanted to have sex with him. She had wanted to have the baby. He had paid her fairly, taken care of her as well as Nadine would allow him to. And God knows, he had raised the troublesome child when he could have told her to have it aborted, or forced her to adopt it out to strangers.

He was, in his own mind, not guilty of anything.

Nadine had killed the girl, not him.

And Quentin was forcing him to take these measures, when God knew, he would rather not have raised the rifle and held it on his oldest friend.

“Lock the door to your office, Quentin.”

The doctor did so. “Tom, you don’t really—”

It was all he got a chance to say.

The judge put the rifle on the floor, took off the gloves he’d worn to carry and shoot it, and carried them out the front door with him. Then he walked with confident strides back across the street and into the house.

He noticed a red truck parked down the street, but paid no attention to it.

People saw what they were expecting to see. And his word was law.

It was only when he walked into his house that he found himself surprised by something. Or rather, by someone.

“Hey, Judge,” said the disheveled-looking drunk who had walked in the front door that the judge, for once in his life, had left unlocked. “Remember me? You put me in jail a few times, right? Made me pay a few fines, right? Well, not this time. This time, I’m the one’s come to collect from you.”

Marty Francis stood weaving on the fine Persian carpet on the floor of the judge’s living room. When Tom was able to figure out that the man was there to blackmail him to keep secret the identity of the girl in the grave, Tom said, “I don’t have that much money in the house. Let’s take a drive together and I’ll get it from the bank for you.”