The Virgin of Small Plains Read online

  He suddenly felt so ill that he thought he was going to have to put her down and turn away and actually throw up in the bushes.

  “Are you all right?” she asked him.

  He swallowed. “I’m okay. Do you live around here?”

  “Me? Oh, no, I’m from Wichita.”

  “Then how did you ever hear about…the Virgin?”

  “She’s kind of famous, like that place in France…”

  “Lourdes?”

  “Yeah, that’s the one, where they say the water cures you.”

  He felt bile rising in his chest again, and fought it back.

  “I asked her to help me,” the girl told him in a reverent whisper.

  “Did you?” They had returned to her van. “Here we are again.”

  Mitch gently set her on her feet long enough to allow him to open her van door for her, and then he helped her back into it.

  “Is it cancer?” he asked bluntly, looking into her wide eyes in her thin face.

  She nodded, and then stuck out one thin hand. “I’m Catie.”

  “Mitch,” he said, and took the hand. “How far do you have to go? Are you sure you can drive?”

  “Not far. I’m staying in town. And really, I’m okay when I’m driving.”

  Mitch stood by the side of the road and watched her leave the cemetery. There had been a kind of happy glow to her face as she gave one last look out her side window at him. If nothing else, the visit to the grave seemed to have made her happier for a little while.

  When she was gone, he walked slowly back to the grave of the girl that Catie had called the Virgin. Mitch stood staring down at it for a long time, until enough other people began to enter the cemetery with their memorial flowers that he began to worry about getting spotted by somebody he knew.

  One last time, he looked at the gravestone.

  “So they couldn’t identify you,” he said with a cynical, bitter twist to his tone. “But there’s one person who still knows who you are, isn’t there…Sarah?”

  On his way out of the cemetery in his own car, he looked to the side, right into the face of a woman who looked vaguely familiar to him, as if she might have been someone with whom he had gone to school. Mitch didn’t allow any expression to enter his eyes, but he thought he saw a startled spark of recognition in hers.

  “Screw it,” he thought angrily, as he found himself turning left toward town instead of right toward the interstate up north. “If I didn’t have a good reason to stay longer before, I do now.”

  His heart was pounding hard as he crossed the town limits.

  As he slowly drove around the once-familiar streets of Small Plains he put on his sunglasses again, and his Royals baseball cap, and he propped his left arm on the doorsill to hide the side of his face. He took in the surprising fact that downtown looked better than he remembered it, but he also noticed a number of FOR SALE signs placed in storefront windows.

  His father, Abby’s father, and Rex’s father had considered Small Plains to be their territory, their fiefdom, theirs by right of inheritance by their own fathers and grandfathers before that. As Mitch drove around, an idea began to grow in him of how he might get a measure of revenge, and possibly even justice.

  He recalled his own vow to himself: I’ll never forget. I’ll never forgive.

  He thought of a beautiful girl with her face beaten, her identity erased as if she had never existed, and he thought of how too many years had gone by without him doing anything about it.

  Feeling a turbulent mix of fear, anger, and resolve, Mitch turned his car toward a bit of acreage and a small ranch house that his family had owned. He was betting it was still there and that his father still owned it. If the ranch house was still there, if they hadn’t sold it or rented it to somebody else, if the keys were still hidden where they had been for all the early years of his life, if it was still habitable, then that’s where he would spend the night.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Because I say so.”

  At 11:30 that morning in his office in the sheriff’s department in downtown Small Plains, Rex gave two of his deputies an exasperated look that did not even begin to hint at the indigestion they were giving him. Unfortunately, when they heard him say that, instead of taking him seriously, they both laughed at him.

  So did his other visitor, the fourth person in the room.

  “Yeah, right, Dad,” the male half of the deputies scoffed.

  “And go to our rooms?” chimed in his female counterpart, with a grin.

  “You tell him,” Abby said, egging them on.

  That earned her a darkly repressive glance from her old friend and their boss. This is all your fault, his expression said. And, of course, it was. She had driven here straight from her father’s house and solely to encourage Rex to reopen the Virgin’s homicide case, having decided to keep moving while the impulse was still strong in her, and while the holiday gave her time on a Monday that she didn’t usually have.

  By happy chance, she had run into a couple of eager deputies in the hallway outside his office and promptly enlisted them in the cause.

  Abby knew them both, having gone to high school with one of them and having sold a lot of garden supplies to the other. The female deputy and gardener was Edyth Flournoy, thirty years old, only the fourth woman ever to serve in the sheriff’s department of Muncie County. The male deputy was John Marvel, a ten-year-veteran whose last name provoked eternal ribbing from the good guys and the bad guys alike. Now he leaned forward, looking as eager and excited as a rookie cop, instead of the jaded thirty-three-year-old he really was. “Listen, boss, when’s the last time we even had a homicide to investigate? Seventeen years ago, when she was killed, that’s when! And there wasn’t another murder for five years before that, and it got solved. We can’t leave this one homicide hanging over our department!”

  “Hell, no,” Flournoy weighed in. “It makes us look bad.”

  “How come it didn’t make us look bad until now?” their sheriff asked.

  But they all knew that that was merely a rhetorical question.

  “Think of how many new technologies have been invented since the Virgin was killed,” Flournoy said.

  “Dozens, probably,” Abby chimed in, helpfully.

  “Don’t call her the Virgin,” Rex griped.

  “Why not?” Deputy Flournoy shot back at him. “Everybody else does. If we call her Jane Doe, nobody will know who we’re talking about.”

  “They’ll know.”

  “But listen,” Flournoy persisted. “There’s so much we could do now that your dad couldn’t do back then. We could use CODIS, we could try AFIS…”

  “What’s Codis?” Abby asked her.

  “Combined DNA Indexing System,” Deputy Flournoy said, rather proudly. “And AFIS stands for Automated Fingerprint Identification System.”

  “Uh huh,” Rex interrupted, “and do any of you happen to have the two thousand bucks we’ll need for a DNA comparison with the DNA of missing people?”

  “I might,” Abby offered.

  “Oh, shut up,” he snapped at her, and then turned back to his deputies. “And where do you think you’re going to find fingerprints when there wasn’t any weapon and she wasn’t wearing any clothes—”

  “There was a blizzard, right?” Flournoy asked him. “Was your dad able to collect any evidence at the scene?”

  “No, not until the snow melted, which took a few weeks.”

  “And?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing.”

  “Why didn’t he go out with a generator and heating fans and melt the damned stuff?” Marvel said.

  “I don’t know. I could be wrong about some of this. Maybe he did.”

  “We could go back out and search all over again,” Flournoy offered.

  Rex gave her a deeply skeptical look. “In a pasture? Seventeen years later?”

  “Hey, boss, what do you think archeologists do?” she retorted. “What difference does it make how many yea
rs have gone by? Something could have gotten buried, or even just overlooked—”

  “Definitely,” Abby agreed, with a vigorous nod of her head.

  “Or eaten by coyotes, or trampled by cows, or picked up by a tornado,” Rex shot back. He sat forward to try to impress them all with his earnestness. “Listen, I know you’re eager to delve back into this. I understand that. Or, at least I understand why the two of you are. You’re being good cops. And it’s quite the thing these days to solve old crimes. You—” He glared at his dear friend. “You, I don’t know what you’re up to. You, I suspect of just being a pain in the ass. But hey.” He forced a smile at his deputies. “I watch Cold Case, too.”

  His deputies grinned back at him, both of them looking a little shamefaced to be caught getting their inspiration from a TV show about investigating unsolved crimes.

  “And I am happy you want to get into this, truly, I am,” Rex continued. “But here’s the thing. You’ve got to face some facts that aren’t cold. One of them is that we have the same limited resources we’ve always had. No county crime lab. Not enough money. Not enough people like you.”

  Rex inclined his head, his way of pointing out the window of his office.

  “We may not have much crime in this county, but hell, we don’t even have the budget or personnel to handle what little we do have, much less remove any of you from those duties in order to investigate a seventeen-year-old crime.”

  He held up a hand when all three started to speak at once.

  “Do you know how much work is involved in cold cases?”

  Flournoy’s face brightened again. “There’s a seminar down in Miami…”

  “Yeah, right,” Rex said, and had to laugh. “That’s gonna happen. I’m going to send both of you to Miami about the same time I buy Hummers for everybody.” He got serious again. “It is incredibly tedious and time-consuming. The paperwork alone is enough to kill you. And I know how much you guys love paperwork.”

  Their eager looks faltered a bit, as he had hoped they would.

  “And speaking of paperwork that needs doing,” Rex said ominously.

  His deputies took the hint. They picked up their coffee cups and departed the office together, leaving Abby alone to face the bad mood their boss was in this morning.

  Rex swiveled his chair so he could stare at his old friend Abby.

  “What’s up with this?” he asked her.

  “I’m not sure,” she admitted. “Or maybe I am. It started when we found Nadine, Rex. I started to think more about that girl who was killed, and how maybe now we could find out who she was—with all the new technology, like Edyth said.”

  “And find out who killed her?”

  Abby shrugged. “I don’t know about that. I just want to put a name on her grave.”

  “Why?”

  “Why?” Abby blinked. “Don’t you want to identify her? Wouldn’t everybody like to know who she was?”

  “Of course. That’s not what I meant. I guess I mean, why you?”

  Abby took her time answering and stared over his shoulder, out the window, while she thought about her answer. “Maybe I’m just curious.”

  “There must be more to it than that.”

  Abby could only shrug again. “I really don’t know.”

  He took a breath and sat up straight in his chair. “Okay. Well, here’s the deal. I’m sorry, but it’s not going to happen, not unless we get some kind of lucky break like we’ve always been depending on. We’d have to exhume her to get DNA, Abby. And we can’t afford to do that, and we can’t afford to do any of the rest of it, either, and don’t give me any baloney about you paying for it. I’ve seen how bad your house needs paint and I know how old your truck is. So just forget about anything like that, all right?”

  “All right,” she said, so quickly and meekly that he was immediately suspicious.

  “Abby…?”

  “No, really, all right, Rex. I mean, what could I do by myself? Nothing.”

  “That’s right,” he said firmly. “Nothing. Please do exactly that.”

  Abby got up from the chair, gave him a warm smile, and started toward his doorway. When she got there, she turned around and said, “Your mother didn’t want me to do anything, either.”

  “My mother?”

  But Abby had already gone, leaving his doorway empty but his office filled with the musky scent of her perfume. Or maybe that was John Marvel’s cologne, Rex thought, and smiled in spite of himself.

  He got up, walked over to his office door, and shut it.

  Then he went back to his desk, picked up his pile of keys that lay on top of it, and rifled through them until he found the one he sought: a tiny silver key that fit into the bottom drawer of his desk. Once unlocked, the drawer revealed only papers…until he lifted the papers and then the false bottom beneath them. Below it, there was a box about four inches square.

  He reached down and lifted the lid of the box.

  Inside, there was a red circlet of fabric and elastic. The girls he had gone to high school with had called them “scrunchies.” This one had a dark stain on one side of it. It also had several long dark hairs curled within its wrinkles. When his father, Patrick, and he had lifted the dead girl into their truck and laid her down on the cold metal floor of it and covered her with burlap feed sacks, Rex had been the last to climb back down to the ground.

  His father and brother had walked on toward the doors of the truck.

  It was he who had sighted something dark lying in the snow.

  He had reached down to pick it up, and found that he was holding a red elastic band that had tied back her hair.

  The sound of someone clearing her throat made Rex look up toward his doorway.

  He closed his fist over the red hair band, quickly hiding it.

  Rex was shocked to see that a half hour had passed while he had just sat there.

  Edyth Flournoy stood in the doorway with a grin on her face. Upon getting the boss’s attention, she said, “Hey, boss, I forgot to tell you…saw your brother doing something interesting this morning.”

  Rex heaved a big sigh. “What? Robbing a bank? Driving under the influence?”

  “Nah.” She laughed, assuming he was joking. “Shacked up with Abby, from the looks of it. I passed him coming from her place early this morning.”

  Sensing a sudden change in the atmosphere, the deputy said, “Guess it’s none of my business,” and quickly walked away.

  Rex felt the flash of intense anger he experienced almost every time his brother crossed his mind. It didn’t improve his temper to think that Abby had sat right there across from him and never said a word about being with Patrick last night. Not that she was likely to tell him, he had to admit, knowing how he felt about it, as she did. If he ever thought it was getting serious between Abby and Pat, he thought he might have to arrest her for something just to keep her from making the biggest mistake of her life. Or maybe he’d just shoot Patrick. He had to admit, though, that if he could have shot his older brother and gotten away with it, he probably would have already done it by now.

  Rex opened his fist and stared down at the object in it.

  It had slid off her hair when they handled her. When he had found the red “scrunchie” lying in the snow, he had hesitated for a moment, staring at it. Then he had quickly stuffed it down into his coat pocket, meaning to give it to his father. Or maybe he never had really meant to do that, he thought now, alone in his office. Maybe he had always meant to keep it as a private memento, since he was the one who had given it to her.

  Chapter Seventeen

  August, 1986

  Maybe it was the heat—110 degrees on the thermometer that was screwed to an outside corner of the barn—that propelled him into following Patrick that summer day. Or maybe it was the fact that for three days out of the last five, Patrick had vanished from the fields where they were both supposed to be baling hay, leaving Rex to sweat through the work alone.

  Despite the fact t
hat he felt resentful enough to stick Patrick’s face in a water trough and drown him, Rex hadn’t complained about it to his parents. That wouldn’t do anything except bring parental wrath down on his own head. They had never allowed the brothers to come running to them to settle fights; from an early age, the boys were instructed to settle it themselves or to stew over it privately, their choice. So even when his father yelled at them that they weren’t getting enough work done fast enough to please him, Rex’s eyes had shot pitchforks at his older brother, but he’d kept his mouth shut while his parents were around. He figured his father wasn’t stupid. Nathan could read the signs. He knew he had one hardworking, sporadically dutiful son and one lazy-ass, rebellious one. Even if Nathan didn’t know the precise nature of the disagreement this time, he surely knew Patrick was the cause of it. But he still expected Rex to handle his complaints on his own. He also expected the hay to get put up while the weather held, whether both brothers did their shares or one brother did it alone. It was one of the prices the brothers paid for having a father who also held a full-time job as the county sheriff. Without two strong sons to work in his place, Nathan could never have pulled it off.

  When the mechanism of the baler got clogged up for the second damn time in the past hour, Rex stopped the big machine. When he opened the door of it he realized that all the fields were quiet except for the buzzing of insects. There should have been the low roar of another baler. He looked over at the next field for the dust his brother should have been raising. All he saw was heat rising from the field. That was the last straw for him.

  Furious, he flung himself out of the cab, down to the prickly ground, and stalked off to where his old secondhand beat-up truck was parked at the far end at the gate.

  He got in his truck, peeled off toward the next field, and found that Patrick’s old truck was gone again. Where the hell does he go? Rex fumed. Probably off to one of his equally worthless friends’ houses to hide out in air-conditioning and drink beer for a couple of hours. Or off to visit one of the infinite number of girls who always seemed willing to put up with his good-looking, no-good self.