The Virgin of Small Plains Page 14

  And how do I think I’m going to find him?

  It dawned on Rex that if he didn’t know where his brother had disappeared to, then he probably couldn’t find him, at least not without taking a couple of hours to do nothing but drive from one possible place to another. And it wasn’t like Patrick was stupid enough to park his truck out in front of somebody’s house, or a bar, where their father or one of his deputies would be likely to see it.

  With a string of curses, Rex turned his truck around and returned to the field where he was supposed to be working. Maybe he couldn’t find Patrick today, but he thought he knew how to find him the next time he did this.

  For two days in a row, Patrick worked the way he was supposed to, as if he had calibrated exactly how much slack he had before their father might come roaring home to check on them. But then on the third day, he vanished mid-afternoon again.

  This time, Rex was ready for him.

  He had watched his brother’s work like a hawk since the last time, throwing constant beady-eyed glances in that direction, on alert for the moment when the dust in that field stopped rising and moving.

  When he saw it happen, he immediately shut down his own machine.

  He ran to his truck and was on the road, following Patrick’s dust before his brother could get so far ahead that he was impossible to follow.

  Mitch’s parents owned a place that bordered the far western edge of the Shellenbergers’ much bigger spread, in the section across the highway. Rex was totally surprised when his brother drove in the back way to the Newquists’ small ranch. The main entrance—with a wrought-iron gate—was around a bend in the road to the west. This back way was the one that he and Mitch always used on the rare times they spent any time at the place. Mostly, the Newquists’ ranch was only used by Mitch’s parents for entertaining out-of-town judges and lawyers who were easily impressed by a cattle ranch of any size, even if it only had a few dozen head of cows on it. To people from the city, five hundred acres sounded huge. The Shellenberger spread was closer to ten thousand acres. But then, the Shellenbergers ran a real, operating ranch, not just a showplace.

  Rex had no idea in the world what his brother could be doing there.

  It couldn’t be good, though. He had a sudden, awful vision of his brother and friends using the elegant little ranch house for parties. Patrick would know it was empty most of the time. They could break in and trash the place without the Newquists ever knowing it until it was too late to stop them. Rex doubted that it would bother Patrick’s alleged conscience in the least to think of using property, even of family friends, in such a shabby way.

  His truck bounced over the rough terrain, while anxiety ate at his stomach…anxiety and glee, because this might turn out to be the one offense his parents couldn’t forgive. Could a sheriff overlook a serious act of vandalism by his own son? Could he overlook breaking and entering? Patrick might have to be charged with a crime. Patrick might have to go to jail. Rex stepped harder on the gas in anticipation of that exhilarating possibility.

  He didn’t remember a time when he didn’t hate Patrick.

  Rex felt as if he had hated his older brother on sight. His earliest memories were of Patrick tormenting him in some way or other, and of feeling furious and helpless to do anything about it. He figured Pat must have hated him on sight, too—the younger brother coming along to take his place.

  So maybe it was understandable, in a way.

  But that didn’t make it forgivable, not when you were the younger, smaller, vulnerable brunt of it, and not when your parents never did anything stronger to protect you from it than to snap, “Patrick, stop it.”

  Patrick never stopped it. Rex hoped he went to fucking prison.

  When Rex finally came around a bend and saw the Newquists’ ranch house, he was surprised to see only Patrick’s truck there, instead of a whole slew of his friends.

  Instead of barreling onto the scene, he backed up, and parked among some trees.

  After looking around to make sure that Patrick wasn’t anywhere in sight, Rex began to work his way down and around to the house, keeping to the shade of the trees and the outbuildings to hide his presence there.

  When he got closer, he heard music coming through the open windows.

  Party, he thought, hoping it was true, after all.

  It wasn’t that he wished damage on his best friend’s property, it was that he wished damage on his brother. If Mitch was with him, he’d be thinking the same thing. Patrick had never been any nicer to Rex’s friends than he was to his brother. When Abby was little, Patrick could make her cry in about ten seconds flat, and that, alone, had made Rex and Mitch want to kill him.

  With murder very much on his mind, Rex sneaked up to the window where the loudest sound of music seemed to be coming from. He flattened himself against the side of the house and peered around to see in. It was a bedroom, but there was no person in it, so he kept going from window to window until he finally saw his brother’s broad, bare, tanned, muscular back, the back that made otherwise sensible girls go all swoony when they saw him at the county swimming pool.

  Bare chested, in jeans and cowboy boots, Patrick was talking to someone else in the room.

  When his brother took a step to the side, Rex saw who it was, and he couldn’t have been more surprised. Or disappointed. Really disappointed to the point of feeling stabbed and betrayed, even if he didn’t have a right to be. It was a girl named Sarah who used to work as a housecleaner in a lot of homes in Small Plains. She was Patrick’s age, Rex knew, and she was from another town about twenty-five miles away.

  Rex understood why she used to drive all that way to work.

  Or at least he understood it after Abby explained it to him one time.

  “There’s nothing wrong with cleaning people’s houses,” Abby had said, looking earnest, “but I wouldn’t want to do it in my own hometown, not if I didn’t have to. Or, like, if I lived in a city, I wouldn’t want to do it in my own neighborhood. If that’s what I had to do to make money, I’d go someplace else, too.”

  “That’s stupid,” he’d declared.

  “No, it’s not! If some girl we know did that, you think that kids wouldn’t be mean to her about it?”

  Rex had thought at the time, but didn’t say to Abby, that if any girl they knew was as beautiful as Sarah was, she could do practically anything she wanted to do, and it wouldn’t matter what anybody said about it. Abby was pretty, really pretty, but Sarah was from a whole different planet of beauty, in Rex’s opinion. With her dark hair and pale, perfect skin, with her kind of weird but beautiful light blue eyes that slanted up a little, and her big boobs and flat stomach and long legs, he thought she was just about the sexiest, most incredible-looking girl he’d ever seen outside of a movie screen. But maybe he didn’t know about how kids in her own hometown would treat her. He wasn’t a teenage girl. Maybe Abby was right. Plus, he’d heard that there was trouble with Sarah’s family, so maybe she had other reasons for traveling twenty-five miles to work.

  As Rex stood, feeling dumbfounded, at the window, she saw him.

  Because of the look on her face, Patrick turned around, and saw him, too.

  “You little bastard,” he yelled, “you sneaking little bastard!”

  Patrick moved fast, running toward the front door, then onto the porch, then around to where Rex stood rooted to the ground.

  He stood like a cement statue when Patrick grabbed him by the shoulders, and half pulled, half pushed him. “What the fuck are you doing here? Did you follow me? Listen to me, you stupid kid, if you tell Dad about this, I’ll kill you!”

  “Tell him about what?” Rex said, starting to come to life again.

  He pushed his brother away, which made Patrick push him again.

  “I’m warning you, don’t say one word about seeing me here. You don’t know I was here, you don’t know anything about Sarah being here, you were never here!”

  “Okay, I was never here,” Rex said, duc
king out of the way.

  He backed up until he was out of reach. Although he was no longer a “little” brother, although he was within an inch of Patrick’s height, he was still a string bean compared to his brother’s more filled-out body. At nineteen, only a week away from heading off to college, Patrick looked like a man. At seventeen, soon to be eighteen, Rex still looked like a teenage boy. But he felt man enough to say, in a low, taunting voice he hardly recognized as his own, “I was never here—if you never come back here.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Patrick moved threateningly forward.

  “Just what I said.” Rex stood his ground. “If I ever see you leave the fields again and come over here, I won’t keep quiet about it. You stay there doing the work you’re supposed to do, and I’ll keep my mouth shut about this forever.”

  “You wouldn’t tell them, you little fucker.”

  “Try me, asshole.”

  Patrick hesitated, and Rex knew he’d won. At last, he’d won a battle with his brother! He knew he’d probably have to pay for it someplace down the line, but for right now, it felt terrific.

  Then he glanced in through the screened window and saw her.

  She had moved back into shadows inside the house, but he could see her eyes staring out at him. He couldn’t read them. There weren’t any answers or explanations in them, not that she owed him any.

  He was suddenly painfully aware of how filthy he was, how smelly and sweaty.

  He turned back to look at his brother.

  “Well,” he said, a little cockier than was safe for him, but he couldn’t help but swagger anyway. “You coming? We’ve got extra work to do today, thanks to you screwing around over here.”

  Patrick looked as if he felt as murderous as Rex had felt when he drove over.

  “Yeah, I’m coming. I’ve got to get my shirt.”

  Rex walked back to his truck, feeling so victorious it was all he could do not to pump his fist. But just to be sure, he didn’t leave the property until he saw that his brother was right behind him. They finished their separate baling jobs, went home, ate supper, and went their ways that night, without speaking to each other.

  Their parents noticed only the relative peace, and not the animosity.

  When Patrick left for K-State, Rex drove back to the Newquists’ ranch.

  He didn’t expect to find her there. He hadn’t told Mitch or anybody else about seeing her there. So he was shocked, yet again, when he drove up and she opened the front door.

  She was living there, she told him that day.

  It was a secret from certain people, and she asked him to swear not to tell anyone.

  Eventually, he went out to see her so often that she presented him with periodic lists of supplies for things she needed or wanted, which was how Rex happened to purchase a red scrunchie for her long dark hair.

  Chapter Eighteen

  May 31, 2004

  Abby knew something was up that evening the minute she spotted certain familiar cars parked around her house. She’d been out in a distant wildflower field gathering blossoms to hang from the rafters so they’d be dry for making wreaths for Christmas, and the time had gotten away from her. She had hurried back in her truck, expecting to jump in the shower and rush to her sister’s house for dinner.

  But her sister was here, instead.

  There was her sister Ellen’s Volvo station wagon, and there was Cerule Youngblood’s red convertible, there was Susan McLaughlin’s black Caddy, and there was Randie Anderson’s white pickup truck.

  It wasn’t her birthday, so it couldn’t be a surprise party.

  And it was suppertime, on a holiday, when they all should have been home cooking, or over at their relatives’ houses…

  Was something wrong? Was that why they were here?

  Heart thumping with worry, she hurried into her own house.

  Four female faces turned to look at her, all of them smiling in various stages of welcome, but their smiles looked tense to Abby. Between them, they represented a goodly chunk of the movers and shakers of Small Plains: there was her own trim, efficient older sister, the mayor, dressed in her trademark Western shirt, tan trousers, and brown leather cowboy boots. There was Ellen’s best friend Susan, who owned her family’s funeral and cemetery business. There was Randie, married into the Anderson grocery clan, and Cerule, who worked at the courthouse, both of whom had been friends of Abby’s since high school.

  They had the three birds in the kitchen with them, which pleased Abby.

  Ellen was at the sink mixing drinks of some kind—margaritas from the look of the tub of mix on the counter. Susan, in her black funeral director’s suit, was pulling glasses down from the cupboard. Randie was seated at the kitchen table trying to keep Gracie away from the salt she had poured into a dinner plate in preparation for dipping the rims of the glasses in it. Cerule was on her cell phone, saying a quick good-bye and flipping it closed as soon as she saw Abby in the doorway.

  “We heard you turn in the drive,” Ellen said, by way of explaining their drink-making organization, and then she turned back to measuring out alcohol.

  “I thought I was having dinner at your house,” Abby said to her.

  “You need a drink,” Cerule announced.

  “I do?” Abby saw that Gracie, stymied from eating salt, was now going after Patrick’s expensive sunglasses. She darted toward the kitchen table to rescue them. “Why do I? Why are you guys here? What’s up?”

  “There’s something we have to tell you,” Susan said, without quite looking at her.

  It was then that Abby realized that Susan wasn’t the only one avoiding her eyes. Ellen was, too. And although Randie and Cerule were staring at her, they were observing her like a specimen under glass.

  “What’s up?” she repeated, with more urgency. “You’re making me nervous!”

  The others looked toward the sink, expecting Abby’s sister to take charge. In the silence, Ellen turned around. She exchanged glances with the other women, and then finally looked straight at her sister. It made Abby’s heart beat faster to read worry and concern in Ellen’s eyes.

  “What?” she demanded. “Is it Dad? I just saw him this morning…”

  “No, no,” Ellen assured her. “Dad’s fine. It’s nothing like that. It’s…he’s back, Abby. Mitch is in town. He was at the cemetery, at Nadine’s grave this morning. Susan saw him.”

  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?