The Virgin of Small Plains Read online

  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 weathe
r 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.

  “When you get to the cemetery?” he called out to Deputy Flournoy. She turned around to hear the rest of it. “Get the Virgin to give us a pass on the tornadoes, okay?”

  The deputy grinned. “Will do, Sheriff.”

  Only after he’d said it did Rex feel the cringe inside, and taste the guilty bitterness, that came from joking about her. She deserved better than that from him.

  Chapter Twenty

  August, 1986

  The summer before his senior year, Rex couldn’t stop thinking about the girl he knew only as Sarah. It wasn’t as if she had never entered his mind previously. She had already played a starring role in his fantasies, back when he used to catch glimpses of her cleaning houses in town. But then she had stopped coming to Small Plains, and he had mostly forgotten about her. Actresses, or girls he knew, took her place in his imaginings. Now, though, after seeing her in the shadows of the Newquists’ ranch house, where Patrick had stood talking to her with his damned bare chest sticking out, now all of Rex’s other fantasies were swept clean off the movie screen of his mind. Now there was only Sarah, hot and sexy, beautiful and willing Sarah. Or, at least that’s how she was in his dreams.

  In your dreams! he scoffed at himself, but that didn’t stop him.

  He didn’t tell anybody about seeing her at the Newquists’ place—not because he was keeping his word to his brother, but because he wanted to keep her his secret. If he didn’t tell anybody about that day, not even Mitch, then they couldn’t take it for granted that she was Patrick’s girl, instead of his. In his fantasies, he could erase Patrick altogether, or fight him to the death for her. If Rex could have spent the next month in his room, on his bed, with the door locked, he would have spent it doing nothing but making up erotic fantasies about her.

  He had to go back to school a few weeks before Patrick left for K-State in Manhattan. What with football practice every day, and the ranch work that never stopped for anything or anybody, and what with also getting started with his senior year, he managed to distract himself enough to keep from driving out there until the day Patrick officially left.

  It had killed him to be in school all day, leaving Patrick back home, free to do what Rex didn’t want him to do—find Sarah, be with Sarah, make Sarah fall for him. Or, just “make” Sarah. That was the nightmare scenario, the extremely likely possibility of his brother in bed with the girl of Rex’s dreams.

  She was way too good for Patrick. Rex hoped she realized that.

  Not that he actually knew her, or anything about her.

  But, on general principles, any girl was too good for Patrick, in Rex’s view. And, anyway, he could tell just by looking at her.

  Though he hadn’t done so yet, one day he planned to casually inquire of Mitch if he knew what Sarah’s last name was, and what town she was from. If Mitch didn’t know, Rex planned to casually ask one of the women Sarah had cleaned for, if he could remember—or find out—who they were. He could ask Mrs. Newquist, but he’d rather not. Mitch’s mom had a way of turning any question back on whoever asked it, in a way almost guaranteed to make them feel stupid or embarrassed. Rex already felt stupid and embarrassed; he didn’t need Nadine Newquist to make it worse.

  He planned that once he had Sarah’s last name and knew her town, then maybe he’d just happen to have some reason to drive to that town. And maybe he’d just happen to run into Sarah, and the two of them would start talking, and then you just never knew what might happen after a remarkable coincidence like that…

  He didn’t let himself really ever admit it was impossible. These were his fantasies. He could make them star any woman he wanted, and he could make them turn out any way he wished them to.

  One of his fantasies was that after Pat left for K-State, Rex would drive up to the Newquists’ ranch house and she would still be there, for some reason. He didn’t care why. Maybe they had hired her to clean it, that was a good enough reason for his fantasies. Maybe she had left something there from the day he had seen her with Pat. Or, and this was his favorite, maybe something, some inexplicable inner urge, whispered Rex’s name to her and made her drive out into the country, without knowing exactly why. Maybe she’d have a feeling that her fate, her destiny, her own true love awaited her somewhere just off Highway 177…

  It could happen, he told himself.

  In your dreams, he told himself, as he actually drove out there.

  No one could have felt more shocked than he did when he drove onto the Newquists’ ranch, pulled up to the house in his truck, and saw her.

  She was standing in the front doorway, staring at him with an expression of alarm on her beautiful face.

  “Who are you?” she called to him, sounding defensive and nervous.

  He got out of his truck and quickly identified himself. “I’m Rex. I didn’t know you were here. I mean, I didn’t know anybody would be here. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to bother you—”

  She seemed to relax a little, and she interrupted him by saying, “Okay.”

  He was so surprised to find her there, as surprised as she looked at the sight of him. She looked a little younger than he remembered, and just as beautiful. She was wearing white shorts that showed off her long, tanned legs, and a loose, orange T-shirt that gave him the impression she didn’t have a bra on. She had her long straight hair tied low on the back of her neck, and she was wearing dangly earrings that sparkled in the sunshine when she moved. Rex felt his body responding. He wanted to whip off his cap and hold it over his crotch to hide what was happening to him. Instead, he stared fiercely at her face, keeping his eyes above her collarbone.

  She shaded her eyes with one hand, suggesting, to his immense relief, that she couldn’t see him all that well in the bright sun. “Oh! You’re Pat’s brother, aren’t you?”

  Apparently she saw him well enough to recognize him. Rex felt a confusing mixture of worry and pleasure. On the one hand, he was surprised she had ever really seen him. On the other hand, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to remember him from that day.

  “Yeah,” he confirmed for her. “Pat left for college.”

  “Right. K-State.”

  He hated it that she knew.

  “You were here before,” she said.

  He nodded, wondering if she thought he was an idiot.

  “You made Patrick leave.”

  He thought he saw her smile,
just a little.

  Rex was tongue-tied. All he could do was nod again.

  “Why’d you come out here?” she asked him.

  He thought fast. “I’m looking for Mitch.”

  She looked alarmed again. “Mitch Newquist? He’s coming here?”

  “No. I mean, I don’t know. I’m just looking for him.” Feeling as fake as a dimestore cowboy, Rex asked her, “You haven’t seen him?”

  When she shook her head no, he didn’t know what to do next. After an awkward moment, Rex turned around to leave. But she called out to him, with a tone of urgency in her voice that made him turn around in a hurry. “Hey! Don’t tell anybody you saw me here, okay?”

  He took a couple of steps toward her. “Why not? Aren’t you supposed to be here? Why are you here, anyway? Are you, like, cleaning the house for them?” He didn’t see a car that she could have driven here. Come to think of it, he didn’t recall seeing any vehicle but Patrick’s the last time he was here. A wild idea came to him out of nowhere. “You’re not, like, living here, are you?”

  Once again, he was totally surprised when she said, “Yes,” and then, “Would you like a beer?”

  Would he ever.

  She invited him onto the porch that first time, but not into the house, and brought a cool bottle out to him. “You’re not having one?” he asked her, feeling awkward if he was going to be the only one to drink. She shook her head. Rex quickly got over his hesitation and sucked down a swig, reveling in the beer, the forbiddenness of it, and being on a porch alone with a gorgeous girl.

  “I’m living here,” she said.

  He sat on the porch railing while she leaned against the frame of the screen door, and explained it to him, or part of it, anyway. “You don’t know my family,” she began, a statement with which Rex could only agree. “If you did, you’d know why I have to get away from them. My dad—” She stopped, shook her head, then started in with another sentence entirely. “I can’t tell you the reasons. They’re personal. But Judge and Mrs. Newquist know about it, and they told me I could stay here, until I figure out somewhere else to go.”