The Virgin of Small Plains

by Nancy Pickard

  “Abby, talk to me! Your eyes are open…Tell me how many butt-ugly sheriffs you see standing in front of you.”

  “Three.”

  He looked even more horrified, until she smiled.

  “Kidding. There could only be one of you, ever.”

  “Whew. Don’t scare me like that. What happened to you?”

  Abby put her left hand cautiously up to her forehead, and when she pulled it down to examine it, she saw blood on her glove. Feeling stiff as a corpse, she reached up her right hand to lower the visor and lift the cover of the mirror there. What she saw scared her, too—how pale she looked, how blood was trickling from underneath her black wool cap. Her pupils looked big and black, which must account for how much her eyes hurt, she thought. She grabbed sunglasses from the seat beside her, and gently eased them onto her face. Then she snatched the cap off to see her own smashed blond curls, now tinted red and pink.

  “I look punk,” she said weakly. “All I need is a safety pin through my eyebrow.”

  “Put your hat back on before you catch pneumonia.”

  “Yes, Dad.” Despite her sarcasm, she did as he said, even though the pain when she lifted her left arm made her suck in her breath. When she saw that her coffee had all spilled out, she realized she couldn’t smell it and wondered for a panicky moment if her nose had frozen. When Rex leaned in to examine her face, she was relieved to smell the leather of his jacket.

  “You scared the shit of me, Abby,” he said, accusingly. “When I saw your truck in the ditch…”

  The window wasn’t cracked, and neither was her head, she guessed, though the skin was definitely split up there. The pain of disturbing her own wounds woke her up some more. She remembered, in a rush, how she had landed there.

  “What happened to my truck? Get me out of this seat belt. Have you got Nadine?”

  “No. How do you know about Nadine?”

  It was Abby’s turn to look horrified. “Didn’t you hear my message?”

  “No, I just happened to be coming this way—”

  “Oh, my God, Rex! Nadine is in the cemetery! I saw her walking there in her bathrobe—”

  He straightened up and looked in that direction. “Jesus,” he said in a low, urgent voice. Quickly, he shoved back the glove on his left wrist and checked his watch. “It’s six thirty-two. Do you know when you crashed?”

  Abby was already fighting her way out of the cab of her truck, using Rex’s big, lanky body as leverage to propel herself safely down to the ground, into the deep snow where he stood. The snow was so deep that if he had on boots, she couldn’t see them.

  “It had to have been around six,” she told him. “Oh, my God, Mitch, a whole half hour!”

  “Mitch?” Rex had looked as if he was ready to leave her there, and go find Nadine. But now he turned back. “You called me Mitch, Abby.”

  She stared into the familiar brown eyes that now held a hint of anger.

  “I did? I called you Mitch? Well, that’s his mother out there. Who cares, Rex! Does it really matter if I call you Fred or Harvey? Come on, we’ve got to find her. Help me, I’m dizzy—”

  “You’re not going. You may have a concussion.”

  “Oh, shut up, Rex. I’m freezing, I need to move. I can show you where she was.”

  She felt her vision starting to black out, and quickly leaned into him until she could see again.

  “Yeah, you’ll be a big help,” he said, still sounding angry.

  “Nadine!” she snapped at him, and tugged at his coat to get him to hurry.

  He grabbed her to steady her, and then kept tight hold of her as they hurried up out of the culvert and made their way through the snow to his SUV. Three times, one or the other of them slipped, nearly bringing both of them down, but his strength kept them upright, and she was determined not to let him go alone. Abby didn’t trust a man to be able to find anything. Not even Rex, not even to find a sixty-three-year-old woman in a rose-colored bathrobe in the snow.

  “She was near there, the first time I spotted her, Rex.”

  With a frantically waving finger, Abby pointed to a place about a hundred feet past the front gate.

  “Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she urged him, even though she knew he couldn’t go any faster. “She wasn’t much farther along the last time I saw her.” Abby’s voice choked on the words. Rex reached over to squeeze her hand, before he put his own back on the wheel. “She has on a bright pink bathrobe, Rex, so we ought to be able to find her.” Hopefully, she said, “Maybe she doesn’t know she’s cold, you know? Maybe she thinks it’s summer. Maybe she thinks she’s just crossing the street to visit my mother.”

  “Maybe” was all Rex replied to that fantasy, but at least he didn’t try to squelch it.

  That was one of the things she loved best about Rex, Abby realized, that he was a realist, but not a squelcher. People could believe six crazy things to Sunday, and he’d just nod his head in a respectful sort of way, and say, “Interesting.” Of course, he picked up a whole lot of information about people that way, too, which came in handy when he was investigating something or other. Rex wasn’t like Mitch’s mom, who had always been more likely to say something like, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” and hurt somebody’s feelings. Of all her parents’ closest friends, Nadine had always been the only one she didn’t like, and the only one she’d felt afraid of. Rex’s sheriff father was gruff to his boys, and the judge could be intimidating, but both men had always been pussycats to Abby. Nadine was a different story. She had a sharp tongue on her, and strict ideas of how the world ought to be. Alzheimer’s had only made her harder to get along with, as if it had eaten down to the core of her bitter character, revealing the heart of her Inner Bitch. When Abby had complained about Nadine to her own mother, Margie had usually said some version of, “Oh, Abby, I’ve known Nadine all my life, and besides, this town’s not big enough that we can be all that picky about our friends.”

  The two of them, Nadine and Margie, would bicker and sometimes stop speaking to each other for a few days—it was weeks after Mitch left before they spoke again—but they had always wound up at the same card tables again. Nadine had been smart, with a sharp, gossipy wit, and Abby’s mom had always said it was wiser to be friends with her than to be her enemy. It wasn’t that Nadine couldn’t ever be kind—she was, sometimes, especially if it boosted her reputation. It was that kindness wasn’t her instinctive reaction, her default position, as it had been with Margie, and still was with Rex’s mom, Verna.

  “Rex?” Abby said, as they scanned the white landscape. She was still feeling dizzy, but the cold was bracing her awake. The front half of the cemetery she was searching with her eyes dated to the 1800s, with gravestones worn thin, slick, and plain with time. In the back half, over a high ridge, the elegant old tombstones gave way to flat modern markers. Abby hated the back half, even though it was so much easier for her guys to mow. Everybody hated the back half, but nobody knew how to stop the march of lawn-mowing progress, not even the owner of Abby’s Lawn & Landscape. “She could die without ever seeing Mitch again.”

  “We’ll all die without ever seeing Mitch again,” Rex muttered.

  Abby started to say, “Maybe she wouldn’t even remember him,” when she spotted a daub of color in the snow. “Rex, there!”

  He pulled the SUV as close as he could get, his tires crunching over snow, and they hurried out of it. Holding on to each other again, they slogged through the deep snow to get to her. Nadine Newquist lay on her left side between two ragged lines of gravestones that were nearly up to their tops in white. Snow had already begun to cover her; in another few minutes of the heavy fall, they wouldn’t have been able to see her at all.

  Even though Abby was half-expecting this outcome, it was still a shock.

  It was so cold, so lonely.

  She smelled wood fire from somebody’s chimney, and tasted it on her tongue. The contrast between cozy and comfortless seemed at that moment unbearably cr
uel.

  Rex knelt, touched Nadine, gently turned her over so they could see her eyes were open, staring into the gray-and-white day. For form’s sake, and not because he thought she lived, he bent his ear to her chest, placed fingers on her throat and wrist, checked for a pulse that wasn’t there. She wore a thin white nightgown under the rose bathrobe, prompting Rex to shake his head and say, “Jeez, she was probably already half-frozen by the time she got here.” Her long, thin, bony feet were as bare as the day she’d been born. Her auburn hair—which she had always gone to Kansas City to get fixed, because she hadn’t trusted anybody local to do it—showed roots as white as the ground on which she lay.

  “You know what people are going to say, don’t you?” Abby asked, in a shaky voice.

  He leaned back and stared up at her. She stood above him with her hands fisted down in her pockets and blood crusted onto the swollen side of her pretty face.

  “No, what?”

  Abby pointed beyond Nadine to the top of a particular tombstone that poked up over the drifts. The inscription on it was hidden by the snow. “They’re going to say Nadine was trying to get to that grave,” Abby told him, referring to the partly obscured tombstone. “They’re going to say that if Nadine could only have stumbled a few more feet, it might have saved her.”

  Rex turned his head to stare at the gravestone that Abby meant.

  He knew it well.

  It was the burial marker of the girl that he, his father, and brother had found in another blizzard seventeen years ago. Back then, the people of the town of Small Plains had been horrified by her murder and saddened by the fact that nobody claimed her. They had pitched in to pay for her funeral expenses. They had turned out in their best clothes for her burial. And since that time a legend had grown up around her. People claimed that the unidentified murdered girl could heal the sick, that she interceded on behalf of people who needed help, all because she was grateful to the town for caring about her.

  “Yeah?” Rex said in a voice that came out harder than he had intended, “Well, people frequently prove themselves to be idiots.”

  “Rex!”

  He frowned at her. “You don’t believe all that crap, do you?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake.” He sounded disgusted. “Forget all that. Just come on. I’ll carry her to the car, and we’ll take her home.”

  “Okay.” But then she said, “Nadine would hate this, Rex. It’s…undignified.”

  “What else can we do?”

  “Yeah.”

  He looked again at the other gravestone she had pointed out.

  “What?” Abby asked, noticing his distraction.

  “You know what today is?” Rex said.

  “Monday?”

  “No, I mean the date. It’s the twenty-third of January.” He looked at Abby, as if expecting something to dawn on her. After a moment, when it didn’t, he said, “Just like on the day we found her.”

  Abby frowned, then understood what he was saying. “It is? Oh, God, Rex, I always forget that you found her.”

  “Not just me. My dad and…my dad was there, too.”

  Abby glanced at the almost-hidden gravestone. “I was barely aware of it, Rex. I know that sounds awful, but I had my mind on other things. You know how it is when you’re sixteen, the whole world is only about you. A meteor could have hit and I wouldn’t have noticed.” She looked at him and he saw her brow furrow above her sunglasses, as if she was puzzled by something. “I don’t remember seeing much of you.”

  He nodded. “I think I was hiding, like you.”

  “Hiding?” Abby was, at first, uncomprehending, but then in a rush, staring at his face, she got it; after seventeen years she finally understood something she had missed before. “Oh, God, Rex, it was awful for you, wasn’t it? Finding her body. And then Mitch leaving…” Tears stung her eyes. “Rex, I’m sorry. I should have known, I should have said something a long time ago. I was thinking only of myself.”

  He waved it off. “Are you kidding? I wasn’t exactly a great friend to you, either.”

  She sniffed in the cold air, and said, “Well, I’m sure glad we got over that.”

  “Yeah.” He smiled at her, but then his smile faded. “Come on. I don’t want to do this any more than you do, but we’ve got to.”

  “Déjà vu, for you.”

  “Not so much. I’ve picked up other frozen people in the snow since then.”

  “Lucky you. Strange coincidence, though.”

  Rex squatted down in the snow, and squinted at the body of his former best friend’s mother. “Yes, it is,” he agreed, in a voice gone suddenly thoughtful and quiet.

  “Well, I hear life is strange.”

  “No kidding.”

  “Maybe my mother killed her,” Abby said.

  He jerked around and stared at her. “What?”

  Abby touched the sore side of her face, winced, and said, “When Mitch left, Nadine was not very nice to me. My mother said she’d kill her for being so mean to me.” She made an effort to smile a little, but it hurt, so she gave that up and just looked down at him. “Maybe my mother lured her out from the grave and got her revenge.”

  “Sometimes,” he said, still staring at her, “you are pretty strange yourself.”

  “Yeah, and you’re a fine one to talk.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “Oh, nothing.” Abby pointed at something. “What’s that, Rex?”

  “What?”

  “That thing she has in her hand. What’s she carrying?”

  Carefully, Rex turned the thin hand over, revealing what Nadine Newquist had gripped in tight fingers. He could see just enough of it to be able to tell Abby what it was. “It’s a picture of Jeff.”

  “Oh!” Abby grabbed the fabric of her coat above her heart. “That’s so sad.”

  This one thing had finally brought her to tears. She had felt anxious and scared when they were searching for Nadine, but now, finally, she felt sorrow—even if she did suspect it was more for her mother and other people she had lost than for the woman in the snow before them. Still…Nadine may have had a serpent’s tongue, but she had gone to her death clutching a photograph of her adopted child, her younger son.

  Rex lifted the thin, light body, and carried it back like a baby to his car. Abby ran alongside, pulling at the robe and nightgown to make sure Mitch’s mom had some modesty in death.

  Rex carried Nadine into the Newquists’ house, through the front door.

  At the judge’s suggestion, Rex laid the body down on a double bed in a guest room on the first floor.

  “I thought you’d want me to bring her here,” he told Tom Newquist. The judge stood in the bedroom doorway, blocking the view from Abby, who stood behind him. “I thought you’d want to call McLaughlin’s and have them come and pick her up here, rather than have me carry her into the funeral home like this.”

  Tom Newquist nodded his head without speaking.

  He hadn’t said a word about his wife since they had arrived, except to ask, “Where’d you find her?” He had looked drawn and tired when he opened the door—admitting them into the immaculate, fragrant home his wife had kept for him for many years—but there wasn’t any shock in his eyes. It had never been a situation that was going to end well, and they all knew it.

  As Abby looked up at him—at all six feet four of him—from behind, outside the guest room, she saw that his back was stiff as always, his posture suggesting what it always did, that this was a big man capable of shouldering big responsibilities.

  She had felt nervous at the front door, as if somehow he’d blame her.

  Rex came out of the room, and the judge stepped aside to let him pass.

  “You’re famous for always locking your doors,” Abby heard Rex say as the two men moved toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “How in the world did the door come to be open this time?”

  She heard the judge say in his deep voice, “One
of the damned nurses.”

  As she heard the men’s footsteps moving away toward the kitchen at the back of the big house, Abby quietly walked into the bedroom and then over to the side of the bed where her late mother’s friend lay. There was a silky white comforter folded at the foot of the bed. Abby reached for it, pulled it open, releasing its scent of potpourri, and she neatly covered Mitch’s mom with it, up to her shoulders. She took a few moments to straighten and smooth Nadine’s hair, which was still wet from the snow. Rex had closed the eyelids when he had knelt beside her in the cemetery.

  The right hand still clutched the photo of her adopted son Jeff.

  Abby stood for a moment staring down at the woman she had feared and disliked, but whom she had been raised to treat with courtesy and respect, no matter what. Then she leaned over and—dripping snow, herself—gently kissed the cold forehead. It wasn’t a forgiving kiss, and she knew it. She did it for her own mother, and for Mitch. As she did it, she hated herself for the thought that had occurred to her the moment she knew for sure that Nadine was dead. It wasn’t a thought for Nadine’s final suffering. It wasn’t for the judge. It was the absolutely last thing she ever wanted to think at this moment, but she was powerless over it, and so it came to her anyway…

  Maybe he’ll come back for her funeral.

  Chapter Eight

  He didn’t come back for the funeral.

  The day of the service for Nadine was one to stir up ghosts, Rex thought, as he stood at the back of the crowd gathered around her open grave, and all those ghosts seemed to be howling at once. He, himself, was feeling distinctly un-nostalgic, but he could tell by the somber, faraway looks on some faces that the day was bringing other days to mind for some people. The cottonwood trees and the tall, flat-topped hills didn’t even begin to break the wind that snaked in between everybody standing around the grave. Rex thought he wouldn’t have gone so far as to call them mourners, except maybe as mourners of their own losses, or maybe as mourners of life and death in general. One thing they all had in common, though, was they were cold. The wind was frigid from its slide down the front face of Colorado, fast from its skid across the plains. It was a wind with a serrated edge that cut under the raised coat collars of the men and chapped the thighs of any woman in a dress.