The Virgin of Small Plains

by Nancy Pickard

  And in the next instant, Mitch saw Rex cut it off, so he did, too.

  Mitch had a sense of being in a twilight zone where he and Rex had seen an open door that they could have stepped through to a different, happier conclusion. Instead, given the choice, they both slammed that door shut. It left them standing in the rain on the shoulder of the highway, staring at each other in wary disbelief at what they couldn’t believe they were seeing with their own eyes, after all these years.

  “Mitch,” Rex said, in a neutral tone.

  “Yeah. I didn’t know it was you when I pulled up—”

  “Or you might not have stopped?” Rex cracked a grin, after all, but a cynical one.

  “No, I mean—” He stopped trying. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Rex made a show of knocking mud off his clothes. Mitch sensed he was doing it just so he didn’t have to look him in the eye. “No harm done.” When Rex straightened up again, he said, in the same careful, neutral tone, “I never heard you were coming back—”

  “Just for a visit—”

  “Sure. Wouldn’t want to stick around.”

  “Jesus.” It slipped out of Mitch. He hadn’t meant to react angrily to anything any of them said, but Rex’s sarcasm had poked him into a response. “It’s not that.”

  “Whatever. Looks like you’re already heading back the way you came.”

  “What?” Mitch realized that Rex meant, you’re driving north. Away. “No, I just…came out to see the storm.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m on my way to check on…people in that direction.”

  He isn’t even going to say her name to me, Mitch thought.

  “Okay, well, I better not keep you from it.”

  “You’re not. I guess, if you’re going to be around for a while, I’ll probably see you.”

  “I don’t know how long I’ll be here.” Mitch paused, then added reluctantly, “My dad doesn’t know I’m here, so I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t say anything.”

  Rex raised his eyebrows. “You going to tell him?”

  “Pretty soon. So…are you a deputy to your dad now?”

  “No.” Rex smiled slightly. “He’s retired. I’m it.”

  “You’re the sheriff?”

  There was another moment then, following Mitch’s incredulous question when they might have laughed together about it, about the idea of either one of them growing up to be a lawman, but again they kept it from happening.

  “Yeah, I’m the sheriff.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Rex restrained himself from commenting on that.

  “What about you? he asked Mitch.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What do you do?”

  “Some law, some real estate.”

  “Sounds lucrative.” Rex looked over Mitch’s shoulder at the black Saab.

  “It’s all right,” Mitch said. “You married?”

  “No, you?”

  “Divorced. I have a son. Any kids?”

  “Not so I’ve heard.”

  Mitch smiled, but Rex didn’t return it.

  And that was that. There was an instant when they might have shaken hands in parting, but they didn’t.

  “Good to see you,” Mitch said awkwardly.

  “Yeah. Take care.”

  Each man turned and went toward his car without looking back.

  Mitch got into his vehicle and sat and watched Rex drive off. If Rex was going to check on Abby, then he didn’t have to. He felt shaken by the encounter. He felt angry, sad, a jumble of emotions he realized he had not anticipated fully, and did not know how to absorb in a way that might make them go away. He just wanted them to go away. For a moment, he again considered just going away, himself.

  Not yet. Not until he had done what he needed to do for himself…and Sarah.

  It occurred to him that the aftermath of a storm might be a good time to start.

  Mitch waited until the sheriff’s car was out of sight. Then he turned the Saab around on the highway, and headed back toward Small Plains to see if the high winds and rain had produced any damage that might be of benefit to him.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  The rain had washed the air clean, giving everything a bright, sharp edge.

  Mitch drove into town, noting tree limbs and wet leaves in the streets, and gutters backed up so high that water stood in pools at the intersections. He spotted minor property damage in some places—a shutter torn here, a large tree branch fallen on a roof there.

  The only place Mitch saw serious damage was at Sam’s Pizza.

  It looked dark, but then so did everyplace else. It appeared the electricity was out all over town. There didn’t seem to be anybody inside the restaurant with the light pole sticking out of it. Maybe they had all gotten out in time, he thought as he drove slowly past it. But what if they hadn’t?

  He pulled over and parked, and hurried to find out if anybody inside needed help.

  It struck him as ironic that he couldn’t recall ever having gone to the rescue of anybody in all the years he’d lived in Kansas City. Yet, here he was helping out for the third time that day, counting the girl at the cemetery and stopping to check on the man who had turned out to be Rex Shellenberger.

  Across the street, in the shadow of a store’s doorway, Abby crouched beside the elderly man, who had fallen during the storm. She had one hand gently on his shoulder and in her other hand she held her cell phone, on which she was in the middle of a conversation with her doctor-father. Once the storm had passed, she had been able to make calls again. Still unable to raise Rex, she’d finally connected with the sheriff’s department to tell them about the trapped people in the basement of Sam’s Pizza. She tried not to think about how scared her sister and her friends must be right now, and to focus instead of the immediate needs of the old man in front of her.

  “He says his arm hurts, Dad, and he can’t seem to get up—”

  She heard a car door slam, and turned to see if help had arrived.

  But instead of seeing Rex or his deputies, she saw a tall man get out of a black Saab. He glanced around the street without noticing Abby and the old man, and then hurried toward Sam’s Pizza.

  Abby’s voice faltered; her breath stopped in her chest.

  “Abby?” she heard her dad say. “Are you there?”

  “Hold on, Dad,” she said into the phone.

  Abby watched, disbelieving, as Mitch Newquist crossed the street in front of her.

  She crouched deeper into the shadows, trying to keep him from seeing her. In spite of everything, and whether it was stupid vanity or not, she couldn’t bear the thought that he might see her for the first time in seventeen years like this—looking like a drenched rat from running in the wind and rain. She felt suddenly as unsteady, as wounded and dazed, as the old man beside her. When Mitch never turned around, she relaxed a little bit. Before he vanished into the restaurant, however, she saw how broad his back was across his shoulders, and how it tapered to his waist, and how his legs looked long and lean in his jeans, and how his blond hair had darkened, but not thinned, over the years. When he disappeared inside Sam’s Pizza, she said helplessly, “Oh, dammit!”

  “What’s the matter?” her father demanded.

  “Just drive on over here Dad, and check on this guy, will you?”

  She hung up, still staring at the darkened restaurant across the street. And suddenly she no longer felt helpless, she just felt furious.

  “You rotten lousy no-good runaway son of a damned bitch!”

  The old man stared at her in alarm.

  “Not you,” she soothed him. “I didn’t mean you.”

  When Mitch walked into Sam’s Pizza, he whistled at the damage the top half of the light pole had done, the way it had shattered plate glass and broken tables and scattered silverware, food, napkins, and plastic glasses. There was room to walk without running into the danger of any wires that might come to life. It almost looked as if somebody had moved th
e wires out of the way. A part of the pole had lodged in a way that held shut a door that he decided must lead to the basement. When he heard pounding and yelling voices coming from behind it, he hurried to apply muscle to the broken pole.

  “The door’s stuck!” he called to the voices behind the door. “Hold on.”

  Their calls for help subsided, but he could still hear talking on the other side.

  It took him several minutes, but Mitch finally managed to dislodge the splintery wood, and when he did the door popped open on its own. He saw a couple of people he didn’t recognize standing toward the middle of the stairs, but couldn’t see anybody else in the dimness beyond them.

  “Thank you!” the woman closest to him said, and was echoed by other voices.

  “No problem. Everybody all right down there?”

  “We’re fine. Just scared, with no lights.”

  “I’ll bet. There’s a lot of broken glass up here. And watch out for electrical wires when you come up.”

  Having ascertained that they were okay, Mitch turned and walked out.

  Down at the bottom of the stairs, four women stood, dumbfounded, staring up at the open doorway where the tall, baritone-voiced man who rescued all of them had stood just an instant before. He hadn’t been able to see any of them, but they had been able to see him clearly, framed as he was in the new clear light of the evening.

  “Uh oh,” Cerule Youngblood whispered to her friends.

  In the time it took Mitch Newquist to free the trapped people in the basement, Quentin Reynolds had pulled up in his car and taken over the care of the tourist from Abby. She was just getting ready to tell him about seeing Mitch when her cell phone rang and she answered it, glad of a distraction from the way her heart was pounding and her knees were trembling. When she said hello and then heard Rex’s voice, she asked, “What did the storm do?”

  “Come home, Abby,” Rex told her, in a somber tone of his own. “The tornado only landed in one place, but it just happened to be your greenhouse.”

  “Oh, no!” she cried, and then blurted the first concern that came to her mind, and it wasn’t about her flower and landscaping business. “Rex, my birds!”

  Mitch walked down the Sam’s Pizza side of the street, looking at storm damage.

  When he came to a small business with a discreet FOR SALE sign and a front display full of broken glass, he walked in, and said to the woman who was sweeping up her mess, “Need some help?”

  Without even waiting for an answer, he grabbed a second broom that was propped against a wall near him. Why, I’m just a Boy Scout, Mitch thought, feeling nearly amused enough to laugh out loud, though he managed to restrain himself. This wasn’t exactly the way he had planned to ingratiate himself with the marginal property owners of Small Plains, but if this was the opportunity that fate was laying across his path, then he would grab the broom end of it, and see what he could sweep into his grasp.

  When he finished that task successfully, stepped back outside, and looked down the street toward his car, he saw a stocky, gray-haired man helping an older man into a vehicle. At first, Mitch didn’t recognize Abby’s father. It wasn’t until Doc Reynolds stepped away from the vehicle and stood by himself on the sidewalk that recognition kicked in—and with it, a resurgence of rage so overwhelming that for a minute Mitch thought he might black out from the power of it. He stared, clenching and unclenching his fists, not trying to hide himself, inwardly daring Quentin Reynolds to turn and look him in the face.

  But the doctor turned the other way and got into his own car.

  He drove past Mitch without looking his way, but Mitch got a good look at how dramatically the man had aged in the past seventeen years. If the devil left telltale marks, Mitch thought, then Quentin Reynolds deserved every line on his face, and then some. Any doubts Mitch had been feeling about his purpose in Small Plains were swept away by the sight of his enemy.

  Abby bolted out of her sister’s car even before it stopped in her yard.

  Ignoring her leveled greenhouse, she raced for her screened-in porch.

  “The door’s open!” she screamed, panic and despair in her voice.

  When her friends came hurrying up behind her, she was already on the porch, on her knees, cradling a trembling little gray bird in her hands. “Gracie!” The conure was alive, but the body of Lovey, the lovebird, lay against the door leading into the house, where it had fallen, as if the wind had hurled it into the glass.

  Randie tiptoed over to where the colorful little body lay. She knelt down and stroked Lovey’s feathers. When there was no response from the beautiful peach-faced lovebird, she whispered, “Oh, no.”

  There was no big red parrot anywhere to be seen.

  “Look for J.D.!” Abby begged them, sobbing over her lone remaining bird.

  Carrying Gracie, Abby made a frantic tour of the inside of her house, hoping against hope that somehow she’d find the parrot there. In keeping with the sometimes bizarre path of tornadoes, her greenhouse had been destroyed, but her house was undisturbed—except for one thing.

  The only thing she noticed missing was Patrick’s sunglasses.

  Abby had put them back on the kitchen table before leaving for supper with her friends, and now they were gone. She stood for a long time, cradling Gracie and staring at the empty space where they had been.

  The other women ran off the porch and scattered around the property. They called out over and over for the twenty-year-old South American parrot. They stared helplessly up into every tree, searched all around the bushes, lifted fallen boards, and ignored every other need while they fruitlessly searched for him.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  By the time she got back to the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying, Catie Washington felt exhausted again, or at least her body was. Her mind was still racing, and her emotions were still in a rising, swirling white tornado of their own. Her thoughts were floating, her feelings were sailing, they were riding out ahead of her body’s ability to keep up with them. She felt alive. Emotionally, she couldn’t wait to get back to her bedroom in the B&B and open her laptop computer and log on to write her story down as fast as she could, in the hope of remembering every detail of the miracle while it was still incredibly vivid in her mind. But physically, she felt terrible again, ill, worn down to the marrow, drained of the tiny bit of remaining energy that had driven her to Small Plains in desperation.

  Was it a miracle? she wondered, though she didn’t really feel any doubt that it was. But other people might question her, so she needed to be able to answer them. Was it still a miracle if your body didn’t feel healed, but you felt happier than you ever had in all your life, and you felt lifted up onto a higher plane of existence where amazing things could happen, like fresh flowers raining directly onto you, only onto you, from out of a terrifying sky?

  A few of the flowers lay around her on the floor of the van.

  When she had risen from the grave, she had gathered into her hands some of the flower heads and stalks, leaves, and buds that had fallen on her. When she got to the car, she let them fall into her lap, from where most of them had tumbled around her as she drove the van. Now she bent, painfully, to pick up as many of them as she could carry again.

  But she couldn’t force her body to move after that, and finally she gave up the effort, and simply pressed the horn until the proprietor of the inn came running out to help her.

  In her room, seated in a straight-backed chair in front of a scarred old wooden desk, Catie logged onto thevirgin.org, which was the most popular of the small number of websites that had sprung up about the Virgin of Small Plains. Without even stopping to read through the entries from that day, she opened a new window to type up her own account of the astonishing thing that had truly happened to her.

  “I have a miracle to report,” she typed. “Some of you know me, because I have participated in this blog before today. If you recognize my blog name, then you know that I have advanced breast cancer that has spr
ead to my lymph nodes, my lungs, and most recently, my brain. I drove down here to Small Plains two days ago after my doctors told me I was going to have to go through another round of surgery, chemo, and radiation, and that there wasn’t much chance left that any of those miserable things would do any good for me. Like you guys, I had heard about the Virgin, and how she had helped lots of people in this town over many years. So here I came, and here I am.”

  After that preface, she typed what had happened to her that day, ending her story with, “I survived a tornado that flew directly above me! I actually looked up into the cone of it! And it released flowers on me! I have never felt so protected, so blessed. I know now that no matter what happens in regard to my cancer—even if I die tomorrow, or today—I will be all right. Something in the universe is watching out for me, keeping me safe from the most terrifying harm there could possibly be. Until today, I thought that was cancer. But I have looked up into a deadly tornado, and it has sprinkled flowers onto me, and I have lived to tell you my story. If that’s not a miracle, then I don’t know what is.

  “I wish blessings on all of you, as I have been blessed today. May the storms of life fly safely over you and may the flowers of the Virgin bring you beauty and peace as they have done for me today. I don’t know if you will ever hear from me again, but when the storm clouds gather around you, think of me, and know there are flowers in the storm.”

  She signed it with the only name by which they knew her, “Love, Catie.”

  Slowly, feeling ill but calm, she closed out the blog window.

  Then she turned off her computer and lowered the lid of it.

  Too ill to get back into her wheelchair, or even to crawl to the bed, she slid as carefully as she could out of the chair, and slipped to the worn, flowered carpet. There, she lay on her side, curling up against the pain she felt, closed her eyes, and grasped some flowers in her hands. Breathing in a shallow, careful way to keep her chest from hurting, Catie lay on the carpet wondering if she could sleep, wondering if she would ever wake again. She felt so transcendent, so peaceful to the depths of her soul, that she wasn’t sure she cared.