The Virgin of Small Plains

by Nancy Pickard

At 7:22, he reported it moving, “in the air, over the cemetery, heading southeast at about fifteen miles an hour.”

  When Rex got the first report, he realized the twister had touched down in the approximate location of Abby’s home and greenhouse. When he couldn’t raise her by land or cell phone, he ran to his car and rocketed out of town to check on her. Partway there, he got a report that the tornado had taken a sudden veer in his direction. It was now moving southeast along the same general route where he was going northwest. Southeast? Rex thought incredulously. Tornadoes didn’t go southeast, they went northeast. He saw it when it emerged from clouds that looked about a mile and a half away from him. What the hell was this one doing?

  At least it wasn’t on the ground anymore.

  It was high up in the air, but to his eyes it looked as if it was dipping lower by the second, and then it split in two, forming twin funnels.

  Oh shit, Rex thought.

  It might come back together again, or one or both of them might touch ground or they could both vanish harmlessly into the clouds again.

  If they were still moving at fifteen miles an hour…

  And they were only a mile and a half away…

  Less than that now…

  There were no highway overpasses handy. There were no side roads going in a safer direction. If he were to drive off into the fields, he was going to have to plow through fences to do it, and there’d be budgetary hell to pay for the damage later. If, on the other hand, the tornado picked up his car and hurled it, not even the county’s insurance agent could argue with that. A human body inside in a car during a tornado was a bad idea, however.

  Rex drove his SUV onto the shoulder of the highway.

  Just as the first small hail arrived, he flung himself out of his vehicle and down into a culvert at the side of the road, pulling his jacket up over his head to protect himself from the hail, rain, and flying debris.

  “This is the real thing, ladies,” the Sam’s Pizza manager told them, and then she raised her voice for all of her customers to hear. “Tornado sighted, coming this way! Everybody follow me! Everybody into the basement, now!”

  “Sure, sure,” Randie scoffed, even as a customer said, “Tornado?” in a loud, scared voice. But Randie said only to her friends, dismissively, “How many times have we heard that?” She sliced into a triangle of pizza as casually as if the restaurant manager hadn’t said anything. “You know what I think, I think Rex runs that siren too damned much. Do you guys even take it seriously anymore? I swear, the thing goes off if somebody so much as breathes heavy! Did you all hear it when it went off the other night? It finally woke me up, but all I did was turn over and go back to sleep.”

  “I know!” Susan reached for the hot pepper flakes while some customers around them hurried to follow the manager. At a couple of other tables, people just kept eating, like the five friends. “It’s like crying wolf. Someday, we’ll have a real one, and we won’t pay any attention to it, and we’ll all die.”

  “Good for business, though,” Cerule teased her.

  Susan gave her a repressive look, which earned a wink.

  “Rex wouldn’t run the siren,” Abby defended him, “unless there’s a good reason—”

  “Whoa,” Cerule interrupted.

  They saw that she was staring out one of the big windows near their table, and they all turned to look, too.

  “Jeez,” Randie breathed. “Could be a real wolf this time.”

  With glances at one another, but without much talk, they put down their food and drinks and started getting up from the table.

  Abby hurried over to the window to get a closer look at the conditions outside. They saw her crane her neck to look up, and then look from side to side down the street. In front of her, on the other side of the glass, the evening air had taken on a strange yellow-greenish tint. When she turned around and said, “You ought to see these clouds,” the other four women went over to join her. They saw the oily, boiling look of the black clouds above them. Hail began to ping against the glass.

  “Okay, I believe it,” Randie said, and turned to seek shelter.

  Abby, Ellen, Susan, and Cerule followed her over to where the restaurant manager stood, waving stragglers like them down the stairs. As they joined the people moving toward the open door, Cerule poked Abby in the ribs. When Abby looked at her, Cerule nodded her head to point to somebody.

  Over by the cash register, Abby saw Jeff Newquist, the judge’s teenager, the adopted boy known cruelly around town as “the substitute son.” He was a sharp-featured kid, taller than average, husky, with dark eyes and long dark hair that he wore caught back at the nape of his neck in the kind of ponytail that was sure to get yanked on by every cowboy who walked past it. As the two friends watched him, Abby suddenly drew in her breath in a little gasp, and whispered, “Did he just do what I thought I saw him do?”

  Cerule gave her a startled glance, and nodded.

  Jeff Newquist, seventeen years old, out for pizza with a couple of his buddies, and heading for the basement along with everybody else, had just lifted several candy bars from a display on top of the cash register counter and slipped them into a pocket of his jacket. He fumbled one of them, which fell to the floor at the feet of his friends. One of them laughed. Jeff looked around the restaurant, and stared straight into Abby’s face. And then suddenly, the three of them turned around and trotted toward the restaurant door.

  “Hey!” Cerule yelled to them.

  Behind them, the manager yelled, “Boys! Don’t go out there!”

  But the kids just laughed, rolled their collars up on their necks, and continued running out of the restaurant and into the street, where the first drops of rain were starting to fall, and the wind was picking up.

  At the basement door, Ellen said to the manager, “Do you know those boys stole some candy bars from you?”

  The manager sighed and just said, “It wouldn’t be the first time. Must be nice to be a judge’s kid.”

  The friends vanished down the staircase, hurrying behind everybody else. There was a rising chatter from the underground shelter, where it seemed as if everybody was reaching for their cell phones at the same time. The women heard snatches of concern, of people trying to check on children, husbands, wives, homes, businesses, and some expressions of scared worry when their calls didn’t go through. In the dim light, they saw they were surrounded by anxious faces. They were all the way to the bottom, and seated on packing cartons, pulling out their own cell phones to try to call their families, when they realized that Abby hadn’t followed them down.

  “Abby?” Her sister Ellen stood up just as several things seemed to happen all at once. Thunder rolled so loud it sounded as if it was right above their heads, lightning cracked almost instantly afterward, and the electricity went out, throwing them into total darkness. A crashing noise above their heads made them all jump, and a few women screamed. In the darkness, a child began to cry.

  Abby had hurried back to the windows to check on the storm one more time before going to the basement, but then she found that she couldn’t pull herself away from the sight of her town’s main street. There was something magical to her about the moments right before, and then immediately after, a thunderstorm. There was something uncanny and beautiful about the quality of the light and the way everything looked in it.

  As she stared, mesmerized, she saw the three boys run to a pickup truck, hop in it, do a U-turn in the middle of the street, and then drive off into the direction of the storm. Her heart pounded when she saw what they were doing; she wanted to grab their rear bumper and haul them back to safety.

  A few other cars were still plying the road, and there were even a couple of people out on foot. The rain hadn’t started to pour yet, though it felt to her as if it could at any moment. Then this odd, suspended moment of beauty would be gone.

  How could Mitch have stayed away so long?

  Abby had thought he loved their hometown as much as she did. She thou
ght they had talked about it, how they wanted to stay here, where their families had roots going back a long, long time.

  She was scared to see him again. The very thought of it dried up her mouth and made her feel shaky. She didn’t know what she’d say; she didn’t know how she’d act. Paralyzed, probably. Maybe she should be combative: Why the hell did you do that? Where the hell have you been? But what if she burst into tears, as she was prone to do when she was angry? That would be humiliating.

  Maybe she should play it cool.

  Yeah, that’s gonna happen, Abby thought, echoing the sarcastic tone that Rex had used with his deputies that morning. Yeah, right, she was going to be cool when she saw Mitch for the first time in seventeen years like Rex was going to send his deputies to Miami for a forensics conference.

  Maybe she could avoid him altogether. It was just a visit, her friends had guessed. Visits didn’t last long; people left again, after visits.

  Abby looked at how the asphalt glistened on the street outside, she looked through the store windows into the strange clarity of their interiors, able to see shelves and merchandise, colors and forms.

  And still she didn’t move, even when she heard the basement door close behind her.

  The air darkened even more, changing the feeling of the scene at which she was staring. Now, in the eerie, ominous cast of the greenish light, everything looked hyper-accentuated, as if an artist had outlined every building with a black line, making all of them pop out from the air around them. Abby thought it still looked beautiful in a strange way, like a painting by a demented artist. There were odd angles she had never noticed before, juxtapositions of signs she could swear she had never seen before. The gargoyles on the nineteenth-century bank building on the corner seemed to shift on their pedestals, to flash their bulging eyes.

  Her hometown looked vulnerable in the strange light.

  Because it is vulnerable, Abby thought, with an inner shudder.

  No matter how much better it was doing than a thousand other towns, Small Plains was always just one disaster away from their fate. Most of the stores along this main street were occupied, but that didn’t mean there were no empty storefronts at all. There were, in fact, three of them in a five-block area, counting both sides of the street. Their empty interiors were hidden behind the civic advertisements that Ellen, as mayor, had persuaded the owners to let her put up, so nobody could see the dirt and bleakness within. Their FOR SALE signs were discreetly posted in a lower corner of their front windows.

  Three wasn’t much, as such things went, in old towns of this size, but it only counted the vacant ones. For every one of those three that had already failed, Abby knew of a dozen others that were struggling. They were making it, still making it, but barely. She was a small-business owner herself; she knew about struggling to make a go of it. She doubted those particular store owners had sufficient insurance, or any at all. If a tornado swept straight down Main Street, in minutes there would be changes they might not be able to rise above.

  One disaster away from disaster…

  Something outside caught Abby’s eye.

  An old man was coming out of the Wagon Wheel Café, or trying to.

  She watched, appalled, as he was struck by a sudden blast of wind, and pushed back against the brick wall of the building. Abby stepped away from the big window and ran toward the door to go help him, just as the hair on the backs of her arms rose and her scalp tingled. In the instant afterward, a lightning bolt hit the electrical transformer half a block away, turning the sky bright green, and throwing downtown into darkness. The bolt ricocheted off the transformer, shot horizontally above Sam’s Pizza, and struck the light pole in front of it. The pole cracked in two, sending the top half through the plate glass window where Abby had just been standing. The power of the lightning blew her against a table, which fell over, taking her to the floor with it. Glass flew like shrapnel behind her. The top half of the pole missed her by less than two feet; splinters from it landed all around her. The crossbars of the pole lay several feet beyond her head. Electrical wire draped the tables. Abby had already accidentally brushed against an exposed end of it before she realized it was dead. She felt astonished to realize she wasn’t dead, or even injured. There was a burned smell all around her, but no fire. When she realized she had just touched an electrical wire of who knew how many thousands of volts, she nearly lost her pizza. Just to be sure it was all dead, she grabbed pieces of pizza and crust from the floor and tossed them onto the wires at various places. When nothing happened, no sparks or crackling, she decided it was safe to move the wires. Using the legs of a wooden chair, she pushed at the wires and moved them out of the way so that they wouldn’t scare people to death when they came back upstairs, and so that nobody would trip over them. Plus, there was no telling if they might suddenly come to life again, and pose a deadly risk.

  She ran to the basement door, but a chunk of the light pole had tightly wedged between the door and a permanent counter, and she couldn’t budge it.

  At least they’re safe down there, she hoped. For now, anyway.

  She tried yelling down to them, but the noise of the storm covered up her voice.

  She tried calling Rex to get help, but her call wouldn’t connect.

  Abby pushed against the wind to open the front door so she could run to the assistance of the old man down the street.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  The name, “Cotton Creek Ranch,” was still above the front gate, the ranch house was still down in a hollow at the end of the dirt road, and the keys to it were where they had always been, but when Mitch walked in he discovered that the house looked like nothing his mother would have allowed. There were beer cans everywhere—most empty, some partly full. The furniture that his mother had been so insistent on keeping clean was in disarray, with dining room chairs in the living room, a couple of them overturned, and the sofa and armchair cushions scattered on the floors.

  What with the stale beer and being closed up, the place stank like a tavern.

  He walked into the back of the small house and found the two bedrooms in much the same condition: sheets and blankets tossed about on the beds, stains on the carpets, rings on the tops of the furniture.

  He didn’t even want to see the bathrooms.

  Mitch suspected for a moment that his father had sold the place, lock, stock, and love seats, following his mother’s death, and he nearly walked back out again to put the keys back where he’d found them. But then he saw some family photographs, even one of him as a small boy, and an old file cabinet containing ancient legal documents. His father would never have let strangers get their hands on the photos or papers.

  Mitch opened all the windows and propped open the front and back doors.

  Had kids broken in and used it as a party house?

  If that was true, they had known where to find the keys, because no door locks or windows showed signs of a break-in.

  He located a roll of plastic trash bags and started picking up beer cans.

  It didn’t take him long to discover there were many more things he had forgotten about living in the country than he remembered. Well water, for one thing. He’d forgotten that his parents’ small ranch house wasn’t on a city water line, and so his first glass of water surprised him with its mineral flavor.

  He used many gallons of it to mop, wash, scrub.

  It made him feel better to work hard, sweat, get results.

  After two hours of nonstop cleaning that left nine full trash bags propped outside against the house, he closed the windows and doors again, turned on the air conditioner, put one last load of towels in the washing machine, and then—feeling suddenly starved—went through all the cupboards to see if there was any food. The refrigerator was empty except for one lone beer can and a container of rotten salsa. On the cupboard shelves he found cans of gourmet stuff: little cans of sardines that might be a decade old, mustards in brands that local grocery stores would never sell, cocktail onion
s, and several different versions of liver pǎté.

  There had been cocktail parties here, he recalled, with the Old Friends.

  The Shellenbergers, the Newquists, the Reynoldses.

  While the six adults had drunk themselves silly, with a lot of laughter and card playing, he, Rex, Abby, and Patrick had chased one another around in the grass. The memory of that made him think again of the grown-up Abby and Patrick he had seen that morning, which made his stomach clench and drove him restlessly outside again.

  Mitch stepped onto the front porch and then into the middle of the front yard, where he stopped and turned in every direction, looking around. That’s when he saw another thing he couldn’t believe he had ever forgotten—the drama of an approaching thunderstorm.

  “Wow,” he breathed, unable to keep from saying it out loud.

  He was facing southwest, looking straight into the leading edge of the blackest, biggest, baddest storm he had seen since he left his hometown. My God, he thought, did I ever take these for granted? Did I used to think this was no big deal? The line of black was huge, rolling for miles horizontally, and also up, up, up until he had to bend his neck back to see the top of it. He’d seen dramatic clouds in the city sky, but nothing had the overwhelming drama of this panorama in which he could view the whole front edge, and watch it marching toward him.

  It was close, he realized with an inner start.

  The wind was kicking up in front of it.

  He could see the lightning now, hear the rumble of the thunder.

  It was spectacular. He didn’t know how he had lived without seeing this for so many years. He felt as if it was made of sheer energy—which, he supposed, it was—and that all of it was starting to infuse him with something that felt exciting. Ions of excitement. He glanced to the south and saw that part of the countryside had gone stark black, hiding everything that stood there. Then there was a ferocious crack of thunder followed by a lightning bolt that flew from sky to ground, lighting up the southern scene with false daylight. In that incredible instant, he saw cattle standing in the pastures. Then, just as quickly, they were gone, disappeared into the blackness of the storm again.