The Virgin of Small Plains

by Nancy Pickard

  “No! I want to. I mean, I don’t want to…but I should do it so I can get it over with. I mean, if he’s going to be in town, then I’m probably going to have to see him eventually, right? So let me do it on purpose, let me plan it and do it my way, so he doesn’t take me by surprise again.”

  “Again?”

  Abby’s face flushed. “Monday night…seeing him on the street…” Desperately, she looked around for a conversational diversion. “Speaking of streets, what’s with all the traffic? I haven’t seen this many cars downtown since the Founder’s Day parade.”

  “It’s that tabloid article.” Ellen smiled down at the dirt.

  “You’re kidding. People believe that stuff? They’d actually drive here to see?”

  “Believe it? You heard Terianne, didn’t you? She thinks the Virgin sent Mitch to buy her store.” Ellen laughed a little. “You notice how many handicapped stickers there are on those cars?”

  “My God, they’re coming here to get cured by the Virgin?”

  Ellen looked at a vanload of senior citizens driving past and waved back when one of them waved at her. “I think so.”

  “Well, you’re the mayor, can’t you tell them to go home?”

  “Go home? And drive all this business away? Abby, they’ll eat at the Wagon Wheel. They’ll buy groceries at Anderson’s. They’ll stay at the motels. They’ll buy gas. This is the best thing that’s happened to Small Plains since barbed wire.”

  “But it’s not right.” Frowning, Abby stared back at her sister.

  “Why not? If it gives them hope and a little happiness?”

  “And then disappoints them and wastes their money—”

  “But Abby,” Ellen said, reasonably. “You’ve heard the stories, too.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “And you can’t prove they aren’t true.”

  “You can’t prove they are true.”

  “I don’t have to.”

  “Ellen, that’s a terrible attitude!” Abby stood up. She threw her own trowel down onto the pavement and it landed with a clatter that made her sister jump. “This is wrong. It’s wrong to lead desperate people on! It’s wrong to give them hope when there isn’t any hope. It’s criminal. It’s…wrong.” Tears came to her eyes, and her voice began to shake. “People get lonely and they get desperate and they’ll cling to anything that gives them hope, and they just want to feel better, they just want to make all the misery go away, and it’s just not right to take advantage of them when they’re feeling that way, it’s just not right, Ellen!”

  As her sister stared up at her, Abby’s voice broke on a sob.

  Without another word, she turned on her heel and ran away, before Ellen could figure out that she wasn’t really talking about sick people and the Virgin, she was crying about herself and Mitch. Down the sidewalk she raced, through the pedestrians, who turned to look after her, wondering what in the world would make such a pretty young woman so unhappy on such a lovely day.

  As luck would have it, when Abby had run almost three full blocks, she spied a new black foreign-looking automobile signaling for a left turn that would take it right in front of her when she crossed the next street.

  Seeing who was behind the wheel, Abby ran faster.

  The driver, not seeing her, began his turn onto Main Street.

  His brakes squealed when she stepped out in front of his car.

  Mitch stopped midway in his turn and stared at Abby as she ran up to his window.

  He didn’t get to say a word before she started screaming at him.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Mitch? Why did you buy Terianne’s store? Why did you buy Joe Mason’s building? What are you doing, buying up properties? What do you want? Why did you come back?” Tears rolled down Abby’s furious face. “And why don’t you just leave again? Just go away and don’t ever come back, just like you meant to do seventeen years ago. Why are you coming back and shaking everything up again? I want you to leave! This is my town! I want you to go away and never come back! Nobody wants you here! I don’t want you! You don’t belong here anymore!”

  He had his hand on the door handle, and was starting to get out.

  And then she was gone, walking away quickly against the traffic.

  Abby wasn’t finished screaming at people.

  Now that she’d started, she felt as if she had been holding in a lot of screaming and a lot of tears for a lot of years.

  She was running again, slowing down now because she was out of breath, but still fueled by the most bewildering set of emotions she had ever felt in all the years since Mitch left. But she had one more stop to make, now that she was on a roll, one more person to scream at, and he was going to listen to her, because it was long past time that somebody ought to, and it wasn’t right, none of it was right, it had always been so wrong, and she was going to make it right if it killed her.

  Mitch saw that he was holding up cars from four directions.

  A couple of people started honking. Many others were staring.

  He thought about chasing her down the street, grabbing her, holding her until she heard him out, until she let him explain, until she understood…

  And then he got back into the Saab, finished his left turn, and drove on with his hands shaking, his heart pounding, his gut in an uproar, and all of his carefully laid plans in splinters. He had spent much of the last few days calmly and coolly figuring out his own legal vulnerabilities if he went public with what he knew. He had witnessed a crime and had not reported it. Normally, the Kansas statute of limitations would have run out a mere two years afterward, and he’d be safe from prosecution. But that rule didn’t apply when an accused person was absent from the state, and he had been gone for the entire time from then to now. In that case, the statute of limitations only began to run again the moment he set foot back in Kansas, and here he was. The awful irony was that Doc Reynolds and Nathan Shellenberger were safe from prosecution because they’d been in-state the whole time and so the statute of limitations applied to them, at least in regard to the only crime that Mitch knew for sure they had committed, which was covering up the identity of a murder victim.

  But being prosecuted for failing to report a crime would be the least of his problems if Doc and Nathan decided to play rough with him. There was no statute of limitations on murder. They were smart men. Between the two of them they could cook up a story and manufacture evidence to trap him. At the very least, it would be his word against theirs, as his father had always said it would be. And who was he but the boy who’d run away, which could also be used against him.

  Mitch felt so filled with pain and anger that he thought he would explode if he couldn’t release it, and he knew just who his first target was going to be. There was only one way for him to know what they had planned and that was to confront one or both of them and see exactly what they threatened him with.

  Then he would decide what to do about them.

  He pulled onto his father’s street, but not into the old man’s driveway.

  Instead, Mitch parked in front of the big house across the street, the house where Abby had grown up. He got out of his car. It was Wednesday and apparently the clinic at the back was open for business. There were three cars parked in the wide driveway toward the rear of the house. Doc was seeing patients.

  Mitch strode up the front walk, counting on the fact that, except for his own parents, nobody in Small Plains ever locked their doors.

  Jeffrey Newquist stood outside the side door of his father’s house and stared across the street at the foreign car parked there. Black Saab. It could only be his brother’s cool car. Brother. It felt weird in his mind, even weirder to say, but he tried it out loud: “Brother.” Didn’t feel right yet, felt weird, but he thought he could get used to it.

  Growing up, there hadn’t been much talk of the brother who left, but the house had felt haunted by him. By how smart he was supposed to have been, how good looking, what a sports star, how popular, how e
verybody loved him. Every time Jeff failed at something he saw the comparison in people’s eyes.

  Substitute son.

  Well, he was no failure now. After his success at selling his video and the story of the girl in the tornado, he felt the equal of anybody in town, even of his brother.

  Sometimes he’d hated Mitch for going away and for abandoning him to Nadine and the judge. At those times, Jeff fantasized about how someday everybody would hear how Mitch Newquist was a serial killer or bank robber or something and they’d all realize how wrong they’d always been about him. Other times, Jeff imagined the perfect older brother—successful, rich, secretly devoted to his kid bro, who he would give anything to see but who he was prevented from seeing for some mysterious but totally understandable reason. And this cool older brother would come back to Small Plains and see how miserable Jeff was there and take him away to live in, like, New York City, where he’d buy him a cool car of his own and clothes and introduce him to gorgeous women.

  And damned if it wasn’t that version that was coming true!

  Jeff stepped forward. His brother. He had a right to go see him.

  The night they’d met, Mitch had seemed okay to Jeff.

  They’d gotten along okay, he thought, even down to the beer.

  He didn’t know how Mitch felt about him taking the gun and the extra beer, because Jeff had left early so there wouldn’t be the opportunity for any confrontation about it, but he figured Mitch was probably cool with it.

  From that first meeting he had begun spinning subsequent scenarios. He saw the two of them getting in that black car and driving together back to Kansas City. Okay, it wasn’t New York City, but it also wasn’t Small Plains. He saw Mitch putting him up in his own house, giving him the run of the place, maybe giving him a job or getting him into college somewhere cool. He imagined how Mitch was probably ready to trade in that Saab for the new model and how he’d pass the keys to the “old” one over to Jeff.

  He tried the driver’s door and discovered it was not locked.

  But instead of getting in to see how it felt to sit behind the wheel, Jeff looked up at Doc Reynolds’s house. It was his childhood doctor up there. And his own brother. He had a right to go in there, too. Just like he had as much right to have their father’s old silver pistol as Mitch did. He had it with him even now, tucked into his waistband, below an overhanging shirt, where he liked the weight of it and all it meant to own a gun. Or at least to have possession of one. On the other hand, he didn’t really have a place to keep it where the judge wouldn’t find it, so maybe he’d give it back so Mitch could return it to the bedside table, or maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe that would depend on whether Mitch was glad to see him again. A lot of things might depend on that. With his right hand resting on the handle of the gun sticking out from his waistband, Jeff started up the front walk, taking long, loping strides.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  It had very briefly passed through Marty Francis’s mind to avoid drinking for a while after he got out of jail this time. Sitting on a stool at the bar of the Cottonwood Inn in the middle of the day, surrounded and jostled by a lunch crowd of strangers, he was on his sixth bottle of beer, thinking it over, pro and con, when somebody shoved a napkin under his nose.

  The arm that shoved it was gone as quick as it had appeared and Marty’s reaction time wasn’t good enough to look around for the rest of the body that went with it, but he could see that the napkin in front of his nose had writing on it.

  “Go to the Small Plains Cemetery,” it said in plain block printing, in ink. “There’s $ in it for you.” He read it three times before he could focus on the important part: “$.” Below the words was a roughly drawn map. It took him a while longer, but eventually he deciphered it: Cottonwood Inn to Highway 177 to Small Plains Cemetery, turn left inside the cemetery, go 100 yards, find the grave circled and marked with an X on the napkin.

  “Johnny,” he said to the bartender, who was wiping down the counter next to him.

  “No,” the bartender said without even looking up. “Six is enough, Marty. Seven is a car wreck.”

  “I don’t want another beer, dammit. I want to know something. If somebody told you to go to the cemetery, because there was money in it, would you go?”

  “What do you mean, money in it? Like in a grave, or something?”

  “I don’t know. It just says there’s money in it.”

  “For you?” The bartender sounded skeptical.

  Marty held up the napkin and the bartender bent over to look at it.

  “This is a joke,” he pronounced. “Or a scam.”

  “But it says there’s money in it for me.”

  “Where does it say it’s for you?”

  Marty stared down at the napkin and noticed for the first time that his initials were there: M.F. “Here,” he said, and pointed.

  “Hmm,” the barkeep said, after examining it again. Unable to refute the presence of the initials, he said, “And you want to know should you go? Well, do you owe anybody any money, Marty?”

  “No, why?”

  “Just checking to see if it could be a trick to lure you in to get you beat up. You got anything on you that anybody might want?”

  “Not if I leave you a tip.”

  “Who gave this to you?”

  “I don’t know. It just got put in front of me.”

  The bartender smiled a little. “Like an act of God, or something?”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, me, I wouldn’t trust this any farther than I could throw it, but I guess if you’re telling the truth that nobody’s out to get you, and even if there is—” He paused. “You got a gun, Marty?”

  “Isn’t that what glove compartments are for?”

  They both smiled a little this time.

  “Well, then, if nobody was out to get me, and there wasn’t anything I had that anybody wanted, and I had a gun on me, then I’d go to the cemetery and lie down in a fucking coffin if I thought there might be money in it.”

  When Marty got to the cemetery, he discovered that he wasn’t the only one looking for that particular grave. It gave him pause, because what if the mysterious stranger had dropped off similar napkins in other people’s laps?

  It took him a while to figure out how to apply the map to the cemetery, but finally he walked up to the right stone.

  Peace Be Unto You were the only words engraved on it, along with 1987.

  But somebody had affixed another white bar napkin to the stone, below the words:

  Sarah Francis

  Born, Franklin, Kansas, 1968

  Murdered, Small Plains, Kansas 1987

  It took him a moment to put the name and places and dates together and realize it seemed to be describing one of his own sisters.

  Feeling confused, he ripped the paper off the stone.

  “Hey!” a man standing nearby objected. “What are you doing?”

  “Fuck off,” Marty told him and walked back toward his car.

  When he got back to it, he found a tall man wearing a Western shirt, blue jeans, and cowboy boots leaning up against it smoking a cigarette. The man pointed to the crumpled paper in Marty’s hand.

  “You know her?”

  “I dunno,” Marty mumbled, feeling more confused than ever. “My sister, maybe.”

  “Really. That could be worth a lot of money to you.”

  “How so?” Marty perked up.

  “Don’t you know about this grave?”

  Marty shook his head.

  “It’s famous,” the man told him. “She’s famous, although nobody has ever known who she really is. If that”—he pointed to the napkin with the name on it—“is your sister, there are a lot of people who would pay for her story.”

  “What people? What story?”

  “Media.” The man gave Marty a puzzled look. “They’d pay for you to tell them who she is, where she grew up, all about her, anything you know.”

  “Why the hell would they do
that?”

  Again, the man gave him a puzzled look. “Don’t you live around here?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The girl in this grave is supposed to be able to cure people of diseases—”

  “No way!”

  “Really. She’s kind of a local saint, you might say.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “Maybe, maybe not, people claim some pretty amazing things about her.” The man reached for the napkin, but Marty jerked it away. “Sorry. I just wanted to see her name again. I saw it on the gravestone before you came up here.”

  Marty covered the napkin with his hand.

  “Who wants to know about her?” he asked the man. “How do I get this story out and get paid for it?”

  The man smiled. “Just go into town and start telling people you know who the girl in the grave is. Say it’s your sister. Start demanding they dig her up so she can be identified. Believe me, the people who want the story will come to you.”

  Marty, who was feeling more eager and more sober by the moment, listened up.

  “And while you’re at it,” the man advised him, “you might want to be sure to ask people why Mitch Newquist left town when she died.”

  “Who?”

  “Mitch. Newquist.”

  “Newquist…I had a judge who—”

  “That’s the one. Mitch Newquist is the judge’s son.”

  “You’re saying maybe a judge’s son killed my sister?” Marty pulled himself up, feeling indignant. “This Mitch Newquist, he killed my sister?”

  “I’m saying there’s a reward for the person who identifies her and another reward for the person who fingers her killer.”

  “Reward? From who? Not my family.”

  Marty laughed a little at the very idea.

  “The town, that’s who,” the man said. “For seventeen years, there has been a reward fund just sitting in the bank gathering interest.”

  Marty’s eyes shone. “What’s that guy’s name again? The bastard who murdered my poor sister?”

  “Mitchell Newquist, the judge’s son.”

  It was only when they parted that Marty thought to ask, “Who are you? How come you know so much about my sister?”