The Virgin of Small Plains (29 page)

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 the 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.