The Virgin of Small Plains (31 page)

The padlock held, but now it held on to a hasp that dangled in air.

Mitch pulled at the door handle, and was unsurprised to find it didn’t open easily.

He planted his feet and put his weight and strength into pulling on it.

When the old door finally gave way, it opened so suddenly it knocked him back.

Mitch shone his light through the black opening, but that revealed nothing to him.

He stepped through the doorway, bending over to protect his head from getting bumped on the low doorsill. And then an instinct moved his left hand to brush the wall beside it. Old knowledge had kicked in, causing his fingers to move before his brain knew it was telling them to do it.

He touched cool plastic. His fingers brushed up.

To his utter astonishment, electric lights went on in the storm cellar.

The fact that the wiring still worked—and that it hadn’t been used enough in recent years even to wear out the lightbulbs—didn’t surprise him nearly as much as what he saw in the illumination.

He thought he remembered only a single light fixture hanging from the ceiling. He thought he remembered only cement floor, walls, ceilings, and the plumbing his mother had put in. And he was pretty sure there used to be a few shelves where his mother had stored fruits and vegetables that friends of hers had canned and given to her.

But now…there was a single bed, rumpled with sheets as if somebody had gotten out of it that very morning. There was a table with two chairs. There was even a toilet and a sink. There was a small refrigerator. There was a tall wastebasket with a brown paper sack lining it. There was a chest of drawers. There was a rack with hangers, and there were clothes on them, women’s clothes that didn’t look like anything his mother would have worn: short cotton blouses, T-shirts, and summer shorts.

Mitch stood staring at the furnished storm cellar, trying to make sense of it.

He moved around inside of it, and found there was even more than he had first noticed. There was a pile of what looked like rags near the bed, and when he got to the bed, he saw the sheets were deeply stained with some dark color. It could have been anything—a water stain, anything, but Mitch felt he knew what it was: very old, dried blood.

A noise outside, some animal noise, made him jump nearly out of his skin.

With one last look around, one sweep of the light, he hurried out.

He pushed the storm cellar door closed again, leaving the lock to dangle against the rotten wood, and all he could think as he made his way back up to the house was—what the
hell
?

Had his claustrophobic mother furnished it like that so she could fool herself into thinking it wasn’t really a storm cellar if they had to use it? Was she scared of getting caught in it, and so she made sure there was even running water? But that didn’t explain the clothes, or the bed that somebody had actually slept in, much less the blood.

Maybe it wasn’t blood, he told himself.

He had no way of really knowing it was blood. Probably he was wrong. Probably it wasn’t.

It had looked like a goddamned
apartment.

The idea of somebody, anybody, actually staying in the storm cellar for any longer than it took a tornado to pass over gave him the shuddering creeps.

Having earlier stocked the kitchen with food and drink, Mitch had one beer before he went to bed. As he lay between the clean sheets, he allowed himself to think of Abby for just a moment and to remember how pretty she’d looked that morning on her screened-in porch. Her hair was just as blond and curly as it had ever been, her grin was as open-hearted and infectious as he remembered it, and her voice, calling to Patrick, had sounded just like the girl who used to yell across their lawns at him.
Enough,
he told himself. He had to tell himself a few more times.
The woman is not the girl,
he told himself.

Mitch fell asleep and dreamed of dark and secret places where he didn’t want to go. Because of his dreams, he didn’t sleep long. In the middle of the night, Mitch got up and got dressed again.

He walked to his car and went for a drive.

Chapter Twenty-eight

September, 1986

On Rex’s third trip out to see the girl, Sarah Francis, she invited him into the house.

Once in, he didn’t know what to do with himself. She made it easier by calling to him to come into the kitchen and offering him a can of beer that she pulled from the refrigerator. He was still underage, but then so was she.

“Did Pat get some beer for you?” he asked her, attempting to hide his resentment.

His brother was also too young to buy beer legally, but those sorts of things never seemed to operate in Patrick’s world the way they did in most people’s.

She nodded. “He left me enough to party for a year, but I can’t drink, and nobody ever comes to see me anyway.” She glanced over, looking surprised, and smiled a little. “Except you.”

“Why can’t you drink?”

She shrugged, but didn’t answer him.

Rex and his friends usually had to struggle to a) find somebody old enough who was also willing to take the chance of getting booze for them, or b) find somebody with a fake ID to do it, and even then there wasn’t anybody local who’d sell it to them if there was a whiff of suspicion that they were the ones who wanted it. Usually it required trips out of town to stock up on cases they could hide where parents would never find them. Pat, on the other hand, seemed to have never-ending supplies of anything he desired, especially girls and alcohol, and he was never inclined to share with his younger brother unless there were serious bribes involved. Once, out of desperation before a field party, Mitch had paid Pat a hundred dollars on
top
of the price of the keg of beer he obtained for them.

Rex didn’t know much about alcoholism, but he guessed that considering the family that Sarah came from, that might have something to do with her reluctance to drink alcohol. He decided to be tactful for once in his life and not push her about it.

“What
can
you do out here?” he asked her.

He pulled up a kitchen chair and sat down in it with his cold, sweating beer. He could hardly believe he was there with her, and with a beer in his hand on top of it. He sat back and just enjoyed being able to look at her without having to come up with some kind of excuse for staring.

She wore the same T-shirt he’d seen her in before, a plain orange cotton one, and again he would have sworn she wasn’t wearing anything underneath it. Her shorts were different this time—black ones instead of white. But her legs were just as long and tan, her feet just as bare, her face just as beautiful, her hair just as long and black. It was hot in the house—there was air conditioning, but she didn’t have it on—and she kept lifting her hair up off the back of her neck in an irritated kind of way and draping it over one shoulder. Then when it fell back on her neck again, she’d lift it up again. Rex wanted to go over and lift it for her, hold it on top of her head for her like an Egyptian slave, fan her until she sighed with pleasure, bend over and kiss that sweet, sweaty place on the back of her neck…

“What?” he asked, having missed whatever it was she had said to him.

She smiled a little, as if she could read his mind, and then she leaned against the kitchen counter. “I said, I don’t do
any
thing out here. Thank God there’s a TV, and I’ve got some magazines and music. Hey, do you think you could get some books for me?”

He sat up straighter. “Sure!”

Then he slouched again, feeling foolish for being so eager.

“I like romances,” she said, “and mysteries.” She added wistfully, “I wish I
could
go someplace. I get so bored!”

“Don’t you get lonely all by yourself out here?”

She shrugged, but he thought he saw her eyes glisten and her lower lip tremble a little before she heaved a big sigh and said, fervently, “I’d give
any
thing to get out of here for a few hours.”

“You don’t ever leave? Like, never?”

Solemnly she shook her head so that her hair swung again and she lifted it again. “Nope. I haven’t left this place at all in a whole month.”

“How long you gonna have to stay here?”

She turned, and shaded her eyes and looked out into the sunshine. “A while. ’Til I have enough to make it out there.”

“Have enough what? Money? How are you going to do that?”

She turned her head quickly, and looked flustered. “I just meant…I just meant, since I don’t have any expenses, I’m not spending anything. So I get to save a lot. That’s what I meant.”

He didn’t understand much about it, and didn’t quite have the courage to ask the questions that were piling up inside his head. She couldn’t just stay here forever avoiding her family, could she? Was she waiting until she could get a way out of here, find a job, get some transportation, a job someplace else? But how was any of that going to happen if she never left this house?

“I could take you someplace,” he blurted.

“No you can’t. I can’t go anyplace they might see me.”

He would have asked who “they” were, but he was sure he already knew: her family.

“I don’t mean a place, exactly,” Rex said. “I just mean, I could take you for a drive.”

“A drive?” She looked at him as if he’d spoken a foreign word she didn’t comprehend. “You mean, like—”

He grinned. “Like a drive. In my truck. Just drive around, you know?”

“Drive around…where?”

“I don’t know, out of town, maybe, where nobody knows you.”

“No.” She shook her head violently. “No, no. I can’t. I can’t be seen.”

“I don’t mean in the daytime. At night. And not early in the night, either. I mean, like, really late?” He laughed a little, because it sounded like fun. “We could do it, like, after midnight. And we could just drive around with the windows open so you could feel the breeze and, I don’t know, just get out of here for a little while.”

When she looked at him then, he saw a hopeful, mischievous glint in her eyes.

“It would have to be
really
late,” she said slowly.

He liked that idea. In fact, he loved that idea. “Sure!”

In an instant, a whole fantasy ran through Rex’s mind. He saw himself making an excuse to his parents to be somewhere else that night, hiding his car, maybe even sleeping in it until it was time to pick her up. He imagined himself driving to pick her up under a romantic full moon. No, on second thought, that would reveal too much. It should be dark and cloudy. He saw her waiting eagerly for him to arrive, running out of the house to hop into the car with him. He could feel how the bench seat on his truck would sink down a little with her weight, though just a little. He could sense the presence of her body next to him, smell the clean soapy fragrance that trailed behind her when she moved. He could see her eyes shining in the dark cab of the truck, see her teeth when she grinned like a conspirator at him, see her eyes widen when she looked at him in that dim light and realized that he was sexier than she had ever realized, that he was more mature than his older brother…

“I don’t know,” she said, looking suddenly doubtful and frightened.

He didn’t want to frighten her. He didn’t want to make her unhappy at all, about anything, ever.

“Okay,” he said, temporarily giving up. “Whatever you think.”

She looked both disappointed and grateful that he was dropping it. But he wasn’t, not really. Rex figured this was an argument he was bound to win eventually, because nobody sane, not even somebody with a good reason for hiding, could possibly stand being cooped up in one place for very long. Eventually she was going to go so stir-crazy that she’d practically beg him to take her for that drive.

He was surprised how long she held out.

It took another three weeks of irregular visits—and magazines and beauty stuff and feminine products and groceries—before she finally greeted him at the door one night with, “I can’t take this anymore! You’ve got to get me out of here. Let’s go for that drive you talked about! Do you promise me that nobody I know will see us? Do you swear?”

As if I have control over her universe,
he thought, pleased that she was giving him that much power. He felt so turned on that he could barely walk into the house to put down the sack of goodies he had brought to her.