The Virgin of Small Plains (5 page)

Mitch dived into the dark medical supply closet seconds before Abby’s dad pushed open the door from the kitchen. Light from approaching headlights flooded the dark rooms as somebody drove up to the entrance to the doctor’s office. For several moments, Mitch stood frozen in the dark, trying to catch his breath without anybody hearing him gulp it into his lungs. Abby’s voice, calling “Dad!” had scared the hell out of him. Now, he cringed at the sight of the long sliver of light that came in at the edge of the supply closet door. He hadn’t dared to close it all the way, since that might make noise. Would Doc notice it was ajar?

Oh, God, he thought, what if Doc had to get something in the supply closet?

Desperately, he stared around, but saw only open shelves, including the one with the box of condom packets. They looked like a bad joke now.
Ha ha. Not tonight, sucker.

Mitch’s heart pounded so hard in his ears that he felt deaf. As through a percussive din, he heard doors slam outside, then the outside door to the office opened, and then he heard the voices of men. With a shock that felt like a kick to his stomach, he recognized them.
Jesus H. Christ,
it was Rex’s dad and Patrick.
Oh, great!
Was his own dad coming next?

Feeling as if he had little left to lose, since they were bound to catch him, Mitch inched closer to the crack of light. He might as well take a look. But what he saw shocked him more than his own predicament did: Preceded by Doc Reynolds, Rex’s dad and brother were carrying a naked girl down the hallway, coming right toward him.

Doc stopped in front of the supply closet door and then flung open the door of the examining room opposite it.

“Put her in here,” he told them.

The father and son turned into the first examining room.

As they did, they turned their burden so that her long hair hung down over their arms, and her face was revealed to Mitch.

His breath caught in his throat, and he thought,
My God, she’s dead!

Instinctively, he stepped back to get away from what he was seeing, but he could still see her. Her eyes open, she seemed to stare right at Mitch for an instant before they moved her face from his line of vision.

And then, belatedly, a jolt went through him, and he thought,
I know her.

Through the blood pounding in his ears, he heard Quentin Reynolds say, “Lay her down on the floor, Nathan.”

“The floor, Quentin?”

Rex’s dad sounded angry, aggressive, but then, he almost always did.

“You’ve got to put her someplace,” Abby’s dad said with a kind of heavy patience. “Lay her down.”

“Why not on the examining table?”

“Put her on the goddamned floor, Nathan!”

In the supply closet, Mitch’s whole body jerked in surprise at the doctor’s tone. He had never,
never
heard Abby’s dad curse, or even talk like that to anybody.

“Keep your shirt on, Quentin,” Nathan Shellenberger said.

There was a pause, and then Mitch heard Doc say, “Patrick, go wait in the truck.”

When the asshole didn’t move, as Mitch knew he wouldn’t, because that was the kind of jerk Patrick was, his father shoved at his shoulder and said, “You heard him. Go.”

Patrick didn’t argue, just shrugged and slowly did as he was told, slamming the office’s outside door behind him. It was only after he was gone that Mitch realized he was surprised to see that Patrick was in town at all. Why wasn’t he in Manhattan, where he was supposed to be at college? Rex hadn’t said anything about his asshole older brother being home.

It didn’t seem important, especially not when Mitch heard Nathan Shellenberger say to the physician in a low voice, “What now?”

Abby’s dad didn’t answer him with any words. Instead, he surprised Mitch—and, from the expression on his face, the sheriff—by walking out of the examining room and back inside the house. He left the examining room door open. Mitch stood in the dark supply closet staring across the hall at a frightening tableau: The sheriff stood silently, a sentinel, seeming to guard the girl’s body on the floor.

Doc returned within a few moments, carrying several plastic grocery bags in his left hand, and something else in his right hand. He walked back into the examining room. Still without speaking, the most respected and popular general practitioner in the county looked the county sheriff in the face briefly, and then squatted down and proceeded to place the girl’s head carefully inside three of the bags. He then took some kind of twine from one of the drawers in his office and tied it tightly around her neck, securing the bags.

“What the hell are you doing, Quentin?” Rex’s father demanded of him.

“What has to be done.”

He left the office again, going back into the house one more time.

While he was gone, Mitch again watched Rex’s dad stare down at her.

Slowly, almost not wanting to look, Mitch let his own gaze slide down to her body. They had put her on her left side. She was curled up as if she were asleep, and she wasn’t moving.

When Abby’s dad came back, he had a couple of sofa pillows in his hands. He squatted down again, only this time he lifted the girl’s covered head, and placed the pillows under it, as if he were trying to make her comfortable on the hard, tiled floor.

Then Abby’s father moved back a couple of feet, though he still squatted on the tile. He reached for the other object he had brought in along with the plastic bags. He lifted the girl’s softball bat that he had carried with him into the office, and he brought it down on the plastic-covered face. Nathan Shellenberger cried out. So did Mitch, in the supply closet. But nobody heard him; their attention was riveted on the bat that just kept going up and coming down. The plastic bags contained the splattered flesh and blood. The pillows muffled the sound to thuds, though in the doctor’s office they all heard the repeated and terrible cracking of bone.

The sheriff turned away, fumbled toward a plastic wastebasket, and vomited into it.

“Jesus Christ,” he whispered, as he wiped his mouth off on the sleeve of his coat. “Jesus, God, Quentin!”

“Go home,” Abby’s father said, in a harsh voice. “We’ll talk when Pat’s not waiting for you.”

The sheriff fled, letting a blast of snow and cold air in behind him before he shut the door.

In the closet, Mitch sank down onto the floor and stared wide-eyed into the light.

He watched Quentin Reynolds examine the surface of the bat, and then bend down to examine the floor. He seemed satisfied that the bags had contained the gore, because he didn’t attempt to wash anything. Gently, he leaned the bat against a wall. He picked up the plastic wastebasket into which his old friend had thrown up and carried it down the hall to the bathroom. Mitch heard the sounds of a toilet flushing, of water running, and after a while Doc came back down the hall with the wastebasket in his hands and walked back into the examining room again. After putting the wastebasket back down, he put his hands on his hips and gazed around, as if checking to see if he had missed anything. And then, without any warning, he began to weep, a weeping made more violent by his efforts to contain the sounds of it. For several moments, the stocky man’s shoulders shook as sobs wrenched him. Finally, he dragged the sleeves of his shirt across his eyes. Then he removed the cushioning pillows. He checked them, too. He left the girl with the destroyed face on the floor, and carried the bat and pillows back into his house, turning off the office light and quietly closing the door behind him.

Mitch waited until he thought he could stand up again.

Barefoot and coatless, without even a sweater to pull over his T-shirt, and on nerveless legs that trembled as he moved, he emerged from the closet. He paused for a moment in the hallway and stared into the examining room, but he couldn’t bring himself to look down. Averting his eyes from the horror of it, he ran into the waiting room and then stumbled out into the snow. He could barely feel the cold. It was only when he inhaled sharp, painful air that he realized he had been holding his breath. As he shuffled down the driveway, he looked up at the windows in Abby’s room. There was no light up there. Mitch felt as if all the light had gone out everywhere.

When the truck backed down the driveway and its headlights disappeared, when her father came trudging back up the stairs, when he had shut his bedroom door and a long time passed after that, Abby gave up waiting for Mitch to return to her bed that night. At least he hadn’t gotten caught, she was pretty sure, or else her father would have thrown open her door to read her the riot act. So that was good. But nothing else was. Not poor Mitch having to run home barefoot in the snow, not Mitch having to take the chance of getting caught by
his
parents when he sneaked back into his house, and not the two of them being separated on the one night they should have been together most.

God only knew when she’d get the nerve to try again.

The tears started to come. Abby cried herself to sleep, feeling sorry for herself.

“This is just the
worst,
” she told her wet pillow. It was
hard
to be sixteen. She just couldn’t imagine how it could be any harder.

Chapter Five

When she padded downstairs in the morning, Abby wasn’t surprised to realize that Mitch hadn’t called her yet. Yawning, delighted that school was canceled, she took bread out of the refrigerator and put two slices in the toaster.

“Mom?” she called out in a sleep-hoarse voice.

“Doing laundry,” came her mother’s voice, up from the basement.

Abby was relieved not to hear any condemnation in it, no hint of, “Boy, are you in trouble when I get up there, young lady.” She could hear sounds and low voices from her dad’s medical office, meaning he was working in there this morning. When he didn’t come storming out to confront her, either, she figured they’d gotten away with it.

Gotten away with nothing, she thought, ruefully.

Mitch would probably sleep in even later than she had, Abby thought, as she pulled out butter and raspberry jam, and he deserved to. She unscrewed the top on the jar of jam, ran a forefinger around the outer edge of it, and then licked off the tangy, seedy overflow. She hoped he hadn’t gotten caught sneaking home. She didn’t envy anybody who had to convince the judge of a false story. It was his profession to be able to winnow truth/wheat from lies/chaff, and it would be especially easy with Mitch.

Around the time that her toast was about to pop up and the room was filling with the warm, yeasty aroma of homemade bread, Abby got the delightful idea of getting dressed and stomping into Mitch’s house and waking him up. If Nadine would let her into his bedroom, she could jump on him and surprise him awake. He’d hate it for about two seconds, until he saw who it was who was straddling him and tickling him.

Abby left the toast where it was in the toaster.

She ran upstairs, got dressed in warm layers of clothes, then raced back down to find her tallest, warmest boots and to toss on all the other layers of protection that made living in Kansas such a drag in the wintertime. She told herself that if she lived on a Caribbean island, she wouldn’t get any snow days. But maybe she’d get hurricane days—

Abby felt goofy with the sheer pleasure of being sprung free for a day.

She flung open the front door.

God, what a gorgeous day!

The sun was so bright, reflecting off the snow, that she almost ran back into the house for sunglasses. Squinting hard against the glare at first, she barely noticed the presence of the sheriff’s car in her driveway. But it was just Nathan Shellenberger, Rex’s dad, her own dad’s lifelong friend, no big deal. Abby was accustomed to all of the town’s families running in and out of one another’s homes. She didn’t give it a second thought.

It wasn’t even all that cold, really. By the time she had high-stepped the length of two front yards, and waved at neighbors who were shoveling, she was so hot she pulled her wool cap off her head and stuck it in her coat pocket.

Abby shook her hair loose, reveling in the crisp feel of fresh air, clean hair, being sixteen.