The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Page A

Abby told him.

    When Abby went back to high school after the blizzard, she felt like a frozen girl, barely able to remember how to smile back at people, or to pick up a tray in the cafeteria line, much less to eat the food on it. In class, it was too hard to raise her hand to ask a question, though she answered when she was called on. When somebody came up behind her and said her name—“Abby!”—she jumped. She walked in dread of hearing
his
name, and quietly walked away when there was talk of him. There was a gold heart necklace he had given her; she stuck it deep into a pocket of whatever she was wearing on any given day and rolled it around in her fingers where nobody could see.
    When Ellen came home from KU, Abby hid in her room. When her girlfriends dropped by to try to see her, she fended them off, even her best friends Cerule and Randie. Now and then she picked up the phone to call Rex, or started to talk to him in the halls, but he seemed to be avoiding her, and she was mad at Rex anyway, because he hadn’t called her. Every time she was tempted to try to talk to him, she got mad all over again, and hung up before anybody answered. She wondered if Rex was feeling bad, too. He had been Mitch’s best friend forever. But then, maybe Rex
knew
why Mitch had left the way he did. Maybe Rex wasn’t calling her, because he didn’t want to tell her anything.
    Well, the hell with him, then, she thought.
    The hell with everybody.
    They all thought Mitch had left town because of her, because his mother had made sure to tell them so.

    Eventually, Abby caught on to how to do natural things again.
    She began to be able to hear other people say his name.
    One day she accidentally left the heart necklace in some shorts she was washing. When she heard it rattling around inside the clothes dryer she took it out and put it in the bottom drawer of her jewelry case.
    A detached part of her understood how lucky she was: she was pretty, she was well-liked, there were boys who wanted to try to be with her now that Mitch was out of the picture, and there were girls who felt closer to her now that she had been dumped like anybody else could be. Slowly, lured out of her loneliness by other kids, she came to life again. But it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t the same. She was a girl who had lost the boy she loved for reasons she believed she would never understand, and she felt estranged from her other best male friend, Rex, and she’d been accused of things she hadn’t done, and even her father seemed to be distancing himself from her, and now her best friend was a big red South American parrot.
    The distance between her and Rex continued through the following lonely summer, and then he went off to college. Each time they saw each other after that, it was a little easier to be in each other’s company. By the time they had both graduated from college, they were back on steady ground. A few times Abby tried to talk to him about Mitch, but Rex wouldn’t do it. She finally gave up the effort. But Abby always suspected that Rex felt like she did, like a triangle with one side missing.

 

    Chapter Seven
    January 23, 2004
    There had been a bad wreck east of Small Plains—a tractor-trailer had overturned in the blizzard—and then there were motorists for Rex Shellenberger and his deputies to help out of ditches. Now that the sun was up, more or less, he was tired from fighting the storm, and starving for a big breakfast in town. But before he could even begin to fantasize about bacon and eggs, his cell phone rang.
    It was Judge Tom Newquist, transferred to Rex’s cell phone in his SUV and sounding frantic because he couldn’t locate Nadine.
    “Where do you think she went, Judge?”
    Rex felt all of his police senses go on high alert again.
    No rest for the wicked, he thought. Or eggs or bacon, for that matter.
    “If I knew where she went, I’d find her!” Tom Newquist sounded angry, like a desperate man. “In her condition, she