The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Page B

could go anywhere. There’s no point looking for logic in it.”
    “But you think she’s outside the house?”
    Rex drove with one bare hand on the steering wheel, feeling the cold plastic under his fingers, the other holding the metallic phone to his ear. As slick as it was out, as thick as it was still coming down, he’d a whole lot rather have had both hands on the wheel.
    “I know she’s not
in
side.” The judge’s tone was sharp, unhappy. “I found the kitchen door open. Snow was blowing in.”
    Shit,
Rex thought, but didn’t say out loud. An Alzheimer’s patient, out in this weather?
    “Go look outside again, Judge. See if you see any footprints leading in some direction.”
    “I already did that.” The judge was no fool. “There’s nothing to see.”
    Double-dip shit,
Rex thought. That meant she’d left some time ago, long enough for fresh snow to fill in any tracks she left. “I’m on my way,” he promised the judge. “Please don’t you go looking for her, all right? Nobody with any sense would go out on a day like this.” He realized what he had just said, and regretted it. “I’m sorry, Judge. I didn’t mean to say that.”
    “I thought she was doing better,” the judge said, ignoring the tactless comment. “Enough so that I sent her nurse home last night. She was making sense when she talked. She was walking around okay, taking care of herself. She wasn’t crying all the time like she has been. I thought it was safe to let her sleep in her room by herself.”
    On second thought, maybe the judge
was
a fool, Rex thought. Alzheimer’s patients roamed at night, worse than they did in the daytime. Anybody who’d ever known one well knew that. If the judge couldn’t handle that basic fact, he should have put her in a nursing home long ago.
    “Is Jeff there?” Rex asked him.
    Jeffrey was their other child, the one who had come along eighteen years after Mitch’s birth, the adopted child whom some people called their substitute son. Ordinarily, Rex wouldn’t have felt the need to inquire if a kid had stayed home on a school night while a blizzard raged, but Jeff was a high school senior, a breed that Rex didn’t trust any farther than he could throw them. Mainly, because he remembered his own final year of high school. But either he had whitewashed his own memory, or Jeff was worse than he or any of his friends had been at that age, and more given to copping an attitude, too. It didn’t help that his mother had gone mental, and that the judge was still the oblivious workaholic he’d always been. There had been too many times already when Rex had picked Jeff up someplace he wasn’t supposed to be, and delivered him home to his parents, who hadn’t even realized he was gone.
    The judge assured him that Jeff was asleep in his room.
    Rex refrained from asking, “Have you actually opened his door to make sure?” The judge didn’t need one more family member to worry about this morning. If Jeff was out someplace he would likely survive, which was more than could be said of the chances for his mother.
    “How soon can you be here?” the judge demanded.
    “I’ll cut through the cemetery.”
    “You’re not coming here first?”
    The judge sounded as if he was ready to argue about it.
    “I’m taking the fastest route from where I am now,” Rex said to calm him.
    The Newquists’ place backed up to the cemetery, so there was a good chance Nadine had gone that way.
    Another call came through while he was on the phone with the judge, but Rex ignored it. By the time he hung up, his mind was focused on finding Nadine. Forgetting about the second call, he laid his cell phone back down on the seat beside him in order to concentrate on his driving. As bad as the conditions were, they weren’t bad enough to take his mind off an awful irony that confronted him. He wondered if the judge was aware of it, too: It was January 23, and he was going out searching in a blizzard. It wasn’t the