Free The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard

the gravestone that Abby meant.
    He knew it well.
    It was the burial marker of the girl that he, his father, and brother had found in another blizzard seventeen years ago. Back then, the people of the town of Small Plains had been horrified by her murder and saddened by the fact that nobody claimed her. They had pitched in to pay for her funeral expenses. They had turned out in their best clothes for her burial. And since that time a legend had grown up around her. People claimed that the unidentified murdered girl could heal the sick, that she interceded on behalf of people who needed help, all because she was grateful to the town for caring about her.
    “Yeah?” Rex said in a voice that came out harder than he had intended, “Well, people frequently prove themselves to be idiots.”
    “Rex!”
    He frowned at her. “You don’t believe all that crap, do you?”
    “I don’t know—”
    “Oh, for God’s sake.” He sounded disgusted. “Forget all that. Just come on. I’ll carry her to the car, and we’ll take her home.”
    “Okay.” But then she said, “Nadine would hate this, Rex. It’s…undignified.”
    “What else can we do?”
    “Yeah.”
    He looked again at the other gravestone she had pointed out.
    “What?” Abby asked, noticing his distraction.
    “You know what today is?” Rex said.
    “Monday?”
    “No, I mean the date. It’s the twenty-third of January.” He looked at Abby, as if expecting something to dawn on her. After a moment, when it didn’t, he said, “Just like on the day we found her.”
    Abby frowned, then understood what he was saying. “It is? Oh, God, Rex, I always forget that you found her.”
    “Not just me. My dad and…my dad was there, too.”
    Abby glanced at the almost-hidden gravestone. “I was barely aware of it, Rex. I know that sounds awful, but I had my mind on other things. You know how it is when you’re sixteen, the whole world is only about you. A meteor could have hit and I wouldn’t have noticed.” She looked at him and he saw her brow furrow above her sunglasses, as if she was puzzled by something. “I don’t remember seeing much of you.”
    He nodded. “I think I was hiding, like you.”
    “Hiding?” Abby was, at first, uncomprehending, but then in a rush, staring at his face, she got it; after seventeen years she finally understood something she had missed before. “Oh, God, Rex, it was awful for you, wasn’t it? Finding her body. And then Mitch leaving…” Tears stung her eyes. “Rex, I’m sorry. I should have known, I should have said something a long time ago. I was thinking only of myself.”
    He waved it off. “Are you kidding? I wasn’t exactly a great friend to you, either.”
    She sniffed in the cold air, and said, “Well, I’m sure glad we got over
that.
”
    “Yeah.” He smiled at her, but then his smile faded. “Come on. I don’t want to do this any more than you do, but we’ve got to.”
    “Déjà vu, for you.”
    “Not so much. I’ve picked up other frozen people in the snow since then.”
    “Lucky you. Strange coincidence, though.”
    Rex squatted down in the snow, and squinted at the body of his former best friend’s mother. “Yes, it is,” he agreed, in a voice gone suddenly thoughtful and quiet.
    “Well, I hear life is strange.”
    “No kidding.”
    “Maybe my mother killed her,” Abby said.
    He jerked around and stared at her.
“What?”
    Abby touched the sore side of her face, winced, and said, “When Mitch left, Nadine was not very nice to me. My mother said she’d kill her for being so mean to me.” She made an effort to smile a little, but it hurt, so she gave that up and just looked down at him. “Maybe my mother lured her out from the grave and got her revenge.”
    “Sometimes,” he said, still staring at her, “you are pretty strange yourself.”
    “Yeah, and you’re a fine one to talk.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “Oh, nothing.” Abby pointed at something. “What’s that,