Free The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Page B

for the funeral.
    The day of the service for Nadine was one to stir up ghosts, Rex thought, as he stood at the back of the crowd gathered around her open grave, and all those ghosts seemed to be howling at once. He, himself, was feeling distinctly un-nostalgic, but he could tell by the somber, faraway looks on some faces that the day was bringing other days to mind for some people. The cottonwood trees and the tall, flat-topped hills didn’t even begin to break the wind that snaked in between everybody standing around the grave. Rex thought he wouldn’t have gone so far as to call them
mourners,
except maybe as mourners of their own losses, or maybe as mourners of life and death in general. One thing they all had in common, though, was they were cold. The wind was frigid from its slide down the front face of Colorado, fast from its skid across the plains. It was a wind with a serrated edge that cut under the raised coat collars of the men and chapped the thighs of any woman in a dress.
    At graveside, the minister’s lips were so cold he could barely move them to pray. He mumbled everything he said, fumbling all that he touched. Finally, he put his Bible on a metal folding chair, stuck his bare, chapped hands down into the pockets of his black overcoat, and left them there. Rex wished he would just mumble “Amen,” and release everybody to go back to the heaters in their cars, vans, and trucks.
    “Come
on,
” Rex thought as the minister lingered overlong on a prayer.
    There was a space, a body’s width, between Judge Tom Newquist and seventeen-year-old Jeff Newquist, as if they had saved a place for someone who hadn’t gotten there yet. Rex saw Abby staring at that space, and his heart felt bad for her. Her face was still bruised from her accident in the truck, and she kept her left arm close in to her side, as if it hurt her. She’d heal from those wounds, he knew. But some things, some heartaches, rejections, and surprises, you just never got over. Abby was probably never going to get over the feeling that she had done something wrong.
    Me, too,
Rex realized, with a start. He had his own reasons for feeling that way.
    He glanced at the burial marker of the girl who had died on that other January 23. The girl’s gravestone had no name on it, because she had never been identified. It held only the year of her death, and an epitaph:
Peace Be Unto You.
    When the minister finally let them go, Rex took note of the number of people who just happened to pass by the grave of the murdered girl, and touch it. Abby’s prediction had been right—he’d heard more than one person say something like, “Well, you know why Nadine Newquist was out in the cemetery, don’t you? She was trying to get cured of her Alzheimer’s, poor thing. In her mind, she probably thought that if she could drag herself to the cemetery, she’d get a miracle.”
    Around town, they not only attributed healing powers to her, they called her the Virgin.
    The first thing wrong with that theory, in Rex’s opinion, was that she hadn’t died a virgin. Rex would never forget his father’s voice stating she had been raped. He would never forget the blood frozen on her legs. Of course, nobody outside of his family knew about that because his father had forbidden them to talk about it. But a cockamamie rumor had gone around that when Doc Reynolds examined her, he had pronounced that prior to the attack she was pure as the driven snow. Rex supposed that appealed to people’s love of melodrama. She couldn’t just be an unfortunate girl who got killed, she had to be a
virgin,
to boot.
    The second thing wrong with that theory was that Doc couldn’t necessarily have proved such a thing, even if he had wanted to. And a third thing wrong with it was that Quentin Reynolds would have sliced himself open with his own scalpel before he would have spoken a cliché like “pure as the driven snow.”
    I’ll show you a miracle,
Rex thought, as sunlight cut through