When she saw the awful state J.D. was in, Abby felt really angry at Mitch, so angry that she hated him. It felt really good to hate him. It felt good to see that there was another creature on earth who was suffering, as she was, and for the exact same reason. She didn’t want J.D. to hurt, but seeing him like that made her feel a little less crazy. Maybe she was only as sane as a half-bald parrot, but at least she knew that another creature was taking it as hard as she was. From that moment, Abby swore to rescue the parrot and love him back to happiness. Three weeks later, she got her chance, and stole him off the Newquists’ screened-in porch. It took a long time to bring J.D. around, but eventually his feathers began to grow back, his eyes lit up again, and his appetite came back. On a day when he nuzzled her hair and gently nibbled her earlobe without drawing blood, she knew it was going to be okay.
The only thing about the bird that changed permanently was that he never squawked again, as he had used to do when Mitch was around. The parrot had a squawk that could rouse roosters from their perches, the judge had always said, but now the big red bird only made quiet noises, as if he was afraid of offending.
“I don’t know what I did wrong, either,” 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 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 inside.” 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.