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 first time he’d ever done that on this date. He could only hope that it ended better this time than it had the time before.
It took him more than twenty minutes to draw near to the cemetery.
“My God-”
He spotted a black Ford pickup truck, wedged deep and damaged in a drainage ditch across the highway. Scrawled across its passenger-side door was a logo written in white script letters: Abby’s Lawn & Landscape, with a phone number and a website address.
“No!” Rex yelled the word as he slid to a stop as close as he could get to the truck. No!
To his horror, he saw a body slumped against the window on the driver’s side.
Rex felt his heart begin to break, just as it had once before, a long time ago. He had never been in love with Abby, except for one brief time when he was seven and she was five. Even then she’d had long curly blond hair, just as she still did, and big blue eyes, and she’d been easy to love. And that was even before she had developed the figure that looked so good in tight jeans and snug shirts. But he had transferred his affection to a little red-haired girl who moved to town, and then to a series of other girls who mostly hadn’t loved him back. And so it had fallen to Mitch to love Abby, a job at which he had proved himself to be piss-poor.
Rex tore out of his SUV, grabbing his gloves, and leaving the door hanging open behind him.
He half-slid, half-ran toward the wrecked pickup truck, yelling and praying all the way. He loved Abby like a sister, and he didn’t think he could stand it if she was dead. Losing Mitch had been bad enough, but this would be so much worse. When he got to the truck he jerked the driver’s-side door open.
“Abby!”
At the sound of Rex’s voice, she started to come to. She saw a white sky through a windshield that was tilted, for some strange reason, upward. She saw that she was inside the cab of her own truck, held in place by her seat belt. The outside of her left arm and the left side of her head hurt. A lot. She was so cold she felt numb all over. When she turned to see who was saying her name, the view spun sickeningly for a moment. With effort, she recognized the handsome-homely face that was staring at her as if she was some kind of horrifying sight to see, as if he had just come across Godzilla in a pickup truck.
“Abby, talk to me! Your eyes are open…Tell me how many butt-ugly sheriffs you see standing in front of you.”
“Three.”
He looked even more horrified, until she smiled.
“Kidding. There could only be one of you, ever.”
“Whew. Don’t scare me like that. What happened to you?”
Abby put her left hand cautiously up to her forehead, and when she pulled it down to examine it, she saw blood on her glove. Feeling stiff as a corpse, she reached up her right hand to lower the visor and lift the cover of the mirror there. What she saw scared her, too-how pale she looked, how blood was trickling from underneath her black wool cap. Her pupils looked big and black, which must account for how much her eyes hurt, she thought. She grabbed sunglasses from the seat beside her, and gently eased them onto her face. Then she snatched the cap off to see her own smashed blond curls, now tinted red and pink.
“I look punk,” she said weakly. “All I need is a safety pin through my eyebrow.”
“Put your hat back on before you catch pneumonia.”
“Yes, Dad.” Despite her sarcasm, she did as he said, even though the pain when she lifted her left arm made her suck in her breath. When she saw that her coffee had all spilled out, she realized she couldn’t smell it and wondered for a panicky moment if her nose had frozen. When Rex leaned in to examine her face, she was relieved to smell the leather of his jacket.
“You scared the shit of me, Abby,” he said, accusingly. “When I saw your truck in the ditch…”
The window wasn’t cracked, and neither was her head, she guessed, though the skin was definitely split up there. The pain of disturbing her own wounds woke her up some more. She remembered, in a rush, how she had landed there.
“What happened to my truck? Get me out of this seat belt. Have you got Nadine?”
“No. How do you know about Nadine?”
It was Abby’s turn to look horrified. “Didn’t you hear my message?”
“No, I just happened to be coming this way-”
“Oh, my God, Rex! Nadine is in the cemetery! I saw her walking there in her bathrobe-”
He straightened up and looked in that direction. “Jesus,” he said in a low, urgent voice. Quickly, he shoved back the glove on his left wrist and checked his watch. “It’s six thirty-two. Do you know when you crashed?”
Abby was already fighting her way out of the cab of her truck, using Rex’s big, lanky body as leverage to propel herself safely down to the ground, into the deep snow where he stood. The snow was so deep that if he had on boots, she couldn’t see them.
“It had to have been around six,” she told him. “Oh, my God, Mitch, a whole half hour!”
“Mitch?” Rex had looked as if he was ready to leave her there, and go find Nadine. But now he turned back. “You called me Mitch, Abby.”
She stared into the familiar brown eyes that now held a hint of anger.
“I did? I called you Mitch? Well, that’s his mother out there. Who cares, Rex! Does it really matter if I call you Fred or Harvey? Come on, we’ve got to find her. Help me, I’m dizzy-”
“You’re not going. You may have a concussion.”
“Oh, shut up, Rex. I’m freezing, I need to move. I can show you where she was.”
She felt her vision starting to black out, and quickly leaned into him until she could see again.
“Yeah, you’ll be a big help,” he said, still sounding angry.
“Nadine!” she snapped at him, and tugged at his coat to get him to hurry.
He grabbed her to steady her, and then kept tight hold of her as they hurried up out of the culvert and made their way through the snow to his SUV. Three times, one or the other of them slipped, nearly bringing both of them down, but his strength kept them upright, and she was determined not to let him go alone. Abby didn’t trust a man to be able to find anything. Not even Rex, not even to find a sixty-three-year-old woman in a rose-colored bathrobe in the snow.