“She was near there, the first time I spotted her, Rex.”
With a frantically waving finger, Abby pointed to a place about a hundred feet past the front gate.
“Hurry, hurry, hurry,” she urged him, even though she knew he couldn’t go any faster. “She wasn’t much farther along the last time I saw her.” Abby’s voice choked on the words. Rex reached over to squeeze her hand, before he put his own back on the wheel. “She has on a bright pink bathrobe, Rex, so we ought to be able to find her.” Hopefully, she said, “Maybe she doesn’t know she’s cold, you know? Maybe she thinks it’s summer. Maybe she thinks she’s just crossing the street to visit my mother.”
“Maybe” was all Rex replied to that fantasy, but at least he didn’t try to squelch it.
That was one of the things she loved best about Rex, Abby realized, that he was a realist, but not a squelcher. People could believe six crazy things to Sunday, and he’d just nod his head in a respectful sort of way, and say, “Interesting.” Of course, he picked up a whole lot of information about people that way, too, which came in handy when he was investigating something or other. Rex wasn’t like Mitch’s mom, who had always been more likely to say something like, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” and hurt somebody’s feelings. Of all her parents’ closest friends, Nadine had always been the only one she didn’t like, and the only one she’d felt afraid of. Rex’s sheriff father was gruff to his boys, and the judge could be intimidating, but both men had always been pussycats to Abby. Nadine was a different story. She had a sharp tongue on her, and strict ideas of how the world ought to be. Alzheimer’s had only made her harder to get along with, as if it had eaten down to the core of her bitter character, revealing the heart of her Inner Bitch. When Abby had complained about Nadine to her own mother, Margie had usually said some version of, “Oh, Abby, I’ve known Nadine all my life, and besides, this town’s not big enough that we can be all that picky about our friends.”
The two of them, Nadine and Margie, would bicker and sometimes stop speaking to each other for a few days-it was weeks after Mitch left before they spoke again-but they had always wound up at the same card tables again. Nadine had been smart, with a sharp, gossipy wit, and Abby’s mom had always said it was wiser to be friends with her than to be her enemy. It wasn’t that Nadine couldn’t ever be kind-she was, sometimes, especially if it boosted her reputation. It was that kindness wasn’t her instinctive reaction, her default position, as it had been with Margie, and still was with Rex’s mom, Verna.
“Rex?” Abby said, as they scanned the white landscape. She was still feeling dizzy, but the cold was bracing her awake. The front half of the cemetery she was searching with her eyes dated to the 1800s, with gravestones worn thin, slick, and plain with time. In the back half, over a high ridge, the elegant old tombstones gave way to flat modern markers. Abby hated the back half, even though it was so much easier for her guys to mow. Everybody hated the back half, but nobody knew how to stop the march of lawn-mowing progress, not even the owner of Abby’s Lawn & Landscape. “She could die without ever seeing Mitch again.”
“We’ll all die without ever seeing Mitch again,” Rex muttered.
Abby started to say, “Maybe she wouldn’t even remember him,” when she spotted a daub of color in the snow. “Rex, there!”
He pulled the SUV as close as he could get, his tires crunching over snow, and they hurried out of it. Holding on to each other again, they slogged through the deep snow to get to her. Nadine Newquist lay on her left side between two ragged lines of gravestones that were nearly up to their tops in white. Snow had already begun to cover her; in another few minutes of the heavy fall, they wouldn’t have been able to see her at all.
Even though Abby was half-expecting this outcome, it was still a shock.
It was so cold, so lonely.
She smelled wood fire from somebody’s chimney, and tasted it on her tongue. The contrast between cozy and comfortless seemed at that moment unbearably cruel.
Rex knelt, touched Nadine, gently turned her over so they could see her eyes were open, staring into the gray-and-white day. For form’s sake, and not because he thought she lived, he bent his ear to her chest, placed fingers on her throat and wrist, checked for a pulse that wasn’t there. She wore a thin white nightgown under the rose bathrobe, prompting Rex to shake his head and say, “Jeez, she was probably already half-frozen by the time she got here.” Her long, thin, bony feet were as bare as the day she’d been born. Her auburn hair-which she had always gone to Kansas City to get fixed, because she hadn’t trusted anybody local to do it-showed roots as white as the ground on which she lay.
“You know what people are going to say, don’t you?” Abby asked, in a shaky voice.
He leaned back and stared up at her. She stood above him with her hands fisted down in her pockets and blood crusted onto the swollen side of her pretty face.
“No, what?”
Abby pointed beyond Nadine to the top of a particular tombstone that poked up over the drifts. The inscription on it was hidden by the snow. “They’re going to say Nadine was trying to get to that grave,” Abby told him, referring to the partly obscured tombstone. “They’re going to say that if Nadine could only have stumbled a few more feet, it might have saved her.”
Rex turned his head to stare at 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.”