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, Rex?”
“What?”
“That thing she has in her hand. What’s she carrying?”
Carefully, Rex turned the thin hand over, revealing what Nadine Newquist had gripped in tight fingers. He could see just enough of it to be able to tell Abby what it was. “It’s a picture of Jeff.”
“Oh!” Abby grabbed the fabric of her coat above her heart. “That’s so sad.”
This one thing had finally brought her to tears. She had felt anxious and scared when they were searching for Nadine, but now, finally, she felt sorrow-even if she did suspect it was more for her mother and other people she had lost than for the woman in the snow before them. Still…Nadine may have had a serpent’s tongue, but she had gone to her death clutching a photograph of her adopted child, her younger son.
Rex lifted the thin, light body, and carried it back like a baby to his car. Abby ran alongside, pulling at the robe and nightgown to make sure Mitch’s mom had some modesty in death.
Rex carried Nadine into the Newquists’ house, through the front door.
At the judge’s suggestion, Rex laid the body down on a double bed in a guest room on the first floor.
“I thought you’d want me to bring her here,” he told Tom Newquist. The judge stood in the bedroom doorway, blocking the view from Abby, who stood behind him. “I thought you’d want to call McLaughlin’s and have them come and pick her up here, rather than have me carry her into the funeral home like this.”
Tom Newquist nodded his head without speaking.
He hadn’t said a word about his wife since they had arrived, except to ask, “Where’d you find her?” He had looked drawn and tired when he opened the door-admitting them into the immaculate, fragrant home his wife had kept for him for many years-but there wasn’t any shock in his eyes. It had never been a situation that was going to end well, and they all knew it.
As Abby looked up at him-at all six feet four of him-from behind, outside the guest room, she saw that his back was stiff as always, his posture suggesting what it always did, that this was a big man capable of shouldering big responsibilities.
She had felt nervous at the front door, as if somehow he’d blame her.
Rex came out of the room, and the judge stepped aside to let him pass.
“You’re famous for always locking your doors,” Abby heard Rex say as the two men moved toward the kitchen at the back of the house. “How in the world did the door come to be open this time?”
She heard the judge say in his deep voice, “One of the damned nurses.”
As she heard the men’s footsteps moving away toward the kitchen at the back of the big house, Abby quietly walked into the bedroom and then over to the side of the bed where her late mother’s friend lay. There was a silky white comforter folded at the foot of the bed. Abby reached for it, pulled it open, releasing its scent of potpourri, and she neatly covered Mitch’s mom with it, up to her shoulders. She took a few moments to straighten and smooth Nadine’s hair, which was still wet from the snow. Rex had closed the eyelids when he had knelt beside her in the cemetery.
The right hand still clutched the photo of her adopted son Jeff.
Abby stood for a moment staring down at the woman she had feared and disliked, but whom she had been raised to treat with courtesy and respect, no matter what. Then she leaned over and-dripping snow, herself-gently kissed the cold forehead. It wasn’t a forgiving kiss, and she knew it. She did it for her own mother, and for Mitch. As she did it, she hated herself for the thought that had occurred to her the moment she knew for sure that Nadine was dead. It wasn’t a thought for Nadine’s final suffering. It wasn’t for the judge. It was the absolutely last thing she ever wanted to think at this moment, but she was powerless over it, and so it came to her anyway…
Maybe he’ll come back for her funeral.
Chapter Eight
He didn’t come back 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.