Rex remembered Abby’s bloody forehead, and that she’d had to make a choice between saving herself and calling for help for Nadine, and he wanted to slug every one of them. As for causing Mitch to leave, Rex didn’t know why their best friend had gone away, but he would have bet everything he owned that it wasn’t Abby’s fault. It infuriated him when people tried to blame her for it.
In the years since Mitch Newquist had packed up and left town overnight, he had turned into a Golden Boy for a lot of people who hadn’t known him all that well-a Joe Montana on the football field, a Jim Ryan on the track, a born politician, entrepreneur, rancher, and general all-round Renaissance man. At first, when he’d left, there’d been some nasty speculation that maybe he had killed the girl, but that had quickly died away as more people came to find out he had an alibi in Abby. After that, his memory had taken on a glow. Some people even remembered him as playing the piano, an alteration of history that made Rex laugh rudely when he heard it. If Mitch had stayed, he would have benevolently run the town, was the underlying assumption, like a handsome, strapping, blond god with a grin that never aged. Nicer than his mother, less autocratic than his dad, he was Small Plains’ star that got away…
The Mitch Myth, Rex called that one, though nobody liked it when he did.
How this image fit a man who didn’t return for his own mother’s funeral was a conundrum nobody seemed willing to address. Just like they had never figured out how to harmonize the dissonance between the Abby they all knew as a nice person, and the pushy broad who forced her boyfriend to leave his hometown forever to escape her clutches. Both paradoxes-the actual eighteen-year-old boy and the romanticized one, the actual Abby and the One to Blame-existed in many minds, like alternate realities held in opposite hands.
It all came down to one twenty-four-hour period:
Before January 23, 1987…
After January 23, 1987.
You were seventeen years old and fell asleep over your homework one night, Rex thought, as he left the reception early. Memories he had fought all day to keep at bay came roaring in like the wind that had snaked around his ankles at the cemetery. And when you woke up, everything was changed. For you, for your family, for your best friends, for your hometown, forever.
Chapter Nine
January 23, 1987
By the time Mitch got home that night from Abby’s house, his bare hands were so cold he could hardly get his house key out of his pants pocket and insert it in the door. When he finally got inside, he looked down and saw that his hands and feet were red from the cold. His coat and shoes were back in Abby’s bedroom. Snow coated his clothes; he felt it dripping from his hair, he felt it on his eyelashes.
Nothing on the outside of him matched the freezing shock he felt within.
He lifted his head and slowly looked around, as if seeing his own home for the first time. There was Persian carpet at his feet and climbing the stairs to the second floor. Paintings lined the front hallway. His mother’s favorite potpourri, scattered about the rooms in widemouthed Chinese porcelain bowls, permeated the air in a comforting, suffocating kind of way. He looked left into the living room, then right into the dining room. Everything was immaculate as both of his parents preferred for it to be. He felt glad to step back into an ordered universe, but it also felt unreal to him, as if he had stepped into a fantasy.
A door to his father’s office at the back of the house opened, and suddenly his father stood in the doorway, dressed in pajamas, slippers, and a bathrobe, staring at him. Tom Newquist was a big man; at six feet four, he was four inches taller than his only child. With a jowly face and beefy physique, he cut an imposing figure, whether in the judicial robe of the Sixth Judicial District, or at home in his bathrobe. It wasn’t unusual for him to be working late; he liked to work in the quiet and solitude of his home after his wife and son had gone to bed, and didn’t like it whenever either one of them decided to stay up late for some reason.
“Mitchell! What in the world-”
“Dad.” His lips trembled, his voice shook. “I have to tell you something.”
“You’re barefoot! Where have you been? Are you drunk?”
“No! Dad, listen to me, something’s happened-”
His father stepped forward. “Were you in a car accident? Are you all right? What were you doing out driving in this storm?”
“Dad!” He raised his voice. “I was at Abby’s! I wasn’t in a car! Listen to me!”
His father frowned, unaccustomed to such a tone. “Put on some other clothes first. Get warm. Then come down to my office. And don’t wake up your mother.”
“Dad.” Mitch took a pleading step forward. The single word hung in the air. His voice strained from what felt to him like a superhuman effort to speak in a calm, quiet tone that might compel his father to finally listen to him. Speaking slowly, trying to penetrate his father’s infuriating assumptions, he said, “Do you remember…the girl who used to come and clean for us? Her name was Sarah? She wasn’t from around here. I mean, she was from Franklin.” It was another, much smaller town about twenty-five miles from Small Plains. “Dad, she’s dead. I saw her…I saw…”
His mouth wouldn’t form the words that should come next.
Staring at his father’s face, a face that had gone blank and puzzled, Mitch was struck dumb with the enormity, the awfulness, the sheer weirdness of what he was going to have to say next. Say it! he told himself, screaming at himself inside his head. But he couldn’t, his voice gave out on him, his brain refused to kick in the orders. He was filled with dread at the effect the news he had to give his father might have on the judge. These were his father’s best friends he was going to…to what? Betray was the word that came to him. But that couldn’t be right. He wasn’t betraying anybody, he was only telling about the horrible thing that he had witnessed. It wasn’t his fault that he had seen them do it. It wasn’t something he could just witness and then never talk about to anybody. His father might be their friend, but he was also a judge. Mitch had to tell him, he knew he had to…
His father was frowning, as he might have over some ill-prepared legal briefs that an attorney had submitted to him.
“Who? Was this girl in an accident? What are you saying?”
“Sarah,” Mitch repeated, but then he began to shiver uncontrollably. He couldn’t remember her last name. How awful was that, he berated himself, that he couldn’t even come up with her last name? Through chattering teeth, he managed to say, “I…can’t…talk.” Ten feet away, his father didn’t move. Mitch said, “W-wait for me, okay? I’ll ch-change clothes. I’ll c-come back down…”
He fled to the stairs, and ran up to his room.
When he came back down, he was not only fully dressed in several layers of clothing, including wool socks, but he also had a blanket wrapped around him to try to still his inner, and outer, shivering. But when he sank down on a couch in his father’s office and told the judge what he had witnessed, all he got for his pains, at first, was disbelief.
“First of all,” his father said, sternly, “what were you doing in Quentin’s office?”
“What?”
Mitch froze, taken by surprise by the question. First of all? What kind of stupid “first” question was that? What did it matter? Who cared? Hadn’t his father heard anything he said? A girl was dead! Somebody they knew, somebody who used to work for them, was dead! When Mitch heard his father’s all-too-parental question, he nearly laughed, but stopped himself in time. Caught off guard by a question that felt irrelevant to him, his mind went blank. He felt completely unable to think of a lie.