“I don’t know,” Rex said.
“The court takes away a man’s driver’s license, but if the only way he’s got to make a buck is to drive to it, he’s going to drive a car anyway, you know he is, right?”
Rex nodded, knowing that that was the truth of it.
“Were either of your parents alcoholics, Marty?”
The other man laughed. “Them and every other cousin.”
“You’ve got a couple of brothers, right? How do they do with it?”
“One’s an AA fanatic, the other got killed in a bar fight a few years back.”
“What about sisters, you have any sisters?”
Rex kept his own breathing slow and even, to control his pulse rate as he neared the questions that were the reason for this visit.
The inmate quirked a corner of his mouth in a disgusted kind of way. “A couple. Worthless bitches.”
“Yeah, why so?”
“Well, one of them, younger than me, she married a worse asshole than me, and he beat her to death, but it was hard to blame him. She was a complaining kind of girl, if you know what I mean.”
Rex kept still, listening to the man reveal himself.
“The other one, she was the oldest of all of us. Ran away from home when she was, I dunno, seventeen, maybe-”
Nineteen, Rex thought, remembering this man’s sister, Sarah.
“She was a looker, believe it or not.”
“Is that right? Where’d she end up, Marty?”
The man shrugged and then finally seemed to grasp that the sheriff of Muncie County was displaying an unusual degree of interest in a drunk-driving offender. “Why you asking me all these questions about my family?”
Rex shrugged, and began to move toward the cell door. “Thinking about instituting a new program for drug and alcohol offenders,” he said, making it up as he went along. “Get a feel for their families, look for root causes, that kind of thing.”
“Fucking social work?”
Rex smiled a little. “Exactly.”
“Would it get me my license back any sooner?”
“Not a chance.”
“Well, fuck it then.”
Rex took the keys the deputy had handed him, reached his hands through the spaces between the bars, and released himself from the cell. Before he departed, he turned to ask one more question.
“Your family ever look for that runaway sister, Marty?”
“My family?” He sounded amazed the question would even occur to the sheriff. The man showed his teeth again. “Nah. We all split for other places, all except me. I’m the only one left around here. Most everybody else is dead, anyway. But I’ll sure as hell look for her-”
Rex’s chest muscles clenched. He thought, I have made a mistake in raising this.
“-if I find out she married a rich man.”
Sarah’s brother boomed out a laugh that bounced off the cement walls.
Rex relaxed again, and nodded a good-bye to the man in the cell.
He walked alone back down the corridor.
Nobody in her family had bothered to look for her in all these years. Apparently, they hadn’t even questioned her existence. And there was no reason, ever, for them to connect that girl-whose own brother couldn’t even correctly remember her age when she “left”-with a battered body in a grave.
His relieved feeling didn’t last long.
When he emerged into the light of the central office, Edyth Flournoy trotted up to him and said, “You know that rain we might get tonight, Sheriff? Looks like it’s going to get nasty. Funnel clouds sighted in Marion County fifteen minutes ago.”
Marion was one county over from Muncie.
“Any on the ground?”
“None reported.”
“What’s the weather service saying?”
“So far, just a tornado watch for us, warnings out for them.”
“Are we in the path?”
“Yes.”
“How long have we got?”
“Storm’s moving at forty miles an hour. The front edge of it is about ninety miles out from us.”
“A little over two hours then.” Rex thought of something. “Damn.”
“What?”
“It’s Memorial Day. Get out to the cemetery. Clear it, and close it.”
His locals knew what to do in the case of tornado warnings, but visitors might not. Plus, what was he going to do with them if a bad one did strike? In a flash, Rex mentally reviewed all the basements he could remember in town, from churches to schools, the courthouse, and downtown businesses.
Small Plains hadn’t had a really bad hit from any kind of storm for several years. The snowstorm that killed Nadine Newquist last winter had caused a lot of traffic accidents and killed some animals, and an ice storm five years previously had taken down many trees and a lot of roofs with them. But it had been longer than that since a tornado had done any more damage than to lift a few outbuildings off their foundations on outlying farms and ranches. When that happened, it wasn’t unusual to find cattle in the wrong pastures after the storm passed, it having picked them up and deposited them to graze on a neighbor’s grass. But they hadn’t had a tornado go through town in Rex’s lifetime; he couldn’t even remember the last human injury from one. An optimist might have considered that a good sign of the night to come, but Rex thought, as he always did, that they had probably been pushing their luck.
“When you get to the cemetery?” he called out to Deputy Flournoy. She turned around to hear the rest of it. “Get the Virgin to give us a pass on the tornadoes, okay?”
The deputy grinned. “Will do, Sheriff.”
Only after he’d said it did Rex feel the cringe inside, and taste the guilty bitterness, that came from joking about her. She deserved better than that from him.
Chapter Twenty
August, 1986
The summer before his senior year, Rex couldn’t stop thinking about the girl he knew only as Sarah. It wasn’t as if she had never entered his mind previously. She had already played a starring role in his fantasies, back when he used to catch glimpses of her cleaning houses in town. But then she had stopped coming to Small Plains, and he had mostly forgotten about her. Actresses, or girls he knew, took her place in his imaginings. Now, though, after seeing her in the shadows of the Newquists’ ranch house, where Patrick had stood talking to her with his damned bare chest sticking out, now all of Rex’s other fantasies were swept clean off the movie screen of his mind. Now there was only Sarah, hot and sexy, beautiful and willing Sarah. Or, at least that’s how she was in his dreams.
In your dreams! he scoffed at himself, but that didn’t stop him.
He didn’t tell anybody about seeing her at the Newquists’ place-not because he was keeping his word to his brother, but because he wanted to keep her his secret. If he didn’t tell anybody about that day, not even Mitch, then they couldn’t take it for granted that she was Patrick’s girl, instead of his. In his fantasies, he could erase Patrick altogether, or fight him to the death for her. If Rex could have spent the next month in his room, on his bed, with the door locked, he would have spent it doing nothing but making up erotic fantasies about her.
He had to go back to school a few weeks before Patrick left for K-State in Manhattan. What with football practice every day, and the ranch work that never stopped for anything or anybody, and what with also getting started with his senior year, he managed to distract himself enough to keep from driving out there until the day Patrick officially left.
It had killed him to be in school all day, leaving Patrick back home, free to do what Rex didn’t want him to do-find Sarah, be with Sarah, make Sarah fall for him. Or, just “make” Sarah. That was the nightmare scenario, the extremely likely possibility of his brother in bed with the girl of Rex’s dreams.
She was way too good for Patrick. Rex hoped she realized that.