There was nothing particularly interesting to hear until he reached the jail.
“Had a visitor just now, Sheriff,” the night deputy informed him.
“This late? Who the hell was it and who did they want to see?”
“Well, it was your brother. And he wanted to see Marty Francis.”
Sarah’s brother. Once he got over the initial instant of shock, Rex felt a slow burn start to rise up his esophagus. “He say why?”
“Nope, but I told him he was too late, ’cause Marty got out today, but that if he waited long enough he’d probably catch him on the rebound.” The deputy’s laugh was a deep, fruity, cynical sound.
“Your prisoner say where he was going when he left?”
“Get a drink he said, damn fool.”
“Does he still live in Franklin?”
“Dunno, Sheriff. Want me to find out for you?”
“Yeah. Call me back. Wait! What did my brother say when you told him that Marty was gone?”
“What’d he say?” the deputy repeated, clearly stalling for time while he tried to remember. “I think he said, well, you can’t say I didn’t try, or something like that. I didn’t know what he was talking about.”
“You wouldn’t be the first person to feel that way.”
“Uh, Sheriff, doesn’t your brother know we got visiting hours?”
“Rules have never stopped my brother, Deputy.”
The deputy laughed again. “Stopped him this time.”
Rex soon clicked the phone dead and then got up to put frozen shredded potatoes in a skillet of bacon grease to fry along with a thick slice of ham. As he moved the ham around while he waited for his deputy to call back, he poked at it viciously with a two-pronged cooking fork as if he were taking vicious pokes at his brother’s gut.
Shortly before midnight, Abby heard Patrick’s truck pull up in her driveway.
A few moments later she heard her front doorknob rattle softly, and then again, a little more noisily.
He was accustomed to finding her doors unlocked, but they weren’t tonight. Would he knock, she wondered?
The doorbell rang, making her jump a foot.
When Patrick wanted something, he wanted it, she thought, as she got out of bed and pulled a light blanket around her shoulders. She padded barefoot to the front door and opened it to find him standing with his cowboy hat in his hands on her front stoop.
“A little late,” she observed.
“But better than never,” he said, and grinned down at her.
“How was Emporia?” she asked him.
“Empty without you.”
“Get all your work done with your accountant?”
“Pretty much. Took a lot longer than I expected. You going to let me in?”
Abby smiled at him. They were not married. They were not even engaged. She had no formal commitment to him, nor he to her. He could do whatever he wanted to do, including lying to her about where he was going and why. But she didn’t have to like it. And she was no longer sure she believed him about the sunglasses. “I don’t think so, Patrick.”
“Why not?” He looked surprised enough to nearly make her laugh.
“Because I don’t have to,” Abby said, and closed the door in his face.
She didn’t remain on the other side of the front door to hear if he stood there for a while or if he walked away immediately, but it must have taken him a few moments of thinking it over, because it was a good five minutes by her clock before she heard his truck backing down her driveway toward the road.
Chapter Thirty-five
On the Wednesday morning following Memorial Day, Randie Anderson signed for that day’s delivery of newspapers and magazines to Anderson’s Grocery from the distributor’s truck driver. Rather than calling for a stock boy to open the see-through wrapped packages, she picked up a pair of scissors and cut through the white plastic cords herself. She was eager to get hold of the daily newspaper from Kansas City to see if there were any sales at the big box stores to make it worth her while to grab Cerule and drive all the way up there this weekend. Maybe, she thought, they could even persuade Abby to take a break from the storm cleanup and go with them.
Randie lifted a stack of The Kansas City Star and set a paper aside for herself.
Then she looked straight down into the far-more-garish front page of a tabloid, and grinned at what she saw. The aliens were pregnant again. Brad Pitt was in love with somebody new. Big Foot was alive and well in Indiana. And a tornado had rained miracle flowers on a sick woman in…
“Small Plains?!”
Randie grabbed a copy and stared at the fuzzy dark picture on the cover.
It was impossible to tell if it was a picture of what it said it was, though it was sure dark enough to be a tornado. There was light in the middle and little dots of something. Quickly, Randie turned to the rest of the story inside.
There’d been a miracle cure of somebody with cancer, she read. It had occurred in the middle of a tornado at the grave of a young woman who was mysteriously murdered many years ago. Nobody knew her name or anything about her, except that she could cure anything that ailed you, including, it was suggested, bad credit, warts, and, as proven by the miracle, cancer. And when there was a cure, the heavens released an angelic sign, like flowers mysteriously dumped out of a twister.
“Small Plains?” Randie exclaimed again.
My God, they were talking about the Virgin!
And where did that photo come from, and who got cured, and how’d they ever hear about her hometown? She checked again, looking for local names, and finally found one: Photo and story tip from Jeffrey M. Newquist of Small Plains, KS. Randie’d sneaked peeks at enough tabloids in her time to know they paid actual money for tips on stories.
“That little twerp got paid for a photo that you can’t even see!”
Tabloid in one hand and cell phone in the other, Randie started making calls.
She quickly found out she wasn’t always the first with the news. Several people had already heard the story about the Virgin and the miracles and the flowers that fell out of a tornado from radio talk shows that featured story tips from listeners.
It appeared that Jeffrey M. Newquist had been one very busy teenager.
“And I’ll bet he got paid for every single one of them,” Randie said to Susan McLaughlin when she got her on the phone. “Sam’s Pizza ought to send him a bill for all those candy bars he stole.”
“Patrick asked me to marry him, Ellen.”
Abby and her older sister were crouched beside a large flowerpot on Main Street, where Ellen was giving Abby a hand with repairing the damage done to the downtown flowerpots by the storm. They had bags of potting soil and new plants beside them and a garden hose running out from a spigot in the bathroom of the store just behind them.
“He didn’t!” Ellen stared over the pot, wide-eyed. “You wouldn’t!”
“Might keep me out of trouble,” Abby said, trying to keep it light.
“Oh, sure. Any woman who’d marry Patrick Shellenberger is going to stay out of trouble, all right,” Ellen retorted. “She’ll never have a day’s worry in her life.” Then, getting serious, she said, “You’re not even considering it, are you?”
“I told him I’d think about it.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“I’m not getting any younger, Ellen.”
Her sister snorted. “And not any smarter, either, from the sound of it.”