Marty forgot about the miracles as soon as the stranger walked away from him. His attention was focused on the paper in his hand. He fumbled for a pen in his shirt pocket and wrote down the other name he’d heard, using the top of his car as a table. Mitch Neukwist.
The judge’s son.
Judges were rich, everybody knew that.
The hell with taking Sarah’s story to a million different people. It wasn’t like he remembered anything about her anyway. In a moment of clarity Marty had a brilliant thought: To make some money, he only needed to talk to one person.
Chapter Thirty-eight
“Sheriff? You’ve got a call.”
“I’ll take it in my office,” Rex told the deputy.
“Shellenberger,” he barked into the phone, feeling out of sorts. He needed to talk to Patrick, but he hadn’t been able to find his brother either last night or this morning. Nor had he located Sarah’s brother, Marty Francis, now that Marty was out of jail. At least Patrick hadn’t spent the night at Abby’s house, Rex had learned when he had called her to ask if his brother was there. In fact, she hadn’t sounded all that pleased with his brother, so at least that was good news.
“Good morning, Sheriff,” a young male voice said on the other end of the phone connection. “This is Bernie Simmons. I’m a reporter with The Wichita Herald.”
“All right,” Rex said cautiously. It was rare for a journalist to call.
“I guess you had quite a storm up there?”
“That we did. Nobody hurt, though. Some property damage.”
“Well, that’s good. I mean…”
“I know what you mean.”
“I’m calling about something else.”
“And that would be?”
“That unidentified murdered girl they call the Virgin.”
Indigestion rose in Rex’s esophagus again. “You read the tabloids?”
The reporter laughed. “When the story’s about miracles in Kansas, we do.”
“Not much I can tell you. I wasn’t the sheriff then.”
“Who was?”
Rex silently cursed himself for having begged the obvious question. “That would have been my father.”
“No kidding. That’s interesting, a father-son sheriff’s department. Maybe I’ll do a story on how that happened-”
“It happened,” Rex said dryly, “because he won elections and so do I.”
“I wasn’t suggesting nepotism, Sheriff.”
“No? Most people do, until they hear it’s an elected position.”
“Let’s get back to the girl in the grave.”
Rex realized, too late, that he would have preferred to discuss nepotism. “What can I tell you?”
“Now that there’s been this publicity, will you reopen her case?”
“Cases like that are never really closed,” Rex said, stepping carefully.
“Too bad this isn’t California,” the young reporter said.
“That’s probably true in many ways,” Rex allowed, “but why in this case?”
“Because California has that law that requires coroners to submit DNA samples of all unidentified bodies. So they can run them past samples submitted by the families of missing people.”
“Yeah?” Rex said.
“Too bad we don’t have that law.”
“Yeah, but even California didn’t have that back when she was killed.”
“Can’t you still get her DNA and run it through the federal clearinghouse?”
“Maybe, if our county had the money.”
“I’ll bet people would contribute to a fund like that. Our paper could set one up. I could put it in the article I’m writing about her-”
Rex had a sudden vision of worlds colliding, of previously stable systems spinning out of control, of messes he wasn’t going to be able to clean up. “Can I call you back, Mr. Simmons? I’ve got a deputy standing in my door”-Rex eyed his empty doorway-“needing my attention. What you should do is e-mail your questions to me.” Without giving the reporter a chance to object, Rex reeled off his e-mail address at the sheriff’s department, just happening to get one letter of it wrong.
By the time he hung up he was sweating.
But that was only the first of several calls he received that morning, some from other journalists, some from citizens wanting to give tips about the crime. Midway through one of them, Rex started making hash marks on a pad of paper, one mark for every lie he told. By the time he left for lunch at the Wagon Wheel, he had a little row of straight black lines with diagonal slashes through them.
Rex stood up, tore the paper off the pad.
Feeling disgusted with himself, he wadded it up and threw it in the trash.
He didn’t realize there was a storm of a different kind chasing him.
Abby, still on her tear of furious emotion, reached the sheriff’s department after Rex had left for lunch, they told her.
“Where’d he go?”
“Wagon Wheel.”
So she went there, pushing her way through the front door, then winding through the little crowd of people who stood waiting for lunch tables, giving quick tense nods to those who said her name, avoiding eye contact and conversation, pulling away from hands that clutched her arm in an attempt to get her to stop and talk, keeping intent on her purpose, so that when she spied Rex eating at a table in the back with four other men from Small Plains, she charged forward as if they were the only two people in the room.
“Hi, Abby,” Rex said, being the first to see her. “Want to join us?”
“I need you to come with me,” she told him, over the heads of the other men.
Immediately he was alert, and getting to his feet. “What’s the problem?”
“You,” she said fiercely, while his lunch companions stared up at her, their forks and knives halted in mid-bite or slice. “You’re the problem! And me. And everybody else.”
Abby turned on her heels and fought her way back out of the café the same way she’d come, leaving in her trail a hurrying sheriff and a lot of people who wondered what kind of burr the younger Reynolds girl had got under her saddle today.
“We’re taking your car,” she informed him when he finally reached her side.
Knowing better than to argue, Rex said, “Where are we going?”
“To the cemetery.”
“Look at them!” Abby said, pointing at a handful of strangers at the Virgin’s grave.
“Okay,” Rex said. He had pulled onto a shoulder of the highway next to the cemetery and parked there at Abby’s command. It was a beautiful day without a cloud to suggest there could ever be any other sort of weather. He looked where she was pointing and saw cars parked along the cemetery road and he also saw that there were more people standing around one particular grave than any other. “I’m looking. What am I supposed to be seeing?”
“People being taken advantage of!”
“Who’s doing the taking?”
“We are! This town is, by letting sick people believe those stupid stories, by letting them come here and make things worse for themselves!”
“There’s no law against people believing everything they read, Abby.”
“There are laws against defrauding people!”
“Who’s doing the defrauding?”
“You’ve got to go up there and tell them to go home.”
“Or what? I’m going to arrest them and throw them in jail for wanting a miracle?”
Abby turned to him. “You think this is all right, what’s happening?”
“I think it’s going to blow over pretty fast, Abby, without anybody having to do anything about it. And anyway, most of this county has believed in the Virgin for a long time. I didn’t hear you raising a fuss about it before now. This is just a few more people, and they don’t happen to live here. So what’s the big difference? Why are you so upset about this? I left a pretty good chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes, you know.”