He tried to get her to smile, but it didn’t work.
It not only didn’t work, but it seemed to provoke her to come at him from another, even angrier angle. “If you or your father had ever solved her murder, if either of you ever so much as found out who she is, this wouldn’t even be happening. She’d just be another poor murder victim in another grave, she wouldn’t be some mysterious saint who can supposedly cure things and work miracles-”
“So you’re saying those people up there, that’s my fault?”
Rex did not like the direction their argument was taking.
“Well, what have you ever done to find out who she is?” Abby yelled at him in the small space of the interior of his SUV. “You won’t send out her DNA, you won’t let anybody else pay for it, you don’t want your deputies to do any investigating, so yeah, maybe it is your fault, wouldn’t you say so?”
“What is wrong with you?” Rex yelled back at her.
Abby burst into tears.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she sobbed.
Furious and defensive, and not at all swayed by the water show, Rex sat and glared across the seat at her, waiting for a better answer. But when it came, he wasn’t prepared for it.
“I slept with him,” Abby mumbled through her tears.
“With who? With my brother? I already knew that, and that just makes you a bigger fool than those people up there at the grave, and so what?”
“With Mitch. The night of the tornado. He came over. I slept with him, Rex.”
Abby flung herself over the seat and up against Rex’s chest.
“That son of a bitch!” he said, putting his arms around her. “That son of a bitch!”
He held her while she sobbed, which didn’t keep him from also muttering, “Expecting some kind of miracle, were you?” And then he said, when she was finally quiet enough to hear him, “Abby, I did send out her DNA.”
“What?” She pulled herself away so she could look at him.
Rex nodded. “On my own, with my own money, a long time ago. But I already knew who she was. Abby, I’ve always known who she was. I also think I know why she got killed. And I’m pretty sure I know who killed her. And since I’ve never been able to figure out what to do about any of it, and I’ve never talked to anybody else about it, maybe I ought to tell you, and then we can figure something out together.”
He refused to tell her anything more until they got into his office.
Rex barked at his deputies to leave them alone, and then he closed his door and pushed the lock on it. While Abby took a chair on the other side of his desk he went around it and sat down. He reached toward the lower drawer that held the box with the red scrunchie in it and pulled it out, but he also pulled out what was below it: four thin folders. He opened the box first, took out the elastic red hair accessory, and placed it on his desk close to where Abby sat. “This belonged to her,” he said. “She wore this.” Then he picked up the top folder, opened it, and pushed its contents toward her, too. “Here’s the DNA lab report on some hairs that were in it.” He hadn’t given the lab all of them. Even now, there were a few stray dark hairs in it, as if the beautiful girl who had worn it had only just taken it off.
Abby sat with her hands in her lap, not touching anything.
“Her name is Sarah Francis,” Rex said, and waited to see if Abby reacted. When she didn’t, he said, “You might remember her if I tell you she used to clean houses in town. She worked for Nadine for a while.”
Abby frowned, and he could tell she still didn’t quite recall.
“She was beautiful,” Rex said. “A little older than us, long dark hair, really pretty. She lived over in Franklin.”
Finally he saw recognition…and then horror…in Abby’s blue eyes. Her hands flew to her mouth as she gasped, “Oh my God! Oh, Rex. I do remember her. I liked her. She was nice. And she was…gorgeous.” Abby’s eyes, which had only recently stopped leaking tears, filled up again. “That’s her, in the grave, that’s her?”
He nodded. “It’s Sarah.”
“And you’ve known this ever since you got the DNA report…” Abby leaned forward to look for a date on the papers in the folder. “…five years ago?”
“No,” Rex told her. “I’ve known it since the night she died.”
“What? You’ve known since then?”
He nodded. “I’m not the only one. My dad has known it, and my mom, and Patrick. I think your father has always known it, too.”
“My dad? My father knows who she is?”
Rex thought Abby looked as if she couldn’t absorb any additional shocking revelations, but he had many more to give her. For the next half hour, he told her the same story he had told his mother on the night that he, his brother, and father had found Sarah.
Abby didn’t say a word through his telling of it until toward the end, when she said, “Wait a minute. She was supposed to be so beaten up that nobody could identify her. Wasn’t that true?”
“She wasn’t beaten,” he said. “I think my dad and your dad just made that up.”
“But why, Rex? Why would they do that?”
“To protect somebody,” he said, and then held up a hand to stop her obvious next question. “Wait. Please, Abby. Let me finish telling this my way.”
When he did finish-without telling her who he thought the fathers were protecting-Abby stared at him accusingly and said, “You’ve all known, all this time you’ve known, and nobody said anything? Rex, why haven’t any of you identified her? Why have you let people think that nobody knows her name?”
“Like I said, they were trying to protect somebody.”
“Who?”
“My brother,” Rex said, and watched Abby’s hands go to her mouth in horror again. “I’m pretty sure Patrick killed Sarah, Abby.”
“Why? Oh, my God, why?”
Her old friend put a hand flat on each of the other three file folders.
“Because of these,” he said.
Abby started to reach for the folders, but he pulled them back out of her grasp. Then he spread them out in a line, one, two, three, and commenced to open them one at a time. “These are the results of other DNA tests, Abby. Do you remember that I told you that my father said she had been raped?”
Wide-eyed, out of words, Abby nodded.
“She wasn’t raped. She had blood down her legs because she had given birth.”
“How do you know that?” Abby whispered.
“Because I knew she was pregnant and when I saw her in the snow that night, I could see she wasn’t pregnant anymore. Abby, we had just been out in the fields delivering newborn calves. I knew a recently delivered female when I saw one, even if she was human instead of some other kind of mammal, and even if I was only a kid. Sarah had been pregnant, and she’d had the baby, and then she died.”
“What happened to the baby…and who was the father?”
Abby was still whispering, as if she was afraid to ask such questions.
Rex tapped the first folder. “This is the child’s DNA. I had it identified by comparing it with her DNA.” He looked at her. “It’s Jeff, Abby. Jeff Newquist is Sarah’s child. I got a sample of his saliva off a cigarette he smoked, and I did that because of what I knew. I knew Sarah was pregnant, I knew she stayed at the Newquists’ ranch house during her pregnancy, and then they showed up with a brand new adopted baby. I thought there was at least a chance that baby was hers.” Once he saw that she had absorbed that information as well as she could at the moment, he continued. “My next job was to identify the father, so I sent in samples from the most likely suspects.” He tapped the second folder. “These are Patrick’s DNA results.” He tapped the next one. “Mitch’s.”