The three of them argued about it while the snow fell outside the cellar.
In the end, he went along with it, but only because of the girl.
He heard her make a sound and hurried back to her bed to see what she needed. “Please,” she whispered to him, “they’ll give him a life I never can. I’ll make a new start someplace far away.”
“But he raped you…”
“Please,” she murmured and then she closed her eyes again. He was the only one of them who heard her say one more thing. “I’ll come back for him someday.”
Quentin stood up, feeling undone by all of it.
“I’m going to try to drive back to town before this gets worse.” He gave both of his friends a hard, penetrating stare. “You’ll take care of them?”
“Of course,” Nadine told him.
He believed them. God help him-as he told Nathan later, when it was all over and nothing could be taken back-he believed them.
He didn’t know what a contributing, negligent, murdering fool he had been until the second devastating call came through, this time from his other oldest friend, Nathan Shellenberger.
“Quentin, we’ve found a body in the snow.”
“Whose?”
He didn’t connect it immediately, wasn’t expecting the blow when it came.
“A girl. That girl who used to work for Nadine and Tom.”
“What do you mean you found her in the snow?”
“We found her in the snow! Naked. Dead. Dead, Quentin.”
He was a man who thought he could handle anything, but he found he couldn’t remain standing and hear these words. Quentin sank down into the closest chair. He bent his forehead into his free hand and crouched over the telephone like a wounded animal. But before he could even say anything, Nathan blurted out words that made Quentin shut his own mouth. “Quentin, I’m scared as hell that Patrick had something to do with it. I heard him and Rex arguing about her, just in the last few days. From what I overheard, I think Patrick has been seeing her, Quentin. Rex was riding him about something to do with her, and Patrick was furious about it, like he was jealous. And he’s not acting right, not since we found her. He hasn’t even said he knows her. He acts like he doesn’t care that she’s dead! My son, Quentin! You know how he is, you know what people think of him. If they find out he had anything to do with her, they’ll blame him. And if there’s any evidence to tie him to her…I’m the sheriff! I can’t turn my own boy into a suspect in a murder!”
“Murder! How do you know she was murdered?”
“Jesus, God, Quentin, are you even listening to me? We found her naked and bloody in the middle of a blizzard. What do you think, that she decided to take a naked walk in the snow? Of course it’s murder, or if not murder then some kind of manslaughter, and what the hell am I going to do?”
“Bring her to me.”
“I’m afraid to ask Patrick anything.”
“Then don’t. We’ll figure this out. Bring her here, Nathan.”
He didn’t tell his old friend what had transpired earlier.
He allowed Nathan to believe that Patrick might have done it.
When they brought her into his examining room he made sure no one could ever identify her and bring all of their lives tumbling down around them. He said nothing while Tom and Nadine arranged an adoption of Tom’s own biological child. He and Nathan both let Verna and Rex worry for years that Patrick might have done it, let other people wonder if Mitch was the guilty one.
And they let Jeffrey Newquist grow up without knowing the truth of his birth or the true nature of the people he believed had adopted him from strangers. In the years that followed, Quentin mentioned it only one time to Tom and once to Nadine.
To Tom, he said, “What did you do to her after I left?”
“I didn’t do anything,” the big man had said indignantly.
“Then what did Nadine do to her?”
Tom’s eyes had narrowed, as if he was annoyed at his wife. “I went into the house to rest. I left Nadine in the storm cellar to watch them. When I woke up and came back out the girl was gone. Nadine said she had fallen asleep and the girl had wandered out into the snowstorm. We couldn’t look for her, not in that weather, you know how bad it was. We couldn’t even move the car.”
Had Nadine fallen asleep and the girl just wandered away?
Escaped was more like it, Quentin thought.
Or had Nadine put her out into the storm to freeze to death?
Quentin could see that Tom didn’t know the answer to that, either.
Either way, they had killed her.
To Nadine, Quentin said, “You locked her in that storm cellar! For God’s sake!”
“She wasn’t there the whole time, Quentin,” Nadine had said, as if he were being unreasonable. “For most of her pregnancy we gave her the house to live in. We provided her with everything she needed! More than she had ever had before in her life, I’m sure. We only had to put her in the storm cellar when we found out that she’d had visitors. We couldn’t allow that, so we put her in there for her own good so that she couldn’t ruin our bargain with her. It was all to her benefit, after all.” Nadine had smiled her cold smile, the one that chilled even her oldest friends. “I don’t know what you’re so upset about, Quentin. She was only in there for three months, and we made sure she had everything she needed there, too. She was only there until the baby was born.”
“Did she escape, Nadine, or did you put her out?”
Nadine had given him a look with venom at the back of it, a look that told him all he needed to know about how Sarah Francis came to be found naked in a blizzard after wandering lost, weak, and bleeding from childbirth. And he also understood from that murderous look that Tom and Nadine would do anything, harm anyone, who ever divulged any of their horrible secrets.
Quentin told one person the rest of the story: Nathan.
Together they looked at the damage that had already been done, the damage that could still be done, and they came to the decision to let it be. The families involved were already broken up; telling the truth would only harm them further. The child Jeffrey was being raised by his real father.
They never spoke of it, not even to each other, again.
Quentin always thought that Nathan paid for it with the excruciating pain of his arthritis. Nathan always thought that Quentin paid for it in the loss of his closeness to his daughters. Filled with the guilt of what had been done to an innocent girl close to Ellen and Abby’s age, Quentin Reynolds had never again allowed himself the pleasure of being close enough to his girls to feel loved by them.
But they went on with their “friendship” with Tom and Nadine. Because they had all known each other all their lives, because their wives didn’t know anything about what had happened, and because it was a small town where relationships had to be mended in order for people to live together so closely, and because the sheriff, even the sheriff, and the town’s doctor were afraid of the judge and of what he and his vicious wife could do to their own wives and children.
In the fraught silence that followed Nathan’s recital, Mitch looked around the living room.
“Where’s Jeff?” he said suddenly, breaking the mood. He stood up. “Where’d my brother go?”
Rex also jumped to his feet and looked over his father’s head into the kitchen. The kitchen table was empty. Jeff Newquist had slipped away, taking his father’s pistol with him.
He was gone, but somebody else had come into the house while Nathan was telling his story and had propped himself against a wall to listen along with everybody else.
Patrick looked from Abby to Mitch and back again.
And then he said, “What happened at your dad’s house, Abby? I saw the judge walk over there with a rifle.”