The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard Read Free Book Online Page B

may be the most important thing I ever tell you. I’m serious now. I am trying to prepare you for something. You need to know that you’re going to hear some things about that girl’s death that you aren’t expecting to hear.”
    Rex’s body jerked involuntarily. His heart hammering, he blurted, “Like what?”
    For the first time, his father’s gaze slid away from him.
    “You’ll hear soon enough. All you need to know right now is that I’m telling you to keep your mouth shut about it, no matter what you hear. You are never…and I mean
never…
to talk to anybody about last night. Ever. Not Mitch, not Abby, not anybody. If you have anything to say about it, you’ll say it to me.”
    “Fine with me,” Rex said, but his father talked right over him.
    “If anybody asks you about it, you tell them it’s an active homicide investigation and your father won’t allow you to discuss it. Period. End of story. Can I trust
you
to do that, Rex?”
    Rex had looked off into the distance, but now there was a silence that brought his attention back to his father. He realized the old man was staring at him, waiting for something.
    “What do you want me to say, Dad?”
    “I told you. I asked if I can trust you.”
    Rex nodded his head solemnly, as he knew his father wanted him to do. He said, “Yes,” in the serious voice he knew his father wanted to hear. But inside, he was thinking,
This is bullshit. Nobody has to shut me up, no matter what weird things I hear.
The last thing he ever wanted to do as long as he lived was to talk about it, to talk about her.
    “What about Pat?” he asked.
    “Pat’s going back to college.”
    “How? He flunked out.”
    “There are other schools.”
    Not for this family, there has never been,
Rex thought. He felt almost as shocked at this news as he was at everything else. His family was K-State from the git-go. It had been a major blowup when Patrick flunked out; it was taken for granted it was where Rex would go next year, just as he had taken it for granted that Patrick would, somehow, end up back there again.
    “And that’s something else,” his father said to him.
    “What is?”
    “Patrick. Who knows he’s been home?”
    Rex started to shrug, but even that made his hand hurt, so he stopped. “I don’t know.”
    “Well, who have you told?”
    “Nobody.”
    “Nobody? Are you sure? What about Mitch?”
    “No, I never told anybody. It’s not like I want to brag about it.”
    His father’s face darkened a little, and he seemed to wince. “I want you to forget he was here this week. You and I found that girl’s body, just the two of us, nobody else. Patrick is still at K-State.”
    “Huh? Why?”
    And then, suddenly, Rex didn’t want to know why.
    Which was just as well, since his father didn’t give him any reasons.
    The world was tilting, throwing everything off-kilter.
    It shifted even further that morning when his mother got so sick that Quentin Reynolds told them they needed to get her to the hospital in Emporia, because it sounded like pneumonia. And it blew Rex clear out of the known universe when he got home hours later and picked up the phone. It was his friend Matt Nichols on the line, saying in an excited rush, “Man! Where have you
been
? Everybody’s been trying to find you! We heard you found that murdered girl on your ranch last night, and she was beaten up so bad you can’t even tell she has a face left! Is that true? Do you know who she is? And, hey, what do you know about Mitch Newquist leaving town all of a sudden like that, and supposedly never coming back?”
    It all blew at him so fast, so unexpectedly, that it panicked and confused him, and he totally forgot the warning his father had given him. The pain medication they had shot into him at the hospital when they set a cast up to his elbow was making him dopey, too. So instead of saying, “It’s an active homicide case,” he blurted, “My mom’s in the hospital, Matt. I can’t talk