The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy Pickard

Author:Nancy Pickard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery & Detective, Cold cases (Criminal investigation), Fiction, Mystery fiction, Crime, General
ISBN: 9780345471000
Publisher: Ballantine Books
Published: 2007-05-28T23:00:00+00:00

One last stop, and he was finished pursuing the story she’d told him.

The next Saturday, after morning football practice, and on a day when his father had released him from work at home, Rex fended off his friends who wanted him to drive around with them, and he drove alone to Franklin, twenty-five miles away.

He hadn’t had a reason to be there in years, and he was a little shocked to see how much the tiny town had declined since then. There never had been more than a handful of jobs there, and a scattering of houses. It was barely even a town. But it was in even worse condition now, with hardly a sign of life on the bedraggled-looking, two-block Main Street. Immediately, he understood why Sarah Francis had regularly driven all the way to Small Plains to find work cleaning houses, and it didn’t have anything to do with status in her hometown. It had to do with survival, from what he could see.

He hadn’t been able to find out where her family lived, not without drawing attention to the question, so he hadn’t asked. Now he realized it didn’t really matter. There wasn’t a decent house in the town. It appeared that every resident lived on the edge of poverty, or deep down in it. Add that to a bad family, and a girl wouldn’t need any other reasons to want to run away. So maybe Sarah hadn’t sounded totally convincing to him when she had explained her presence at the Newquists’ place, but then maybe that was only because she was ashamed of where she’d come from and what she was going through.

I should have believed her, he thought, feeling bad about it.

He turned around and drove back home. Two days later, he worked up the nerve to go back out to see her again.

“I just wondered, is there anything you need that I could bring you?”

“Well, Mrs. Newquist makes sure I have groceries, but…yeah, there’s some stuff I don’t really want to ask her for.”

She gave him a short list, mostly expensive snack foods, which he happily filled at a grocery store in yet another town, where nobody would know him, and where nobody would ask why the sheriff’s son was buying women’s magazines and frozen diet dinners, among other things. Doing it made him feel happy and needed, and the nature of the things she asked him to get gave him the feeling of intimacy with her. When he handed them over to her, and she forgot to ask him how much they cost, he didn’t mind. After what he had seen in Franklin that day, he was happy to help her in any way she might need help. After that, he began to think of his trips to stores for her as favors that she was doing him, by allowing him to be of service.

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