The Virgin of Small Plains Read Online Free PDF Page B

truck.”
    When the asshole didn’t move, as Mitch knew he wouldn’t, because that was the kind of jerk Patrick was, his father shoved at his shoulder and said, “You heard him. Go.”
    Patrick didn’t argue, just shrugged and slowly did as he was told, slamming the office’s outside door behind him. It was only after he was gone that Mitch realized he was surprised to see that Patrick was in town at all. Why wasn’t he in Manhattan, where he was supposed to be at college? Rex hadn’t said anything about his asshole older brother being home.
    It didn’t seem important, especially not when Mitch heard Nathan Shellenberger say to the physician in a low voice, “What now?”
    Abby’s dad didn’t answer him with any words. Instead, he surprised Mitch—and, from the expression on his face, the sheriff—by walking out of the examining room and back inside the house. He left the examining room door open. Mitch stood in the dark supply closet staring across the hall at a frightening tableau: The sheriff stood silently, a sentinel, seeming to guard the girl’s body on the floor.
    Doc returned within a few moments, carrying several plastic grocery bags in his left hand, and something else in his right hand. He walked back into the examining room. Still without speaking, the most respected and popular general practitioner in the county looked the county sheriff in the face briefly, and then squatted down and proceeded to place the girl’s head carefully inside three of the bags. He then took some kind of twine from one of the drawers in his office and tied it tightly around her neck, securing the bags.
    “What the hell are you doing, Quentin?” Rex’s father demanded of him.
    “What has to be done.”
    He left the office again, going back into the house one more time.
    While he was gone, Mitch again watched Rex’s dad stare down at her.
    Slowly, almost not wanting to look, Mitch let his own gaze slide down to her body. They had put her on her left side. She was curled up as if she were asleep, and she wasn’t moving.
    When Abby’s dad came back, he had a couple of sofa pillows in his hands. He squatted down again, only this time he lifted the girl’s covered head, and placed the pillows under it, as if he were trying to make her comfortable on the hard, tiled floor.
    Then Abby’s father moved back a couple of feet, though he still squatted on the tile. He reached for the other object he had brought in along with the plastic bags. He lifted the girl’s softball bat that he had carried with him into the office, and he brought it down on the plastic-covered face. Nathan Shellenberger cried out. So did Mitch, in the supply closet. But nobody heard him; their attention was riveted on the bat that just kept going up and coming down. The plastic bags contained the splattered flesh and blood. The pillows muffled the sound to thuds, though in the doctor’s office they all heard the repeated and terrible cracking of bone.
    The sheriff turned away, fumbled toward a plastic wastebasket, and vomited into it.
    “Jesus Christ,” he whispered, as he wiped his mouth off on the sleeve of his coat. “Jesus, God, Quentin!”
    “Go home,” Abby’s father said, in a harsh voice. “We’ll talk when Pat’s not waiting for you.”
    The sheriff fled, letting a blast of snow and cold air in behind him before he shut the door.
    In the closet, Mitch sank down onto the floor and stared wide-eyed into the light.
    He watched Quentin Reynolds examine the surface of the bat, and then bend down to examine the floor. He seemed satisfied that the bags had contained the gore, because he didn’t attempt to wash anything. Gently, he leaned the bat against a wall. He picked up the plastic wastebasket into which his old friend had thrown up and carried it down the hall to the bathroom. Mitch heard the sounds of a toilet flushing, of water running, and after a while Doc came back down the hall with the wastebasket in his hands and walked back