“Uh oh,” Cerule Youngblood whispered to her friends.
In the time it took Mitch Newquist to free the trapped people in the basement, Quentin Reynolds had pulled up in his car and taken over the care of the tourist from Abby. She was just getting ready to tell him about seeing Mitch when her cell phone rang and she answered it, glad of a distraction from the way her heart was pounding and her knees were trembling. When she said hello and then heard Rex’s voice, she asked, “What did the storm do?”
“Come home, Abby,” Rex told her, in a somber tone of his own. “The tornado only landed in one place, but it just happened to be your greenhouse.”
“Oh, no!” she cried, and then blurted the first concern that came to her mind, and it wasn’t about her flower and landscaping business. “Rex, my birds!”
Mitch walked down the Sam’s Pizza side of the street, looking at storm damage.
When he came to a small business with a discreet FOR SALE sign and a front display full of broken glass, he walked in, and said to the woman who was sweeping up her mess, “Need some help?”
Without even waiting for an answer, he grabbed a second broom that was propped against a wall near him. Why, I’m just a Boy Scout, Mitch thought, feeling nearly amused enough to laugh out loud, though he managed to restrain himself. This wasn’t exactly the way he had planned to ingratiate himself with the marginal property owners of Small Plains, but if this was the opportunity that fate was laying across his path, then he would grab the broom end of it, and see what he could sweep into his grasp.
When he finished that task successfully, stepped back outside, and looked down the street toward his car, he saw a stocky, gray-haired man helping an older man into a vehicle. At first, Mitch didn’t recognize Abby’s father. It wasn’t until Doc Reynolds stepped away from the vehicle and stood by himself on the sidewalk that recognition kicked in-and with it, a resurgence of rage so overwhelming that for a minute Mitch thought he might black out from the power of it. He stared, clenching and unclenching his fists, not trying to hide himself, inwardly daring Quentin Reynolds to turn and look him in the face.
But the doctor turned the other way and got into his own car.
He drove past Mitch without looking his way, but Mitch got a good look at how dramatically the man had aged in the past seventeen years. If the devil left telltale marks, Mitch thought, then Quentin Reynolds deserved every line on his face, and then some. Any doubts Mitch had been feeling about his purpose in Small Plains were swept away by the sight of his enemy.
Abby bolted out of her sister’s car even before it stopped in her yard.
Ignoring her leveled greenhouse, she raced for her screened-in porch.
“The door’s open!” she screamed, panic and despair in her voice.
When her friends came hurrying up behind her, she was already on the porch, on her knees, cradling a trembling little gray bird in her hands. “Gracie!” The conure was alive, but the body of Lovey, the lovebird, lay against the door leading into the house, where it had fallen, as if the wind had hurled it into the glass.
Randie tiptoed over to where the colorful little body lay. She knelt down and stroked Lovey’s feathers. When there was no response from the beautiful peach-faced lovebird, she whispered, “Oh, no.”
There was no big red parrot anywhere to be seen.
“Look for J.D.!” Abby begged them, sobbing over her lone remaining bird.
Carrying Gracie, Abby made a frantic tour of the inside of her house, hoping against hope that somehow she’d find the parrot there. In keeping with the sometimes bizarre path of tornadoes, her greenhouse had been destroyed, but her house was undisturbed-except for one thing.
The only thing she noticed missing was Patrick’s sunglasses.
Abby had put them back on the kitchen table before leaving for supper with her friends, and now they were gone. She stood for a long time, cradling Gracie and staring at the empty space where they had been.
The other women ran off the porch and scattered around the property. They called out over and over for the twenty-year-old South American parrot. They stared helplessly up into every tree, searched all around the bushes, lifted fallen boards, and ignored every other need while they fruitlessly searched for him.
Chapter Twenty-six
By the time she got back to the bed-and-breakfast where she was staying, Catie Washington felt exhausted again, or at least her body was. Her mind was still racing, and her emotions were still in a rising, swirling white tornado of their own. Her thoughts were floating, her feelings were sailing, they were riding out ahead of her body’s ability to keep up with them. She felt alive. Emotionally, she couldn’t wait to get back to her bedroom in the B &B and open her laptop computer and log on to write her story down as fast as she could, in the hope of remembering every detail of the miracle while it was still incredibly vivid in her mind. But physically, she felt terrible again, ill, worn down to the marrow, drained of the tiny bit of remaining energy that had driven her to Small Plains in desperation.
Was it a miracle? she wondered, though she didn’t really feel any doubt that it was. But other people might question her, so she needed to be able to answer them. Was it still a miracle if your body didn’t feel healed, but you felt happier than you ever had in all your life, and you felt lifted up onto a higher plane of existence where amazing things could happen, like fresh flowers raining directly onto you, only onto you, from out of a terrifying sky?
A few of the flowers lay around her on the floor of the van.
When she had risen from the grave, she had gathered into her hands some of the flower heads and stalks, leaves, and buds that had fallen on her. When she got to the car, she let them fall into her lap, from where most of them had tumbled around her as she drove the van. Now she bent, painfully, to pick up as many of them as she could carry again.
But she couldn’t force her body to move after that, and finally she gave up the effort, and simply pressed the horn until the proprietor of the inn came running out to help her.
In her room, seated in a straight-backed chair in front of a scarred old wooden desk, Catie logged onto thevirgin.org, which was the most popular of the small number of websites that had sprung up about the Virgin of Small Plains. Without even stopping to read through the entries from that day, she opened a new window to type up her own account of the astonishing thing that had truly happened to her.
“I have a miracle to report,” she typed. “Some of you know me, because I have participated in this blog before today. If you recognize my blog name, then you know that I have advanced breast cancer that has spread to my lymph nodes, my lungs, and most recently, my brain. I drove down here to Small Plains two days ago after my doctors told me I was going to have to go through another round of surgery, chemo, and radiation, and that there wasn’t much chance left that any of those miserable things would do any good for me. Like you guys, I had heard about the Virgin, and how she had helped lots of people in this town over many years. So here I came, and here I am.”
After that preface, she typed what had happened to her that day, ending her story with, “I survived a tornado that flew directly above me! I actually looked up into the cone of it! And it released flowers on me! I have never felt so protected, so blessed. I know now that no matter what happens in regard to my cancer-even if I die tomorrow, or today-I will be all right. Something in the universe is watching out for me, keeping me safe from the most terrifying harm there could possibly be. Until today, I thought that was cancer. But I have looked up into a deadly tornado, and it has sprinkled flowers onto me, and I have lived to tell you my story. If that’s not a miracle, then I don’t know what is.