Thief River Falls

by Brian Freeman

  “Do you want to work on the puzzle while I talk to Laurel?” Lisa asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Start with the corners.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t go anywhere. If you see anyone or if anyone turns off the road, you come running inside and find me. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  Lisa turned away, but Purdue called after her. “Hey, Lisa?”

  “Yes?”

  “I still don’t like her.”

  “Laurel? You should give her another chance. She wants to help.”

  The boy shrugged. “If you say so.”

  Lisa left Purdue with the puzzle and headed for Laurel’s door. The house wasn’t large, and it was painted bright yellow, like a beam of sunshine. Laurel always wanted her house to be a buffer against the gray northern days. Beyond the house, she saw farm equipment sitting unused, because the ground was too wet to let Curtis and his men in the fields. On the border of the farmland was a narrow strip of grass that Curtis used as a runway, and his restored Cessna Skylark sat at the end, as if hungry for the sky. Laurel herself never went up in the plane with her husband. She hated flying. But Lisa had flown with Curtis many times. For her, the thrill was worth the fear.

  She noticed that Laurel’s red Ford Bronco wasn’t parked near the house, and she wondered if her friend was out. When she knocked on the door, Curtis was the one who answered. He looked surprised to see her.

  “Oh. Lisa.”

  “Hi, Curtis. Is Laurel home?”

  “No. She had an appointment, but I expect her back soon. Do you want to wait?”

  “Sure.”

  Curtis waved her inside. They stood awkwardly together in the foyer, and then Curtis gave her a hug, which was even more awkward. He wasn’t an expressive man, but Lisa suspected that Laurel had told him what was going on. Curtis took off his Enestvedt Seed baseball cap and smoothed his sweaty, graying hair. He was older than Laurel, almost sixty, and he had the lean frame and slightly crooked physique of a man who’d done hard physical work every day of his life. He wore a pale-blue button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up and dark jeans.

  Lisa knew him to be knowledgeable about everything from mechanical engineering to the Chinese economy. He had a curious streak and read voraciously. Like most northern farmers, he also had a graveness of manner that strangers would consider aloof. He rarely smiled or laughed. He drank one beer every Sunday after church. Life was serious business, and Curtis was a serious man.

  “You want to wait in Laurel’s office?” he asked.

  “Okay.”

  “Can I get you anything? Coffee, milk?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  “Well, you know the way.”

  Curtis left her alone. Lisa didn’t feel offended by his abruptness, because that was who he was. She did know the way to Laurel’s office, because she’d been here many times. Sometimes by herself, sometimes with Noah. She followed a hallway painted in warm goldenrod and decorated with photographs of sunflowers to a brightly lit room at the corner of the house. Laurel kept a rolltop desk and a locked filing cabinet in one corner, but the rest of the office furniture was plush and comfortable. A worn leather sofa loaded with pillows. An overstuffed chair. An area rug with bell-shaped designs in red and blue. A Tiffany floor lamp. It was a place where Lisa had always felt comfortable.

  She sat down on the sofa and let her body sink into the cushions. Piano music played softly from hidden speakers, something classical and relaxing. In front of her was a claw-foot antique coffee table that held a stuffed cat, a box of tissues in a floral holder, and a mason jar of potpourri that gave the room an aroma of patchouli. There was one other item on the table, too. It was her own novel. Thief River Falls. Her fourth thriller, her award winner, the book that would be a movie soon, the book that had changed her life.

  She picked up the hardcover copy and opened it to the title page. It was inscribed to Laurel in Lisa’s own handwriting with a quote from Carl Sandburg about a wild girl holding on to her dreams. Lisa remembered writing that inscription and remembered the little nod of Laurel’s head as she read it. Then she opened the book to the prologue and read the first sentence, which she knew by heart, the first sentence she’d written and rewritten a hundred times:

  Down, down, down comes the rain of black dirt, landing in showers on the boy’s small body and slowly burying him in the ground.

  Lisa closed the book and put it back on the antique table without flipping through any of the other pages. The story was too much for her now. Everything was too much.

  She heard a noise in the hallway and saw Laurel heading past the sunflower photos. Her friend never walked fast. Laurel stopped along the way to straighten one of the picture frames, and she took a step back to make sure it was level. Then she came into the office and closed the door behind her. She reached down and squeezed Lisa’s hand.

  “I’m so sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,” she said.

  “I haven’t been waiting long,” Lisa replied.

  “Good.”

  Laurel took a seat in the overstuffed chair. Her eyes noticed everything. Lisa could see her take note of the position of Thief River Falls on the table, as if she recognized that it had moved from where it was before. She also noted the empty cushion on the sofa next to Lisa, who was sitting in the middle. When Noah had come with her, he’d sat on the end. A year had passed, and Lisa still found herself leaving a space for him.

  “Did you find out anything?” Lisa asked. “You said you were going to make some calls. I hope you were careful about who you talked to.”

  “I did make some calls. That’s how I’ve spent most of my day.”

  “And?”

  As always, Laurel chose her words carefully. “I wish I had answers for you. I don’t.”

  Lisa frowned. “So either no one knows what’s going on, or they won’t say a word. That’s the problem. I don’t know who to trust.”

  “You can trust me,” Laurel replied.

  That was true, but Lisa found it an odd thing for her friend to say.

  “I told you to stay home,” Laurel added. “I said you should lay low while I looked into this.”

  “I know, but I couldn’t sit there and do nothing. I had to get out and ask questions. I managed to kick a hornet’s nest while I was doing it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lisa explained. She needed to unburden herself about what was going on, so she related everything that had happened in the past few hours. She told Laurel about her visit to Mrs. Lancaster, about her conversation with Will Woolwich at the FBI, about the desperate escape from the ginger man in the state park, and finally about her confrontation with the police officers outside her shed. That story brought a look of horror to her friend’s face.

  “You pulled a gun on two police officers?” Laurel exclaimed. “My God, Lisa, you’re lucky they didn’t shoot you. You could have been killed.”

  “They would have killed me anyway if I’d gone with them. And Purdue, too. At least I got away.”

  “For now, but what happens when they find you again? The police are going to consider you dangerous.”

  “That’s why I need to get out of town.”

  “And go where?” Laurel asked.

  “Anywhere. I don’t care. But I can’t use any of the main roads. They’ll be looking for me and my truck. I just need to get far away from Thief River Falls.”

  “Why does that matter? TRF is already an hour away.”

  Lisa got off the sofa. She found herself pacing again. Restless. “Because this all goes back to Thief River Falls! Those two cops—if they’re even cops at all—they’re from Pennington County. The truck where Purdue stowed away made its last stop at the hospital in Thief River Falls. Don’t you see? That’s where this all started.”

  “Then we should go back there and get some answers,” Laurel said. “Together.”

  Lisa shook her head. “And put Purdue in danger? No. I w
on’t do that.”

  “So the boy is still with you?”

  “He’s in your gazebo.” Lisa took a seat on the sofa again, going back to the middle seat by habit. She picked up her novel from the coffee table again, caressed it, and put it back. She took the mason jar and inhaled the scent. Then she gave her friend a little smile. “He doesn’t like you, by the way.”

  “You mean Purdue? He doesn’t like me?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “He thinks you know more than you’re telling me. That you know who he is.” She tried to read the expression on her friend’s face, but Laurel was inscrutable. “I mean, that’s wrong, isn’t it? You don’t know anything about Purdue, do you? About why people are hunting for him?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Well, good,” Lisa replied.

  “If you want to get away from here, you need to figure out where you’re going,” Laurel said.

  “I told you it doesn’t matter where I go. Somewhere else, where we’ll be safe, where I can find people I can trust.”

  “I can think of one place,” Laurel said.

  “Where?”

  Her friend pursed her lips, as if debating whether to say anything more. “Fargo.”

  “Why there?”

  “I’ve known something for a long time, Lisa. I haven’t told you before now, but I know where Noah is. I’ve known all along.”

  “Noah? You’ve talked to him?”

  “Not in some time. But I know he’s in Fargo. That’s not even three hours away by car, Laurel. If you need to get away from here, if you need to find someone you can trust, why not your brother?”

  “Because I can’t trust him,” Lisa snapped. “Noah made that very clear. I can’t rely on him to be there when I need him.”

  “Maybe it’s time to try.”

  “And have him run away from me again? No, thanks.”

  “Then what do you want to do?”

  Lisa stared through the window at the fields stretching behind Laurel’s house. From where she was, she could see the red Cessna on the grassy runway. She made a decision. “I need a favor.”

  “What is it?”

  “I need Curtis,” Lisa said. “I need his help. I want him to fly me to Minneapolis.”

  “Why there?”

  “It’s far away. It’s a city. This is a small town, Laurel. Everybody knows everybody else around here. Not in Minneapolis. Purdue and I can disappear, blend in. I can go talk to Will at the FBI, and they can figure out who the boy is and why he’s in trouble.”

  Laurel took a long time to answer. “Don’t you think it would be easier to stay here with me?”

  “If I do that, they’ll find me. You know that. How long will it be before they show up here? People know we’re friends. And I’m not going to put you and Curtis at risk, too.”

  Laurel got out of the chair. Her lips were pursed, and this time, she was the one who paced. “I’ll talk to Curtis,” she said. “But if he agrees, I also have one condition.”

  “What is it?”

  Laurel stopped in front of the sofa and held out her hand, palm upward. “No gun.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You know how I feel about guns, Lisa. I don’t want you or anyone else getting hurt. Give me your gun. Otherwise, that plane isn’t going anywhere.”

  Lisa debated with herself. She didn’t like the idea of being unarmed and defenseless. Part of her wanted to say no, to walk away, but if she did that, she was truly on her own.

  “Okay,” she agreed. “Whatever you say. No gun.”

  She reached into her jacket pocket and handed the Ruger to Laurel.

  16

  Lisa made sure her safety belt was buckled, and then she twisted around to check on Purdue in the back seat of the four-seater Cessna. The boy looked ready to head off on a grand adventure. His wavy blond hair flopped in front of his big eyes, which took in everything about the plane and its instruments. She gave him a thumbs-up, and he returned the gesture with an excited grin. He didn’t look scared at all. He had faith that she would protect him from whatever was out there, that she would find a way to fix everything. She wasn’t so sure. She studied the wet, grassy runway ahead of her, and the charcoal sky looming to the southeast, and she hoped that the boy’s faith in her wasn’t misplaced.

  She waited for Curtis, who stood in the field with Laurel fifty yards away. From their demeanor, it was obvious that they were arguing. Laurel did most of the talking, and Curtis shook his head in firm opposition to whatever she was saying. He planted his feet in the ground and braced his hands on his hips. Lisa wished she could hear what they were saying. She knew they were both smart, stubborn people, and she’d seen them bump heads in the past, but this looked worse than usual.

  Before she could climb out of the plane and talk to them, the fight ended. Laurel took both of Curtis’s hands, kissed him, and whispered something in his ear. Curtis shrugged her off and headed for the plane without looking back at his wife. Lisa wasn’t sure which of them had won, but if history was any indication, she thought that Curtis had finally surrendered to whatever Laurel wanted.

  Curtis performed his final safety checks on the plane’s exterior. Then he got into the pilot’s seat without acknowledging his passengers. He ran through his cockpit checks, not saying a word to Lisa as he did, and he squinted at the clouds.

  “Everything okay?” she asked him finally.

  “Fine.” His voice was clipped, but that wasn’t unusual. Curtis never used two words when one was enough.

  “What was that about?” she asked.

  “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.”

  But Lisa was worried anyway. She was certain they’d been arguing about her. And Purdue.

  “Thank you for doing this,” she said.

  “I do what I’m told,” he replied, which did nothing to ease Lisa’s concerns.

  He put on a headset and started the engine. A second headset hung on a hook in front of her, but she left it where it was. She welcomed the white noise, no matter how loud. In front of her, the propeller accelerated, making fluttery half moons in front of the windshield. Lisa felt the plane rock and heard the whine of the motor grow louder as they inched forward. The ground beneath them was uneven, and she could feel every bump. Spray rose from pools of standing water as they plowed through it. The plane hardly seemed to move at all, even as they went faster, but in no time, the nose tilted up and the Cessna floated off the ground, as if it couldn’t wait to fly. The wings waggled, and the plane dipped. They took a few seconds to steady.

  Lisa looked back through the window, watching Laurel grow smaller. They could see each other, but her friend didn’t wave. She wasn’t the sentimental type. Even so, she could see Laurel following them as Curtis increased altitude and then bent into a turn that took them back over the house. Lisa leaned with the plane. The sharp angle always made her feel untethered, as if she would spill through the door and fall. She wondered if it made Purdue afraid, but when she looked over her shoulder, she saw the boy staring out the window, mesmerized by the flat earth stretching out below them.

  As they climbed higher, the ground became a checkerboard of roads and farm fields, occasionally interrupted by an uneven plot of woodland. There weren’t many lakes in this part of the land of ten thousand lakes. Curtis was using Highway 59 as a guidepost to lead them southeast, and she recognized the familiar landmarks, the places she knew. She could see the thin black line of a freight train on the railroad tracks, heading toward Canada. A cluster of roads met like threads leading into the nucleus of a cell, which was the town of Karlstad. The houses and streets below them came and went, and the emptiness of the earth took over again.

  It was a rocky flight, the worst she’d ever been on with Curtis. The clouds were a low shroud, so low she felt as if she could raise her hand and skim her fingers through them. As they flew, rain began to spit across the windshield. The unsettled air threw the plane around like a drunk
dancer, lifting her off the seat with each rise and fall. The unexpected jolts made her want to scream, but she held it in, biting her tongue so hard she was sure it would bleed.

  Curtis touched her shoulder and gestured at the headset. She slipped it over her ears, and he spoke into the microphone.

  “We need to keep an eye on this,” he said, his voice crackling into her ears. “Weather’s getting worse.”

  Lisa nodded without a word. She left the headset on. Curtis’s face was calm, but that didn’t make her any less nervous. Her fingers were clutched around the leather grip on the door, but it was hard to hold on through the pockets of turbulence. They’d only been airborne for a few minutes, and the flight already felt long. Minneapolis seemed a world away. She looked back at Purdue, but he rode the waves like a kid on a roller coaster. She envied him that innocence.

  Her eyes followed the squares of green fields, as dark as emeralds under the grim sky. The highway shot south like an arrow, but they were too high to see any cars on the road. A strange sense of foreboding clouded her mind, a feeling of danger and despair that she was flying into a nightmare. Through the window, between the raindrops, she could see a black snake on the ground, slithery and poisonous, coiling in tight swirls, and she knew what that snake was. It was the Thief River. And she knew why her stomach felt hollow, why she could hardly breathe, why tears had begun to leak from her eyes.

  They were closing in on the town of Thief River Falls.

  She could see it all from up here, every building she knew, every cross street, every park that had been part of her childhood. Thief River Falls, where the Thief River and the Red Lake River met in a kind of psychedelic Y. This was the town where she’d been born. Until recently, it was a town she’d loved and had never dreamed of leaving. Anyone who lived in this place had to embrace its fierceness and remoteness, because this was not a soft part of the world. It was a town that stared north at the bitter Canadian plains and pounded in tent stakes against the winter winds. It was a town dropped down in the middle of nothingness, where every mile looked like every other mile.