Thief River Falls

by Brian Freeman

  “Yes, readers like that.”

  “We sure do! And of course, I thought it was hysterical that you used your own house as the scene of the murder. That was so wild.”

  Lisa smiled blankly again. That was another downside of celebrity in a small town. Everyone knew where she lived. Or where she used to live. She and Noah still owned their parents’ house, where they’d all grown up, but neither of them had visited the place for nearly a year. In the aftermath of the Dark Star that had stolen away their whole family, they’d never taken the time to sell it or rent it. So it sat there, empty, furnished, gathering dust like a museum no one visited.

  Missy was still talking.

  “Are you doing research for a new book? Is there going to be a sequel?”

  “I don’t know yet. And no, I’m not doing research right now. I’m not going to be in town long.”

  “Too bad. You know, if you’re looking for a crime scene in your next book, feel free to use my house. We have a little place just three blocks away from here. In fact, if you need a name for a victim and you want to kill off my sister, she’d get a kick out of that. Her name is Millicent. Milly and Missy, that’s us.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Lisa said. She gestured at the kitchen counter behind Missy, where the cook had placed two foam take-out containers. “Is that my order, by any chance?”

  The waitress looked over her shoulder. “It sure is. Let me grab that for you.”

  She got out of the booth, but then leaned over the table again. She spoke softly, and her face turned serious. “I’m so sorry, Lisa. You know, I was so caught up with seeing you that I didn’t even think. I feel like a fool. I should have asked before now. How are you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Well, how are you? Are you all right? Everybody knows what you’ve been through.”

  Lisa hesitated. “Do they?”

  “Oh, sure. You know TRF. People talk. So are you okay?”

  “Yes, I’m okay.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  “Well, if you need anything at all, you come back here. I mean it. Nobody’s a stranger around here, least of all someone like you. People stick together, right? We look after our own. You live here, you’re part of the family.”

  “That’s very nice.”

  “You should know how proud everyone is of you.”

  “Thank you, Missy.”

  “I’ll get your food,” she said.

  Lisa knew the waitress meant well, but she couldn’t wait to be gone from this place. She peeled a couple of bills from her wallet and put money on the table that included a large tip, and she was already standing up when Missy brought over her take-out order wrapped in a plastic bag. The waitress hugged her, which made Lisa uncomfortable. She backed out of the door and almost dropped her food, because the footing was treacherous.

  On the street, another police vehicle passed at high speed. This time, its lights swirled, responding to a call, and Lisa covered her face with the bag of food. She retreated, slipping and sliding, to the rear of the parking lot and got into the Camaro next to Purdue. Despite the falling snow, the car was absurdly visible, and she knew she needed to get out of town before it was daylight. She had the feeling that if she could only find a way out of Thief River Falls, they would both be free.

  “We’ll take the back roads,” she told Purdue.

  They were close to Highway 1, which headed east out of town. From there, she could eventually hook up with a southbound highway and make her way toward Minneapolis. She turned right in the snow, still driving slowly. There were almost no other cars nearby in the early morning, but she felt nervous and exposed. The road led her across a bridge at the crown of the Y, where the town’s two rivers met. In the old days, this area at the confluence of the rivers had been the site of the falls that gave the town its name. But since the dam had been built downstream, the waters here were calm.

  As she inched forward, her windshield wipers pushed away the snow. She passed the community college, and not long after, the houses and apartments thinned as she neared the border of the town. There were miles of open land ahead of her, and once she was there, she could lose herself in the web of minor roads, like playing a game of Tetris. She began to relax a little, thinking they’d made it out of town before the alarm spread, but then she realized she was wrong.

  Through the pouring snow, she saw the taillights of a vehicle down the highway, parked on the shoulder. She squinted at the road ahead of her and tapped the brakes, feeling the Camaro skid. Her heart sank. She knew what it was. It was a sheriff’s cruiser, and its location was no accident.

  They were waiting for her. Blocking the route out of town.

  If they were watching the eastbound highway, they were watching all the roads. They had her trapped in a box.

  “We have to go back,” she murmured.

  She steered off the highway and swung into a U-turn. She kept an eye on the mirror as she headed back toward town, to make sure the police car didn’t make any efforts to follow her. Soon they were in the heart of Thief River Falls again, zigzagging through the empty side streets. It was like she was caught up in a small-town version of “Hotel California.” Thief River Falls welcomed her back but refused to let her leave. Every time she tried to escape, she wound up in the same place, forced into a cage.

  “I told you,” Purdue murmured.

  “What?”

  “I’ll never get out of here.”

  Lisa didn’t know what to say. The boy was right. She couldn’t take him away. “If we can’t escape this town, there’s only one thing to do,” she told him. “There’s only one way to make this right.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We figure out who you really are,” she said. “And why people are trying to kill you.”

  22

  Lisa assumed that the police would be watching her family house, but she had the advantage of knowing every square inch of that neighborhood. She knew how to get around undetected. She’d played spy and detective with Noah for years when they were kids, and she’d always been able to sneak up behind him with her cap gun before he knew she was there.

  She didn’t park the Camaro anywhere close to their house. There was a better place. One of Lisa’s old grammar school teachers lived at the far end of Conley Avenue, and she was retired and housebound, with a side yard full of mature trees whose branches hung practically to the ground. Lisa stored the sports car there, mostly out of sight, and then she and Purdue walked two blocks through the front yards toward her old house. The snow flurries and trees gave them cover.

  Darkness was giving way to dawn, slowly lighting up homes she knew from her childhood and filling her with memories and sadness. The houses were small and dated back to before World War II. Over the decades, the trees had grown leafy and tall, sheltering the homes. There were no fences. Neighbors didn’t need fences here. The driveways were unpaved. In the summer, the open green lawns were dotted with clover, but now it looked like winter and Christmas. The road was directly across the street from the north-south railroad tracks, and Lisa could remember their whole house shaking whenever a train rumbled by.

  She was so caught up in her past that she didn’t immediately notice that Purdue kept glancing over at the railroad tracks, too. His face looked absorbed in memories of his own. She asked him about it, but he shrugged and said nothing.

  Her old house waited for her. Two houses, actually. Her parents’ two-story house was on the corner, and next to it was the matchbox rental house where she’d lived for a decade, right up to the moment she bought the place near Lake Bronson. Her entire life sat there side by side. The rental house had new tenants; from where she was, she could see a light inside. But the house of Madeleine and Jerry Power was unoccupied. A time capsule. The key was in her pocket, the way it always was.

  If the police were waiting for her, she didn’t see them. The streets looked deserted. Even so, she took the precaution of ve
ering into the rear yards of the neighboring houses and taking Purdue around to the back door. Then she let them inside the cold house.

  The ghosts of her family welcomed her.

  Nothing had changed since she’d been back, other than a thicker layer of dust on the furniture. No matter how much time had gone by, it smelled the same, as if Madeleine were still trailing violet perfume through the rooms. She could hear her mother singing French nursery rhymes in her head. She could hear the excited shouts of her brothers playing football in the yard. When she went to the kitchen window and looked across the driveway at the rental house next door, she saw a young woman moving back and forth behind the curtains, then bending down to talk to a child. It could have been her.

  The past felt so vivid it was difficult to believe it was really the past.

  “You lived here?” Purdue asked.

  “I was born here.”

  She went upstairs, and Purdue followed her. Her own bedroom, which she’d shared with Noah, was nothing special. It was so small that it was a place to sleep, not a place to play. The one thing she remembered from that room was all the time that she and Noah had spent in the darkness, trying to read each other’s thoughts. Noah had always believed in the special power of twins. She wasn’t so sure. Yes, there were times when words and emotions would pop into her head out of nowhere, and sometimes she wondered if that was her twin brother. Or maybe it was just her imagination. She’d felt that odd presence a lot lately, and whenever she did, she found herself thinking, Go away, Noah.

  She didn’t want to go into her parents’ bedroom, but the place drew her there anyway. Everything was exactly as it had been when they were alive, so it looked as if Madeleine should be sitting at the mirror and humming as she did her makeup, and her father should be in the bathroom, in his white T-shirt, pulling a razor across his face. Their queen bed was neatly made, with its burgundy comforter and pillowcases decorated with a geometric design. The closet door was closed. She always kept it closed.

  She’d been the one to open the door and find her father hanging from the rod by the loop of his belt.

  The note in his pocket read, There’s no life without Madeleine.

  “You’re crying,” Purdue said.

  “Am I?” She touched her cheek and realized that he was right. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been here in a while.”

  Lisa sat down on the end of the bed, and Purdue sat next to her, pedaling his legs.

  “Why are we here?” he asked.

  “Because I need a place where you can be safe. Where no one can find you. I have to go out and get some answers, and I don’t know how long that will take me. So you can wait here. I’m going to show you a hiding place down in the basement. Noah and I used to go there when we didn’t want anyone to find us. If someone comes to the door, I want you to hide there.”

  “Why can’t I come with you?”

  “I wish you could. The trouble is, everyone’s looking for you. For me, too, but mostly for you. I don’t know why, but I do know that it’s important that nobody find you until we understand who you are and what happened to you two nights ago. So I want you to stay here while I look for some people who might be able to help us.”

  The boy’s face bent into a frown. “What if you don’t come back?”

  “I will come back. I promise.”

  “You’re all I have now. I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You’re not going to lose me. I’ll always protect you.”

  He nodded, but she didn’t think he believed her. He was a smart boy. Promises were empty things. She was trying to be strong for him, and he was trying to be strong for her, but neither of them knew the future.

  “How are you going to figure out who I am?” he asked her.

  “Well, I need your help with that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know someone hurt you. I know you don’t remember everything. But I also think you remember more than you’ve told me. I wasn’t going to push you while we were trying to get out of town, but things are different now. You can’t hide the truth from me anymore.”

  “I don’t remember anything,” he protested, but he had that nervous look again, the look of a boy who was keeping secrets.

  “I think you do remember. At least you remember some things. I think that whatever it is, it’s really hard for you, but at some point, we have to figure out how to face hard things. Even memories that are awful and painful for us. Sometimes we really, really don’t want to do that, and our brains come up with ways to avoid thinking about them, but sooner or later you have to deal with the pain. You have to stare it down and let it out. That’s the only way you can begin to live with it. Does that make any sense?”

  He didn’t answer. She could see him biting his lip, holding back tears.

  “There are a lot of things in this house that I’d rather forget,” she told him, shivering as she stared at the closet door. “I haven’t been back in more than a year because it was so hard. But here I am. That’s the first step.”

  She waited, hoping Purdue would open up to her. They sat in silence for a long time. The ghosts who were here must have been waiting, too, wondering if she’d meant what she said about facing down the hard things in life. Because she was a hypocrite. She couldn’t deal with the Dark Star that had taken her family. She was just like Noah, running away to Lake Bronson when the going got tough.

  The house began to shake.

  Literally. The floor trembled under her feet, and the windows rattled, and a whistle that was more like a scream split the air. Purdue’s eyes widened with wonder.

  “What’s that?” he asked.

  “A train. They go by right in front of the house. Want to see?”

  “Yeah!”

  They went to the bedroom windows, and Purdue pressed his nose against the glass. Across the street, the engine of a freight train rumbled through the crossing, dragging car after car, some stacked one on top of the other. The freight cars were a kaleidoscope of peeling paint, rust, and wild graffiti, and they went on forever. By instinct, Lisa counted the cars, and she got to seventy-one before the caboose brought up the rear and the earthquake eased under the ground.

  Purdue stayed at the window, watching until the train had completely disappeared. Even then, he didn’t move; he just stared at the tracks the way he had when the two of them were creeping down the street toward the house. There was always something about boys and trains, but this was more than that.

  “Purdue?” she murmured.

  He said nothing, but she could tell that the rattling of the train had jarred something loose in his head.

  “Purdue, talk to me.”

  He looked up at her, and suddenly he was calm.

  “That’s how I got here,” he said. “I came on a train. I was running away.”

  23

  “Running away?” Lisa said. “What were you running from?”

  “I was in the hospital.”

  Lisa took his hand. The two of them were still in her parents’ bedroom, looking down from the window at the train tracks. He recited the story with that odd detachment he often had in his voice, as if the events had happened to someone else. Maybe that was the only way he could face it, like a character in a novel.

  “Why were you in the hospital?” she asked. “Were you sick? Or hurt?”

  He shook his head and then wiped his nose with his sleeve. “It wasn’t me.”

  Lisa didn’t understand at first. And then she did. She made a guess. “Was it your mother?”

  Purdue nodded.

  “Do you remember where you were?”

  “No. We had to go somewhere because of what was wrong with her. I didn’t know where it was. We drove for a long time.”

  “And where’s home? Do you remember that?”

  “We didn’t really have a home,” he said. “We moved around a lot. My mom had friends in different places, and we’d go there and stay with them for a while. But we always kept moving.
I don’t remember us staying anywhere for a long time. Sometimes we’d just sleep in her car if it wasn’t too cold. We kept all of our stuff with us there.”

  Lisa thought of the key she’d found in his pocket. Not a house key. A car key.

  “It was just the two of you?” Lisa asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What about your father?”

  The boy shrugged. “I never met him. Mom never talked about him.”

  Lisa realized that she really was dealing with a lost boy in Purdue. Homeless. The child of a single mother. She’d hoped there would be a better explanation for his missing past, something that gave him a family and a place to go. Instead, here he was. Alone. With her.

  “Purdue, what happened to your mom?”

  The boy took a long time to say anything more. “Months ago, she started having headaches. Really bad ones. We were staying with one of her friends, and she said Mom should go see a doctor, but Mom didn’t want to do that. Doctors cost a lot of money, and we didn’t have any. She said it was nothing. She said the headaches would go away, but they didn’t. They got worse. A lot worse. There was one night where Mom woke up in the middle of the night, and she was screaming because it hurt so bad.”

  “That must have been very scary,” Lisa murmured.

  He nodded. “I made her go to the doctor. She didn’t want to, but I said she had to. The doctor put her in a big tube where they could see inside her, and after that, he said she needed to go to a hospital right away.”

  “Did the doctor say what was wrong with her?”

  “Well, he said they were going to take out her brain.”

  Lisa wanted to smile, but she knew what he meant. “A brain tumor? They were going to remove a brain tumor?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So you went to a hospital?”

  “Yes. They shaved my mom’s head. I didn’t like that. It didn’t look like her anymore. I remember sitting in a room and talking with her before they took her away. We talked for a long time. We talked about places we’d been. Stuff we’d done. That was nice. But doctors and nurses kept coming in, and they were whispering to each other. My mom said everything was going to be fine, that I shouldn’t be scared or worry about anything. I didn’t believe her.”