Thief River Falls

by Brian Freeman

  “Oh, really? All right, I can see you’re impatient, as usual. What can I do for you?”

  “This is sort of an odd request, but something strange may have happened in town two nights ago. I’m trying to find out the details. I know rumors sometimes make their way across your desk, so I wanted to see if you’d heard anything.”

  “That is an odd question,” Mrs. Reichl said. “And vaguely mysterious.”

  “I know. I’m sorry about that.”

  “Is this for a new book?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  The librarian’s face was quizzical. “I’m afraid I need a little more detail. Rumors about what? Give me a clue.”

  Lisa hesitated, deciding what she could say. “Has anyone in town gone missing?”

  “Missing? Not that I’ve heard. I have to tell you, Lisa, I don’t like the sound of this. Is everything really all right with you? What is this about?”

  “Please. Anything at all.”

  The librarian removed a pencil from her pocket and tapped it against her lips. “I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a thing.”

  “Whatever happened may have taken place near the river,” Lisa added. “Maybe someone around here saw or heard something?”

  “Hmm.” Mrs. Reichl tilted her head, and her eyes focused over Lisa’s shoulder. “You say whatever happened was two nights ago?”

  “Yes.”

  The librarian got out of her chair and went to the office window. “I don’t know whether this will be of any help to you, but I think the person you should talk to isn’t me. It’s that girl out there.”

  Lisa joined Mrs. Reichl at the window. Near the checkout desk, she spied a young girl, probably seventeen or eighteen, with a stack of books she was preparing to scan. The girl was tall and skinny, way too skinny for a healthy teenager. She had stringy black hair and intense green eyes, two little jewels set deep inside a pale face. She wore a long-sleeved gray T-shirt that slipped off one bony shoulder. The shirt was emblazoned with a large picture of Emily Dickinson, and there was a strange symbiosis between Emily’s melancholy expression and the expression of the teenager wearing the shirt.

  “Who is she?” Lisa asked.

  “Her name is Willow Taylor,” Mrs. Reichl replied. “Willow’s a writer, like you. A poet. She’s very talented.”

  The girl looked up from her books and noticed the women watching her. Her mouth dropped open as she spotted Lisa. Willow stared back the way an astronomer studies the stars, but when Lisa smiled at her, the girl immediately looked down with an embarrassed expression and opened up the first book in her stack.

  “She knows me,” Lisa said.

  “Oh, yes. Actually, the girl idolizes you. She talks about you and your books all the time. You’re her—well, who’s all the rage with teenagers these days? You’re her Ariana Grande, I guess.”

  “Impressive pop culture reference, Mrs. Reichl,” Lisa said.

  “I do have grandchildren.”

  Lisa noticed that Willow refused to look up from the books in front of her, even though it was obvious she was aware that Lisa was watching her. For Lisa, it was impossible to imagine being anyone’s idol. It gave her no thrill. Idols were supposed to be perfect, and Lisa felt far from perfect right now.

  She turned back to Mrs. Reichl. “Why do you think I should talk to Willow?”

  “You were asking about something unusual that happened two nights ago.”

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, Willow was in here yesterday morning, and I heard her talking to a friend about something she’d seen the previous night. The two of them clammed up when I came by, the way teenagers do. I don’t know what Willow saw, but the poor girl was trembling like a leaf. She was definitely scared of something.”

  25

  Willow Taylor had already left the library by the time Lisa said goodbye to Mrs. Reichl, but when Lisa hurried outside, she found the teenager standing against the wall near the building’s back door. The girl was reading one of the books she’d checked out. She wore no coat, and she danced uncomfortably in the cold as lingering flakes of snow blew through the alley. Their eyes met, and as she had before, Willow looked nervously away when Lisa spotted her.

  Lisa walked right over to her. “Hi. It’s Willow, right?”

  The girl’s green eyes widened as if a museum statue had suddenly started talking. “Oh my God. Wow. Hi.”

  “I’m Lisa.”

  “I know! I know!”

  “I hear you’re a writer, like me.”

  “Me? No way. Well, I mean, I want to be. Right now, I’m not very good.”

  “That’s not what Mrs. Reichl tells me. She says you’re a talented poet, and she has a good eye. I’ve always thought it takes extraspecial talent to be a poet. You really have to understand people’s hearts. Novelists like me, we have it easy. We just make stuff up.”

  “Oh, no, I think you’re amazing,” Willow gushed. “I learn so much from your books. I really get into the characters and their stories.”

  “I’m glad.” She noticed the pink flush on the girl’s skin. Below her Emily Dickinson shirt, the girl wore skintight black pants that left her ankles bare. The teenager’s green eyes blinked like Morse code.

  “Actually, Willow, I wanted to talk to you about something,” Lisa went on.

  “To me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, sure. Anything.”

  “Great. But let’s get out of the snow, okay? You look like you’re freezing.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  The two of them wandered across the parking lot, which was a slippery mess of wet snow and ice. Lisa had parked the Camaro between two larger SUVs so that it wasn’t visible from the street. She opened the door to let the teenager inside, and then she went around to the driver’s door. When she got in, she turned on the engine to warm up the interior.

  “Cool car,” Willow said.

  “It’s not mine. I borrowed it. I drive a boring old pickup.”

  “Really? Me too. My parents let me drive their pickup to school.”

  “Do you go to Lincoln?” Lisa asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “I did, too. Are you a junior or a senior?”

  “Junior,” Willow said. She bounced one knee nervously up and down. “You know, you’re pretty famous at school. All the kids read your books. I actually did a paper on you in my English class. I wrote about Thief River Falls and talked about why you decided to use real places in the book.”

  “And why is that?” Lisa asked with a grin.

  “Because everybody wants to wake up in the middle of a thriller,” the girl replied.

  “That’s very insightful. How’d you do?”

  Willow blushed. “I got an A.”

  “Good for you.”

  The girl twisted her fingers together like she had a nervous tic. “This is probably a weird question, but is writing painful for you?”

  “That’s not a weird question at all. And yes, sometimes you have to go to some pretty dark places.”

  “Yeah. I know what you mean. My poetry is pretty dark, too. There’s lots of blood and killing and swearing and sex. It freaks my parents out. And my teachers. They look at me and say they can’t figure out where those things come from.”

  “Well, why do you think you write about those things?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just where I go. That’s what comes out. But the way people react, I’m wondering if something is wrong with me.”

  Lisa could hear the self-doubt in the girl’s voice. It didn’t matter what their age was; at some point every child was as lost as Purdue. Looking at her, Lisa realized that this girl could have been a doppelganger of her own younger self. Wounded and sensitive and at that age where the world was full of uncertainty, desire, innocence, and despair. Twenty-plus years later, Lisa sometimes felt as if nothing had changed.

  “Believe me, when I was your age, I heard the same things from people,” Lisa
told her.

  “Really?”

  “Really. I heard more than once that nice girls should write nice things. That wasn’t me. Nothing I wrote was very nice, and it still isn’t. People die in my books. They kill. They betray the people who trust them. They lose the people they love. It’s not pretty. But you know what? That’s life. Writing is a mirror. If someone doesn’t like what you write, maybe it’s because they don’t like what they see in the reflection.”

  Willow stared down at her lap. She pushed her black hair back behind her ears. “I never thought about it like that.”

  “Well, as far as I’m concerned, you keep doing what you’re doing,” Lisa said. “Don’t worry about what other people think.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I said I wanted to talk to you about something, Willow,” Lisa continued. “I need to ask you a question.”

  “Okay.”

  “Mrs. Reichl said she overheard you talking to a friend about something that happened two nights ago. She didn’t know what it was, but she thought you were scared. I was wondering if you could tell me what was going on.”

  Willow cocked her head in surprise. “Really? That’s what you want to know?”

  “Yes. Is that a problem?”

  “No, it’s just that this is so weird.”

  “What is?”

  “That it’s you asking me about this,” Willow said. The girl looked over at Lisa and then looked away. “I mean, what happened that night was sort of about you.”

  “About me? I don’t understand.”

  Willow sucked her upper lip between her teeth and didn’t say anything. Lisa felt the girl’s anxiety spreading like a virus, and it infected her, too. It was the same kind of anticipation she’d felt when she put her hand on the closet door in her parents’ bedroom and knew that something horrible was waiting for her inside.

  “Willow? What’s wrong? Tell me what happened.”

  The teenager whispered, as if she was sharing a terrible secret. “Do you ever worry about someone bringing your books to life?”

  Lisa recoiled as if she’d been slapped. The words coming out of the girl’s mouth sounded strangely familiar, like déjà vu from a nightmare. Then she remembered. She’d heard them before. Two nights ago, before everything started, she’d done a book club with a group of women in California. And the husband at the party, Mr. Dhawan, had asked her the exact same thing.

  Have you ever been afraid that someone will bring your books to life?

  “Why would you ask me that, Willow?”

  The girl squirmed in the seat, as if she’d made a mistake. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything about this. Maybe I should go.”

  “No.” Lisa’s voice was harsher than she intended. “No, stay, please. Talk to me. What’s going on? Where is this coming from?”

  Willow hesitated. “I saw something in the cemetery two nights ago.”

  “The cemetery? What did you see?”

  “If I tell you, you’re going to think I’m weird. Really weird, not writer weird.”

  “I promise I won’t think that.”

  Willow shook her head. “You will. But I guess that’s okay. I am weird. See, the thing is, I wrote a poem a couple of years ago. I called it ‘Dance of the Dead.’ It’s my all-time favorite poem. Normally, I don’t really like what I write, but I think this one is pretty good. It’s about this girl who goes to a cemetery in the pouring rain. She’s lonely, and—well—she’s thinking about killing herself. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to be dead, and she wants to find out before she does anything. So she—so she tries to raise the dead. She does this dance in the rain, and she asks the dead to dance with her. And they do.”

  Lisa shuddered, listening to Willow build a little shop of horrors. As a writer, she realized that the girl was good. The tingles of fear rose up in Lisa’s mind like a body floating to the surface of a lake.

  And still she wondered, What does this have to do with me?

  “In my poem, the dead rise up from the ground as the girl dances,” Willow went on. “Old ones and young ones. The ones who were sick, the ones who died in their sleep, the ones who were murdered. They dance with the girl, all of them taking turns. It’s like she finally has friends, you know? She finally fits in. Except she doesn’t, because she’s still alive. But the dead know this, and they want to help her. So they have a lottery, and the winner is the one who has to kill the girl. He’s handsome. He’s young. He’s the last one to dance with her, and when it’s done, he puts his hands around her neck and chokes her. She doesn’t struggle. She knows he loves her and wants her to be with him. And at the end, the dead sink back into the earth, and the girl is left there, with the rain pouring over her body.”

  “Willow,” Lisa murmured, feeling out of breath. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?”

  “Two nights ago, I did that,” the girl confided in a hushed tone.

  “You did what? What are you saying?”

  “It was pouring down rain, remember? I was in my bedroom reading that poem, and I felt like there was no one in the world who would ever understand me. I wanted to be the girl in the poem. I thought, Maybe I can make it come to life. Maybe if I go to the cemetery and dance for the dead, they’ll come get me. They’ll bring me home. It sounds kind of stupid now, but that’s what I did. I drove down to Greenwood Cemetery, and I went out among the graves, and I danced. I kept hoping I’d see the dead rise, and I’d see that boy in the black suit who would come and put his hands around my neck. I thought I’d see my poem come to life. But I didn’t. I saw something else.”

  Lisa couldn’t strip her gaze away from the girl’s face. There was something horrible and hypnotic in those green eyes. “What did you see?”

  “I saw your book come to life.”

  “What?”

  Willow nodded earnestly. “I danced until my legs got tired, and I had to stop. So I sat down against a tree, and I cried. I don’t know how long I sat there. The rain just came down, down, down. But after a while, when I was sitting there, I heard something strange from the other side of the cemetery. Near the trees, you know? Near the path to the river? It was like a scrape of metal against rock. I could just barely hear it. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt familiar. Like something I knew. And then I remembered. It was just like the prologue of your book. It sounded like someone digging. So I got up and went toward the sound. When I got close enough, I could barely make out someone. Just a shadow in the rain. I couldn’t see who it was, but I saw what they were doing, and I ran. I ran away as fast as I could.”

  “Tell me,” Lisa said. “What were they doing?”

  “They were burying a body in the cemetery. It was just like Thief River Falls, Lisa. They were burying a body.”

  26

  Lisa knew where she had to go. The cemetery.

  She crossed the river again and parked the Camaro in an empty lot amid patches of snowdrifts and fallen leaves. Ahead of her, a path led into the woods. The trees and trails of Greenwood Park began here. So did the prologue of Thief River Falls.

  The sheer weight of memories in this place was suffocating for her, like being buried alive. Whenever she wanted to feel Danny’s presence again, she came here. This was where she, Danny, and Noah had all become friends on their weekends in high school. This was where she and Danny had come on a hot June day during their last summer together, two months before the California fire. They’d found a secluded clearing and shared a bottle of wine, and that was where Danny had taken out an oval-cut diamond ring and asked her to marry him. She hadn’t hesitated a moment before saying yes. With the heat of the day on their bare backs and the buzz of the birds and the insects in the trees, they’d celebrated their engagement with a wildly erotic and foolishly unsafe coupling on the soft grass.

  It felt like long ago.

  The trail was wet under her feet. She kept her head down and her hands in her pockets. Soon she reached a familiar cross trail. Going right would ta
ke her to the river and the path that was haunted by Indians and murderers, according to local legend. Dead Man’s Trail, they called it. Going left would lead her out of the park toward the open land of the cemetery. Part of her wanted to go right and stay in the past, when she was young and Danny was alive. But she went left, following Willow’s instructions. She saw the midday light through the trees, and when she broke free of the woods, the dead were waiting quietly for her in neat, parallel rows.

  This was where her entire family was buried.

  Madeleine Power, her mother. Gerald Power, her father. Anton, Charles, and Samuel, her brothers. They were together, lined up next to each other under matching gray marble stones. Danny was buried here, too, in a more distant place. Everyone she loved was here, waiting for the day when she would join them. She thought about Willow’s poem, and for an instant, she was possessed by a strange desire to dance until the dead came to take her away.

  But no. She couldn’t do that. According to Willow, Lisa’s book had come to life here two nights ago, and she needed to understand why. If the teenager was right, someone had visited the cemetery in the rain and buried a body in the soft ground. Two nights ago, Purdue had also showed up at her house. She didn’t believe in coincidences. If reality and fiction were blurring, it was because someone had planned it that way.

  Someone was playing a game with her, but it didn’t feel like a game at all.

  Have you ever been afraid that someone will bring your books to life?

  Lisa was alone in the graveyard. The huge field was dusted over with wet snow clinging to the grass, untouched by footprints. Even without the sun, she felt blinded by the reflected brilliance of white light. Rows and rows of headstones pushed out of the ground, stretching for hundreds of feet in every direction. A few trees interrupted their neat geometry. Some trees clung to their colored leaves; others blew them across the field.

  She walked up and down the rows. The years on the stones went back for decades, but every now and then, she came across the names of people she knew. A couple of times, they were people she didn’t even realize had died. The dentist her family had used when she was a girl had passed away two years ago. A nurse who’d retired not long after Lisa joined the hospital had died only recently. The current year was freshly carved on her stone.