Thief River Falls

by Brian Freeman

  Lisa approached the tree.

  She knew a little secret from her writing. Living things had an energy all their own. They could convey horror just by being there, and she could feel it as she got closer. This ash tree was alive, and it was part of the conspiracy. It was a murder tree.

  She examined the gray ridges of the trunk. Five feet off the ground, she found the burn marks where the friction of the rope had eaten away the bark in two parallel lines as Nick struggled. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew what it was. She aimed the bright light at the snowy ground. The whole scene took shape for her the way chapters of a book always did, taking over her mind. She felt sick. The violence was coming.

  Looking at the ground, she knew they’d tried to clean up the evidence of their crime. When she kicked away the wet snow, she saw that the area was clear of leaves, clear of debris. They’d gathered up everything, right down to the wooden chips of bark that must have sprayed off the ash tree. The rain had taken care of the blood and left no clue of the horrible thing that had happened here.

  But plans that looked good on paper still had to rely on humans, hopped up on adrenaline and fear. Humans made mistakes.

  Someone hadn’t counted properly.

  They’d meant to count to ten, but they’d only gotten to nine.

  Lisa spotted something on the ground, caught in the bulging roots of the tree trunk. Somehow they’d missed it. When her light passed over it, she thought at first that it was simply an acorn fallen from one of the oaks, but then she squatted and looked at it more closely.

  When she did, she jumped back and slapped a hand over her mouth.

  It was not an acorn.

  It was a man’s finger, sliced cleanly at the knuckle.

  33

  That was how the mystery began, with torture at the river.

  Lisa wondered if Denis had felt anything at all, watching it happen. Probably not. No joy, no satisfaction, but also no revulsion. It would simply have been justice in his mind to watch Nick Loudon writhe, to watch him vomit into his gag and have to swallow it down, to watch fountains of blood erupt with each snip of Liam’s clippers. There would have been no expression on Denis’s face at all. He would have stood there like a statue outside the courthouse, patiently observing the story in Nick’s eyes.

  Disbelief. Panic. Agony. Madness. And finally nothingness.

  Her gaze traveled from the murder tree to the river where Purdue had hidden away in the matted-down brush. The next chapter had taken place there. Denis had found him. Maybe he’d limped down to the water, turning his back on the coup de grâce from Deputy Garrett’s gun. And there he was, a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with a serious face. A boy who’d seen everything they’d done.

  Lisa tried to imagine the horror of that moment. It must have felt to Denis that God was punishing him with a cruel joke, sending a witness to that exact place at that exact moment. You think you’re good, not evil? You think you’re delivering justice? Then see if you can live with what you have to do now.

  She knew how Denis had gone about saving himself. How he’d chosen to protect his secret. She’d already given him the perfect plan. She’d laid it all out for him in Thief River Falls. Kill the boy. There was no other choice, nothing else to do, no opportunity for reprieve. Kill the boy. Then take both of the bodies to the cemetery, and bury them in a fresh grave.

  Oh, how Denis must have appreciated the irony of bringing the events of her book to life. She’d painted him as a fictional villain, and now he had the opportunity to turn the tables on her. Now he was a real villain. A real murderer.

  But sometimes life imitated art too well. The deputies were nervous. They didn’t like the idea of murdering an innocent boy. They didn’t hit him hard enough; they didn’t bury him deep enough. Purdue escaped, just like the Purdue in her own novel had escaped. She understood now why they were so desperate to find him and get him back. As long as the boy was free, Denis and the others were at risk of being exposed.

  Lisa knew what she had to do next.

  She had to go to the cemetery and dig up Nick Loudon.

  She left the cabin behind, which was like leaving her own past behind all over again. All the echoes. All the memories. She lingered in the woods, staring at the cabin and the river, wishing she could go back to those days, when she didn’t know the horrors that lay ahead. All the loss she would have to endure. Then the white snow blew into her face, waking her up, and she had to go. She hiked through the trees back to the Camaro parked on the shoulder of the dirt road.

  The darkness was complete out here. She couldn’t see a thing. As she drove, the car’s headlights felt weak against the sheer vastness of the dark land around her. She used the back roads to retrace her steps, avoiding the center of town. She made a stop at the house on Annie Street where she’d been hiding the Camaro, but she didn’t leave the car there this time. Instead, she needed something she’d seen leaning against the garage wall.

  A shovel.

  It was heavy in her hands, with a pointed blade. The metal was rusted, but it would do the job.

  She got back in the Camaro and drove to where Greenwood Street dead-ended near the railroad tracks. She parked the car. With the shovel clenched in her right hand, she hiked across the tracks and through empty parkland toward the cemetery only a few hundred feet away. The snow was still falling, huge cold flakes nipping at her exposed face. The world was white, like an avalanche falling over her. She crossed Pennington Avenue, where there was no traffic, and found herself back among snow-topped rows of tombstones.

  There were so many graves. So many bodies. It took her a moment to orient herself and remember where she was going. The plot she’d seen with the overturned earth was at the far end of the cemetery, near the dense forest of the neighboring park and the path that led toward Dead Man’s Trail. She pushed through the snow. The whistling of the wind filled her head, and she grimaced, because her headache was back. Really, it had never gone away.

  When she spotted a faint indentation marking the curve of the sidewalk, she knew she was close. The street was nearby. Garrett and Stoll would have parked at the curb, not far from where they were taking the body. That wasn’t the kind of thing you wanted to do over a long distance; it was hard to explain, even for cops. They would have had shovels, like her.

  Her imagination told her the story: They’d dragged the body from the car. Purdue was with them. They’d found the freshly dug grave—a rectangular plot at the end of a row, so close to the trees that the branches could reach out and tap on your shoulder. When they got there, they began to dig it up.

  She wondered at what point one of them had swung the shovel into Purdue’s head.

  Before they began to dig?

  After the hole was ready?

  She wondered which one did it. Garrett or Stoll. But their reluctance showed. Their hesitation won out. They hated what they were doing, and so they didn’t do it well. The glancing blow drew blood and knocked out some of Purdue’s memories, but it didn’t kill him.

  They put Nick in the hole. Then they put Purdue on top of him. And they filled it in. They buried him alive. Lisa shuddered at the horror of it. The thought of the boy underground made her sick with fear. It was the kind of thing that grew out of her worst nightmares. To wake up under the ground, unable to see or move or hear, barely able to take a breath.

  She reached the grave near the trees. It wasn’t hard to find, despite the deeper layer of snow. The uneven ground still showed the evidence of fresh digging. Lisa stood in front of the plot and realized she was crying. She felt overwhelmed, exhausted, almost unable to function. Her headache made a searing stab behind her eyes. She clutched the shovel in her hands and tried to plunge it into the ground.

  Down there, a few feet away, was the body of Nick Loudon.

  She knew it.

  If she found him, she had all the proof she needed. She pointed the shovel at the ground and put her foot on top of the back of the blade. She just
needed to push down and turn the dirt away. It wouldn’t take long, but the shovel felt heavy in her hands. She found herself sweating, and she was dizzy at what she had to do.

  Find the body. Bring him back.

  “Oh my God, what are you doing?”

  The voice startled Lisa. She dropped the shovel to the ground and spun around. On the sidewalk near the trees, two teenagers stared at her, open mouthed. Two girls, both young, probably no more than sixteen. One girl wore a white bubble coat down to her knees, and the other was dressed in a heavy army jacket with a rainbow-colored wool cap pulled down below her ears.

  “It was you!” the girl in the multicolored hat screamed at her. “I saw you!”

  “What?”

  “You put that body in the ground!”

  “No!” Lisa took a step toward them and held up her hands. “No, you’re wrong!”

  “Get away from me! I’m calling the cops!”

  “No, wait!” Lisa shouted. “Don’t do that! Stop, I need to talk to you!”

  But the first girl didn’t listen to her. She ran, stumbling through the snow and abandoning her friend. Lisa watched the teenager slip-sliding through the rows of tombstones, heading for the road. The clock was ticking now, leaving her no time to uncover the body. As soon as the girl called the police, Denis Farrell would be here. Nick Loudon would disappear for good. The evidence would be gone. They’d have Lisa in their hands, and soon enough, they’d have Purdue, too.

  “Wait, listen to me!” Lisa called after her again. “You’ve got the wrong person. I’m trying to help!”

  But the girl was already gone.

  The other girl, the one in the white bubble coat, simply looked at Lisa with a curious expression. She didn’t seem afraid, and she made no attempt to run. She was tall, with long blond hair and earmuffs over her head. Her hands were in the pockets of her white coat.

  “It wasn’t me,” Lisa told her. “I didn’t do this.”

  “Yeah, I know.”

  “You do?”

  “Sure. I know who you are. You’re Lisa Power. The writer. I’m a friend of Willow’s. That’s why I’m here. She told me all about what happened the other night, so I figured I’d check it out for myself. I mean, somebody burying a body in a cemetery in the rain at midnight? That’s pretty wild.”

  “What about your friend?” Lisa asked.

  “Oh, don’t worry about her. I told her Willow’s story. She freaked when she saw someone out here.”

  “She can’t call the police,” Lisa said. “I know that sounds strange, but it’s not safe.”

  “I’ll text her and tell her to knock it off. I’ll say it was all a misunderstanding. She’ll listen to me.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What are you doing here, anyway? What’s with the shovel? Is there really a body buried there? I mean, duh, sure, there are like a thousand bodies out here, but Willow said she saw someone actually digging a hole in the ground. That’s pretty creepy.”

  “I know it is. And yes, I think someone’s buried out here who’s not supposed to be here, and I think I know who it is. That’s what I came out here to do. Find the body.”

  “Like in your book?” the girl asked.

  “Yes, just like in my book.”

  “Is that where the boy came from?” the girl asked. “Was he in the ground? That was in the book, too, right?”

  Lisa had to stop herself from jumping across the space between them and grabbing the girl by the shoulders. “What do you know about the boy?”

  “Well, I don’t know who he is or anything, but a lot of the kids were talking about him at school yesterday.”

  “What did you hear?” Lisa asked. “What were they saying about him?”

  The teenager shrugged. “A woman on the other side of Pennington came across a boy wandering around the trailer park two nights ago. The park’s not far from here. It’s an easy walk from the cemetery. Anyway, this kid was hurt. He said he didn’t know who he was. He didn’t remember anything, his name, where he came from, nothing like that. So the woman took him over to the hospital to get him checked out. But the boy kept saying people die in hospitals, that he was going to die if he stayed there. He wouldn’t get out of the car.”

  Lisa closed her eyes. Purdue.

  “What happened to him?” she asked.

  “Well, that’s the weird part. A doctor came out of the hospital, and the woman flagged her down. The doctor got the boy calmed down and said she would make sure he was okay. She told the woman to go back home, that she had everything under control.”

  “So the boy went into the hospital with the doctor?” Lisa asked.

  “I guess. Except the woman called the hospital the next day to see how he was doing, and there was no boy. He was gone. The hospital told her they had no record of him ever being there at all.”

  34

  The hospital.

  Somehow Lisa had always known that the road would take her back to the hospital. Sooner or later, that was where she had to go. She’d gone through those doors thousands of times in her life, and now she would have to go through them again. That was where she’d find the last piece in the puzzle about Purdue.

  She sat in the Camaro in the hospital parking lot. The one-story brown-brick building sprawled over a flat lot in the middle of empty fields. It was night, but the parking lot was crowded, and people came and went through the doors. Emergencies didn’t punch a clock. She’d worked the graveyard shift as a nurse for years, and there were nights when she’d have hours of boredom where she could take out her laptop and write, and there were nights when she’d spent the whole shift literally running from room to room to keep up.

  Lisa waited for the right moment. It didn’t take long. Two SUVs pulled up near the ER doors, and a crowd of people piled out of the vehicles, including a teenage girl who’d obviously injured her leg in some kind of high school sports accident. Several of the people with her were teenagers who wore uniforms from the local team, the Prowlers. Two adults carried the girl inside, two other adults called for help, and everyone else flooded into the hospital lobby with them, triggering what Lisa knew would be a chaotic scene of confusion and noise.

  She got out of the Camaro and hurried across the snowy parking lot to slip into the hospital in the wake of the crowd. No one noticed her. The attendant at the desk was busy. Lisa put her head down and walked into the main corridor that led past the waiting room and into the treatment areas of the facility. The soft brown wood and ochre color on the walls was supposed to be soothing, but Lisa felt her heartbeat take off like a thoroughbred out of the gate. She could feel it beating madly in her chest, and to her ears, it sounded like the electronic beep-beep-beep of a heart monitor. She knew that sound only too well.

  A nurse approached her from the other end of the corridor. Lisa knelt down, letting her hair fall in front of her face and fiddling with one of her shoelaces to avoid being seen. She made the mistake of looking up too soon and found the nurse staring right at her. The woman’s brown eyes widened with recognition. The nurse didn’t say anything or sound an alarm, but her shoes squeaked on the floor as she moved quickly away.

  The nurse would tell everyone about her. Soon security would be looking for Lisa in the hallways. She thought about shouting questions after the nurse while she still had time.

  Did you hear about the boy who disappeared two nights ago?

  Did you see him?

  Which doctor brought him in?

  But Lisa didn’t need to ask those questions. She already knew which doctor had brought Purdue in from the parking lot. It could only be one person. She remembered what Purdue had said about Laurel’s reaction while the boy pretended to be asleep.

  How did she look at you?

  Like she knew who I was.

  Lisa continued past the hospital rooms one by one. Most were empty. It was a quiet night. But she passed one room that was a hive of activity, and she found herself stopping to see what was going on. They’d forg
otten to draw the curtain. A gray-haired man, easily in his eighties, lay under the white sheet of a hospital bed. A doctor and two nurses clustered around him. The doctor wore a white lab coat, and all three of them wore white masks. Something about the sheer volume of whiteness filled her with an inexplicable horror. White was the absence of color. White was the absence of life. The people in the hospital room didn’t look like caregivers, like people who would save you and protect you. Instead, they looked like angels come to collect a body, come to usher you from death to the other side. It made Lisa want to scream. She closed her eyes and covered up her face with her hands, but she didn’t see blackness on the other side of her eyelids. She saw white.

  Everything was white.

  She couldn’t get away from white.

  Lisa stumbled down the corridor. When she found an empty room, she went inside and shut the door behind her. She kept the lights off, because she didn’t want white light. She went to the hospital bed and ripped off the white sheet and crumpled it up and stuffed it inside a drawer. She wanted nothing white in here at all, but she realized that she couldn’t escape it. The whiteness followed her wherever she went, chasing her when she tried to hide. She sat on a window bench, and outside, white snow poured down through the white tower lights of the parking lot.

  She pulled her knees up to her chest and wrapped her arms around them. She closed her eyes again. Her body was bathed in sweat, and her heart continued to race. Nothing felt real to her. Her lungs struggled for breath, and she was self-aware enough to realize that she was having a panic attack. She tried to coach herself to breathe more slowly, more deeply. She concentrated on her muscles and tried to relax them. Her arms, her legs, her chest. She opened her eyes to look for something she could focus on, and she picked the green EXIT sign outside the hospital’s rear door. The letters glowed at her, telling her there had to be a way out of this situation.

  She heard words in her head: You are not going to die, my sweet.

  Madeleine’s words. Madeleine’s voice. Her mother had told her that with a musical little laugh, when Lisa was thirteen years old and in the hospital to have her appendix removed. She’d been so scared, and her mother was right there to give her comfort and tell her that everything was going to be fine. That was what mothers did when their children were frightened or in danger. They protected them. They saved them. That was their job.