Thief River Falls

21

Before dawn broke, the temperature fell, and the freezing rain turned to snow. As Lisa drove, the whole world became white around her. Snow poured through her headlights and swept across her windshield. She had to go slowly. The Camaro was unfamiliar to her, and the car’s tires fought for traction on the ice.

She wanted to go south toward Minneapolis, but she assumed that was what they expected her to do. So she headed north through town, making multiple turns, staying on the side streets while she figured out their next move. The darkness and the snow gave her cover, which she needed, because she knew the word would be out soon. Everyone would be looking for a blue Camaro.

On Atlantic Avenue, she passed one of the local diners. Despite the early hour, the neon sign told her that the restaurant was open. She could get food and coffee and make a plan. She pulled into the diner’s unpaved parking lot and drove to the far back, where the Camaro couldn’t be seen from the street. There were only four or five other cars in the lot.

“I’ll be right back,” she told Purdue. “I won’t be long. Do you want something? Maybe pancakes?”

“French toast.”

Lisa smiled. “Okay. That’s my favorite, too.”

She climbed out of the sports car into the snow, which whipped into her face. She wore a flannel shirt under her leather jacket, but she was still cold. She trudged through the long parking lot to the diner entrance, and she peered through the window before going inside. The interior was long and narrow, with laminate booths. It wasn’t even six in the morning, and only a couple of the booths were filled. She slipped through the door and took the first empty booth near the front window, where she could keep an eye on the street.

Her desire to remain anonymous lasted all of five seconds.

“Lisa Power!”

The excited voice of the waitress boomed through the mostly empty restaurant like a foghorn. In an instant, everyone in the diner was looking at her. Some obviously knew who she was; some were simply curious. As Lisa forced a smile on her face, the waitress hurried over. She slipped into the booth and leaned across the table to grab Lisa’s hands.

“Lisa, I am so thrilled to meet you!”

Her name tag read MISSY. She was slim and in her fifties, with sandy-brown hair in a messy pile on her head and a long face dotted with a few age spots and wrinkles. She wore a homemade crocheted blue top and jeans, with an apron tied around her waist. She had the throaty voice of a smoker and brought a whiff of cigarettes with her.

“I’m sorry — do you mind if I call you Lisa?” the waitress went on. “I feel like I know you. I am a big, big, big fan. Me and my sister and my mother, we all love your books. They are not going to believe it when I tell them you came into the diner. Can we take a selfie together?”

“Well, I’m in a little bit of a hurry, Missy.”

“Oh, this won’t take long!”

The waitress already had her phone in her hand. She rushed around to the other side of the booth, squeezed next to Lisa, and slung an arm around her shoulder. She extended her other arm with the camera and beamed at the lens. Lisa did her best selfie smile as Missy squeezed off several photos.

The woman clambered out of the booth again, looking pleased. “Thank you so much. This is amazing. I’m going to post these to Facebook right now.”

“No,” Lisa interrupted, too loudly. “Actually, would you mind waiting until I leave?”

“Oh, sure, sure, whatever you like. I bet we’d have people rushing over here as soon as they saw it. I get it — you want to have your breakfast in peace. I totally understand.”

“Thank you. Actually, could I get my order to go?”

“Absolutely. Anything you want, hon.”

Lisa didn’t bother looking at the menu. Every diner had the same things. She ordered french toast times two, plus coffee and hash browns and a side of bacon. Missy wrote it all down and headed to the kitchen counter to pass along the order. Lisa stared down at her hands rather than look around the diner, because she could feel the eyes of the other people sneaking glances at her.

Nervously, Lisa kept an eye on the diner window. The snow fell like a cloud over the world, but little had accumulated on the ground so far. Instead, the streets shone with a frozen glaze. As she sat there, she saw a Pennington County sheriff’s vehicle roll past the restaurant, and she held her breath, wondering if the SUV would turn in to the parking lot. But it didn’t. It continued down Atlantic Avenue out of sight.

“You know, I read Thief River Falls in one day.”

Missy was back, and she took a seat opposite Lisa again, as if they were old friends. She put a mug of coffee in front of her.

“Really?” Lisa said politely.

“Oh, I couldn’t put it down. My mom and I had to battle over who got to read it first, but I won. I love that you used real places around here in the book. Every chapter I would go, ‘Hey! I know right where that is!’”

“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.”