Thief River Falls

24

Lisa showed Purdue the secret hiding place in the basement. It wasn’t much more than a crawl space, a gap above the foundation and underneath the floorboards where Madeleine had stored her handmade Christmas decorations. The boxes were still there, labeled in her mother’s spidery handwriting. Behind the boxes, there was just enough room to slither in and hide, which was what Lisa and Noah had done as kids.

“If you see anyone outside, you run downstairs and crawl in here,” she told him. “I’ll be back real soon.”

“Okay.”

She felt a twinge of concern at leaving him behind, but she knew he would be safer at home than with her. She grabbed her mother’s old winter coat from the hall closet, and she ventured out into a white world. The snow continued to fall, with the wind swirling it into a tornado. The blizzard was blinding, but that helped her stay concealed. If she couldn’t see ten feet in front of her, then neither could anyone else. Including the people who were looking for her.

The weather was keeping most of the town inside. She didn’t see anyone as she hurried into the wind toward the end of the street, where the Camaro was hidden in her neighbor’s yard. Before she took the car out, she wandered across the grass to the railroad tracks and stared as far as she could in both directions, which was like staring into a dense fog. If she followed those tracks for several miles, she would pass east of the airport, which was where Purdue told her he’d gotten off the train.

Under her feet, she could still feel the vibration of the train that had passed a few minutes earlier. Like a restless teenager, she stood in the middle of the tracks and then walked south, all alone in the storm’s cocoon. She knew that one of the town’s many cemeteries was to her right, but she couldn’t see it. On the left were trees and open land, all invisible. It was easy to let her imagination run wild, and that was what it did.

She heard a voice in her head. Noah’s voice.

Lis, what happened? Tell me what’s wrong.

She almost turned around to see if he was behind her, but she knew he wasn’t. He was two hours away in Fargo, if Laurel had been telling her the truth. But it didn’t matter where he was. The only reason he was here in her head was because she’d spent the last two hours in the house where they’d grown up together. As far as she was concerned, she didn’t have a brother anymore.

Lisa kept walking. She wasn’t sure how far she went, not with the snow playing tricks on her eyes. When the wind briefly subsided, she could see a trailer park on the other side of a dirt road, but then swirls of snow rose up again and scrubbed it away. The real world only seemed to exist for a few seconds before she lost track of it again. It was time to go back. She turned around, but she realized she’d lost all sense of direction. She started walking again and stopped. She could feel the railroad ties under her feet; she was still on the tracks. But she had no sense of whether she was going north or south.

White, white, white. Everything was white. It had felt that way in her head for more than a day, but now it was getting worse. Thief River Falls felt like a frozen alien planet. The snow clung to her eyelids and made her blink and squint. Wind howled, throwing an icy mist in her face and cold razor blades through her clothes. A finger of panic crept up her spine.

An unwelcome thought sprang of its own accord into her mind: Noah, I need help.

Then she shoved that thought away before it was even fully formed. She didn’t need him or anyone. Alone was fine. She could do this alone. As if to prove she was right, the wind offered up a last whistling gust and then took a break. The snow kept on, but she could see the corner of Annie Street not far away and the neighbor’s yard where the Camaro was hidden. With a little laugh at herself, she headed that way.

When she reached the Camaro, she didn’t get into the car immediately. Instead, she opened the trunk and stared down at Shyla’s guns inside. Part of her wanted to remove them. Get rid of them. But she couldn’t do that, not now, not yet. She didn’t know how any of this would end and what would be required of her before it did.

Staring at the weapons in the Camaro, it occurred to Lisa for the first time that all of this might end badly.

That sometimes in a thriller, the hero died.

She’d written about death, she’d felt the grief of death, but she’d never faced the idea of dying herself. And yet it didn’t scare her. If she had to give up her own life to save Purdue, that was a sacrifice she would willingly make. If she and a gun were the only things standing between that boy and safety, then she would do what she had to do to protect him.

Lisa slammed the trunk shut, got in the car, and backed out into the whiteness of the town.

If there was one person in Thief River Falls who had an ear for the town’s secrets, it was Judith Reichl. She was the senior librarian, a job she had held for nearly all Lisa’s life. Lisa had known her since she was five years old and got her first library card, which to a bookish little girl was like a religious experience. All these years later, she was still Mrs. Reichl to Lisa, never Judith.

The library building was located on the west side of the Red Lake River, which meant Lisa needed to cross one of the handful of town bridges to get there. It was a choke point for traffic that left her feeling exposed in the Camaro, but she didn’t spot anyone watching the bridge. She crossed to the other side of town and parked in the library parking lot, and then she got out and walked beside the one-story redbrick building, with an eye on the cars that came and went.

She was in the belly of the beast here, but it couldn’t be helped. The headquarters of the county sheriff’s department was immediately across the street. If anyone took a close look out the side window, they’d see her.

No one did. She made it inside the library without being spotted.

This place was like a second home to Lisa. She’d done the very first reading from her first book in this library, with Mrs. Reichl beaming proudly from the back of the meeting room. She’d done similar events here with every other book, except for Thief River Falls, where the size of the hometown crowd forced them to reserve the auditorium space at the high school. She still remembered the joyful, terrifying experience of speaking to that crowd, with her entire family cheering for her in the front row.

Lisa knew she had no hope of remaining anonymous here at the library. Every person on the staff knew her. Nearly all the patrons did, too. There was a huge display case near the checkout desk dedicated to her and her books, again thanks to Mrs. Reichl. When the people in the library spotted her, they immediately rushed over to greet her. She was never sure how to extricate herself politely, but Mrs. Reichl spotted her from her office and provided a smooth rescue. The librarian steered her away with an arm around her waist. Lisa breathed a little sigh of thanks into her ear.

The two of them went into her modest office. With a single glance at Lisa’s face, Mrs. Reichl obviously spotted that something was wrong, and she closed the door to give them privacy. She pulled two chairs together where they could sit next to each other.

“Well, well, Lisa Power. How are you?”

“I’m all right, Mrs. Reichl.”

“Are you really? You don’t look so good. You don’t need to sugarcoat anything with me.”

“Let’s just say I’m as good as I can be.”

“Of course. Can I get you anything? Some coffee?”

Lisa shook her head. “No, thank you.”

“How long has it been? A year? I can’t remember the last time you’ve been in here. Your absence has been duly noted. I know you moved to Lake Bronson, and I’m sure writing has been keeping you busy, but it also left me wondering if you were okay. When I don’t see one of my favorite people for so long, I get concerned.”

Mrs. Reichl had a honey-sweet voice that never let you realize you were being interrogated. She was slim and small, always neatly put together in a dark wool suit, with her gray hair in a stylish bob. She wore glasses (every librarian Lisa had ever met wore glasses), and she purchased a new style of frame every year. It was one of Mrs. Reichl’s few vanities. This year, the glasses had a retro cat’s-eye look, with a brown tortoiseshell color. Behind her glasses, she had smart, twinkling eyes, with eyebrows that could arch like the gables of a house when she suspected you were fibbing. Teenagers sneaking books into their backpacks didn’t last ten seconds before confessing.

“It’s just been a busy year for me,” Lisa told her. “That’s all.”

Mrs. Reichl’s eyebrows indicated that she’d failed the polygraph. “I see. And what about Noah? He hasn’t been in here in a long time, either.”

“Actually, Noah left the area. I think he’s in Fargo now.”

“You think?”

“Well, he and I haven’t talked in a while. We had a falling-out.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that,” Mrs. Reichl said. “I don’t think I ever saw closer siblings than you two. I suppose that’s the way it is with twins.”

“People change.”

Mrs. Reichl tugged on the temples of her glasses. “Eyeglasses change, Lisa. You? You are the same girl I knew when you were five years old. Strong willed, smart, an extraordinary imagination. And also stubbornly independent, never needing another soul.”

Lisa smiled. “Not true. I’ve always needed you.”

“Yes, yes, that’s the kind of smooth deflection I’d expect from a writer,” the woman replied with another expressive arch of her eyebrows.

“I’m serious,” Lisa assured her. Then she went on quickly before the librarian could keep digging into her personal life. “In fact, that’s why I’m here. I could use your help about something.”

“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.”