Thief River Falls

37

Denis was sitting on the stairs that led to the upstairs bedrooms, with his hands on his knees, when Deputy Garrett came through the broken window into the living room. The police officer had his gun drawn, and his gaze flew to the mirror that had been shot into a thousand pieces. As he walked across the carpet toward Denis, his boots crunched on shards of glass.

“Are you okay, sir? What happened? I heard a gunshot.”

Denis was still in shock himself and trying to work his way through it. “I’m all right, Garrett.”

“What about your wife?”

“Sleeping like a baby. She slept through the whole thing.”

“What happened, sir?” Garrett asked.

“It was Lisa Power.”

“She shot at you?”

“Yes, she did.” Denis shook his head. “Honestly, I never thought she’d go this far.”

“Is she still here?”

Denis nodded toward the office door. “She went in there and locked the door. I can’t hear anyone inside now, so I’m assuming she’s on the run again.”

As if to confirm his suspicions, the office door opened from the other side. Deputy Garrett began to raise his weapon, but he lowered it again when he saw Deputy Stoll in the doorway of the office.

“Lisa Power was here,” Garrett called to his partner. “Is anyone in the office?”

Stoll had his gun drawn, too. “No, it’s empty. The patio door’s open. If she was there, she’s gone now. There are footsteps in the snow heading away toward the river.”

Denis pushed himself to his feet from the stairs. His legs were rubbery, and he grabbed for his cane and leaned his weight on it. He limped toward the fireplace and stood in front of it, hypnotized by the flames. His silence weighed on the deputies, who were both impatient for instructions.

“Sir?” Deputy Garrett said after a minute had passed. “What should we do?”

“Do we think she’s still driving the Camaro?” Denis asked quietly.

“As far as we know. We’ve been looking for it, but with the darkness and snow out there, we haven’t been able to find it yet.”

Denis took another long length of time to process his thoughts. His mind kept replaying the gunshot that had roared past his head. The noise. The smell of the smoke. The cloud of glass. He ran his hand through his wild hair, and fragments of the mirror fell to the carpet.

“She’ll be trying to get out of town,” he said. “There are only so many ways across the rivers.”

“What do you want us to do?” Garrett asked.

“Pull everyone in. Get every police car on the road. We have to keep her contained. Call East Grand Forks, Crookston, and Bemidji, and see if they can spare some men, too. And alert the border. It’s possible she may head to Canada.”

“Yes, sir.” Deputy Garrett hesitated. “And what do you want me to tell them?”

“That we need to find her,” Denis said.

“Yes, I know, but they’re going to ask. What then? Do they confront her if they locate her? What are we supposed to do?”

Denis closed his eyes. The fire was warm on his face, but he could feel the chill on his back from the wind blowing through the house. “Tell them she’s a threat,” he said.

“Sir?”

“She fired a gun at me, Garrett! If anyone confronts her, she’s likely to do it again. And we suspect she has more guns, don’t we? That’s what Curtis March said. Not just the Glock but assault rifles, too. This situation is explosive. I don’t want this getting out of hand any more than it already is. We need to find her and keep her locked down.”

Garrett nodded. “What do we do if she fires at our people?”

Denis rubbed his unshaved chin. He shook his head. “If she becomes a risk to anyone’s safety, then we fire back. We have no choice. We treat this like any other active shooter situation. Now get moving, go, we need to locate her before she gets out of Thief River Falls. There isn’t much time.”

“Yes, sir.” Garrett turned for the door but then stopped. “Mr. Farrell, did she say anything about the missing boy?”

Denis’s gaze was lost in the fire again. He didn’t answer.

“Sir?” Garrett repeated. “Did she say what happened to the boy?”

“No,” Denis murmured finally. “I still don’t know where Harlan is. I don’t know where she took him.”

The groundskeeper trooped through the snow that was filling up Greenwood Cemetery. He wasn’t a happy man. It was late in the evening, and he’d already been at home in his pajamas with a Budweiser and an episode of NCIS on the flat screen when the public works director called him. Now he was back out in the cold. He wore a khaki parka with the zipper undone and the fur hood flapping behind him. He balanced the metal end of a shovel over his left shoulder.

The two people who were with him wouldn’t stop talking. A mom and her teenage daughter. He’d already forgotten their names. As a general rule, Stan Erenstad didn’t really like people talking. That was one of the good things about working with the dead. They weren’t chatterboxes. He’d spent most of his sixty-three years living alone, with no one but a three-legged cat to keep him company for the past twelve years. He didn’t talk to the cat, and the cat didn’t talk to him, and that was a fine arrangement for both of them.

“Tell the man what you saw, Katy,” Mom told the teenager, but then she didn’t give the girl a chance to say a word. “Katy came home two nights ago with this story about someone digging up a grave over here. To be honest with you, we thought she was making it up. Let’s just say it wouldn’t be the first time that someone’s imagination got a little ahead of the facts. When she was a girl, she had a story for everything, especially when she got into trouble. So when we caught her sneaking into her bedroom soaking wet, we weren’t convinced by this story about being out in the cemetery.”

“Uh-huh,” Stan said.

“Mom, I told you, I was worried about Willow!” the teenager broke in. She wore a green army jacket that swam on her skinny frame, and she had a multicolored wool hat pulled down to her eyebrows. “She had a really weird Snapchat post about going to the cemetery, and it freaked me out. I wanted to make sure she was okay.”

“Well, this girl Willow is definitely an odd duck,” Mom agreed. “Sweet enough, but lost in her own world; do you know the type? Writers, I guess. She wants to be a poet, like you can make any money that way. Kids need to be practical in this day and age. Now quit dawdling, Katy, and tell him the story. Don’t waste the man’s time. We’re out here because of you. Like I said, my husband and I didn’t really believe this story of hers, but she came back home today and said she’d seen the same person in the same place back in the graveyard. She swore up and down she was telling the truth. That’s why we called. My husband golfs with the public works director, and he called him up and said we don’t really know that any of this is true, but it’s strange enough that someone should probably check it out.”

“Uh-huh,” Stan said again.

“It’s true,” the teenager insisted. “It really happened.”

Stan stopped in the middle of the cemetery and didn’t hide his loud sigh. The two women kept going for a few steps before they realized he wasn’t with them, and then they turned back. Stan slipped his shovel off his shoulder and leaned on the post. The snow kept coming down, which was normally one of his favorite things, because snow had a way of quieting the whole world. He really enjoyed going out on his back porch at midnight during a snowfall and listening to a whole lot of nothing.

“Okay, start over,” he said. “What the hell happened?”

Mom opened her mouth to talk, but Stan held up his hand like a stop sign to silence her. “How about we let the girl tell it, okay?”

The girl, Katy, kept eyeing different parts of the cemetery. Her multicolored hat made her look like a rainbow ice pop. “Well, two nights ago, I came out here to find my friend Willow. She wrote this cool poem called ‘Dance of the Dead,’ and she let me read it. It’s really good, but really creepy, because it’s about a girl who goes to a cemetery when she’s thinking of killing herself. So when Willow posted that she was coming out here, I got a little scared. I figured I’d go find her and make sure she was okay. I searched all over the cemetery, but I didn’t see Willow anywhere, so I decided to go back home. Except before I did, I heard something weird, like somebody digging, which is not the kind of noise you want to hear in a cemetery at night. That’s when I saw her.”

“Who?” Stan asked.

“That woman. The writer. Lisa Power. She was burying a body out here.”

“Burying a body? You’re sure about that?”

“Yes, I’m sure! I saw her lift up the body in a sheet and put it in the ground and then start covering it up. I was thinking, wow, did she kill somebody or something? So I got out of there real fast. I told my parents, but they didn’t believe me, even though it happened just like I said. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since then. I figured I should do something, you know? That’s why I came back to the cemetery tonight. I wanted to see if I could find where she put the body.”

“And what did you see?” Stan asked, before Mom could open her mouth.

“I saw Lisa Power again! She was right back in the same place. She had a shovel with her, like she was going to dig up whoever she put in the ground.”

“You’re sure it was Lisa Power both times? I mean, the first night you said it was raining pretty hard. Maybe it was somebody else.”

Katy’s brow crinkled with annoyance. “No, it was her! I’m telling you, it was her! Everybody knows who she is. I figured she was coming back to get rid of the evidence. It was just the two of us out here, and she saw me, so I ran. I told my parents we had to do something right away. We had to get somebody out here to see what was going on.”

“Well, we’re here,” Stan muttered, squinting into the snow. “You said this happened in the back of the cemetery?”

“I think so.”

“Okay, lead the way. You know where we’re going.”

The teenager strutted forward, and Stan followed, with Mom bringing up the rear. He didn’t figure the search would take long, because he didn’t believe the story was true. This was going to be a wild goose chase. There was something about graveyards that had people seeing ghosts. It wasn’t the first time he’d been dragged out here at night over nothing. He was already anticipating getting back home and thawing out in his hot tub and opening up another beer and seeing what Gibbs was up to on NCIS. He just hoped the DVR had recorded it.

They were nearly to the end of the cemetery, at the border of the woods, when the girl pointed her hand excitedly.

“There! That’s the place right there!”

Stan did a double take in surprise. The teenager was right. In the last row of graves, in front of an elaborate marble headstone, the ground had been disturbed. Despite the blanket of snow, it was clear that someone had been digging here. He didn’t know who or why, but there was no innocent explanation for anyone to be doing that without him knowing about it.

When they got closer, he was able to read the headstone near the disturbed ground. It wasn’t for a recent burial. He checked the dates carved into the stone and saw that the grave under his feet was for a man who had died ten years earlier.

A young man. Not even thirty years old.

Stan always hated to see the young ones out here. He didn’t like to see lives cut short. He murmured the name on the headstone aloud.

“Daniel Farrell.”

A nickname was etched in the marble below. Danny.