Thief River Falls

4

Purdue slept.

Lisa put the boy in her own bed, rather than in one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, and she tucked him under the down comforter. His head sank into the mountain of pillows. She turned off the lights but stayed in the bedroom where she could watch him. She pulled a cushioned chair near the windows so she could keep an eye on the front yard, and she draped her mother’s quilt over her knees.

She knew she wouldn’t sleep herself.

Her fingers caressed the squares that were sewn together on the small satin quilt. Her mother had made it for her a decade earlier. All the patterns were in different shades of blue, decorated with whimsical cartoon animals. A whale. A unicorn. A pelican. A giraffe. Her mother had been quirky and artsy when it came to crafts, and Lisa attributed her own love of creating things to her mother’s genes.

Madeleine Power. Her mother, born in France in a small coastal town outside Marseille, pretty, religious, spirited. She’d met Lisa’s father when they were both teenagers and he was an American traveling through Europe with a church choir group. They’d fallen in love, and she’d followed him home to this barren part of the world without a look backward. Sometimes Lisa tried to imagine the courage it had taken for an eighteen-year-old French girl to uproot herself and marry a young Minnesota factory worker thousands of miles from home. But that was her mother — utterly fearless. She’d filled her loneliness by having a large family. First Lisa and her twin brother entered the world, then three more boys over the course of the next eight years, all of them squeezed together in a matchbox house on Conley Avenue in Thief River Falls.

As the only two women in the family, Lisa and her mother had been so close as to be inseparable. She’d lived at home with her parents until she was almost thirty. Even when she’d finally moved out, it was to a rental house right next door, where she could still talk to her mother through the open windows and hear Madeleine singing French songs as she baked.

It was Madeleine who’d read her daughter’s stories at age five and told her that one day she would be a writer.

It was Madeleine who’d been seated next to her at the Grand Hyatt in New York, cheering and whistling when Lisa’s book was named the thriller of the year.

It was Madeleine who’d cradled her when the call came about Danny, who’d held Lisa as she cried inconsolably, who’d whispered that even in the wake of terrible grief, life would go on. La vie continue. Il doit.

It was strange how Lisa’s life had always changed with phone calls.

A phone call from the fire chief in Kern County, California, to break the news about Danny.

A phone call from Reese Witherspoon to make her book into a movie.

A phone call from the police in Crookston, Minnesota, to let her know that there had been an accident on a slippery, snow-swept road, that a semi had gone through a stop sign on the rural highway, that we are very sorry but your mother, Madeleine Power, was killed in the collision.

So began the chain of events that would pick apart Lisa’s whole world, like loose threads unraveling.

The Dark Star.

The quilt slipped from her knees. She got out of the chair, because she couldn’t sit still anymore. Her eyes were teary. She stared out the bedroom windows, watching the flat, empty earth that went on forever in the darkness. Maybe leaving her hometown and buying a place here, away from people she knew, had been a mistake, but at the time, she’d felt as if she needed to escape.

That was what her twin brother, Noah, had done, too.

Escape. Run away.

Lisa walked over to her bed and stared down at Purdue, lost in the white blanket and white pillows. He looked small and fragile that way, as if she could blink and he would disappear. Instinctively, she reached down and ran her fingers through his thick hair. He murmured and sighed in his sleep.

The echo of his words rippled through her memory. Kill the boy.

She didn’t know whether to believe what he’d told her. He gave no indication of lying, and he was injured and clearly terrified of something. And yet it was so easy for children to misread and misunderstand things. Whatever trauma he’d suffered had interfered with his memory, and maybe he’d filled in the gaps with fantasy. She would have assumed that was true if police officers hadn’t showed up outside her house with their guns in their hands.

Purdue’s clothes lay where she’d folded them on the corner of the bed. She realized she hadn’t searched his clothes to see if there were any clues in them about who he was or where he’d come from. She picked up the little bundle, grabbed her phone from the nightstand, and carried all of it out of the bedroom, letting Purdue sleep. Downstairs, she went into her kitchen, turned on the lights, and poured herself a double shot of Absolut Mandarin. When she tasted it, the cold, sweet vodka on an empty stomach went straight to her head.

She examined Purdue’s white T-shirt and white athletic socks. They were standard issue, the kind she would find at any Walmart, including the supercenter in Thief River Falls. His jeans were more interesting. They were stonewashed and featured zippered pockets on the front and back. When she felt the pockets with her fingers, she realized he had things zipped inside, and it gave her hope that maybe some of his secrets were hidden there, too.

Lisa unzipped one of the front pockets and fished out the contents. It was money, a handful of loose change and a few folded dollar bills that were wet from having gone through the wash. She checked the opposite pocket and found a long silver key that looked like it was made for an automobile. There was just the one key and nothing else. She found it strange that Purdue, who was many years too young to drive, had a car key in his jeans but no key for a house.

His back pockets were empty. No wallet. No school ID. No phone. Nothing that would make him anything other than Purdue.

She spotted one more pocket on the side of the boy’s jeans near the knee. It was tiny, barely big enough to hold a credit card, but she realized that something was wedged inside. She yanked open the zipper and scooped out what was in the pocket with one finger. When she held it up, a metal cylinder gleamed in the light. Seeing it, Lisa inhaled sharply.

It was a spent cartridge from a gun.

She held the brass in front of her face and rolled it around in her fingers. The mental image of it being used made her twitch. The bang of the shot. The recoil. The ejected brass flying from the gun.

She wanted to know where Purdue had found it.

She wanted to know who had fired the gun and where the bullet had gone.

At that moment, Lisa realized it was all true. Purdue was in danger.

She finished her vodka in one swallow, and then she gathered up Purdue’s clothes and turned off the kitchen lights. She wanted the house completely dark if anyone showed up here. After she crossed the foyer, she checked the security of the lock and dead bolt on her front door. She went upstairs, where Purdue was still sleeping, and put his T-shirt, socks, and jeans back on the bed. She stuffed the money and car key back into his pockets, but she kept the spent cartridge herself. Then she went into her large walk-in closet and shut the door behind her.

Lisa changed clothes. She anticipated a long, cold day ahead. She found heavy wool socks in a dresser drawer and a pair of dark corduroys. She grabbed a jean shirt, buttoned it, and left it untucked. She had a white down vest on a hanger, and she took it down by the collar. Finally, she went to the bureau at the far back of the closet and found her gun safe shoved to the rear of the highest shelf. She pulled it into her hands and undid the combination lock and flipped open the top.

Her Ruger 9 mm semiautomatic pistol was inside, along with a loaded ten-round magazine. It was in perfect condition, only a year old. She’d bought it when she moved to this house, because help was far away when you lived out here and strange things had a way of happening so close to the border. Once a month, she fired at the range, and she was obsessive about keeping the gun clean and lubricated. She’d grown up with guns in her family. Pistols. Shotguns. Hunting rifles. Firearms were one of the prerequisites of country life. Even so, there had never been a time when she felt as if she needed to keep her pistol on her person when she was out and about.

Not until now.

Now her gut told her, Stay armed.

She shoved the magazine into the pocket of her corduroys, and then she zipped the Ruger into the right-hand pocket of the down vest. She took the vest with her as she left the closet. Purdue was still asleep, a little boy in a sea of white. When she went back downstairs, she hung the down vest on the hook by the front door, so she could grab it whenever they left the house.

She went into the kitchen again. She kept the lights off.

Her phone was on the table. She stared at it, debating what to do. Her gaze shifted to the clock, and she saw that it was nearly four in the morning. Sunrise was still more than three hours away. She’d heard the police saying they would be back when it was daylight.

Lisa took the phone and dialed Laurel March. It was the middle of the night, and she assumed her friend would be asleep, but Laurel answered the phone immediately, sounding as if she’d already been awake.

“Hello?” her friend said. “Lisa, is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me. Laurel, thank God you’re there. I’m sorry to call so late, but I need your help.”