Thief River Falls

5

The nightmares came for Denis Farrell, just as they had the previous several nights. Whenever he closed his eyes, his dreams tortured him. This one was the worst. He lay in a surgery room on the operating table, dressed in a three-piece suit and tie as if this were just another day at the office. A dozen doctors and nurses in scrubs surrounded him, but masks covered their entire faces, so he couldn’t see who they were. One of the doctors loomed over his body, knife in hand. The knife was on fire, a yellow flame dancing all along the metal of the blade.

“I’m awake,” Denis protested in the dream.

The surgeon acted as if he didn’t hear him. As Denis watched, the doctor slowly brought the flaming knife down to make an incision in his body.

“I’m awake!” he screamed.

But his warning had no effect. The blade seared through his skin, cutting him open from the hollow of his neck to the base of his stomach. Black flaming blood leached from his insides onto his clothes. His shirt and tie caught fire, billowing and steaming along with blood that spurted like a geyser. His organs bubbled and burned deep inside his body. When he breathed, he exhaled fire from his mouth like a dragon. The flames flew up the surgeon’s gown, until the doctor was nothing but a column of fire. With each breath, Denis’s mouth expelled more flames, lighting up the others in the room. Fire shot up every doctor, every nurse, like they were dry kindling. And then the walls caught fire. And the floor.

His whole world was flame and pain.

Denis cried out and jolted upward in bed, wide awake now. He was bathed in sweat. The sheets beneath him were soaked. His heart pounded so fast that he was afraid he was having a heart attack. He stretched out his arm to take his wife’s hand, but he realized that he was alone. Gillian was gone. The pillows and sheets on her side of the bed hardly looked slept in at all.

He found the strength to roll his legs out of bed. He stood up unsteadily and went to the bathroom and splashed water on his face, and he ran his wet hands through the thick, wild nest of gray hair on his head. A glass night-light, a gift from his grandson that was painted with the image of a hummingbird, made him look like a shadowy monster in the mirror. His old tanned skin was a web of wrinkles, and dark half moons sagged below his blue eyes. He hadn’t shaved in days, leaving him with scraggly stubble. He wore a graying V-neck undershirt that made him look like an old man. The fact is, he was an old man. He was seventy years old, and he could see every one of those years written in his face and feel them weighing down his bones.

It was the middle of the night, but Denis got dressed for the workday. He wasn’t going to sleep again. Throughout his life, he’d carefully laid out his clothes for the next day before getting into bed, so his suit was waiting for him. He put on a blue Arrow shirt and wool dress slacks, and he knotted a paisley tie carefully at his neck. He sat down on the bed and bent over with difficulty to tie the laces on his brown leather shoes, and then he slipped his arms into the sleeves of his suit coat. In the bathroom, he tried to tame his hair with a brush. These were the routines that shaped his life day after day, and right now, they were the only thing keeping him sane.

Denis used the railing on the steps to help him as he limped downstairs. The house was cold. The lights weren’t on in the living room, but there was enough of a moon to show him Gillian’s silhouette in an armchair by the floor-to-ceiling window that looked out on the backyard. Like him, she was dressed. Her posture was rigid. He spotted a glint of crystal in her hand, which was the last thing he wanted to see. It meant she was drinking again. Ten years ago, she’d nearly drunk herself to death before finally emerging from her downward spiral, and since then, not a drop had crossed her lips. Now the bottle was open again, and there was no such thing as a little slip with Gillian. She’d made the decision, knowing what it meant.

“You couldn’t sleep?” he murmured in the darkness.

“I don’t think I’ll ever sleep again.” Her voice was harsh.

“Yes, I know. I’m sorry.”

He heard the clink of ice cubes as she finished her drink. Languidly, she reached to a bottle of gin on the end table and refilled her glass. It was as if she was daring him to say something, to try to stop her. He couldn’t pretend he didn’t hate what was happening to her, even if he understood the reasons.

“Drinking isn’t the answer,” he said.

“Really? Because I think it’s the only answer.”

“I can take away the bottle, Gillian. Pour it out. I can make sure no one in this town sells you anything. You know that.”

“Go ahead.”

They both knew it was a hollow threat. Yes, he could try to choke off her supply, but she had her ways around that. The last time, every liquor store in Thief River Falls had been under strict orders to keep the booze away from Gillian Farrell, but regardless, he would find the recycling bin stocked every week with the broken glass of half a dozen empty bottles.

“You’re not just hurting yourself by doing this,” he said.

“Oh, I’m sorry. Is this hard on you, Denis? Forgive me.” The sarcasm in her voice was as hot and sharp as the knife in his dream.

“You can’t blame me for what happened.”

“I never said I did.”

“No? You’re acting that way.”

“As usual, you make everything about you. This has nothing to do with you.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” he reiterated. “I did everything I could. We both did. In the end, this was up to God.”

“Don’t talk to me about God,” his wife snapped. “I don’t want to hear about him. Maybe you think you’re closer than everyone else, but you’re not, are you? All that power over life and death, Denis, and in the end, you’re just as impotent as the rest of us.”

He shook his head in frustration. “You’re not the only one grieving, Gillian. Don’t you realize I’m as devastated by this as you are?”

“You? Devastated? When has that ever been the case? You’d have to be human, Denis. You’d have to have emotions.”

“That’s terribly unfair.”

Gillian took another long drink before answering. “Honestly, I don’t care about being fair right now.”

Denis knew there was no point in arguing with her. She was drunk and going to stay that way. He left her alone with her bottle of gin, and he limped down the hallway to his sanctuary, his library, his office. It was a big room with dark furniture and dark carpet, and it smelled of tobacco and leather. Two walls were made of built-in bookshelves stocked with hardcover first editions that he’d collected throughout his life. A third wall had glass doors that led to the green grass of their backyard and down the slope to a horseshoe bend in the Red Lake River.

He sat behind his huge walnut desk and switched on the brass lamp, which gave a dim yellow glow. An oil painting on the opposite wall mocked him. So did the framed photograph on his desk. Art lasted forever, but people didn’t. He took the picture in his hand, stared at it for a while, and then turned it facedown. He put his palms flat on the desk, which was neatly arranged with file folders. There was plenty of work to do, but he didn’t have the spirit to do any of it.

Some people dealt with grief by crying. Some ran away. Some, like Gillian, drank their troubles down. Denis dealt with his grief by getting angry. He liked control, he liked power, and grief took those things away. Gillian was right; he felt impotent. When he felt that way, he had a need to strike back at whatever was causing his pain. He had to find someone to blame. Not that it took any of the grief away.

Denis unlocked the bottom drawer of his desk. He kept his most important papers there. His financial accounts, statements, and passwords. The deed to the house. His will, which would need to be changed yet again. He dreaded the thought of another meeting with his attorney, his life’s tragic events reduced to a series of codicils.

A gun was in the drawer, too. A revolver, practically antique, with a hardwood grip. It had belonged to his father and then his grandfather before that. Denis stared at it and could almost hear the gun calling to him. He thought about taking it out, caressing the black steel of the barrel, easing back the hammer. He’d always kept it loaded for a circumstance just like this. For the end of the road. He’d never intended to go out slowly, wasting away to nothing, losing control over his body and mind day by day. No, when the time came, this was the way to go about it.

He wondered, Was this the day?

Gillian wouldn’t miss him if he left her. Some relationships recover from loss, and some don’t, and theirs fell into the latter category. If he asked her about it, she’d probably tell him to do whatever he wanted, but to do it outside, please, where the blood wouldn’t get on the carpet and the walls. That was the extent of her concern with whether he lived or died.

No. It wasn’t that day yet.

Denis closed the drawer and locked it again. He got up from behind the desk and went to the outside door. His hand-carved walking stick hung on the handle. He opened the door and leaned on the cane as he proceeded into the yard. The grass was sodden below his shoes from the long day of rain. There was a fall chill in the night air, but he didn’t bother with a coat. He never did. He hiked past Gillian’s flower garden and past the fire pit and mature oak trees out to the boat dock that jutted into the water. The shifting dock was treacherous underfoot, but he didn’t care. He walked to the very end, where the river slouched past him at a lazy pace. He stared into the water and then up at the sky, as if he could find answers there. But there were no answers anywhere. Not tonight.

He took his phone from his pocket. Typically, he kept it powered on all the time, because emergencies were commonplace in his job day or night. But he’d switched it off earlier in the evening and left it that way. He turned it on again by habit, and when the phone acquired a signal, he heard the buzz that told him he had messages. Voice mails. E-mails. Texts. People were trying to reach him, but he had no stomach to talk to them. Everything could wait until daylight. He switched the phone off again and dropped it back in his pocket.

But they wouldn’t leave him in peace. He couldn’t get away from who he was. Behind him, on the east end of Eleventh Street where he lived, he heard the noise of a car engine, which was unusual in this neighborhood late at night. The car stopped in front of his house. He waited, knowing that whoever it was, they were here for him. Not long after, the beam of a flashlight swept across the backyard.

Denis glanced over his shoulder to see who was there. He saw a young man in a deputy’s uniform making his way toward the river. Garrett was his name.

“Mr. Farrell,” the police officer called.

Denis didn’t answer and made no effort to leave his place by the water. Soon heavy footsteps made the boat dock shudder. The cop came up behind him and then stopped when he was a few feet away, as if awaiting permission to come closer. Denis finally turned around and made an impatient gesture with his cane. He didn’t want to be disturbed.

“What is it?”

The cop was stocky and big shouldered like most cops, but he looked ready to sink into the ground. Denis had that effect on people. Deputy Garrett shifted nervously on his feet, and the sway of the dock nearly threw Denis into the river.

“Be careful!” Denis snapped.

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir. I apologize for bothering you tonight. I know this isn’t a good time.”

“What is it?” Denis demanded again.

“We’ve been trying to reach you,” Garrett told him.

“My phone’s off.”

“Yes, we figured that. I’m sorry.”

“So why are you here?”

“Well, I know this is the last thing you need right now, but I’m afraid we have a problem. We thought you should know.”

“A problem?”

“It’s about the boy.”

Denis felt a roaring in his head. “What about him?”

“The thing is, the boy is... well, the boy is missing.”

Denis blinked. He heard the words but didn’t understand them. “Missing? What does that even mean, missing? How is that possible?”

“Well, we don’t really know yet, but we can’t find him. He just... disappeared. We’ve been looking everywhere, but so far, we’re not sure exactly what happened.”

“How long ago?” Denis asked sharply.

“Several hours,” the cop replied.

“Hours? And you’re only telling me about this now?”

“We didn’t want to interrupt you, sir. We wanted to take care of it without worrying you, but given the situation, we all thought that—”

Denis silenced him with a wave of his hand. He closed his eyes, needing to think clearly. His anger flooded back and gave him a focus. “I don’t want excuses, Deputy Garrett. This is unacceptable. I don’t care what you have to do, but you need to find that boy. Am I clear? Find Harlan and bring him back.”