“Does it hurt?”
“Yes, it hurts very much.”
“How did they die?” he asked again.
She stared at her plate and found that her own appetite had vanished, too. “This isn’t something I talk about, Purdue.”
“Please?”
“Why is it important to you?”
“Because I like you.”
She mustered a smile, but it was hollow. “I like you, too.”
“Was your family big?”
“Pretty big. I had four younger brothers, plus my parents. We were all very close. All of us squeezed into one little house in Thief River Falls.” She took a deep breath, feeling the Dark Star arrive like a cloud over the sun. “My mom . . . my mom was killed in a car accident two years ago. That was hard enough on all of us, but it turned out to be just the beginning. My father was so sad without my mother that he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t live without her. A month later, he—well, he killed himself. Then my youngest brother died in his sleep. He had what doctors call a stroke, which is like a heart attack in the brain. I’m sure it was caused by the stress of losing both of our parents. And three months after that, my two other brothers were driving home in a thunderstorm, and they tried to make it across a flooded road. Their car was washed away, and they both drowned. That was all in the space of six months. Six months took away my whole family.”
She heard herself reciting the facts as if the words were coming from someone else. She felt far away, looking down on the room, detached from her body. Oddly, she felt nothing. She’d cried about it so many times that she’d cried herself out and had nothing left but a numbness that never went away.
“I heard you say you still had a twin brother,” Purdue murmured.
“Yes. Noah. He left.”
“After everybody died?”
“Yes. I bought this house, because I couldn’t live in Thief River Falls anymore. Noah lived here with me for a while, but it became too much for him. I think seeing me every day was too much of a reminder of the Dark Star.”
“What’s that?”
“Oh, that’s what he and I called that year. The Dark Star. You know what an eclipse is, when a shadow blocks out the sun? That year was like an eclipse that erased our entire family.”
Purdue sat at the table with a little crinkle in his forehead. He seemed to think about everything she said. “So I guess you’re lost, too, huh? Like me.”
“I guess so.”
“I don’t like it. Being lost, I mean. I feel like I’ve forgotten everything important.”
“I don’t like it, either. The difference is, you won’t always be lost, Purdue. You and me, we’re going to figure out who you are and where you’re supposed to be.”
“I don’t have any place to be,” the boy said.
“You do. Trust me. We all do.”
“If we’re both lost, Lisa, why can’t I just stay here with you? You don’t have a family; I don’t have a family. I could live here.”
He said it earnestly, as if it were the most natural solution in the world. They both needed someone, and they’d found each other. End of problem. Lisa didn’t know how to answer him.
“Well, first let’s find out who you really are. Right now, you’ve forgotten everything, but when you remember, you’ll probably discover that you have a family who misses you and is going crazy trying to find you.”
Purdue shook his head firmly. “No, I think it’ll be worse if I remember things. I’m better off forgetting.”
“Why do you say that?”
The boy didn’t answer. He chewed a fingernail and looked scared.
“Purdue? Did you remember something?”
His blue eyes opened wide, and then he nodded.
“What is it?” she asked. “What do you remember?”
“Voices.”
“What did they say?”
Purdue closed his eyes. He put his hands over his ears, as if he were trying to block out the noise from somewhere. “You saw what he did to her. Make him scream.”
Lisa shivered. “Who were they talking about?”
“I don’t know.” He opened his eyes again, and his gaze pleaded with her to help him.
Lisa reached into her pocket and removed the spent cartridge she’d found in the boy’s jeans. She put it on the table where he could see it. “This was in your pocket. It came from a gun. It came from somebody firing a bullet. Do you remember where you got this?”
He stared at the brass, and she could feel the fear rising in his body. “No.”
“Is that really true? Or are you just too scared to tell me?”
He was silent, biting his lip.
“These voices you heard,” she went on. “Did you see the men who were talking? Do you know who they were?”
“Police.”
“Did they have guns?”
“Yes.”
“What else do you remember about them? Did any of them fire their guns?”
He was quiet again. Lisa got up from the chair and came around to the other side of the table and sat next to him. “It may be scary, but you’re going to have to trust me. We can figure out the truth together, but I need your help. Tell me what else you remember.”
He tried to talk, but he choked up, as if he was about to cry. Then he sniffled and wiped his face.
“Fingers,” he said in a low voice.
She stared at him in confusion. “Fingers? I don’t understand.”
“Somebody’s fingers were lying on the ground,” he told her. “The men cut them off.”
8
Laurel had told her to stay home, but Lisa couldn’t do that, not after what she’d just heard from Purdue. She wasn’t going to stay in the dark, and she wasn’t going to wait in the house until the police officers from the previous night appeared on her front porch again. She needed to know what was going on.
“You and I are going to get some answers,” she told the boy. “Are you up for that?”
“I think so.”
“Okay then. The first puzzle we need to solve is exactly how you got here last night. We’re going to work our way backward. That means taking a little drive around the area and seeing if you remember anything. Got it?”
“Got it.”
They left the house together and headed across the driveway to her garage. Lisa unlocked the garage door and threw it open on its metal rails. Her pickup was inside, still wet from the previous day’s downpour. She undid the flatbed door to let the standing water drain. Inside were bags of sand, a dirty shovel, road salt, a handful of sodden two-by-fours, and an emergency roadside kit in a red plastic shell. In rural Minnesota, you always had to be prepared for the possibility of getting stranded on the back roads far from any help.
Lisa relocked the truck bed and opened the passenger door. “Hop in,” she told Purdue.
The boy climbed inside, and Lisa shut the door behind him. She wore her white down vest, and she patted the pocket to make sure her Ruger was safely zipped inside. Then she got behind the wheel and backed the truck out of the garage.
When she reached the highway, she could see for miles. It was just after daybreak on a misty morning, and there was nothingness in every direction. Out here, the earth was flat all the way to the horizon, where the gray land met the gray sky. Railroad tracks paralleled the highway, but there were no trains coming. Telephone wires stretched between an endless series of poles that lined the road like crucifixion crosses. The scrub brush shook in the fields as the wind blew, making a dull kaleidoscope of gold, rust, and washed-out green. She could see small stands of trees huddled together in the far distance. Turning right, the highway led to the border not even half an hour away on the road to Winnipeg. Turning left took her south through places like Strandquist and Newfolden on the way back to Thief River Falls.