Lisa smiled blankly again. That was another downside of celebrity in a small town. Everyone knew where she lived. Or where she used to live. She and Noah still owned their parents’ house, where they’d all grown up, but neither of them had visited the place for nearly a year. In the aftermath of the Dark Star that had stolen away their whole family, they’d never taken the time to sell it or rent it. So it sat there, empty, furnished, gathering dust like a museum no one visited.
Missy was still talking.
“Are you doing research for a new book? Is there going to be a sequel?”
“I don’t know yet. And no, I’m not doing research right now. I’m not going to be in town long.”
“Too bad. You know, if you’re looking for a crime scene in your next book, feel free to use my house. We have a little place just three blocks away from here. In fact, if you need a name for a victim and you want to kill off my sister, she’d get a kick out of that. Her name is Millicent. Milly and Missy, that’s us.”
“I’ll keep that in mind,” Lisa said. She gestured at the kitchen counter behind Missy, where the cook had placed two foam take-out containers. “Is that my order, by any chance?”
The waitress looked over her shoulder. “It sure is. Let me grab that for you.”
She got out of the booth, but then leaned over the table again. She spoke softly, and her face turned serious. “I’m so sorry, Lisa. You know, I was so caught up with seeing you that I didn’t even think. I feel like a fool. I should have asked before now. How are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Well, how are you? Are you all right? Everybody knows what you’ve been through.”
Lisa hesitated. “Do they?”
“Oh, sure. You know TRF. People talk. So are you okay?”
“Yes, I’m okay.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“Well, if you need anything at all, you come back here. I mean it. Nobody’s a stranger around here, least of all someone like you. People stick together, right? We look after our own. You live here, you’re part of the family.”
“That’s very nice.”
“You should know how proud everyone is of you.”
“Thank you, Missy.”
“I’ll get your food,” she said.
Lisa knew the waitress meant well, but she couldn’t wait to be gone from this place. She peeled a couple of bills from her wallet and put money on the table that included a large tip, and she was already standing up when Missy brought over her take-out order wrapped in a plastic bag. The waitress hugged her, which made Lisa uncomfortable. She backed out of the door and almost dropped her food, because the footing was treacherous.
On the street, another police vehicle passed at high speed. This time, its lights swirled, responding to a call, and Lisa covered her face with the bag of food. She retreated, slipping and sliding, to the rear of the parking lot and got into the Camaro next to Purdue. Despite the falling snow, the car was absurdly visible, and she knew she needed to get out of town before it was daylight. She had the feeling that if she could only find a way out of Thief River Falls, they would both be free.
“We’ll take the back roads,” she told Purdue.
They were close to Highway 1, which headed east out of town. From there, she could eventually hook up with a southbound highway and make her way toward Minneapolis. She turned right in the snow, still driving slowly. There were almost no other cars nearby in the early morning, but she felt nervous and exposed. The road led her across a bridge at the crown of the Y, where the town’s two rivers met. In the old days, this area at the confluence of the rivers had been the site of the falls that gave the town its name. But since the dam had been built downstream, the waters here were calm.
As she inched forward, her windshield wipers pushed away the snow. She passed the community college, and not long after, the houses and apartments thinned as she neared the border of the town. There were miles of open land ahead of her, and once she was there, she could lose herself in the web of minor roads, like playing a game of Tetris. She began to relax a little, thinking they’d made it out of town before the alarm spread, but then she realized she was wrong.
Through the pouring snow, she saw the taillights of a vehicle down the highway, parked on the shoulder. She squinted at the road ahead of her and tapped the brakes, feeling the Camaro skid. Her heart sank. She knew what it was. It was a sheriff’s cruiser, and its location was no accident.
They were waiting for her. Blocking the route out of town.
If they were watching the eastbound highway, they were watching all the roads. They had her trapped in a box.
“We have to go back,” she murmured.
She steered off the highway and swung into a U-turn. She kept an eye on the mirror as she headed back toward town, to make sure the police car didn’t make any efforts to follow her. Soon they were in the heart of Thief River Falls again, zigzagging through the empty side streets. It was like she was caught up in a small-town version of “Hotel California.” Thief River Falls welcomed her back but refused to let her leave. Every time she tried to escape, she wound up in the same place, forced into a cage.
“I told you,” Purdue murmured.
“What?”
“I’ll never get out of here.”
Lisa didn’t know what to say. The boy was right. She couldn’t take him away. “If we can’t escape this town, there’s only one thing to do,” she told him. “There’s only one way to make this right.”
“What’s that?”
“We figure out who you really are,” she said. “And why people are trying to kill you.”
22
Lisa assumed that the police would be watching her family house, but she had the advantage of knowing every square inch of that neighborhood. She knew how to get around undetected. She’d played spy and detective with Noah for years when they were kids, and she’d always been able to sneak up behind him with her cap gun before he knew she was there.
She didn’t park the Camaro anywhere close to their house. There was a better place. One of Lisa’s old grammar school teachers lived at the far end of Conley Avenue, and she was retired and housebound, with a side yard full of mature trees whose branches hung practically to the ground. Lisa stored the sports car there, mostly out of sight, and then she and Purdue walked two blocks through the front yards toward her old house. The snow flurries and trees gave them cover.
Darkness was giving way to dawn, slowly lighting up homes she knew from her childhood and filling her with memories and sadness. The houses were small and dated back to before World War II. Over the decades, the trees had grown leafy and tall, sheltering the homes. There were no fences. Neighbors didn’t need fences here. The driveways were unpaved. In the summer, the open green lawns were dotted with clover, but now it looked like winter and Christmas. The road was directly across the street from the north-south railroad tracks, and Lisa could remember their whole house shaking whenever a train rumbled by.
She was so caught up in her past that she didn’t immediately notice that Purdue kept glancing over at the railroad tracks, too. His face looked absorbed in memories of his own. She asked him about it, but he shrugged and said nothing.