“Oh, really? All right, I can see you’re impatient, as usual. What can I do for you?”
“This is sort of an odd request, but something strange may have happened in town two nights ago. I’m trying to find out the details. I know rumors sometimes make their way across your desk, so I wanted to see if you’d heard anything.”
“That is an odd question,” Mrs. Reichl said. “And vaguely mysterious.”
“I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“Is this for a new book?”
“No, nothing like that.”
The librarian’s face was quizzical. “I’m afraid I need a little more detail. Rumors about what? Give me a clue.”
Lisa hesitated, deciding what she could say. “Has anyone in town gone missing?”
“Missing? Not that I’ve heard. I have to tell you, Lisa, I don’t like the sound of this. Is everything really all right with you? What is this about?”
“Please. Anything at all.”
The librarian removed a pencil from her pocket and tapped it against her lips. “I’m sorry, but I can’t think of a thing.”
“Whatever happened may have taken place near the river,” Lisa added. “Maybe someone around here saw or heard something?”
“Hmm.” Mrs. Reichl tilted her head, and her eyes focused over Lisa’s shoulder. “You say whatever happened was two nights ago?”
“Yes.”
The librarian got out of her chair and went to the office window. “I don’t know whether this will be of any help to you, but I think the person you should talk to isn’t me. It’s that girl out there.”
Lisa joined Mrs. Reichl at the window. Near the checkout desk, she spied a young girl, probably seventeen or eighteen, with a stack of books she was preparing to scan. The girl was tall and skinny, way too skinny for a healthy teenager. She had stringy black hair and intense green eyes, two little jewels set deep inside a pale face. She wore a long-sleeved gray T-shirt that slipped off one bony shoulder. The shirt was emblazoned with a large picture of Emily Dickinson, and there was a strange symbiosis between Emily’s melancholy expression and the expression of the teenager wearing the shirt.
“Who is she?” Lisa asked.
“Her name is Willow Taylor,” Mrs. Reichl replied. “Willow’s a writer, like you. A poet. She’s very talented.”
The girl looked up from her books and noticed the women watching her. Her mouth dropped open as she spotted Lisa. Willow stared back the way an astronomer studies the stars, but when Lisa smiled at her, the girl immediately looked down with an embarrassed expression and opened up the first book in her stack.
“She knows me,” Lisa said.
“Oh, yes. Actually, the girl idolizes you. She talks about you and your books all the time. You’re her—well, who’s all the rage with teenagers these days? You’re her Ariana Grande, I guess.”
“Impressive pop culture reference, Mrs. Reichl,” Lisa said.
“I do have grandchildren.”
Lisa noticed that Willow refused to look up from the books in front of her, even though it was obvious she was aware that Lisa was watching her. For Lisa, it was impossible to imagine being anyone’s idol. It gave her no thrill. Idols were supposed to be perfect, and Lisa felt far from perfect right now.
She turned back to Mrs. Reichl. “Why do you think I should talk to Willow?”
“You were asking about something unusual that happened two nights ago.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Well, Willow was in here yesterday morning, and I heard her talking to a friend about something she’d seen the previous night. The two of them clammed up when I came by, the way teenagers do. I don’t know what Willow saw, but the poor girl was trembling like a leaf. She was definitely scared of something.”
25
Willow Taylor had already left the library by the time Lisa said goodbye to Mrs. Reichl, but when Lisa hurried outside, she found the teenager standing against the wall near the building’s back door. The girl was reading one of the books she’d checked out. She wore no coat, and she danced uncomfortably in the cold as lingering flakes of snow blew through the alley. Their eyes met, and as she had before, Willow looked nervously away when Lisa spotted her.
Lisa walked right over to her. “Hi. It’s Willow, right?”
The girl’s green eyes widened as if a museum statue had suddenly started talking. “Oh my God. Wow. Hi.”
“I’m Lisa.”
“I know! I know!”
“I hear you’re a writer, like me.”
“Me? No way. Well, I mean, I want to be. Right now, I’m not very good.”
“That’s not what Mrs. Reichl tells me. She says you’re a talented poet, and she has a good eye. I’ve always thought it takes extraspecial talent to be a poet. You really have to understand people’s hearts. Novelists like me, we have it easy. We just make stuff up.”
“Oh, no, I think you’re amazing,” Willow gushed. “I learn so much from your books. I really get into the characters and their stories.”
“I’m glad.” She noticed the pink flush on the girl’s skin. Below her Emily Dickinson shirt, the girl wore skintight black pants that left her ankles bare. The teenager’s green eyes blinked like Morse code.
“Actually, Willow, I wanted to talk to you about something,” Lisa went on.
“To me?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, sure. Anything.”
“Great. But let’s get out of the snow, okay? You look like you’re freezing.”
“Yeah, okay.”
The two of them wandered across the parking lot, which was a slippery mess of wet snow and ice. Lisa had parked the Camaro between two larger SUVs so that it wasn’t visible from the street. She opened the door to let the teenager inside, and then she went around to the driver’s door. When she got in, she turned on the engine to warm up the interior.
“Cool car,” Willow said.
“It’s not mine. I borrowed it. I drive a boring old pickup.”
“Really? Me too. My parents let me drive their pickup to school.”
“Do you go to Lincoln?” Lisa asked.
“Yeah.”
“I did, too. Are you a junior or a senior?”
“Junior,” Willow said. She bounced one knee nervously up and down. “You know, you’re pretty famous at school. All the kids read your books. I actually did a paper on you in my English class. I wrote about Thief River Falls and talked about why you decided to use real places in the book.”
“And why is that?” Lisa asked with a grin.
“Because everybody wants to wake up in the middle of a thriller,” the girl replied.
“That’s very insightful. How’d you do?”
Willow blushed. “I got an A.”
“Good for you.”
The girl twisted her fingers together like she had a nervous tic. “This is probably a weird question, but is writing painful for you?”
“That’s not a weird question at all. And yes, sometimes you have to go to some pretty dark places.”
“Yeah. I know what you mean. My poetry is pretty dark, too. There’s lots of blood and killing and swearing and sex. It freaks my parents out. And my teachers. They look at me and say they can’t figure out where those things come from.”