32
The trees all spoke in urgent whispers, as if warning Lisa to turn back. She went slowly, navigating through tangled branches and listening to the in and out of her own breathing. The ground was soft, a shallow bed of snow and wet leaves yielding under her feet. The darkness of the night left her mostly blind, but her other senses were alert. She smelled no fire, no cigarette, no cologne. She heard no voices, no footsteps. If anyone was waiting for her near the river, they were well hidden.
She tried to remember the way in. It had been a long time, and everything looked alike under the dark sky. The outer woods were like a wall, but when she crossed that barrier, the trees thinned, spaced around grassland. The cabin was hidden somewhere in there. Danny’s grandfather had built it, or maybe his great-grandfather, back when there were no homes along the river, only rustic forest for hunting and fishing.
Somewhere close by, water gurgled against the rocks. Lisa was near the river. She pushed her way to the very edge of the bank, where a ribbon of black water snaked through the channel. The temperatures weren’t low enough yet to freeze the current in place. She stared at the water, overwhelmed by memories. She remembered skinny-dipping here with Danny during those long-ago high school summers. She remembered drinking whiskey with Danny and Noah around a campfire until she was sick. She remembered a moonlit night when she’d encountered a black bear up to its haunches in the river. It had shaken its wet fur, bared its teeth at her, and then lumbered peacefully away.
Lisa followed the path beside the bank. Purdue would have done the same thing, not knowing where it would take him. She knew the cabin was close by, because you could practically spit from the back porch to the water. Danny and Noah had both tried. Nestled among thick trees, the cabin was barely visible in the shadows. It was unchanged from her teenage years, although it looked smaller than she remembered it. She felt a keen sense of everything that had been lost in the time since then. Danny was gone. Noah had left.
She stopped where she was, waiting before she went closer, making sure she was really alone. Denis had no way of knowing how much Purdue had told her and how much the boy remembered of that rainy night. If he suspected that Lisa knew what had happened here, then he might have someone waiting for her. But the solitude of the area felt unbroken.
The cabin welcomed her back like an old friend. It wasn’t large, and the decades had weathered the exterior. She wondered why Denis had never torn it down and started over, but maybe there was a little bit of sentiment in the man, despite everything he’d done. She found the front door and let herself inside, but she kept the lights off. She remembered that the interior was always nicer than the outside would lead her to believe. Plush furniture. A pool and gaming table. A fireplace. Always beer in the refrigerator and food in the cupboard.
She tried to stay in the present, but the past kept creeping into her mind. Music played from her memory’s speakers; it was Third Eye Blind singing “Semi-Charmed Life” as she danced with Danny. Eighteen years old. The week after her high school graduation. Her gaze traveled around the shadows. She’d kissed him there, up against the wall under the old deer head. She’d taken off his shirt there, where the fire warmed their skin, and he’d done the same to her. She’d lost her virginity there, on the cushions of the sectional sofa.
Stop it!
The past was over. The past was dead.
She had to think like a thriller writer. She had to figure out the mystery of what had happened two nights ago.
Lisa turned on her phone again. She wouldn’t be here long, not long enough for them to find her. When she activated the flashlight, she turned the phone around and squinted as a bright white beam shone in her face. A headache thumped behind her temples, as it had for two days. She quickly pointed the light at the hardwood floor, and when the afterimage disappeared from her eyes, she used it to search the small interior of the cabin.
She tried to put herself inside the head of a character like Nick Loudon.
He’d come back to Thief River Falls in a fit of rage. He’d stormed inside his old house and murdered his wife. Not just murdered her. Desecrated her. Defiled her. He’d left behind the body of Fiona Farrell for her father to find and fled on foot—to go where? Where could he hide in a town where everyone was looking for him? The cabin was the obvious spot. He could clean up. He could stay here for days undetected if he needed to. Stay until the heat died down and everyone had assumed that he’d slipped out of town.
What would he do first?
He’d shower. He’d be covered in his wife’s blood and need to get rid of it. Lisa followed the white light into the cabin’s one tiny bathroom and swept aside the curtain to expose a shower stall not much bigger than a phone booth. She’d showered here with Danny once, the two of them pressed together so tightly they could hardly move. He’d been behind her, his arms wrapped—
No. Let it go.
Lisa shined her light up and down the stone walls and into every corner of the travertine base of the shower. She had to get on hands and knees to get close enough. It was hard to get rid of blood, and there would have been a lot of it. Even so, she saw nothing on the smooth stone. The water had washed everything away as Nick frantically scrubbed evidence from his body.
But no, not everything.
She saw flecks on the grout in the far corner. A constellation of pinpoint flecks, so easy to miss. She crawled over and bent down to examine what was there. Her heart raced. It was only a trace of spatter, but she was sure it was blood. The pulse of the shower had sprayed some of the blood off Nick’s skin and left a residue here after it dried. Nick had missed it.
It was the first real proof that Lisa was right. Nick had come here after the murder. Everything had happened right here in this place.
Lisa returned to the main room of the cabin. She shot the white light around the space, making shadows. Her imagination began to fill in the gaps. Maybe Nick had been foolish enough to go out near the river, and one of the neighbors had spotted him. Or maybe Denis had thought long and hard about his son-in-law and come to the same conclusion that Lisa had about where Nick was likely to run. The one thing she knew for certain was that somehow Denis had figured out that Nick was hiding here.
He’d staked out the cabin and waited for the right moment to move in.
Two nights ago.
The rain had been hammering down. Perfect cover. No one would stumble across them in the rain. No one would hear them go through the door; no one would hear them wrestle Nick to the ground, gag him, and drag him outside. In the beam of the white light, she could watch the action of the fight playing out in her mind. She could see their guns. She could imagine their shouts, muffled by the roar of the storm.
Nick panicking, trying to escape. The men chasing him down.
Four men. Deputy Garrett. Deputy Stoll. A ginger-haired killer named Liam.
And Denis Farrell. Denis was there, too. He had to direct the play. His daughter was dead, and he had no patience for the slow wheels of justice, for the insufficient retribution of a taxpayer-funded life behind bars. He was going to exact revenge on Nick Loudon.
Swift.
Immediate.
Brutal.
It would have come off without a hitch, too, except even a perfect plan couldn’t expect the unexpected. None of them could have anticipated a runaway boy getting off a train, wandering through the muddy fields, and finding himself a witness to Denis Farrell’s vengeance.