Denis’s plan didn’t account for Purdue.
Lisa went back outside and stood alone just steps from the river. The scene began to play out in her mind. A thriller scene. She needed to block out the action, where the actors were, how they moved, what they did. The first character was the boy. Purdue arrived first and made some kind of noise that drew Nick outside, so the boy hid in the weeds by the river.
Right over there.
She went past the cabin porch toward the black water. She could walk down the steps and practically wade into the current. It was so close. In her memory, Danny and Noah were arguing.
You can’t spit that far.
Watch me.
Into the river? No way.
I said, watch me, I can do it.
Oh! Oh, close but not close enough. You lose!
Tall weeds grew on the bank, two feet high or more. They bent as the wind blew. She shined her light along the line of brush and saw a frozen spiderweb stretched across the green fronds. At the water’s edge, she saw an area where the weeds were matted down. Someone had taken refuge here, so close to the water that he must have been partly submerged in the river. From the cabin side, with the rain drowning the clearing, Purdue would have been invisible.
But the boy could see everything.
She turned around. Where did they do it? Where did they tie him up? She eyed the trees that were closest to the cabin, illuminating each one with a white beam, deciding where she would torture a killer.
If I’m the writer, where would I put them?
She spotted an evergreen but rejected it because its branches were too low to the ground. A young oak had a trunk that was too thin. Another, larger oak was too far away from the cabin, too close to the property line. A neighbor might hear or see something and get curious. People around here knew the sound of guns.
Then she saw it.
An ash tree only twenty or so yards from the cabin’s front door. It was straight as a telephone pole, thick and mature. The trunk would hold Nick tight and keep him on his feet when they looped the rope around it. They wanted him standing up, not sitting on the wet ground. Denis would have wanted to see his eyes. His mouth was gagged, but his eyes would have begged for mercy.
Lisa approached the tree.
She knew a little secret from her writing. Living things had an energy all their own. They could convey horror just by being there, and she could feel it as she got closer. This ash tree was alive, and it was part of the conspiracy. It was a murder tree.
She examined the gray ridges of the trunk. Five feet off the ground, she found the burn marks where the friction of the rope had eaten away the bark in two parallel lines as Nick struggled. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew what it was. She aimed the bright light at the snowy ground. The whole scene took shape for her the way chapters of a book always did, taking over her mind. She felt sick. The violence was coming.
Looking at the ground, she knew they’d tried to clean up the evidence of their crime. When she kicked away the wet snow, she saw that the area was clear of leaves, clear of debris. They’d gathered up everything, right down to the wooden chips of bark that must have sprayed off the ash tree. The rain had taken care of the blood and left no clue of the horrible thing that had happened here.
But plans that looked good on paper still had to rely on humans, hopped up on adrenaline and fear. Humans made mistakes.
Someone hadn’t counted properly.
They’d meant to count to ten, but they’d only gotten to nine.
Lisa spotted something on the ground, caught in the bulging roots of the tree trunk. Somehow they’d missed it. When her light passed over it, she thought at first that it was simply an acorn fallen from one of the oaks, but then she squatted and looked at it more closely.
When she did, she jumped back and slapped a hand over her mouth.
It was not an acorn.
It was a man’s finger, sliced cleanly at the knuckle.
33
That was how the mystery began, with torture at the river.
Lisa wondered if Denis had felt anything at all, watching it happen. Probably not. No joy, no satisfaction, but also no revulsion. It would simply have been justice in his mind to watch Nick Loudon writhe, to watch him vomit into his gag and have to swallow it down, to watch fountains of blood erupt with each snip of Liam’s clippers. There would have been no expression on Denis’s face at all. He would have stood there like a statue outside the courthouse, patiently observing the story in Nick’s eyes.
Disbelief. Panic. Agony. Madness. And finally nothingness.
Her gaze traveled from the murder tree to the river where Purdue had hidden away in the matted-down brush. The next chapter had taken place there. Denis had found him. Maybe he’d limped down to the water, turning his back on the coup de grâce from Deputy Garrett’s gun. And there he was, a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with a serious face. A boy who’d seen everything they’d done.
Lisa tried to imagine the horror of that moment. It must have felt to Denis that God was punishing him with a cruel joke, sending a witness to that exact place at that exact moment. You think you’re good, not evil? You think you’re delivering justice? Then see if you can live with what you have to do now.
She knew how Denis had gone about saving himself. How he’d chosen to protect his secret. She’d already given him the perfect plan. She’d laid it all out for him in Thief River Falls. Kill the boy. There was no other choice, nothing else to do, no opportunity for reprieve. Kill the boy. Then take both of the bodies to the cemetery, and bury them in a fresh grave.
Oh, how Denis must have appreciated the irony of bringing the events of her book to life. She’d painted him as a fictional villain, and now he had the opportunity to turn the tables on her. Now he was a real villain. A real murderer.
But sometimes life imitated art too well. The deputies were nervous. They didn’t like the idea of murdering an innocent boy. They didn’t hit him hard enough; they didn’t bury him deep enough. Purdue escaped, just like the Purdue in her own novel had escaped. She understood now why they were so desperate to find him and get him back. As long as the boy was free, Denis and the others were at risk of being exposed.
Lisa knew what she had to do next.
She had to go to the cemetery and dig up Nick Loudon.
She left the cabin behind, which was like leaving her own past behind all over again. All the echoes. All the memories. She lingered in the woods, staring at the cabin and the river, wishing she could go back to those days, when she didn’t know the horrors that lay ahead. All the loss she would have to endure. Then the white snow blew into her face, waking her up, and she had to go. She hiked through the trees back to the Camaro parked on the shoulder of the dirt road.
The darkness was complete out here. She couldn’t see a thing. As she drove, the car’s headlights felt weak against the sheer vastness of the dark land around her. She used the back roads to retrace her steps, avoiding the center of town. She made a stop at the house on Annie Street where she’d been hiding the Camaro, but she didn’t leave the car there this time. Instead, she needed something she’d seen leaning against the garage wall.
A shovel.
It was heavy in her hands, with a pointed blade. The metal was rusted, but it would do the job.
She got back in the Camaro and drove to where Greenwood Street dead-ended near the railroad tracks. She parked the car. With the shovel clenched in her right hand, she hiked across the tracks and through empty parkland toward the cemetery only a few hundred feet away. The snow was still falling, huge cold flakes nipping at her exposed face. The world was white, like an avalanche falling over her. She crossed Pennington Avenue, where there was no traffic, and found herself back among snow-topped rows of tombstones.