Thief River Falls (22 page)

“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.”

“Well, why do you think you write about those things?”

“I don’t know. That’s just where I go. That’s what comes out. But the way people react, I’m wondering if something is wrong with me.”

Lisa could hear the self-doubt in the girl’s voice. It didn’t matter what their age was; at some point every child was as lost as Purdue. Looking at her, Lisa realized that this girl could have been a doppelganger of her own younger self. Wounded and sensitive and at that age where the world was full of uncertainty, desire, innocence, and despair. Twenty-plus years later, Lisa sometimes felt as if nothing had changed.

“Believe me, when I was your age, I heard the same things from people,” Lisa told her.

“Really?”

“Really. I heard more than once that nice girls should write nice things. That wasn’t me. Nothing I wrote was very nice, and it still isn’t. People die in my books. They kill. They betray the people who trust them. They lose the people they love. It’s not pretty. But you know what? That’s life. Writing is a mirror. If someone doesn’t like what you write, maybe it’s because they don’t like what they see in the reflection.”

Willow stared down at her lap. She pushed her black hair back behind her ears. “I never thought about it like that.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned, you keep doing what you’re doing,” Lisa said. “Don’t worry about what other people think.”

“Thanks.”

“I said I wanted to talk to you about something, Willow,” Lisa continued. “I need to ask you a question.”

“Okay.”

“Mrs. Reichl said she overheard you talking to a friend about something that happened two nights ago. She didn’t know what it was, but she thought you were scared. I was wondering if you could tell me what was going on.”

Willow cocked her head in surprise. “Really? That’s what you want to know?”

“Yes. Is that a problem?”

“No, it’s just that this is so weird.”

“What is?”

“That it’s
you
asking me about this,” Willow said. The girl looked over at Lisa and then looked away. “I mean, what happened that night was sort of about you.”

“About me? I don’t understand.”

Willow sucked her upper lip between her teeth and didn’t say anything. Lisa felt the girl’s anxiety spreading like a virus, and it infected her, too. It was the same kind of anticipation she’d felt when she put her hand on the closet door in her parents’ bedroom and knew that something horrible was waiting for her inside.

“Willow? What’s wrong? Tell me what happened.”

The teenager whispered, as if she was sharing a terrible secret. “Do you ever worry about someone bringing your books to life?”

Lisa recoiled as if she’d been slapped. The words coming out of the girl’s mouth sounded strangely familiar, like déjà vu from a nightmare. Then she remembered. She’d heard them before. Two nights ago, before everything started, she’d done a book club with a group of women in California. And the husband at the party, Mr. Dhawan, had asked her the exact same thing.

Have you ever been afraid that someone will bring your books to life?

“Why would you ask me that, Willow?”

The girl squirmed in the seat, as if she’d made a mistake. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything about this. Maybe I should go.”

“No.”
Lisa’s voice was harsher than she intended. “No, stay, please. Talk to me. What’s going on? Where is this coming from?”

Willow hesitated. “I saw something in the cemetery two nights ago.”

“The
cemetery
? What did you see?”

“If I tell you, you’re going to think I’m weird. Really weird, not writer weird.”

“I promise I won’t think that.”

Willow shook her head. “You will. But I guess that’s okay. I
am
weird. See, the thing is, I wrote a poem a couple of years ago. I called it ‘Dance of the Dead.’ It’s my all-time favorite poem. Normally, I don’t really like what I write, but I think this one is pretty good. It’s about this girl who goes to a cemetery in the pouring rain. She’s lonely, and—well—she’s thinking about killing herself. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to be dead, and she wants to find out before she does anything. So she—so she tries to raise the dead. She does this dance in the rain, and she asks the dead to dance with her. And they do.”

Lisa shuddered, listening to Willow build a little shop of horrors. As a writer, she realized that the girl was good. The tingles of fear rose up in Lisa’s mind like a body floating to the surface of a lake.

And still she wondered,
What does this have to do with me?

“In my poem, the dead rise up from the ground as the girl dances,” Willow went on. “Old ones and young ones. The ones who were sick, the ones who died in their sleep, the ones who were murdered. They dance with the girl, all of them taking turns. It’s like she finally has friends, you know? She finally fits in. Except she doesn’t, because she’s still alive. But the dead know this, and they want to help her. So they have a lottery, and the winner is the one who has to
kill
the girl. He’s handsome. He’s young. He’s the last one to dance with her, and when
it’s done, he puts his hands around her neck and chokes her. She doesn’t struggle. She knows he loves her and wants her to be with him. And at the end, the dead sink back into the earth, and the girl is left there, with the rain pouring over her body.”

“Willow,” Lisa murmured, feeling out of breath. “What exactly are you trying to tell me?”

“Two nights ago,
I did that
,” the girl confided in a hushed tone.

“You did what? What are you saying?”

“It was pouring down rain, remember? I was in my bedroom reading that poem, and I felt like there was no one in the world who would ever understand me. I wanted to be the girl in the poem. I thought,
Maybe I can make it come to life. Maybe if I go to the cemetery and dance for the dead, they’ll come get me. They’ll bring me home.
It sounds kind of stupid now, but that’s what I did. I drove down to Greenwood Cemetery, and I went out among the graves, and I danced. I kept hoping I’d see the dead rise, and I’d see that boy in the black suit who would come and put his hands around my neck. I thought I’d see my poem come to life. But I didn’t. I saw something else.”

Lisa couldn’t strip her gaze away from the girl’s face. There was something horrible and hypnotic in those green eyes. “What did you see?”

“I saw
your
book come to life.”

“What?”

Willow nodded earnestly. “I danced until my legs got tired, and I had to stop. So I sat down against a tree, and I cried. I don’t know how long I sat there. The rain just came down, down, down. But after a while, when I was sitting there, I heard something strange from the other side of the cemetery. Near the trees, you know? Near the path to the river? It was like a scrape of metal against rock. I could just barely hear it. I didn’t know what it was, but it felt
familiar
. Like something I knew. And then I remembered. It was just like the prologue of your book. It sounded like someone
digging
. So I got up and went toward
the sound. When I got close enough, I could barely make out someone. Just a shadow in the rain. I couldn’t see who it was, but I saw what they were doing, and I ran. I ran away as fast as I could.”

“Tell me,” Lisa said. “What were they doing?”

“They were burying a body in the cemetery. It was just like
Thief River Falls
, Lisa. They were
burying a body
.”

26

Lisa knew where she had to go. The cemetery.

She crossed the river again and parked the Camaro in an empty lot amid patches of snowdrifts and fallen leaves. Ahead of her, a path led into the woods. The trees and trails of Greenwood Park began here. So did the prologue of
Thief River Falls
.

The sheer weight of memories in this place was suffocating for her, like being buried alive. Whenever she wanted to feel Danny’s presence again, she came here. This was where she, Danny, and Noah had all become friends on their weekends in high school. This was where she and Danny had come on a hot June day during their last summer together, two months before the California fire. They’d found a secluded clearing and shared a bottle of wine, and that was where Danny had taken out an oval-cut diamond ring and asked her to marry him. She hadn’t hesitated a moment before saying yes. With the heat of the day on their bare backs and the buzz of the birds and the insects in the trees, they’d celebrated their engagement with a wildly erotic and foolishly unsafe coupling on the soft grass.

It felt like long ago.

The trail was wet under her feet. She kept her head down and her hands in her pockets. Soon she reached a familiar cross trail. Going right would take her to the river and the path that was haunted by Indians and murderers, according to local legend. Dead Man’s Trail,
they called it. Going left would lead her out of the park toward the open land of the cemetery. Part of her wanted to go right and stay in the past, when she was young and Danny was alive. But she went left, following Willow’s instructions. She saw the midday light through the trees, and when she broke free of the woods, the dead were waiting quietly for her in neat, parallel rows.

This was where her entire family was buried.

Madeleine Power, her mother. Gerald Power, her father. Anton, Charles, and Samuel, her brothers. They were together, lined up next to each other under matching gray marble stones. Danny was buried here, too, in a more distant place. Everyone she loved was here, waiting for the day when she would join them. She thought about Willow’s poem, and for an instant, she was possessed by a strange desire to dance until the dead came to take her away.

But no. She couldn’t do that. According to Willow, Lisa’s book had come to life here two nights ago, and she needed to understand why. If the teenager was right, someone had visited the cemetery in the rain and buried a body in the soft ground. Two nights ago, Purdue had also showed up at her house. She didn’t believe in coincidences. If reality and fiction were blurring, it was because someone had planned it that way.

Someone was playing a game with her, but it didn’t feel like a game at all.

Have you ever been afraid that someone will bring your books to life?

Lisa was alone in the graveyard. The huge field was dusted over with wet snow clinging to the grass, untouched by footprints. Even without the sun, she felt blinded by the reflected brilliance of white light. Rows and rows of headstones pushed out of the ground, stretching for hundreds of feet in every direction. A few trees interrupted their neat geometry. Some trees clung to their colored leaves; others blew them across the field.

She walked up and down the rows. The years on the stones went back for decades, but every now and then, she came across the names
of people she knew. A couple of times, they were people she didn’t even realize had died. The dentist her family had used when she was a girl had passed away two years ago. A nurse who’d retired not long after Lisa joined the hospital had died only recently. The current year was freshly carved on her stone.

Up and down. Back and forth.

Twenty minutes later, with the cold numbing her skin, she still hadn’t found the newly dug grave that Willow had told her about. It occurred to her that maybe the girl had imagined the whole thing. Willow was fragile, probably anorexic, and emotionally overwrought; she’d obviously gone to the cemetery with thoughts of suicide on her brain. Lisa had been concerned enough by the teenager’s story that she’d given Willow her cell phone number and told her to call anytime, day or night, if she ever felt an impulse to harm herself.

So maybe there had been no person in the shadows. No shovel scraping metal against rock. No reenacted scene from her favorite novel. Willow had seen what she wanted to see, all in her head, driven by exhaustion and depression.
Brief reactive psychosis
, that was what the shrinks called it. Lisa had researched the syndrome for her first novel and built it into the book’s plot. In the face of severe trauma, the brain could conjure entire worlds that didn’t exist as a way of blocking out reality. Hallucinations of people and places. Delusions that the mind refused to give up.

Lisa was starting to give up hope of finding anything, but she kept following the rows, continuing past grave after grave.

And then there it was.

Not an illusion. Real.

Near the trees in the cemetery’s far eastern corner, she saw a brown stone with rough, unpolished edges. It was the last plot in the row, and there was an open space next to it for someone else to be buried at a future date. The ground in front of the stone had recently been
overturned and was a blotchy mixture of snow and black dirt. Not green grass like the other graves.

As if a hole had been made and something—someone—had been buried there.

Lisa cast her gaze around the large cemetery. She saw that someone else had joined her in the peaceful ground. A white Oldsmobile was parked on one of the narrow driveways crisscrossing the field, close to the entrance at Greenwood Street. A man made his way down one of the cemetery rows with a large box in his hand, and every now and then, Lisa could see him stop to pluck something off one of the headstones. His clothes—a dark suit and tie, a neat trench coat—made him look like either a minister or an undertaker.