Thief River Falls (33 page)

“What’s going on?” Purdue asked, sensing her panic.

“I think we’re getting to the end of the line,” Lisa said softly.

She sped due east. Her world was narrowed to the white light in front of the Camaro. Everything else was dark. The police car stayed behind her, not trying to stop her or force her off the road, but she knew he was on his radio, calling in backup from every direction.

The car thudded over railroad tracks, pushing her out of her seat. She spotted lights far off in the distance and heard the faint mournful cry of a whistle. A train was coming, only a few minutes away from the crossing. A train was heading north. To Canada.

“You were on your way to Canada,” she said. “That’s why you came here.”

“Yes.”

“Do you still want to see it?”

“Sure, I do.”

“Okay then.”

That was her plan. Get the boy on the train. Let him jump on board, let him travel with the night to faraway places, let him be free. All she needed to do was buy him time. And really, there was no other plan available to her anymore, because as she approached the next crossroad not even a quarter mile away, she saw more red lights. Police cars
had slanted across the highway, forming a barricade. She was blocked from the back and blocked from the front.

Her headlights lit up a lonely building at the intersection. She saw a white tower and realized it was the steeple of a century-old Lutheran church, dropped down miles from anywhere. Her family had worshipped there. She remembered sitting in the wooden pews as a child and watching the light in the eyes of the people who stared at the altar. She remembered the minister talking about eternal life and wondering how anyone could really live forever.

It wasn’t a large building, just the steeple and the slanted gray roof and a trio of windows on the walls of the small sanctuary. Evergreens made a U around the back of the building, creating a little grove that separated the church from the cornfield that butted up against it. There were no lights on inside. She had the strange thought that God wasn’t home.

The police had the cross street blocked in front of the church, so Lisa spun the wheel hard. The Camaro swerved onto the shoulder and took flight across a shallow ravine where dead weeds grew out of the snow. The bumper hit the other slope, jarring their bodies with the impact, and then the wheels chewed into the ground and climbed from the valley with a roar. She turned the wheel again, feeling the car spin. She hit the brakes and jerked the Camaro to a stop just outside the church’s white front doors.

“Inside,” she shouted to Purdue. “Get inside right now!”

The boy ran for the church door. Lisa popped the release on the trunk and bolted from the car with the pistol in her hand. She pointed into the sky and fired. The noise of the gunshot froze everything around her. The police car that had been chasing her slammed to a stop, jerking across the highway. She saw the doors of two other police cars opening on the other side of the intersection. Spotlights swung her way, bathing her in white light.

“Stay there!” she screamed into the wind. “Don’t come any closer!”

She could hear other sirens. More cars were coming. And somewhere out there she heard the whistle of the train again. The back door of the church led toward the evergreens and from there into the cornfield and from there to the railroad tracks. All she needed to do was give Purdue a chance. A chance to run. A chance to disappear like one small shadow into the night, where the police would never find him. Get on the train. Go to a new life.

It was an escape he had to make alone. Without her.

She would stay here, giving him cover. She would hold off the police until he was gone. Then they could do what they wanted with her. Nothing mattered once the boy was safe.

Lisa ran to the trunk and threw it open. She gathered up everything that was inside into her arms.

The assault rifle. The ammunition. An arsenal to hold them at bay.

She took it all with her and followed Purdue into the church.

39

Almost two dozen police cars staked out the two roads that made an L at the lonely corner outside the church. A handful of cops with guns drawn roamed the barren cornfields behind the trees. Intersecting lights from two sides erased the shadows and turned the black night to day. The evergreens bent as the wind blew, and waves of snow continued to pour through the light.

Denis Farrell was at the scene. So was the sheriff, who was on the front line with his officers. The media had heard the overlapping calls on the police radios, and they were on the other side of a perimeter a hundred yards away. Gawkers had begun to show up in the fields as rumors of the standoff went viral around town.

The mayor of Thief River Falls was there, too.

“Have we tried calling the church phone?” he asked Denis in a reedy voice. The mayor was a genial man in his sixties, with two little flaps of gray hair on his balding head. His black glasses were coated in snow. He kept taking them off and wiping them and shaking his head in disbelief at what was going on around him. “I mean, has anyone been able to reach her?”

“We called the church phone and Lisa’s cell phone,” Denis replied. “She’s not answering either one.”

“Well, there has to be someone who knows her, isn’t there? The woman grew up in this town, for God’s sake. We have to have someone who can talk a little sense into her.”

Denis shrugged. “I talked to Laurel March at the hospital, and I explained the situation. She’s on her way over here.”

“Is this woman a doctor?” the mayor asked. “Or is she a friend of Lisa’s? I mean, either way, I hope she can help.”

“Dr. March is a psychiatrist,” Denis replied.

“A shrink? Really?”

“Lisa’s been seeing her for the past couple of years.”

“Well, I’d like to say it’s helping, but it sure doesn’t look that way. Did Dr. March have any suggestions?”

“She said to do nothing until she got here,” Denis replied. “We don’t want to push Lisa and make her feel threatened. It’s impossible to predict how she’ll react if we do that. On the other hand, I’m worried that she may take matters into her own hands. She’s got a lot of guns and ammunition in there.”

The mayor wiped his glasses again. “You really think she’s dangerous?”

Denis scowled and lost his temper. “Dangerous? Of course, she’s dangerous! She broke into my house and took a shot at me tonight. She took a shot at the cops when she went off the road. Yesterday, she pulled a gun on two deputies at her house. She’s holed up inside the church with assault weapons, and she knows how to use them. She’s putting people at risk, and I don’t care if she’s mentally ill. You could say that about any mass shooter.”

The mayor waited for him to calm down.

“I hear you on all of that, Denis, and you’re right. The only thing I’m saying is this is
Lisa Power
we’re talking about. Everyone around here knows her. And this isn’t going to stay local. We’re going to have national press on this, too. This is
news
, Denis. I’m already getting calls.
We need to take every possible step to make sure this situation doesn’t get out of hand.”

“It’s already out of hand,” Denis snapped. “Look, I know exactly who Lisa is. Believe me. No one wants to see anyone get hurt here, least of all Lisa herself. But that’s up to her. The safety of the town and our police officers comes first. If we had some nobody hunkering down in that church with a rifle, you think we’d hesitate to take a shot when we had it? Of course not. The sheriff and I aren’t giving Lisa Power any free passes. If she threatens our people, if she fires at us, she becomes a target, and we have to take her out. You know that’s the only way to go.”

The mayor exhaled long and slow. “Son of a bitch. I know what you’re saying, Denis, but you need to think about what Lisa has been through. Not only is she
not
some nobody, she’s also a woman who’s just gone through the worst kind of loss that a human being can experience. We need to keep that in mind.”

Denis held himself in check this time. He wanted to yell, but yelling accomplished nothing. And the fact was, he did know what Lisa had been through. He didn’t like her, but he didn’t wish her any harm. They’d been estranged for years, but she was still a part of his life. And a part of his family.

“I’m not casting blame on Lisa,” Denis told the mayor. “I know how difficult this situation is for her and how impossible it is to accept. Remember, my wife and I are going through this, too. We’re grieving, just like she is.”

The mayor reached out and put a hand on Denis’s shoulder. “Of course, you are. I wasn’t trying to imply otherwise, Denis. You and Gillian have been through hell these past few days. This whole year, really, ever since the diagnosis. I can’t imagine what this time has been like for you.”

“Thank you.”

“Is there any news of Harlan, by the way?” the mayor asked. “Did you find out where Lisa took the body?”

Denis nodded. He felt as if one weight had been lifted from his shoulders, only to be replaced by an even heavier burden. “Yes, I got a phone call a few minutes ago. They found him and took him back to the hospital. The funeral home will collect him shortly. So at least that mystery is solved.”

“Well, good. One small blessing. Where was he?”

Denis stared at the church and thought of Lisa inside, making a fortress out of her guns and her grief. “She took Harlan from his hospital room to the cemetery. A groundskeeper dug up the grave tonight and found the boy’s body there, wrapped in a sheet. Really, I don’t know why I didn’t think to send someone over there before now. I should have guessed that’s what she would do. After Harlan died, she took him away from the hospital to be with his father. She buried him with Danny.”

Laurel rushed to get ready. She had to get to the church.

She already had Lisa’s clinical file open on the desk in her hospital office, and she’d been rereading every sentence of her notes from the past two years, looking for clues, looking for new ideas. She went over everything. Everything Lisa had told her about losing Madeleine and the rest of her family. Everything Lisa had told her about Harlan as her son’s cancer got worse month by month. As the treatments produced no results, only misery.

Until two nights ago in the hospital.

Until the end.

Laurel felt helpless. She hadn’t felt that way often in her career. She told herself that she’d guided a lot of patients through terrible loss, but she’d failed Lisa. She had never imagined the possibility of a crisis like the one Lisa was experiencing. She’d tried to contain it; she’d hoped she could reach Lisa before grief carried her across a line from which she’d never return. But Laurel was worried now that it was too late.

Lisa was ready to die for the child she called Purdue.

She turned off the lamp on her desk and grabbed her coat from a hook near the window. She needed to hurry. The office was dark, and the snow was like silver through the window. She pulled on her coat, but before she could leave, a shadow filled the doorway.

A man was there.

“
Noah
,” Laurel said.

She crossed the short space between them and put her arms around Lisa’s brother. She felt a desperate sense of relief seeing him, as if maybe there was still hope. Maybe with him here, Lisa could still be saved.

“I’m so glad you came,” Laurel said. “Did Lisa call you? Do you know what’s going on?”

Noah shook his head. He looked at a loss, not sure what to say. It had been more than a year since Laurel had seen him, more than a year since Noah had run away from Thief River Falls. Of course, Laurel knew what Lisa didn’t, that Noah had been on the verge of suicide before he moved away. That he’d sat in Lisa’s basement with a loaded gun in his mouth. The only thing Lisa knew was that a month after her brother had bolted from her life, her only son had been diagnosed with aggressive brain cancer, and she’d been left to deal with it alone.

“I don’t know anything,” Noah said, “but I can feel that Lisa’s in trouble. Do you know what it is?”

“It’s Harlan,” Laurel told him softly.

Noah stared at her, his eyes widening with horror. He didn’t want to hear it, and he didn’t want to believe it. “Oh my God. You can’t be serious. Not him, too. How bad is it?”

“He passed away two nights ago, Noah. Cancer. I’m so sorry.”

Noah turned away from her and slammed one of his fists into the office wall. A keening, desperate wail squeezed from his throat. When he turned back, his entire face had dissolved into fury and tears. He could barely speak. The skin on his hand was a mess of blood.

“I thought the Dark Star was me,” he murmured in a strangled voice. “I really did. I thought I was the curse, that I was the reason they all died.”

“There’s no such thing as a curse,” Laurel told him.

“Well, I didn’t believe that. I thought if I left, the tragedies would go away. And instead this happens. I leave Lisa and Harlan alone, and this happens. My God.”

Laurel saw something different in Noah’s face. Maturity. He’d aged more than just a year in the time he’d been gone. For a man who was nearly forty, he’d been mostly a child his whole adult life. With each loss in their family, Noah had grown more vulnerable, forcing his sister to shoulder the burdens by herself. Lisa had always been the strong one. But that was then. Laurel was staring at a new man. He was torn apart by guilt, but he wasn’t running anymore.