Thief River Falls

Lisa is awoken shortly after midnight by a noise outside her house. Someone is rattling her front door and calling out to her, asking if she is home. Lisa creeps to the window and peeks out the corner, careful to not let the people outside see her. Outside, Lisa sees a black SUV from Pennington County. A police deputy is standing in Lisa’s yard, holding a gun. Lisa knows most of the deputies from Thief River Falls and though she is unable to see the man’s face, “something about this man didn’t feel right. His arrival made her uneasy” (15). She continues to peek through the window, careful to make sure the men can’t see her, hoping they’ll think she isn’t home. The men try opening her garage and front doors, but both doors are locked. Lisa hears the men debate whether to break in. Finally, they agree to return when it is light, get back into their squad car, and drive off.

Once Lisa is sure the deputies are gone, she looks out the window again and sees a boy around 10 years old standing in her yard in the moonlight. When the boy sees Lisa, he turns and runs. Lisa puts on her coat and goes outside to search for him. Lisa calls out to the boy, but he doesn’t answer. Lisa searches around her property. On her way to the barn, which she rarely enters, Lisa sees footprints. Once inside, she notices drops of fresh blood on the ground. Finally, Lisa sees the boy by the light of her flashlight. Lisa speaks to him gently, telling him that she used to be a nurse, and that she wants to help him and make sure he is not hurt. Lisa introduces herself and asks the boy for his name, but the boy responds, “I don’t know” (21). 

Lisa invites the boy inside her house, lets him take a shower, and builds a fire in the fireplace. She discovers a small cut near his ear but no serious injuries. The boy curls up in a quilt by the fire while his clothes are in the wash. As they sit by the fire, Lisa continues to ask the boy questions about himself. The boy still cannot remember his name, so Lisa suggests giving him a “secret agent name” until they figure out his real name (23). Lisa decides to call the boy Purdue. She explains, “It’s from a French word that means ‘lost.’ And right now, you’re sort of a lost boy, aren’t you?” (24). In addition, Purdue is the name of the boy from Lisa’s novel, Thief River Falls.

Lisa continues to ask the boy what he remembers. She discovers that the boy was riding in a truck for a long time when he fell asleep. When he woke up, he realized the truck was parked near a house and no one was around, so he got out of the house and started walking through fields. The boy remembers walking for a long time through the rain and cold until he ended up in Lisa’s yard and he and Lisa saw each other from Lisa’s window. The boy can’t remember anything else from his past. Lisa tells the boy she’d like to bring him to the hospital, but the boy becomes nervous and refuses. Finally, not wanting to upset him further, Lisa tells him he can go to sleep, and then in the morning they’ll figure out what to do next. Lisa gets up to get the boy’s clothes from the dryer, then stops to ask the boy if he knows anything about the police officers that were at her house earlier. Lisa speculates that maybe the police officers were looking for him. She leaves the room, and when she returns with the boy’s clothes, the boy is gone. She soon finds him on her back porch, behind some patio furniture, crying. The boy begs Lisa not to give him over to the police. He says that he heard the policemen say, “Kill the boy” (29).

Lisa allows the boy, whom she is calling Purdue, to sleep in her own bed and pulls up a chair near the bed to keep an eye on him. Sitting in the chair, Lisa remembers her own family. Lisa’s mother, Madeleine, was French. Madeleine and Lisa’s father, an American, met when they were teenagers and he was traveling through Europe. Lisa, her twin brother Noah, and three more younger brothers, all grew up together in Thief River Falls. Lisa remembers how her mother comforted her after the death of her fiancé, Danny. A couple years earlier, Lisa’s mother died in a car accident, a tragedy which “began the chain of events that would pick apart Lisa’s whole world, like loose threads unraveling” (31). Lisa remembers how, when she’d bought her house, “she’d felt as if she needed to escape” (32).

Lisa decides to search through Purdue’s clean clothes for clues, which are folded on the corner of the bed. She takes the clothes to her kitchen. In his jean pockets, she finds money, loose change, and what looks like a car key. Finally, in a small, side pocket, she finds the spent cartridge from a gun. Lisa believes the gun cartridge proves that Purdue is in some kind of trouble. She returns everything to the jean pockets except the gun cartridge and returns the folded clothes to the bedroom. Lisa turns off all the lights, not wanting anyone who comes by the house to know she is home. She gets dressed and retrieves her gun from its safe. Lisa keeps her gun locked away, clean, lubricated, and only retrieves it to take it to the shooting range once a month; even though “[f]irearms were one of the prerequisites of country life […] there had never been a time when she felt as if she needed to keep her pistol on her person when she was out and about. Not until now” (34). By now, it is about four in the morning, a few hours until sunrise. Lisa takes out her phone and calls her best friend, Laurel March.

Chapter 5 introduces two new characters, Denis and Gillian Ferrell, a married couple who live in Thief River Falls. Denis wakes up in the middle of the night from a bad dream in which he is being operated upon by surgeons. Denis realizes Gillian’s side of the bed looks barely slept in. Getting up, Denis discovers Gillian in a chair, drinking gin. Gillian is meant to be ten years sober. Denis and Gillian argue about Gillian’s drinking and about a recent unnamed tragedy that they are both recovering from. Knowing he won’t be able to fall back asleep, Denis gets dressed in his work suit and goes into his study. In Denis’s desk drawer is a loaded gun. The narrator notes that Denis is holding onto the gun “[f]or the end of the road. He’d never intended to go out slowly, wasting away to nothing, losing control over his body and mind day by day” (39). Denis thinks that if he were to ask Gillian about his plan to kill himself, she’d “probably tell him to do whatever he wanted, but to do it outside, please, where the blood wouldn’t get on the carpet and the walls. That was the extent of her concern with whether he lived or died” (39).

Denis goes outside for a walk. He turns on his cell phone and sees a series of missed calls and texts but decides to ignore them until daytime. As Denis walks through his yard, a car stops in front of his house. A police deputy, Garrett, approaches Denis. Garrett says that the boy has been missing for several hours. Denis angrily orders Garrett, “I don’t care what you have to do, but you need to find that boy. Am I clear? Find Harlan and bring him back” (41).