Thief River Falls

Lisa parks the Camaro in a yard overrun by trees at the home of a retired teacher, two blocks from Lisa’s old childhood home. Lisa and Purdue walk through front yards to Lisa’s old house. Lisa and Noah still own the house, but nobody has been inside for a year. Next to her childhood home is a rental house that she had lived in before buying her farmland. Lisa and Purdue enter the house. Lisa feels, “The ghosts of her family welcomed her” (156). As Lisa walks through the house, she remembers how she and Noah used to try to hear each other’s thoughts. She remembers, “Noah had always believed in the special power of twins. She wasn’t so sure. Yes, there were times when words and emotions would pop into her head out of nowhere, and sometimes she wondered if that was her twin brother. Or maybe it was just her imagination” (157). Lisa explains to Purdue that she is going to show him a secret hiding place in the basement, where she and Noah used to hide as kids. Lisa wants to go out and try to find information about Purdue and wants Purdue to hide if anyone comes to the house. Before she leaves, Lisa encourages Purdue to try to remember anything about his past. Purdue insists he can’t remember anything. At that moment, the house rattles from a train passing nearby. Lisa shows Purdue where they can see the train tracks from the windows. Seeing the train pass by, Purdue remembers he arrived to Thief River Falls by train  and that he was running away.

Lisa asks Purdue what he was running away from, and Purdue remembers his life before he arrived at Lisa’s farmhouse.

According to Purdue, he grew up with his mother. Purdue and his mother didn’t have a home; instead, they were always moving, staying with friends in different places, and sometimes staying in the car. Purdue never knew his father. One day, his mother started having really bad headaches. When the headaches continued to worsen, they went to the hospital. At the hospital, the doctors discovered a brain tumor. The doctors and nurses shaved Purdue’s mother’s head and took her into surgery where she died. After his mother’s death, the doctors began asking Purdue about his father and his family. Purdue lied to the doctors and told them his father was coming to get him. Purdue snuck out of the hospital and hopped onto a train nearby. He rode the train for a day until it stopped, and he got off and walked across some fields. The fields led to a river he walked along until he came to a small house. He considered sneaking inside, but he could tell there was a man inside, so he hid outside instead. After a while, four men arrived at the house—the two deputies, the large bald man, and Liam, the red-haired man. The four men dragged the man in the house outside, tied him up, gagged him, cut off his fingers, and killed him.

Lisa asks Purdue how he escaped the murder scene and ended up hiding in a truck, but Purdue only says, “I don’t remember. It’s like one minute I was in the woods while they were killing that man, and then the next minute I was hiding in the truck. And then I was lookup up and seeing you in the window of your house. In between, it’s all just fuzzy” (166). Lisa asks Purdue if he remembers his real name. She “expected to see his face break into a broad grin, like a child reaching out his hand and seeing a butterfly land on it. But it never did. Instead, his head snapped sideways so that he didn’t have to look at her” (166). Purdue insists he can’t remember his name, but to Lisa, “it was painfully obvious that he was lying to her” (166).

Lisa shows Purdue the secret hiding place from her childhood, a crawlspace in the basement under the floorboards. Lisa tells Purdue to hide if he hears anyone come to the house. Lisa leaves. It is snowing heavily, enough to make it difficult to see: “If she couldn’t see ten feet in front of her, then neither could anyone else. Including the people who were looking for her” (167). Lisa heads to the train tracks and walks along the tracks. Lisa walks for a while, but it is difficult to see through the blizzard. Finally, she turns around to walk back, but “she realized she’d lost all sense of direction […] she had no sense of whether she was going north or south” (168). Lisa thinks, briefly, “Noah, I need help” (168) but then “shoved that thought away before it was even fully formed” (169). Finally, Lisa notices the neighbor’s yard with the overgrown trees where she’d hidden the Camaro. Lisa gets into the car and starts to drive.

Lisa heads to the Thief River Falls library to talk to the senior librarian, Mrs. Reichl. Lisa remembers visiting the library as a child and has known Mrs. Reichl since she got her first library card at five years old, “which to a bookish little girl was like a religious experience” (169). At the library, Lisa and Mrs. Reichl go into Mrs. Reichl’s office. Lisa tells Mrs. Reichl she believes something odd happened in town two nights ago and asks if Mrs. Reichl has heard any suspicious rumors. Mrs. Reichl can’t think of anything, but she suggests Lisa talk to a local teenager, Willow Taylor. Lisa and Mrs. Reichl look out Mrs. Reichl’s office window and see Willow Taylor checking out books. Mrs. Reichl tells Lisa that Willow is a writer too, and Willow idolizes Lisa. For Lisa, being someone’s idol “gave her no thrill. Idols were supposed to be perfect, and Lisa felt far from perfect right now” (174). Mrs. Reichl explains that Willow was whispering to a friend about something she’d seen the previous night. Mrs. Reichl could tell Willow was scared by whatever she’d seen.

Willow leaves the library, and Lisa hurries to find her outside. She is leaning against the side of the building, reading a book. Lisa approaches her and introduces herself. Willow is excited to meet Lisa and tells her she thinks her books are amazing. Lisa asks Willow if she can ask her a question, and Lisa and Willow get inside the Camaro to get out of the cold. Inside the car, Willow tells Lisa she wrote a paper on Thief River Falls for school. Willow asks Lisa if writing is painful for her, and Lisa responds, “yes, sometimes you have to go to some really dark places” (177). Willow says she writes about dark things too, and sometimes it freaks people out. Lisa explains:

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. (177)

Lisa asks Willow about the scary thing she saw the previous night. Willow explains that she wrote a poem recently, and she decided to bring her poem to life in Greenwood Cemetery, the local cemetery in Thief River Falls. In Willow’s poem, a girl is so sad, she wants to kill herself, but she doesn’t know what it’s like to be dead. The character in the poem goes to the cemetery and begins dancing in the rain, hoping to raise the dead. In the poem, the dead rise and dance with the girl, until one dead person, a handsome young man, puts his hands around his neck and chokes her. Willow decided to go to the cemetery to dance, just like the girl in her poem. While Willow was dancing, she saw men burying a body.