Thief River Falls

Lisa walks through the trees and arrives at the small cabin near the river; she remembers spending time at the cabin with Noah and Danny when they were teenagers. As Lisa tries to imagine what happened when Nick Loudon arrived at the cabin after killing Fiona, she tries to “put herself inside the head of a character like Nick Loudon” (225). Lisa imagines Nick probably took a shower to wash off Fiona’s blood. In the bathroom, Lisa examines the shower, and finds flecks of blood in a corner of the shower that Nick must have missed when he cleaned up. Next, Lisa goes outside and tries to picture the scene of the murder. She finds a matted-down area of grass near the river where Purdue must have hidden. Then, she finds a thick tree with no low branches, where she assumes, they must have tied up Nick. Examining the tree, Lisa finds burn marks in the bark from the friction of the rope used to tie up Nick. As Lisa imagines the murder, “The whole scene took shape for her the way chapters of a book always did” (228). Lisa looks around the ground near the tree for any evidence the killers forgot to clean up. In the grass, she finds, “a man’s finger, sliced cleanly at the knuckle” (229).

Lisa imagines how, after murdering Nick Laudon, Denis Farrell and the other killers must have discovered Purdue hiding near the river. She imagines they came up with a plan to kill Purdue too and bury him along with Nick Laudon in the cemetery. But the deputies only knocked Purdue in the head hard enough to affect his memory, not to kill him, and after burying him in shallow dirt, Purdue managed to dig himself free.

Lisa decides to go to the cemetery and dig up Nick Laudon in order to prove he was killed. Lisa drives back to her neighborhood and steals a shovel from a neighbor’s garage wall. Then, she returns to the newly dug plot in the cemetery and begins to dig, hoping to unearth Nick Loudon. As Lisa digs, two teenage girls appear in the cemetery. One of them demands to know what Lisa is doing and accuses Lisa of burying a body. She runs away from Lisa, announcing she is going to call the police. The second teenager continues to watch Lisa. She explains that she is a friend of Willow’s, and she believes that Lisa isn’t a killer. She promises to text her friend and tell her not to call the police. Then, she tells Lisa she knows what happened to the missing boy, because rumors about him have been circulating at school. The teenager explains to Lisa that a boy was found wandering around a trailer park near the cemetery. A woman found him and brought him to the hospital, but the boy refused to get out of the woman’s car. The woman went inside the hospital, found a doctor, and asked the doctor to help her get the boy inside. The doctor brought the boy inside the hospital and told the woman to go home. When the woman called the hospital the next day to check up on the boy, she was told that there was no record of him ever being at the hospital.

Lisa goes to the hospital to continue searching for clues about Purdue. She waits in the parking lot for the right moment to slip into the hospital unnoticed. She remembers when she used to work as a nurse, recalling “nights when she’d have hours of boredom where she could take out her laptop and write, and there were nights when she’d spent the whole shift literally running from room to room to keep up” (237). Eventually, a big crowd arrives in the hospital parking lot, accompanying a girl who had been injured in a school sports accident. Lisa takes advantage of the chaos to slip inside.

Inside the hospital, Lisa tries to walk through the halls without being noticed. At one point, she sees a nurse approach her, and ducks to pretend to tie her shoe, but she looks up a moment too early and the nurse recognizes Lisa: “The nurse would tell everyone about her. Soon security would be looking for Lisa in the hallways” (238). Lisa continues through the hallway corridors. In one room, she sees an old man lying under white sheets, surrounded by a doctor and two nurses, also wearing white. Suddenly, “[s]omething about the sheer volume of whiteness filled her with an inexplicable horror. White was the absence of color. White was the absence of life” (239). Lisa stumbles down the hallway and into an empty room, and proceeds to have a panic attack.

The empty hospital room door opens and Laurel steps inside. Laurel calmly tells Lisa she’s having a panic attack and offers to get Lisa some medication to help her relax. Laurel says, “I promise you, nothing will happen” (241) but Lisa responds, “Forgive me if your promises don’t mean shit to me right now” (241). Lisa accuses Laurel of being the doctor who took Purdue in after the woman in the trailer park brought him to the hospital. Lisa believes Laurel helped the hospital hide any records of Purdue ever being there. Laurel refuses to confirm Lisa’s story and instead asks simply where Purdue is hiding. Laurel says she knows Lisa has been at her childhood home and explains that Lisa’s tenant in the neighboring rental house saw Lisa. Lisa suddenly worries that the police are searching her house for Purdue. She pushes past Laurel, runs out of the hospital, and gets into her car to drive home and rescue Purdue. 

Lisa drives back to her childhood house. Outside, Lisa can tell from fresh tire tracks in the yard that the local police had been to the house. Lisa hurries inside and searches the house for Purdue, including the crawlspace in the basement where she’d told him to hide, but he is nowhere to be found. Lisa realizes he is gone and begins to cry: “She had thought the Dark Star that took away her family was the deepest, loneliest galaxy she would ever visit, but somehow, this was even worse” (247). Lisa feels she has broken her promise to Purdue to protect him.

She goes upstairs to her parents’ bedroom and opens the closet door where she had found her father after he committed suicide by hanging himself by a belt. In the bedroom, Lisa thinks she can feel the ghosts of her family surround her and suspects “[t]here was room in the cemetery for another plot behind them” (248).

Lisa loops her own belt around the high rod in the closet and retrieves a chair from another room, planning to commit suicide herself. But as she thinks about her deceased family members, “all she could see were shadows where their faces should be and hear them calling like the whistle of the wind through the old windows. Nooooooooooo. That was what they said” (248). Finally, Lisa realizes she can’t kill herself, and she puts her belt back on. She surprises herself by saying aloud, “Noah, I need you” (249). Crying, she realizes, “She could only help herself. And the way to do that was to keep her promise. She had to find Purdue. She had to rescue him, even if it meant giving up her own life in the process” (249). Lisa figures the local police would have taken Purdue to Denis Farrell’s home. Lisa goes outside to the car, but before she gets into the car, she retrieves the fully loaded gun Shyla gave her and puts it in her coat pocket.

Meanwhile, Noah drives toward Thief River Falls. As he’s driving, Noah hears Lisa calling to him for help “as clear as a church bell” (250). He is twenty-five miles from Thief River Falls.

Lisa arrives at Denis Farrell’s house. Outside the house, Lisa can tell Purdue is inside: “It was like a mother’s sixth sense, part of the connection between them” (252). She picks up a rock and throws it at the house’s floor-to-ceiling window, shattering the glass. Lisa climbs through the broken window and into the living room. Hearing the shattering glass, Denis Farrell comes into the living room from the door to his study. Denis says Laurel told him Lisa might come to his house. Lisa says, “I trusted Laurel, but that was a mistake. I told her everything. I opened my whole heart to her. Has she fed you all of my secrets for the past two years?” (253). Denis offers Lisa a drink, which she declines. As Denis pours a drink for himself, he says that he and his wife, Gillian, have been drinking again as a way to cope with the recent death of their daughter. Denis says, “You probably think I have no emotions at all. But believe me, you couldn’t be more wrong” (254).

Lisa accuses Denis of not saying a word to her after Danny died. She believes Denis blames her for Danny’s decision to move back to Thief River Falls instead of becoming a lawyer. Denis explains that he doesn’t blame Lisa for Danny’s life choices, but he does blame Lisa for not stopping Danny from going to California to work as a firefighter, which ultimately lead to his death. Denis tells Lisa, “you’re fooling yourself if you think this fight is a one-way street […] You blame me. You hate me” (255) and reminds Lisa that she named the villain of her novel after him.

Lisa says they’re done talking and accuses Denis of stalling her, so she won’t find Purdue. Denis claims Purdue isn’t at his house, but Lisa believes he is lying. Lisa takes the gun out of her pocket, points it at Denis, and demands to know where Purdue is. Seeing her reflection in a mirror behind Denis, Lisa saw, “a pane of glass reflecting the back of his head and reflecting her own face, too. She didn’t like what she saw, didn’t like the person who was standing there, but she had come too far to let that stop her” (257). Lisa shoots the mirror, causing Denis to flinch. Lisa orders Denis to get on the floor. She runs past Denis and into his office, where she finds Purdue tied to a chair and cuts him free. They run out of the house.