Thief River Falls Read Online Free PDF

some great people at a hospital about an hour south of here. I’d like to take you there.”
    The boy shook his head again, even more firmly than before. “ No. No, we can’t. Please don’t take me there. Please. You can take care of me! I’m safe here with you.”
    Lisa sighed. She didn’t want to agitate the boy any more than he was. “Tell you what, you’ve had a long day. You must be really tired. Your clothes are probably dry by now, so I’ll go get them, and then you can sleep for a little while and get your strength back. I’ve got a friend who can help us decide what to do next, and we can talk about it in the morning. Okay?”
    Relief flooded across his face. “Yes. Thank you!”
    “I’ll be right back with your clothes,” she said.
    Lisa pushed herself to her feet. She could feel that her face was flushed from the heat in the room. She left the boy by the fire and headed back to the doorway that led to the rest of the house, where the air was cooler. Before she left, however, she thought of another question and turned back.
    “Hey, Purdue?”
    He looked up at her with big eyes. “Yes?”
    “I know you may not remember, but can you think of any reason why the police might be looking for you? I mean, is it possible thatsomeone took you who wasn’t supposed to do that? Like maybe the person who was driving the truck?”
    She saw a shadow flicker across his face. “I don’t know.”
    “It’s just that the police came to my house earlier,” she said. “I didn’t know why, but now I wonder if it could be because of you.”
    “The police were here ?”
    “Yes. They left, but they’ll be back in the morning. I can talk to them and find out what’s going on.”
    Purdue said nothing. The shadow returned to his face, and this time it stayed.
    “Anyway, I’ll be right back,” Lisa said.
    She gave the boy another smile and then wandered through the house to the wrought iron stairs and climbed to the laundry room adjacent to her bedroom. She opened the dryer door and bundled up the boy’s clothes in her arms. She brought them back to the den, but when she came through the doorway, she saw that the quilt had been left in a crumpled pile on the floor. The fire still crackled, but no one sat in front of it. The boy was gone.
    “Purdue?” Lisa called. She dropped the clothes on the rug and crossed the room to the glass door that led to her back porch. It was ajar, with cold wind rushing in. She headed onto the deck under the moonlight and called again. “Purdue, where are you? What’s wrong?”
    At first, she heard nothing to tell her where he was. Then, under the murmur of the wind in the fields, her ears honed in on a low, desperate whimper. He was crying. The noise came from behind her. She turned around and squinted into the farthest shadows of the deck, which was crowded by patio furniture and the square body of an outdoor spa. She spotted Purdue huddled next to the wall of her house, his hands wrapped around his knees. He was barely visible, naked and cold in the darkness.
    When she got closer to him and reached out her hand, he cringed, as if he was afraid of her now, too.
    “Purdue,” she murmured. “What’s wrong? Why did you run?”
    Tears dripped from his eyes, and mucus dripped from his nose. “Don’t give me to the police, Lisa. Please.”
    “Why not?”
    His hair fell across his face, and his low voice gurgled from the back of his throat when he tried to speak. “Kill the boy.”
    “What?”
    “I heard men talking,” Purdue told her. “They were policemen, and that’s what they said. Kill the boy. ”

4
    Purdue slept.
    Lisa put the boy in her own bed, rather than in one of the smaller bedrooms downstairs, and she tucked him under the down comforter. His head sank into the mountain of pillows. She turned off the lights but stayed in the bedroom where she could watch him. She pulled a cushioned chair near the windows so she could keep an eye on the front yard, and she