Thief River Falls Read Online Free PDF Page B

draped her mother’s quilt over her knees.
    She knew she wouldn’t sleep herself.
    Her fingers caressed the squares that were sewn together on the small satin quilt. Her mother had made it for her a decade earlier. All the patterns were in different shades of blue, decorated with whimsical cartoon animals. A whale. A unicorn. A pelican. A giraffe. Her mother had been quirky and artsy when it came to crafts, and Lisa attributed her own love of creating things to her mother’s genes.
    Madeleine Power. Her mother, born in France in a small coastal town outside Marseille, pretty, religious, spirited. She’d met Lisa’s father when they were both teenagers and he was an American traveling through Europe with a church choir group. They’d fallen in love, and she’d followed him home to this barren part of the world without a look backward. Sometimes Lisa tried to imagine the courage it had taken for an eighteen-year-old French girl to uproot herself and marry a young Minnesota factory worker thousands of miles from home. But that washer mother—utterly fearless. She’d filled her loneliness by having a large family. First Lisa and her twin brother entered the world, then three more boys over the course of the next eight years, all of them squeezed together in a matchbox house on Conley Avenue in Thief River Falls.
    As the only two women in the family, Lisa and her mother had been so close as to be inseparable. She’d lived at home with her parents until she was almost thirty. Even when she’d finally moved out, it was to a rental house right next door, where she could still talk to her mother through the open windows and hear Madeleine singing French songs as she baked.
    It was Madeleine who’d read her daughter’s stories at age five and told her that one day she would be a writer.
    It was Madeleine who’d been seated next to her at the Grand Hyatt in New York, cheering and whistling when Lisa’s book was named the thriller of the year.
    It was Madeleine who’d cradled her when the call came about Danny, who’d held Lisa as she cried inconsolably, who’d whispered that even in the wake of terrible grief, life would go on. La vie continue. Il doit.
    It was strange how Lisa’s life had always changed with phone calls.
    A phone call from the fire chief in Kern County, California, to break the news about Danny.
    A phone call from Reese Witherspoon to make her book into a movie.
    A phone call from the police in Crookston, Minnesota, to let her know that there had been an accident on a slippery, snow-swept road, that a semi had gone through a stop sign on the rural highway, that we are very sorry but your mother, Madeleine Power, was killed in the collision.
    So began the chain of events that would pick apart Lisa’s whole world, like loose threads unraveling.
    The Dark Star.
    The quilt slipped from her knees. She got out of the chair, because she couldn’t sit still anymore. Her eyes were teary. She stared out the bedroom windows, watching the flat, empty earth that went on forever in the darkness. Maybe leaving her hometown and buying a place here,away from people she knew, had been a mistake, but at the time, she’d felt as if she needed to escape.
    That was what her twin brother, Noah, had done, too.
    Escape. Run away.
    Lisa walked over to her bed and stared down at Purdue, lost in the white blanket and white pillows. He looked small and fragile that way, as if she could blink and he would disappear. Instinctively, she reached down and ran her fingers through his thick hair. He murmured and sighed in his sleep.
    The echo of his words rippled through her memory. Kill the boy.
    She didn’t know whether to believe what he’d told her. He gave no indication of lying, and he was injured and clearly terrified of something. And yet it was so easy for children to misread and misunderstand things. Whatever trauma he’d suffered had interfered with his memory, and maybe he’d filled in the gaps with fantasy. She would