Brian Freeman - Thief River Falls

“Was it dangerous?”

“Very.”

“Were you scared?”

“I was terrified,” Lisa said.

She thought about the video of the fires outside Bakersfield. The towering flames as tall as dragons. Ash falling over a thousand miles. The scorched trees, the wreckage of homes, the blackened hillsides. Fire was a wily, malevolent enemy. The love of her life was getting ready to strap on his gear and head into an inferno.

“If you were so scared, why did you let him go?” Purdue asked.

It was such a simple question. Why?

She’d asked herself that same question a thousand times. It would have been so easy to make him stay. Two words, that was all she’d needed. Two words, and he would never have left her side. She’d been so close to telling him: Don’t go . But he was determined, he was excited, and she wasn’t going to stand in his way.

“I was scared, but Danny wasn’t scared at all,” she said. “He told me not to worry. He said the time would fly by. I’d be busy with the plans for the wedding. We were getting married two months later. He was sure I’d be busy with publishers, too. My first book was out with an agent, and he was convinced I’d get a deal soon. He was so supportive of my dreams. He believed in me even when I didn’t believe in myself. So I had to do the same for him. I couldn’t take him away from something he really wanted to do.”

“He left? He went to fight the fire?”

“Yes, he did.”

She saw their last moments together in her head. She remembered him coming back to bed and sitting next to her on the rumpled sheets. Lacing his fingers tightly with hers. Kissing her, a soft kiss that became long and passionate. They’d both smiled, but their smiles were fake. And then he’d walked away from her. Letting go of him was the hardest thing she’d ever done.

Two words. She should have made him stay.

“What happened to him?” Purdue asked.

“Danny was in California for a month. He could have gone home, but he volunteered to stay when a new fire broke out. People said it was growing like a monster. It was bearing down on this neighborhood in the hills, and he stayed in the area longer than he should have to make sure that everyone got out. Everyone did, because of him. But not Danny. The fire jumped ahead of him and trapped him.”

Purdue frowned. “I’m really sorry, Lisa.”

“Yeah. Me too.” She felt her eyes fill with tears again; she couldn’t hold them back. “Danny’s father barely spoke to me after that. He blamed me for losing him. He said I could have stopped him from going, and he’s right. I let him go.”

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“No. But there’s a lot I would have done differently if I had the chance. While he was gone, my agent called. Danny was right. She’d sold my first book. And I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to give him the news over the phone. I wanted us to be together. I had so much to tell him when he was back, and I wanted to make it a big surprise. So I waited. That’s what I have to live with. I waited, and I never got to tell him about anything.”

As soon as Lisa turned off the highway onto the main street in Lake Bronson, she felt eyes watching her from every direction. There were no secrets and no strangers in a small town. Two older women at the doors of the Covenant Church leaned in and whispered to each other as they spotted her pickup. A farmer standing outside the town’s grain elevators took a cigarette out of his mouth and twisted his whole body to follow her as she drove by. Across the street, a man pumping gas at the Cenex station tapped his baseball cap with a nod of recognition. She didn’t know any of them, but they knew her.

That’s Lisa Power.

It wasn’t just because of her books. People knew her because of the Dark Star, too. She was a local celebrity stalked by tragedy.

“I need to get some cash,” Lisa told Purdue. “I’ll pick up drinks and sandwiches for us at the market. Do me a favor, and stretch across the seat while I’m inside, okay? I don’t want anyone to see you.”

“Okay.”

Her truck bumped across two sets of railroad tracks. She saw the sign for the town grocery ahead of her, just a small building with the word MARKET hung over the door. She’d visited the store once before on a last-minute quest to buy Betty Crocker mix for a chocolate birthday cake. Four cars were parked on the street outside, practically an overflow crowd for the tiny market. She pulled past the building and parked near an open patch of land adjacent to an auto repair shop.

She whispered to Purdue. “Remember what I said. Stay out of sight.”

Lisa climbed out of the pickup into the cool late-morning air. She shivered a little in the wind and brushed her brown hair away from her face. She blinked nervously as she peered at the quiet neighborhood. In the doorway of the auto garage, a teenager in grease-smeared overalls looked up from the engine of a Ford Explorer. He gave her a salute with the business end of a wrench.

“Hello. You’re Miss Power, aren’t you? The writer woman?”

Another stranger who knew who she was.

She hoped her smile didn’t look as awkward as it felt. “Yes, hello.”

Lisa hurried away, uncomfortable with being under a spotlight. She stole glances around her as she walked, but didn’t see more spies. A young woman unloading packages in front of the post office didn’t notice Lisa. The local bar down the cross street was deserted except for an empty white Chevy Malibu parked outside. She saw two old men near the American Legion building, but they were in the midst of a loud argument and didn’t look in her direction.

She ducked inside the small market, where the jingle of a bell on the door drew everyone’s attention. Her arrival shut down the conversations at the cash register. The heavyset, bearded man behind the counter, who wore a blue-checked apron over his sweater and khakis, stopped as he was scanning the price on a can of soup. His customers stared at her with uncomfortable looks of surprise. Lisa felt a flush rise in her face.

“You’re Ms. Power, aren’t you?” the cashier asked, smoothing his thick beard. “Anything I can help you with?”

“I just need a few things. Do you have an ATM?”

“It’s at the back of the store,” he told her.

“Thank you.”

“It’s nice to see you here, Ms. Power,” one of the women in the checkout line added. She carried a two-year-old toddler in her arms, who squirmed to get free and run around the store. “I’m sure you hear this a lot, but I’m waiting impatiently for your next book.”

“So’s my publisher,” Lisa said, bending her lips into another tentative smile and disappearing down an aisle stocked with cereal boxes and bags of tortilla chips and pretzels.

Behind her, the silence erupted into whispers. The talk was all under their breath, but Lisa pricked up her ears and could hear fragments of words near the counter.

The police were here.

Did you hear about the boy?

Maybe she needs help.

She was shocked to realize that they knew what was going on, and then she remembered that it was her own fault. She’d told Mrs. Lancaster about Purdue, which was enough to start rumors racing around town like a 5G wireless signal. They were all good people with good intentions, but Lisa knew where good intentions typically led. Soon the whole town would know exactly where she was, and she didn’t like that.

Lisa stopped in front of the ATM machine. She reached into her pocket for her wallet, but as she took it out, she found that her hands were trembling so badly she could hardly function. It took her several tries to pry the bank card from the slot in her wallet, and when she finally got it out, the card slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor. She picked it up, inserted the card into the machine, and then managed to key in the wrong security PIN and had to start over. When the machine spat the card out, she dropped it again, and she felt like a fool, as if everyone were watching her go to pieces.