Brian Freeman - Thief River Falls

What would he do first?

He’d shower. He’d be covered in his wife’s blood and need to get rid of it. Lisa followed the white light into the cabin’s one tiny bathroom and swept aside the curtain to expose a shower stall not much bigger than a phone booth. She’d showered here with Danny once, the two of them pressed together so tightly they could hardly move. He’d been behind her, his arms wrapped—

No. Let it go.

Lisa shined her light up and down the stone walls and into every corner of the travertine base of the shower. She had to get on hands and knees to get close enough. It was hard to get rid of blood, and there would have been a lot of it. Even so, she saw nothing on the smooth stone. The water had washed everything away as Nick frantically scrubbed evidence from his body.

But no, not everything.

She saw flecks on the grout in the far corner. A constellation of pinpoint flecks, so easy to miss. She crawled over and bent down to examine what was there. Her heart raced. It was only a trace of spatter, but she was sure it was blood. The pulse of the shower had sprayed some of the blood off Nick’s skin and left a residue here after it dried. Nick had missed it.

It was the first real proof that Lisa was right. Nick had come here after the murder. Everything had happened right here in this place.

Lisa returned to the main room of the cabin. She shot the white light around the space, making shadows. Her imagination began to fill in the gaps. Maybe Nick had been foolish enough to go out near the river, and one of the neighbors had spotted him. Or maybe Denis had thought long and hard about his son-in-law and come to the same conclusion that Lisa had about where Nick was likely to run. The one thing she knew for certain was that somehow Denis had figured out that Nick was hiding here.

He’d staked out the cabin and waited for the right moment to move in.

Two nights ago.

The rain had been hammering down. Perfect cover. No one would stumble across them in the rain. No one would hear them go through the door; no one would hear them wrestle Nick to the ground, gag him, and drag him outside. In the beam of the white light, she could watch the action of the fight playing out in her mind. She could see their guns. She could imagine their shouts, muffled by the roar of the storm.

Nick panicking, trying to escape. The men chasing him down.

Four men. Deputy Garrett. Deputy Stoll. A ginger-haired killer named Liam.

And Denis Farrell. Denis was there, too. He had to direct the play. His daughter was dead, and he had no patience for the slow wheels of justice, for the insufficient retribution of a taxpayer-funded life behind bars. He was going to exact revenge on Nick Loudon.

Swift.

Immediate.

Brutal.

It would have come off without a hitch, too, except even a perfect plan couldn’t expect the unexpected. None of them could have anticipated a runaway boy getting off a train, wandering through the muddy fields, and finding himself a witness to Denis Farrell’s vengeance.

Denis’s plan didn’t account for Purdue.

Lisa went back outside and stood alone just steps from the river. The scene began to play out in her mind. A thriller scene. She needed to block out the action, where the actors were, how they moved, what they did. The first character was the boy. Purdue arrived first and made some kind of noise that drew Nick outside, so the boy hid in the weeds by the river.

Right over there.

She went past the cabin porch toward the black water. She could walk down the steps and practically wade into the current. It was so close. In her memory, Danny and Noah were arguing.

You can’t spit that far.

Watch me.

Into the river? No way.

I said, watch me, I can do it.

Oh! Oh, close but not close enough. You lose!

Tall weeds grew on the bank, two feet high or more. They bent as the wind blew. She shined her light along the line of brush and saw a frozen spiderweb stretched across the green fronds. At the water’s edge, she saw an area where the weeds were matted down. Someone had taken refuge here, so close to the water that he must have been partly submerged in the river. From the cabin side, with the rain drowning the clearing, Purdue would have been invisible.

But the boy could see everything.

She turned around. Where did they do it? Where did they tie him up? She eyed the trees that were closest to the cabin, illuminating each one with a white beam, deciding where she would torture a killer.

If I’m the writer, where would I put them?

She spotted an evergreen but rejected it because its branches were too low to the ground. A young oak had a trunk that was too thin. Another, larger oak was too far away from the cabin, too close to the property line. A neighbor might hear or see something and get curious. People around here knew the sound of guns.

Then she saw it.

An ash tree only twenty or so yards from the cabin’s front door. It was straight as a telephone pole, thick and mature. The trunk would hold Nick tight and keep him on his feet when they looped the rope around it. They wanted him standing up, not sitting on the wet ground. Denis would have wanted to see his eyes. His mouth was gagged, but his eyes would have begged for mercy.

Lisa approached the tree.

She knew a little secret from her writing. Living things had an energy all their own. They could convey horror just by being there, and she could feel it as she got closer. This ash tree was alive, and it was part of the conspiracy. It was a murder tree.

She examined the gray ridges of the trunk. Five feet off the ground, she found the burn marks where the friction of the rope had eaten away the bark in two parallel lines as Nick struggled. You wouldn’t know what it was unless you knew what it was. She aimed the bright light at the snowy ground. The whole scene took shape for her the way chapters of a book always did, taking over her mind. She felt sick. The violence was coming.

Looking at the ground, she knew they’d tried to clean up the evidence of their crime. When she kicked away the wet snow, she saw that the area was clear of leaves, clear of debris. They’d gathered up everything, right down to the wooden chips of bark that must have sprayed off the ash tree. The rain had taken care of the blood and left no clue of the horrible thing that had happened here.

But plans that looked good on paper still had to rely on humans, hopped up on adrenaline and fear. Humans made mistakes.

Someone hadn’t counted properly.

They’d meant to count to ten, but they’d only gotten to nine.

Lisa spotted something on the ground, caught in the bulging roots of the tree trunk. Somehow they’d missed it. When her light passed over it, she thought at first that it was simply an acorn fallen from one of the oaks, but then she squatted and looked at it more closely.

When she did, she jumped back and slapped a hand over her mouth.

It was not an acorn.

It was a man’s finger, sliced cleanly at the knuckle.

That was how the mystery began, with torture at the river.

Lisa wondered if Denis had felt anything at all, watching it happen. Probably not. No joy, no satisfaction, but also no revulsion. It would simply have been justice in his mind to watch Nick Loudon writhe, to watch him vomit into his gag and have to swallow it down, to watch fountains of blood erupt with each snip of Liam’s clippers. There would have been no expression on Denis’s face at all. He would have stood there like a statue outside the courthouse, patiently observing the story in Nick’s eyes.

Disbelief. Panic. Agony. Madness. And finally nothingness.

Her gaze traveled from the murder tree to the river where Purdue had hidden away in the matted-down brush. The next chapter had taken place there. Denis had found him. Maybe he’d limped down to the water, turning his back on the coup de grâce from Deputy Garrett’s gun. And there he was, a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy with a serious face. A boy who’d seen everything they’d done.