Thief River Falls Read Free Page A

immediately, and all she could see in front of her now was the huge bright-white screen, so white that it hurt her eyes. She felt herself breathing quickly, hyperventilating.
    She tried to walk, but the whole world spun like a carousel, and she found herself collapsing to her knees.
    Down, down, down . . .

2
    Lisa awoke sometime later in bed, dreaming that someone was outside her front door. It was after midnight. The last thing she remembered was getting up off the floor in the basement theater and coming upstairs and changing into her nightgown. Outside, through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the bedroom, she could see that the rain had finally stopped. The clouds had cleared out, leaving an open sky, and the moon was a bright searchlight, casting its milky glow across her body. She lay atop the heavy blankets. The house was so silent that she felt lonely.
    Then it happened again.
    Downstairs, someone pounded heavily on her front door. She realized that the noise hadn’t been part of a dream; it was real. She heard a muffled voice shouting her name from the porch.
    “Ms. Power! Are you home? We need to talk to you.”
    Lisa didn’t recognize the voice. It wasn’t anyone she knew, and strangers typically didn’t show up here unannounced in the middle of the night. She slipped out of bed, but she stayed away from the windows, where the curtains were open. She had never felt a need to close them for privacy, because her nearest neighbor was two miles away. But right now, she was conscious of the white moonlight that would make her visible to anyone outside. Until she knew who was there, she didn’t want to announce the fact that she was home and alone.
    She crept to the bedroom wall and nudged just far enough past the edge of the window frame to look down. The slant of the roof made it impossible to see who was on the porch, but she could see a vehicle parked in her gravel driveway. It was a black SUV, and she could make out large gold lettering on the doors. Someone from the county sheriff’s department was paying her a visit.
    But not the sheriff in Kittson County, where she lived.
    The SUV was from south of her in Pennington County, where the county seat was Thief River Falls.
    As she watched, a police officer stepped down from the porch. She could hear the crunch of his boots as he walked into the middle of her front yard. He wore a deputy’s uniform, but the wide brim of the man’s hat made it impossible to see who it was. He turned around to stare up at the house, and Lisa instinctively backed away to make sure he didn’t see her. She didn’t know why she was hesitating about opening the door to the police. She knew most of the deputies in Pennington County, and they knew her.
    And yet something about this man didn’t feel right. His arrival made her uneasy.
    She knelt beside the wall until she was stretched out flat on the ground, and then she crawled forward to spy through the bottommost corner of the window. She still couldn’t see the deputy’s face, but she saw something else. In the shimmering moonlight, she could see his hand, as bone white as the hand of a skeleton.
    He was holding a gun.
    He had his gun out of its holster.
    A second voice cut through the nighttime quiet. “Is she there?”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    She watched another deputy join the first, emerging from the overgrown field on her land. The low brim of this man’s hat, too, covered his face. Their voices were unfamiliar. She didn’t know them.
    The second man had his gun in his hand, too. Why?
    “Check the garage,” the first cop instructed his partner. “See if her truck’s inside.”
    Lisa watched the other cop approach the door of her garage. He tugged on the door handle, but it was locked and wouldn’t open. She found herself grateful that the garage had no windows that would let the man shine a flashlight inside and see that her truck was parked there. She didn’t want them to know that she was home.
    “I