Thief River Falls by Brian Freeman

Author:Brian Freeman [Freeman, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542093385
Published: 2020-01-31T16:00:00+00:00

22

Lisa assumed that the police would be watching her family house, but she had the advantage of knowing every square inch of that neighborhood. She knew how to get around undetected. She’d played spy and detective with Noah for years when they were kids, and she’d always been able to sneak up behind him with her cap gun before he knew she was there.

She didn’t park the Camaro anywhere close to their house. There was a better place. One of Lisa’s old grammar school teachers lived at the far end of Conley Avenue, and she was retired and housebound, with a side yard full of mature trees whose branches hung practically to the ground. Lisa stored the sports car there, mostly out of sight, and then she and Purdue walked two blocks through the front yards toward her old house. The snow flurries and trees gave them cover.

Darkness was giving way to dawn, slowly lighting up homes she knew from her childhood and filling her with memories and sadness. The houses were small and dated back to before World War II. Over the decades, the trees had grown leafy and tall, sheltering the homes. There were no fences. Neighbors didn’t need fences here. The driveways were unpaved. In the summer, the open green lawns were dotted with clover, but now it looked like winter and Christmas. The road was directly across the street from the north-south railroad tracks, and Lisa could remember their whole house shaking whenever a train rumbled by.

She was so caught up in her past that she didn’t immediately notice that Purdue kept glancing over at the railroad tracks, too. His face looked absorbed in memories of his own. She asked him about it, but he shrugged and said nothing.

Her old house waited for her. Two houses, actually. Her parents’ two-story house was on the corner, and next to it was the matchbox rental house where she’d lived for a decade, right up to the moment she bought the place near Lake Bronson. Her entire life sat there side by side. The rental house had new tenants; from where she was, she could see a light inside. But the house of Madeleine and Jerry Power was unoccupied. A time capsule. The key was in her pocket, the way it always was.

If the police were waiting for her, she didn’t see them. The streets looked deserted. Even so, she took the precaution of veering into the rear yards of the neighboring houses and taking Purdue around to the back door. Then she let them inside the cold house.

The ghosts of her family welcomed her.

Nothing had changed since she’d been back, other than a thicker layer of dust on the furniture. No matter how much time had gone by, it smelled the same, as if Madeleine were still trailing violet perfume through the rooms. She could hear her mother singing French nursery rhymes in her head. She could hear the excited shouts of her brothers playing football in the yard.

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