The 37th Hour (18 page)

She shook her head. “I’m sorry.”

I walked three steps toward my car and then turned around again.

“If this was Kamareia,” I said, “I’d never stop helping you look for her.”

I expected anger, expected her to accuse me of cheap tactics in drawing her daughter’s memory into the argument. But instead she said “I’m sorry” again. The terrible thing was, I could hear genuine regret in her voice.

The mud in the yard sucked at my boots like it wanted to keep me there. The Nova slung a few pounds of it at the apple tree in the yard before finding purchase and rocketing toward the road.

chapter 12

I knew what came next:
Utah. If you don’t know where someone is, look into where they’ve been. It’s a truism in Missing Persons, although police rarely have the luxury of following up on it. But I was working for no one but myself, and I was going to Utah.

Shiloh had grown up in Ogden, north of Salt Lake City, in the middle of a pack of six children. He’d left home young. His parents had since died, and he didn’t keep in touch with any of his brothers and sisters except for an annual Christmas card with his youngest sister, Naomi. With his older brothers, and Naomi’s twin sister, Bethany, he didn’t even have that much contact. Of course, I’d asked him why.

“Religion,” he’d said simply. “To them I’m like somebody chronically ill who refuses treatment. I can’t live around that.”

“I know a couple of people who were raised in strict Christian homes—Catholic or Mormon—and aren’t religious anymore. Their families deal with it okay,” I’d pointed out.

“Some families do,” Shiloh had said.

He’d left home at 17, before finishing high school, and of course I’d asked him about that, too.

“It was logical at the time,” he’d said. “I knew I wanted a different life than the one I was headed for, and I knew it wasn’t going to happen if I stayed there.”

Years after he’d left Utah, his family, and their faith, he’d gotten a letter from his younger sister Naomi. Shiloh had answered it, and they’d kept writing to each other for, as he told me, “a couple of months before things cooled off.”

“Why’d you stop writing?” I’d asked Shiloh.

“She was starting to look at me as a project,” Shiloh had said. “I could tell she was working toward getting me to come home. A reconciliation first with my family, then with God.”

It seemed Shiloh had succeeded in introducing a touch of frost into their relationship, because since then they’d only exchanged Christmas cards.

Back at home in Minneapolis, it took me several minutes of sorting through the box of addresses on torn scratch paper before I found the one I needed. Naomi and Robert Wilson. The address was in Salt Lake City, and I felt certain they’d be listed in directory assistance.

There was no reason to believe Shiloh had been in contact with any of his family lately, but I needed to check it out. The ground I’d covered here, at any rate, had been stony to start with, and wasn’t going to get any more fertile. And if there were no fresh leads in Utah to help me find Shiloh, there might be old ones that would help me understand him better.

Over a dinner of shredded wheat, I collected “Robert Wilson” or “R. Wilson” numbers for the Salt Lake City area and began making the calls.

“Hello?”

A young woman answered at the second number I tried. She sounded the right age.

“Is this Naomi Wilson?” I asked.

“Speaking,” she said politely.

“Naomi, this is Sarah Shiloh.” I paused for a second to think how to proceed.

“Who?”
she said. “Did you say your name was Sarah Shiloh?”

“Right,” I said. “Your brother Michael is my husband.”

“Michael? You’re Mike’s wife? Ohh!” she said, and laughed, sounding flustered. “Let’s start over. Yes, this is Naomi Wilson, you’ve reached me.” She laughed again. “You confused me because . . . well, never mind. Listen, can I talk to Mike? We haven’t spoken in a long, long time.”

Something in my chest felt a little colder, leaden, at her words.

“I wish you could,” I said. “I’m looking for him. Nobody, me included, has seen him in several days.”

There was a brief silence on the line, then Naomi Wilson said, “What are you saying?”

“Your brother is missing,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling.”

“My goodness,” she said. The words seemed inadequate, but belatedly I realized that of course a good Christian wouldn’t say
Oh, Christ.
But Naomi’s voice was somber as she said, “Where are you, in Minneapolis? Is that where he still lives?”

“That’s where we live. But he was supposed to go to Virginia, and he never got there,” I told her.

“He’s missing? And you think he’s out here? He’s not here,” she said, answering her own question. Then she corrected herself. “Well, not that I know of. But is that what you think, that he’s somewhere out West?”

“I don’t know. I need to come out and talk to you in person, maybe the rest of your family also.”

“All right,” she said. “When are you coming?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “A morning flight. With the time difference I’m pretty sure I could be there by midmorning. What time is good for you?”

“I work at a day-care center,” Naomi said. “There are two of us there until noon, then I’m on my own until three-thirty. If you can come anytime in the morning, I can get away to talk. I’m going to have a few questions for you, too—about Mike, and how the two of you met and so on. It’s been a long time since I actually spoke to him.”

She gave me the address of her preschool and day-care center on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Then she added, “You’ll recognize me right away. I look like I’m ten months’ pregnant.”

I called Northwest and made the arrangements with my credit card, then packed. Shiloh’s valise was on the floor, right where I’d left it after I’d pulled it out from under the bed and realized what finding it meant. As an afterthought to my packing, I retrieved Shiloh’s old Search and Rescue T-shirt from the suitcase and threw it into my bag.

A freight train rumbled northward on the other side of the bedroom wall. I was sitting on the bedroom floor, cross-legged. I needed sleep but had reached that state where the effort of just getting undressed and brushing your teeth seems like a very sizable obstacle between yourself and your bed.

Instead I reached for the book in Shiloh’s valise, pulled the Northwest ticket out. It was a broken promise, an unfulfilled contract, and the last known signpost on the sane, reasonable course of Shiloh’s life before some unknown wrong turn.

I turned the ticket over, looking at the terms and conditions printed in palest green type on the back.

My heart did a gentle double thump. There was writing across the back, seven numbers in light pencil, the barest of spaces between the third and fourth number.

Shiloh was careful and he was reliable, but the only things I knew him to organize thoroughly were the notes and papers related to his investigations. Otherwise, he kept things in a state of manageable disorder. He stacked the bills on the kitchen table, wrote addresses down on scratch paper, and stored them in a box of letter-size envelopes, where he also kept the stamps. He wrote phone numbers down inside the city phone book, and on one occasion, in pencil on the wall over the phone. Numbers he needed over the short run he’d write on anything handy. Like the back of an airline ticket.

I drummed my fingers hard several times on the cover of the book. He’d written on his ticket. Did they take tickets from you at the gate? Or would Shiloh have this on landing in D.C., where he knew he’d need it? Or was it a Minneapolis number he’d copied down for immediate use?

I carried it to the phone and dialed the straight seven digits, no area code.

“Hello?”

It was a woman’s voice, apparently at a private residence. She sounded older—60 to 70. In the background a TV was turned up loud enough that I could recognize the voices from a syndicated situation comedy.

“Hello, ma’am?” I said.

“Hello?” she repeated.

“Do you need to turn the TV set down?” I suggested. “I can hold the phone.”

“Yes, wait a minute.”

The television noise died; still, I was careful to speak loudly when she returned. “Hello, ma’am? What’s your name?”

“Are you selling something? It’s kind of late.”

“No, I’m not. I’m trying to find a man called Michael Shiloh. Is that name familiar?”

“Who?”

“Michael Shiloh.”

“I don’t know anyone named that,” she said.

“Is there anyone else there you could ask?” I suggested.

“Well,” she said, sounding baffled and mildly put out, “there’s no one here but me, and I don’t know anyone by that name.”

I believed her. Her cigarette-rasp voice, the TV set turned loud for a watcher deafened by old age . . . she sounded like a retired widow.

“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

I knew the Cities’ other area codes by heart. When I tried them, one phone rang endlessly. The other number had been disconnected, no longer in service.

With one hand on the phone’s plastic tongue to break the connection, I held the receiver against my shoulder. D.C., then, I thought. Maybe this was somebody who lived near Quantico.

With a 202 area code, and the new area codes that had sprung up in the vicinity of D.C., I had two more brief and fruitless conversations and heard one more prerecorded, no-longer-in-service message.

In Salt Lake City, those seven digits connected me to the automated customer-service line of a ski- and mountaineering-goods company. (“Your call is important to us. . . .”)

Trying the area codes of outstate Minnesota wouldn’t hurt, I thought.

In northern Minnesota, up in the Iron Range, the number couldn’t be completed as dialed. But in southern Minnesota, it rang.

“Sportsman.”

“Hey,” I said. “Who’s this?”

“This is Bruce, who’s this?”

He sounded like he was in his early twenties, and his tone was professionally flirtatious, like a bartender’s. There was crowd noise in the background.

“Is this a bar?” I asked. “You’re not a sporting-goods store or anything?”

“We’re a bar all right.” The bartender laughed. “You need directions?”

Airball,
I thought. Just some saloon down in the sticks.

“No,” I said. “Actually, I’m trying to find out if anyone there knows a man named Michael Shiloh.”

“Ummm,” Bruce said. “I know a lot of the guys who come in here—and of course everyone who works here—and I don’t know him.”

“Okay,” I said, and gave him my name and work number anyway. “In case you make a connection later,” I explained.

“Area code 612,” he said, commenting on my phone number. “Sounds like you’re in the Cities. I guess you’re not gonna drop by.” There was a sudden burst of enthusiastic noise in the background, the cheers of people following a televised sporting event. “Too bad, you sound like a fun gal.”

I was sure that was the last thing in the world I sounded like.

“Thanks for the thought,” I said. “Just have someone give me a call if that name’s familiar to them, okay?”

“I sure will,” Bruce said.

After I had brushed my teeth and washed my face and done everything I normally did before I slept, I sat above the covers of the bed with my legs curled underneath me, afraid to actually go to sleep.

I was afraid of what my mind would bring me in the dark. In the late watches, all troubles seem darker and past mistakes more inescapably destructive.

When the charges against Royce Stewart, Kamareia’s murderer, were dismissed, the full impact of it didn’t really hit me until one sleepless night a few days after the judge released his ruling. I’d had to slip out of bed and into the living room, where the sound of my grief wouldn’t disturb Shiloh.

Something woke him, though, and he came out into the unlighted room and held me with my wet face against his bare chest and stroked my hair, and in the dark he told me about a dream he’d been having.

I dream about Kamareia’s blood on my hands,
he’d said.

The words startled me. None of what happened was your fault, I told him.

No,
he said,
I mean literally. That afternoon when we found her, I got her blood on my hands. After you went to the hospital with her, I was trying to calm Gen, and I put my hand on her cheek. I got her daughter’s blood on her face. I didn’t want her to see, I wanted to take her into the kitchen to wash it off, but there was a mirror at the foot of the stairs. I knew she was going to see it. And she did. I keep dreaming about that, about looking down and seeing Kamareia’s blood on my skin. I dream about washing it off. Horror novelists tell you that small amounts of blood give water a pink tinge, but it’s not true. It’s just a fainter and fainter red until finally the water runs clear.

The dissociative, faraway sound in his voice made me uneasy. Grasping at anything comforting to say, I repeated, “It wasn’t your fault.” I could think of nothing else to tell him.

No,
he said.
It’s his fault.

I knew who he meant. Shiloh’s arms tightened around me, and he said,
He should have died for what he did to Genevieve alone.

Sometimes I thought about Shiloh’s dream of blood when people who didn’t know him well called him remote and detached.

When I finally did get in bed and turn out the bedside lamp, I directed my thoughts to something positive, to tomorrow. Tomorrow I would be in Utah, meeting Shiloh’s family at last.

Shiloh’s sister Naomi had always been, by his account, the sibling most interested in him. She had said on the phone that she was interested in how we’d met.

If Naomi Wilson was still as devoutly Christian as Shiloh had made his whole family out to be, I thought, she might not be ready to hear all the details of that story.

chapter 13

Several years ago,
my father’s last girlfriend—whose name I learned and forgot in the span of a week—called to tell me my father was dead. She (Sandy? Was that it?) barely tracked me down in time for me to make the service. I’d had just enough time to call my sergeant and explain, and then buy a black dress and a pair of heels at Carson Pirie Scott before catching a flight west on a bargain regional carrier.