The 37th Hour (26 page)

Shiloh was across the room in his dark going-to-court suit. I had taken a personal day to be with Genevieve and the family members who were staying in her house, to help her through the viewing, service, and burial. Shiloh had arranged a split shift so he could be here now, for the viewing.

That was a figure of speech in this case. The mortician could only do so much with a face battered like Kamareia’s had been; the casket at the front of the room was expensive, gleaming, and closed. I stared at it a moment too long, then turned my gaze to the arriving mourners.

One of them arrested my attention immediately.

I’d heard Genevieve talk from time to time about her brief marriage. She was working-class white Catholic from the urban North; he’d been born black in rural Georgia and was raised in the First African Baptist Church. When those differences doomed their marriage, he’d gone on to Harlem, then finally to Europe as a corporate lawyer, while she’d stayed to be a cop in the Cities that had been her family’s home for several generations.

I’d never seen a picture of Vincent, but Genevieve described him to me once, early in our friendship. So when I saw him, there was really no reason for me to think,
Who the hell is that?
but I did, and then of course I realized.

It was my habit to categorize people I saw as the athletes they might have been in high school: linebacker, cross-country runner, swimmer, point guard. That wasn’t possible with this man. Vincent Brown was six-foot-four and he had a powerful physical presence that was impossible to characterize. He was power all over, in a rich man’s monochromatic suit, with something Aztec about his cheekbones and hawklike in his profile. His dark gaze reminded me not at all of Kamareia’s light-hazel, wide-set eyes. It was difficult to imagine him as the father of that lighthearted, gentle girl, and equally difficult to envision him as Genevieve’s husband, the two of them making a home together.

Vincent saw who he was looking for: Genevieve, among her family. He went to her side, and her brothers and sisters moved aside slightly at his approach. Genevieve raised her eyes to him, and Vincent kissed her. Not on the cheek or even the forehead, but on the top of her head, and he closed his eyes as he did it, a gesture of immeasurable tenderness.

Suddenly I saw what I hadn’t been able to only seconds earlier: kinship. Belonging, despite everything that seems to argue against it.

Vincent spoke to Genevieve, and she to him. He turned
and
looked at me, and I realized I was being discussed. Caught staring, I glanced away, but already Vincent was moving toward me, so I turned back to acknowledge him.

“Sarah,” he said.

“Vincent?” It was half a greeting, half a question. He didn’t exactly shake my hand, but took it and held it a moment.

“You were with Kamareia, weren’t you?” he asked. “On the way to the hospital?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you,” he said.

At the Salt Lake City airport I found a flight to Albuquerque that I could be a standby on. I laid down my credit card and bought a ticket.

If Shiloh’s various statements—bank, phone, credit card—had shown no suspicious activity, I was leaving a paper trail that a child could follow: long-distance calls on my card, paperwork at a rental-car agency, plane tickets on the American Express.

But my name was not called, and I was left standing to watch the boarding agent close the door to the jetway. Behind the counter, the little red lights spelling out “Flt. 519—Albuquerque—3:25” went dead.

The 4:40 flight was more sparsely loaded. Our flight time was one hour, twenty minutes. At least, it should have been. As we neared the Albuquerque area, the pilot made an announcement.

“They’re experiencing some delays in Albuquerque due to some heavy low cloud and rain there. We’re not going to reroute; we expect to get you on the ground and on your way before too long, but we will be spending a little while in a holding pattern, waiting for clearance. Sorry for the inconvenience.” The pilot’s voice turned warm and avuncular. “Speaking of the weather, folks, you may want to factor in a little extra time for your ground travel this evening, due to the conditions. We like to see you stay safe so you’ll be back to fly with us again.”

I rested my head against the edge of the little porthole of the window, and listened to the impatient rhythm of my own heart.

The later I was, the more likely it was that Sinclair and Ligieia would put me off until tomorrow morning, probably for a meeting somewhere in town.

I didn’t want to meet Sinclair in a café or diner. If I had to speak to Shiloh’s closest sibling through a translator, at least I didn’t want to do it in a busy public place that wasn’t going to lend itself to a lengthy and comfortable conversation.

The surroundings in which Naomi Wilson and I had talked were ideal. In her own home, we’d had privacy and we’d had time to let the conversation go where it needed to. It probably wasn’t going to be possible to re-create that with Sinclair, no matter what. But I wanted to go to her house, and it wasn’t just so we’d have time and privacy to talk.

All of us have that one place we’d go if our lives fell apart. My conversation with his brother suggested that Shiloh’s place might be wherever his sister Sinclair lived.

Shiloh’s life had not been falling apart. Shiloh’s life had been coming together. His career was taking off, his marriage was young and strong. And yet I had to satisfy myself that he hadn’t, acting under stresses totally unknown to me, sought refuge in this remote corner of the country.

It would seem a strange coincidence, at least to me, if Santa Fe were indeed the place Shiloh had gone to ground. As far as I knew, he’d never been there, while one of my earliest memories was of Santa Fe.

I was perhaps four when Mother had taken me on a trip to the city, for some kind of shopping she couldn’t do in the hinterlands. All I remember of it was that it seemed to be fall or winter. In my snapshot memories I see a cool rainy night and the warm inviting lights of the buildings; I remember eating a creamy soup made of pumpkin or squash in a restaurant and my child’s satisfaction because it was only my mother and me at the table, and I had her all to myself. . . .

The pilot’s voice broke into my thoughts. We were cleared to make a final descent into the Albuquerque area. A stewardess moved smoothly up the aisle on the periphery of my vision, alert for tray tables still down or cell phones in use.

The plane sank down into a layer of cloud smooth as the surface of the ocean. At late twilight, the cloudbank was a very dark gray, night nearly fallen over the city. Droplets of water formed on my window and began to crawl sidewise across the pane. Wrapped in a charcoal mist, for a moment all of us on the plane were nowhere, between worlds.

It was ridiculous and I knew it, the prospect that I might surprise Shiloh at his sister’s home in New Mexico. But I knew why I refused to reject it out of hand. In a weird and backwards way, it was attractive.

I’d once heard a widowed woman say that a month after her husband died in a car wreck, she began to console herself with a fantasy. The fantasy was that her husband wasn’t dead, he’d just left her and was living in another part of the country. At the time, that hadn’t sounded like a very comforting thing to think about late at night, but now I understood. That woman’s love had been unconditional: she’d just wanted her husband to be alive and all right, with or without her.

Of the realistic choices I had to explain Shiloh’s disappearance, this was the only remotely pleasant one.

White runway lights rose to meet the plane.

chapter 17

I merged with a thin crowd of people
on the concourse leading to the main terminal. The things I had yet to do tonight made me feel tired already. There was a bank of pay phones right before me, but I already knew I wasn’t going to call Ligieia.

The kinds of city maps given out at car-rental counters weren’t going to be good enough for the directions I needed. It was at a newsstand that I found what I needed, a map that included the whole state of New Mexico.

At the car-rental counter, I added to my paper trail, renting a Honda. I unfolded the state map and pointed to the small town where Bale College was. “How long should it take me to get here?” I asked.

The clerk looked down to see where I was pointing. “An hour,” she said. “Maybe a little more, ’cause it’s getting dark and you’re new to the area.”

“There’s a full tank of gas in this car you’re giving me?”

“Oh, yes, all our cars are filled up. You’re responsible for returning them refilled or you’ll pay a fueling fee—”

“What about a cupholder?” I asked.

“A what?”

“I’m gonna need coffee.”

“I feel you,” she said, a fellow caffeine addict.

But in the end I didn’t want to take the time to stop, so I didn’t walk back to the Starbucks in the main terminal, nor did I pull over anywhere. I just headed out of town.

A light mist fell steadily, and I turned the windshield wipers on to their intermittent setting. I hoped we weren’t going to have a serious rain, because I was planning on letting my lead foot have its way. I was already going to be late enough to be rude; every minute counted.

I kept it at eighty-two as long as I was on the interstate. When the route to Bale College began to take me up into the hills, I eased off the accelerator, but not enough to be going at a legal speed. Then flashing lights turned the raindrops clinging to my rear window into the colors from a red-and-blue kaleidoscope.

I hit my turn signal immediately, telegraphing my intent to be cooperative, and eased onto the shoulder of the road.

The patrol officer who approached the side of my car looked about 20. He was Deputy Johnson by his name tag. “Do you know how fast you were going?” Johnson said.

“Well, I thought forty-five, but you’re probably going to tell me it was more than that,” I said, trying to sound good-natured.

“It was quite a bit more than that,” he said, unsmiling. “I clocked you at fifty-seven.”

“You got me, I guess. I’m in a strange car; sometimes they can fool you,” I said.

“They can’t fool you if you’re watching the speedometer,” he said didactically. “It’s very important that people drive slow in a light rain like this. See, people think a light rain is better than a heavy rain, but there are oils in the asphalt that . . .”

I’ll pay the fine, I’ll pay it twice, please just stop talking and write the ticket,
I thought. But he was a kid; he took his job very seriously.

Deputy Johnson wrapped up his spiel about a minute later and took my ID off to run it through the computer. I began to leaf through my bag for my Hennepin County shield.

He returned and wrote up my ticket. I took it from him.

“Thank you for your courtesy,” he said.

“Hold on a minute, will you? There’s something I need to ask you.” I held out my shield. “I’m with the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department. That’s Minneapolis and the surrounding area.”

His eyebrows went up, an expression both surprised and defensive.

“I’m not angling for professional courtesy with the ticket. I was speeding; I’ll pay the fine,” I assured him. “I’m here as part of an investigation. I was actually on my way to your department when you pulled me over. I have a phone number here without an address, and I was going to ask someone to get that for me tonight.” I smiled at him to let him know he’d be doing me a favor. “If you could radio this in to your department in advance, maybe they could have it by the time I get there.”

Deputy Johnson furrowed his brow. “You’re from what jurisdiction again?”

“I’m a detective from Hennepin County. I can give you the night number there for the investigation division, if anyone wants to check it out.”

“This is part of an investigation?” he reiterated.

“A missing-persons investigation, yes.”

It was beginning to dawn on Johnson that this was sort of an interesting break from manning the speed trap. “What’s the phone number you’re asking about?” he asked.

I gave him Ligieia’s phone number and he went back to the radio.

“They’re looking it up,” he said when he returned, and gave me directions to the sheriff’s substation. “Come back and talk to me if there’s anything I can do to help you while you’re in town, Detective Pribek,” he said. It sounded as if his job wasn’t keeping him too challenged.

It wasn’t until I got to the substation that someone asked the obvious question, somewhat indirectly.

“Hennepin County must have a real budget surplus to be able to send its detectives around the country to look for missing persons,” the deputy on duty said, lifting an ironic eyebrow.

“They don’t,” I said. “This is a rarity.”

He gave me the address, written on a Post-it with the sticky part folded over onto itself.

“This is a special case?” he said.

“Kind of.” I didn’t feel like explaining. “Hey, is that coffee?”

Ten minutes later I pulled up in front of a low wood-shingled cottage, not far from where the map indicated Bale College was. At the end of the driveway was an outdoor light modeled to look like a Victorian gas lamp. Its hundred-watt bulb cast a bright light over the front yard. The garage was closed, and there was no nondescript clean vehicle parked outside that would have suggested a visitor’s rental car to me.

I heard footsteps respond to my knock, but the door didn’t open immediately. Instead, a curtain moved in a side window, reflecting a wise female caution. A moment later, the door swung open about a foot.

A young woman stood in the opening. She was about five-six, with two dark-brown braids stiff with repressed curls. A crop top over plaid pajama pants exposed her flat stomach, a shade or two lighter than cocoa powder. Her feet were bare.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

“We spoke on the phone today. I’m Sarah Pribek. I was going to call you”—I pushed ahead with my explanation before she could speak—“but my flight was delayed, and I was late getting in.” That didn’t mean anything, but in its way it sounded like an excuse. “And in a missing-persons investigation, time is really of the essence, so I came straight here.”