The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  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 lik
e 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.”

  Ligieia’s deep-brown eyes studied me, and she wasn’t saying no yet. I continued making my case. “I brought a legal pad along.” I touched my shoulder bag, where the notepad rode. “You won’t have to translate if it’s not convenient for you.”

  She stepped back. “Come on in,” she said, grudgingly. “I’ll ask Sinclair if it’s okay.”

  As she closed the door behind us, a little girl ran into the entryway. Her auburn hair was wet, and she was wrapped in a magenta bath towel held in place by her arms. She stopped alongside Ligieia and looked up at me, then she lifted her hands and began to gesture. The towel slipped to her feet.

  “Hope!” Ligieia gasped, and knelt down to snatch up the towel and wrap the naked little girl again. Ligieia glanced up at me, and when she saw me starting to laugh, she began to laugh, too, rolling her eyes. It was the best icebreaker I could have asked for.

  “Sinclair’s daughter?” I asked.

  “Yeah, this is Hope,” Ligieia said. “The signing gives her away as Sinclair’s kid, I guess.”

  I was looking down at Hope when I caught movement on the periphery of my vision. A tall woman stood behind Ligieia, her red hair loose. She trained a familiar assessing gaze on me from eyes that were just slightly Eurasian in their shape.

  Sinclair. Ligieia hadn’t noticed her presence yet. I straightened and nodded to her, and she returned my greeting in kind.

  The exchange had a formal feeling for me, and not just because I couldn’t speak directly to her. I had that feeling, like I’d found a missing person. Two days ago I hadn’t really known she’d existed, at least not by name, and now she felt like someone I’d been trying to locate for a long time.

  “Hold on to that towel, honey,” Ligieia said to Hope, then she stood up and spoke to Sinclair, speaking and signing at once.

  “This is Sarah Pribek.” Spelling out my name slowed Ligieia down. “She says that time is very important in a missing-persons situation, so she came up early. She wants to talk to you tonight.”

  Hope watched the conversation silently. Sinclair lifted her hands and signed.

  Ligieia looked at me. “Do you have a room in town?”

  Damn, I thought, sensing a dismissal. “Not yet,” I said.

  Sinclair signed again.

  “She says she’s going to make up the spare room for you,” Ligieia translated.

  Sinclair scooped her daughter up into her arms and walked back down the hall from which she’d come, while I stood taken aback by her unexpected display of hospitality. I was, after all, a total stranger.

  Ligieia broke into my thoughts. “Why don’t you come into the kitchen with me? I was going to make some tea.”

  “Look, I meant what I said about you not having to translate,” I repeated, following her. “You look like you were on the way to bed.”

  “No,” Ligieia said. “I’m just studying. I have to have Act III of The Merchant of Venice finished by tomorrow.” She lifted a teakettle off the stove and shook it, checking the water level inside. “It seems kind of a waste of time. Hardly anyone performs Merchant anymore, and rightly so, because it’s so horribly anti-Semitic. I don’t think anyone even reads it anymore.” She struck a match before touching it to the burner: it was a very old stove.

  “Have you known Sinclair long?” I asked her.

  “Three years,” Ligieia said. “As long as she’s been at Bale. I was assigned to be her translator right away, and started doing her readings shortly after that.”

  “Readings?”

  “I perform her work at poetry readings and slams,” Ligieia explained. “There’s a lot of challenge in that, because I’m not just reciting her words. I’m translating the emotional content and trying to bring that across as well. I’ve had to really get to know Sinclair, to read her work like she would read it herself if she were a speaking person.”

  I turned at the sound of light footsteps behind me and saw Hope, her copper hair combed, wearing a white nightdress and looking up at me with a child’s seriousness.

  “Mommy says you’re a speaking person,” she announced, but she signed it as well, just in case. Her voice was pitch-perfect, clearly understandable. Until that moment I had thought she was deaf.

  “Your mother’s right,” I said.

  “Is your name Sarah?” she asked.

  Ligieia interrupted. “Hope, does your mother know you’re in here?”

  The girl looked at the floor. She didn’t want to lie.

  “You know what I think?” Ligieia went on, bending slightly to address Hope. “I think she already put you to bed and thought you were going to stay there.” Ligieia straightened and pointed.

  Hope ran from the kitchen, back down the hallway.

  Ligieia shook her head, both indulgent and exasperated. “She’s always got to be a part of everything,” she said. Ligieia held a hand over the kettle’s spout, feeling for steam. “The brainiest little kid I’ve ever seen. Sounds like a ten-year-old when she talks. Signs fluently. I’m sure when she’s older she’s going to do what I’m doing, reading her mother’s poetry at performances. She’s gonna be something.”

  “When did Sinclair divorce her father?”

  Ligieia didn’t respond. Her eyes went to a space behind me, and I turned and saw Sinclair.

  Shiloh was like that. Walked like a damn cloud. Often I didn’t hear him until he was right behind me.

  “I was just about to pour,” Ligieia said.

  We settled in the living room, which was low-ceilinged and crowded with houseplants, marked by eclectic splashes of color. When I was seated in a rocking easy chair, I put my nose down into my tea, stalling. I’d gotten in here by saying that it was important that I speak to Sinclair tonight, and the truth was that I had no urgent questions for her. I’d come here to satisfy myself that Shiloh wasn’t here, and it was plain to me that he wasn’t.

  It was Sinclair who broke the silence, not me.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said through Ligieia. “I’m very curious about Michael. It’s been years since I’ve seen him. I know you probably have questions for me first, though.”

  I set my teacup down. “That was my first question: When was the last time you heard from him?”

  Ligieia waited while Sinclair thought.

  “About five, six years ago,” she signed. “I can’t remember exactly. I was in the Cities to do a reading at the Loft and give a guest lecture at Augsburg College, then I was driving down to Northfield, to lecture at Carleton. I remember the Carleton visit well, because I got there several days after a terrible car wreck near the Cities killed three of their students. It was very sad. Things like that hit a small school hard.”

  “Oh,” I said. The anecdote struck a chord. “I remember that, too.”

  “Do you want me to check the exact date?”

  “Not necessary,” I said. “It was so long ago it’s almost undoubtedly not part of whatever has happened now. I was more curious about how much you’d
kept in contact with Shiloh. Did you actually see him in person when you were there?”

  “Yes. We ran into each other on the street.”

  “You hadn’t arranged to see him?”

  “I didn’t even know he lived there.”

  “Have you heard from him since: letters, e-mail?”

  Sinclair shook her head.

  “When you heard that he was missing, did any possibilities about what would have happened to him come to mind?”

  Sinclair shook her head again. Her terse answers weren’t meant to be unhelpful, I saw, but actually courteous: She was communicating directly with me.

  “Why do you think he ran away, back when he was seventeen?” I asked her.

  At this question she shifted her gaze from Ligieia’s hands to my eyes, and ran her thumb across her fingertips quickly. I wondered if this hand motion was akin to a speaking person licking her upper lip during an interview, a temporizing gesture.

  “I didn’t hear about that until years later,” Sinclair told me. “But Mike didn’t get along with our father any better than I did.”

  “That’s not what your brother and sister say.”

  There was a slightly longer pause this time, as Ligieia waited for Sinclair’s hands to be still. Then Ligieia translated. “They saw what they wanted to see. My family was accustomed to thinking of me as different, but they wanted Mike to be like them.”

  “When you left home, where did you go?”

  “Salt Lake City. I stayed with a group of friends who were… Jack Mormons?” There was a momentary hitch in the translation process as Ligieia stumbled on the phrase. “Mormons who had fallen away from the LDS Church.”

  It was a term that wouldn’t have thrown me; I’d heard Shiloh use it before.

  “When they went out of town for Christmas, I got lonely and went home. Michael slipped me into the house, through a window with a big tree outside it. It was the same way I used to sneak out.”

  She paused for Ligieia to catch up. “We got caught, and my father was pretty angry. I was sorry that I got Mike in trouble. But he would have broken away from our family sooner or later.”