The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

“You’ve got some time left before you leave,” I reminded him, lacing up my shoes. “You could buy a new car in that time.”

  “I’ve got a week,” he said, peeling the papery husk off a clove of garlic. “I could buy a car in that time, but I can also live that long without one.”

  “I’d go nuts,” I said, getting to my feet. “It’s not that I mind walking, but just knowing I didn’t have a car if I needed one, that’d bother me.”

  “I know what you mean,” Shiloh said. “A car is a lot more than transportation. It’s an investment, an office, a locker, a weapon.”

  “A weapon?” I said doubtfully.

  “If people really thought about the physics of driving, the forces they control, some of them would be afraid to leave the driveway. You’ve seen the accident scenes,” he said, rounding up stray pieces of chopped garlic with the flat of the knife.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Too many.” Then another thought hit me. “When you were downtown, were you looking for a ride home?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I had to drive the car out to the guys who bought it, then I went to find you. But Vang said you were in court.”

  “You should have waited,” I said. “That was a long walk.”

  “A couple of miles. Not so long.” Then he said, “Have you heard from Genevieve?”

  The question seemed to come out of nowhere. I picked up his glass of Coke and took refuge in a sip of it before answering. “No,” I said. “She never calls me. And when I call her, she’s nearly monosyllabic. I don’t know if that’s better or worse than how she was before. For a while, all she wanted to do was talk about Royce Stewart.”

  Genevieve lived an hour north of where her daughter’s murderer had gone to ground in his hometown of Blue Earth. But she knew sheriff’s deputies down there, and some of them were apparently willing to give her information on Shorty’s whereabouts and activities. Genevieve had told me that he was working construction again by day. At night he was a barfly. Even though his driver’s license had been revoked, and he lived outside of town, Shorty would drink in his favorite bar rather than at home. He could often be seen, Gen’s sources said, walking home along the county highway late at night. No one had ever caught him driving without a license, and he was apparently a well-mannered enough drinker that he hadn’t had any arrests for disorderly conduct or the like.

  “I remember,” Shiloh said. “You told me.”

  “She’s stopped talking about him. I don’t know if that means she’s stopped thinking about him,” I said. “I wish she’d come back to work. She needs to be busy.”

  “Go see her,” Shiloh said.

  “You think?” I said idly.

  “Well, you said you were thinking about it.”

  And I had mentioned it to him. How long ago had that been? Weeks, I realized, and in the meantime I hadn’t acted on the idea. I felt ashamed. I’d been busy, of course. That was the classic excuse, and cops used it as often as CEOs. I’m busy, my job is demanding, people depend on me. Then you realize that the needs of strangers have become more important to you than the needs of the people you see every day.

  “You’ve got a couple of personal days coming up,” Shiloh added.

  I was warming to the idea. “Yeah, I’d kind of like that. When exactly did you think we should go down?”

  “Not me. Just you.” He was at the refrigerator, turned away from me, so that I couldn’t see his face.

  “Are you serious?” I was perplexed. “I asked for those days off to spend with you, before you leave for Virginia.”

  “I know that,” Shiloh said, patiently, turning to face me again. “And we’ll have time together. Mankato’s not far away. You could just go overnight.”

  “Why don’t you want to come along?”

  Shiloh shook his head. “I’ve got things to do up here, before I leave. Besides, asking Genevieve’s sister to put up one guest is one thing, two is something else. I’d be in the way.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” I said. “You’ve known Genevieve longer than I have. You were a pallbearer at Kamareia’s funeral, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I know that,” Shiloh said. A quick flash of pain registered behind his eyes, and I regretted bringing it up.

  “I’m trying to say,” I put in quickly, “that if you can’t come with me, I’ll put off the visit until after you leave for Quantico. I’ll have plenty of time to visit Genevieve while you’re in Virginia.”

  Shiloh looked at me in silence. It was a look that made me feel self-conscious, the way I had when I was trying to explain my jump from the railroad bridge.

  “You’re her partner,” he said. “She needs you, Sarah. She’s in a bad way.”

  “I know,” I said, slowly. “I’ll think about it.”

  Shiloh wasn’t trying to shame me, I thought, watching him take a jar of olives from the refrigerator. He was just being Shiloh. Direct, on the verge of blunt.

  “I don’t want to hurry you, but I’m going to need that chicken and the other things fairly soon,” he reminded me. Then he gave me an olive, wet from the jar. He knew I liked them.

  Out on the street, as I drove toward the grocery store, the first electric light was shining from the windows of Northeast’s tall, pale houses. They looked warm and inviting, and made me think of winter and the holiday season coming.

  I wondered how we’d celebrate them this year.

  “No, I’m listening,” Genevieve said. “Elijah in the wilderness. Go ahead.”

  Genevieve’s house in St. Paul had a big kitchen, with lots of room for several people to work, and plenty of tools for a serious cook. She lived only with Kamareia, which was why Shiloh and I had come over to make Christmas dinner with them.

  While a roast crusted with a thick rub of herbs baked in Genevieve’s old, speckled roasting pan in the oven, Shiloh was working on garlic mashed potatoes, and Genevieve was slicing red peppers and broccoli to be cooked at the last minute. I, the least talented in the kitchen, had been assigned to peel and quarter the gold-skinned potatoes, so my work was done. Kamareia, who had made a cheesecake in advance, had been likewise excused from further duty, and was now absorbed in a book in the living room.

  Shiloh had mentioned to Genevieve that he had a theory of investigative work based on the Old Testament story of Elijah in the wilderness.

  “Explain, please,” Genevieve urged, cupping a glass of eggnog in one hand. It was nonalcoholic; the flush in her cheeks was kitchen heat, not liquor.

  “Okay,” Shiloh said, with the temporizing tone of someone mentally rounding up the elements of a story that he knows well but hasn’t told in a while. “Elijah went out to wait for God to speak to him,” he began. “As he waited, there was a strong wind, and God was not in the wind. And there was an earthquake, and God was not in the earthquake. And there was a fire, and God was not in the fire. And then there was a still, small voice.”

  “And the still, small voice was God speaking,” a soft voice said from behind us.

  None of us had heard Kamareia approach, and we all looked toward the archway leading into the kitchen, where she stood watching us with her lambent hazel eyes.

  Kamareia was taller than her mother, and slender where Genevieve had the roundness of muscle. In a heather-gray leotard and faded jeans-we’d all agreed we weren’t going to dress for this dinner-and with her dozens of cornrows pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck, Kamareia looked more like a dancer than an aspiring writer.

  “Exactly,” Shiloh said, acknowledging her erudition.

  Kamareia was generally confident and talkative around her mother and me. When Shiloh was with us, she was much quieter, although I noticed she tended to follow him with her gaze.

  “And the point is?” Genevieve asked Shiloh.

  “The point is”-Shiloh threw a small handful of garlic into the olive oil heating in a saucepan-“that a major crime investigation is kind of like a circus sometimes.”

  “A circus?” Genevieve repeated lightly. �
��Wasn’t Elijah in a forest? I love freshly mixed metaphors.”

  “Well, actually, Elijah was on a mountain,” Shiloh said. “But what I mean is, a major investigation is frenetic and distracting. In the middle of it all, you’ve got to ignore the fire and the whirlwind and listen for a still, small voice.”

  “You should have been born Catholic, Shiloh,” Genevieve said. “You could have been a Jesuit. I’ve never met anyone who can quote the Bible like you.”

  “Even the Devil can quote Scripture to his purpose,” Kamareia interjected.

  Apparently undisturbed by being compared to Satan, Shiloh winked at her. Kamareia quickly glanced away, pretending to take interest in the vegetables her mother was preparing, and I thought that if she had the pale skin of a white girl, her own audacity would have reddened her cheeks.

  Then she surprised me by meeting Shiloh’s eyes again. “Are you saying that in your work you try to listen to God?”

  Shiloh poured milk into the saucepan, soothing the heat and noise of the browning garlic. He didn’t answer right away, but he was thinking about her question. Genevieve, too, looked toward him for an answer.

  “No,” Shiloh said. “I think the still, small voice comes from the oldest and wisest part of the mind.”

  “I like that,” Kamareia said softly.

  Shiloh and I didn’t discuss Genevieve again that night, nor work, nor his impending sixteen-week absence. His Basque chicken was as good as the first time I’d had it, and we ate in the near-silence of true hunger. Later we found Othello on one of the cable channels: the 1995 version, with Laurence Fishburne in the lead. Shiloh fell asleep before it was over, but I stayed awake in the darkened living room to see the tragic lodging of the bed.

  chapter 4

  Shiloh was a morning person. I tended to stay up late. As long as we’d lived together we’d pulled at each other like tides. I got up earlier because of him; he stayed up later because of me. The day I left for Mankato, though, he didn’t wake me; I didn’t feel him slip out of bed at all.

  In the end, Shiloh’s words had weighed on my conscience-You’re her partner-and I’d taken his suggestion. I’d called Genevieve, and also spoken to her sister, Deborah. It was arranged: a quick overnight trip on Saturday, time enough to assess Genevieve’s state of mind and, hopefully, raise her spirits. Not long enough so that the time would drag if nothing I said could rouse her from her dark mood.

  When I came out of the bathroom, dressed and wet-haired from my shower, Shiloh was sitting at the living-room window, which had a wide sill and faced east. He’d opened it and the fresh air was making the room cold.

  It had rained in the night. In addition, the temperature had dropped sharply enough to create sleet; there had been a brief ice storm. Outside the window, the bare branches of our trees were coated with silver shells of ice. The snows weren’t due for another two weeks or so, and yet our neighborhood had turned into an icy wonderland, something a set dresser would be proud of.

  “Are you all right?” Something about his stillness made me ask.

  Shiloh looked over at me. “Fine,” he said. He swung his legs down. “Did you get enough sleep?” He followed me into the kitchen.

  “Yeah,” I said. It was nearly ten by the clock over the stove. “I wish I’d woken up earlier.”

  “It’s not like you’re on a tight schedule. You’ve got all day to get there, and it’s only about a two-hour drive.”

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “Look, it’s not too late for you to come along.” I poured water into the coffeemaker.

  “No,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “I’m just afraid I won’t know what to talk about. You always know what to say in hard situations. I never do.”

  “You’ll do fine.” Shiloh rubbed the back of his neck, his gesture for stalling and thinking of how to phrase something. “I’m supposed to report at Quantico on Monday. I don’t want to cut it that close, if we were to have trouble getting back. My plane ticket’s not transferable. Or refundable.”

  “What kind of trouble would we have? I mean, you’re already willing to count on me to give you a ride to the airport.”

  “I’m not counting on you. It’s a two-thirty flight. If I don’t hear from you by one, I’ll call a cab.”

  The coffeemaker made its choked gurgling noises. I’d already known I wasn’t going to convince him. When Shiloh made up his mind, it was like making water flow uphill to change it. He took my travel mug down from the shelf and handed it to me.

  In the bedroom, I pulled my duffel bag out from under the bed and checked what I’d packed. A change of clothes, something to sleep in, something to wear if I wanted to go for a run. That was all I needed, but when I lifted up experimentally on the handles, the sides drew in, concave. The bag was about a third full, ridiculously thin.

  I felt and heard Shiloh kneel down beside me on the bedroom floor. He scooped hair off the nape of my neck and kissed the skin underneath.

  It was a quick thing. We didn’t even get undressed, really.

  A lot of things had changed for us in the past year: Kamareia gone, Shiloh heading to Virginia, his career to take him God knew where after that. He must have felt the world tipping out of balance as much as I did. It had been Shiloh who’d first brought up marriage, in the same conversation in which he told me he’d passed his Phase II testing and had been given a place in the next class at Quantico.

  Shiloh’s proposal had been an attempt to solidify at least one part of a world gone too fluid. I had understood that, and realized that in considering marriage we were probably grabbing too hard at something that was meant to be finessed.

  Then I’d said yes and married him anyway. I’d never been a finesse kind of person anyhow.

  Shiloh was still breathing hard when he said, “Just in case you do stay down there and I don’t get to say goodbye.”

  “Goodbye to you too,” I said, brushing a lock of hair away from my eyes.

  Shiloh came out to the driveway with me and scraped ice off the windshield of the Nova, while I pitched my thin, light duffel bag into the backseat and unlocked the driver’s-side door.

  “I’ll call if I won’t be back in time to take you to the airport,” I said when he came around to stand near me. “But I’m sure I will.” I leaned over the open door and kissed his cheek.

  Before I could pull away, Shiloh took my face in both his hands and kissed me on the forehead.

  “Be safe,” he said.

  “I will.”

  “I mean it. I know the way you drive. Don’t make me worry about you.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll see you soon.”

  The freezing rain that had fallen on the Cities had also fallen on the southern part of the state, and I eased up on the gas once I got out into the countryside, because there were patches of ice still on the road, although they were shrinking and melting under the friction of car wheels. On the radio, the forecast called for more rains over southern Minnesota later, with the temperature likely to dip down to freezing in the night. But I’d be long off the roads by then. By noon I had shot across the line into Blue Earth County.

  In one of those quirks of geography that drive newcomers to an area up a wall, Mankato was the county seat of Blue Earth County, while the city of Blue Earth, nearly on the Iowa border, was the seat of Faribault County.

  Blue Earth was where Royce Stewart, who’d killed Kamareia Brown, lived and walked around free. Best not to think about that.

  Genevieve’s sister and brother-in-law lived in a farmhouse south of Mankato, although they only had two acres and didn’t farm. This was the first I’d been to their house, although I’d seen a lot of Deborah Lowe in the weeks following Kamareia’s death. She’d come up to the Cities and helped with the needed arrangements, taking as much of the burden as she could from her sister.

  Their family, of Italian and Croatian extraction, went back for four generations in St. Paul. Genevieve’s parents were working-class liber
als, both union organizers. They’d sent four of their five children to college and one into the priesthood as well. When Genevieve had become a cop, her parents had accepted her career the same way they’d accepted the marriage to a black man that had resulted in a biracial granddaughter.

  Deb, I had learned, had flirted with becoming a nun in her teenage years before abandoning the idea. (“Guys,” she’d explained succinctly.)

  She’d become a teacher instead, starting in St. Paul and then moving outstate to find a kind of lifestyle her family hadn’t known for over a century.

  She and Doug Lowe didn’t work the land, but they did have a sprawling kitchen garden and a henhouse to reduce the grocery bills and supplement the paychecks of two schoolteachers.

  It was Deborah who heard the car’s engine and came out of the farmhouse to greet me as I was pulling my bag from the backseat of the Nova, which I’d parked in front of the apple tree in their yard.

  Deborah was a hair taller than Genevieve, a shade thinner, but otherwise they looked a lot alike. Both had dark eyes and dark hair-Deborah’s was long, worn today in a ponytail-and a pale-olive complexion. Deborah descended the front steps, followed by a dog, a fat caramel-and-white corgi that yapped intermittently without a lot of interest. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, content to observe the interloper’s behavior from a safe position.

  Reaching the car, Deborah hugged me while I stood, a little surprised, in the circle of her hard-muscled arms.

  “Thank you for coming,” she said, releasing me.

  I opened my mouth to say “How is she?” but even as I did, the screen door opened again and Genevieve came out to stand on the porch, looking at us.

  She was letting her short, dark hair grow-or more likely, she simply hadn’t thought to have it cut since Kamareia died. The few pounds she had on her sister weren’t fat; they were muscle from the gym. Her physique reminded me of the hard roundness of ponies that used to work down in coal mines.

  Shouldering my bag, I stepped around Deborah and walked to the porch. Genevieve held my gaze as I climbed the front steps.