The 37th Hour

by Jodi Compton

  It seemed only right to hug her in greeting, but she was as rigid in my arms as I had been in Deborah’s.

  From the front room came the sounds of a basketball game on television. Deborah’s husband, Doug, lifted a hand in greeting but didn’t rise from his place in an easy chair.

  Deborah led me down the hall. “You can put your bag in here,” she said, gesturing through the doorway into a spare room.

  Inside were two twin beds. The comforter on one was slightly rumpled as though someone had been lying on it in the middle of the day, and I realized that this was Genevieve’s room that I would be sharing.

  I set my bag down at the foot of the other bed. On the dresser, in an old-fashioned pewter frame, was a familiar picture of Kamareia. The photo was only a year old; a 16-year-old Kam looked at me with her wide-set hazel eyes. She was smiling, almost laughing, and holding the Lowes’ corgi partly on her lap. The dog wanted to be set at liberty, and Kam was trying to hold on until the picture was taken; that was the source of her merriment.

  I’d seen the same picture in Genevieve’s house and wondered if she’d brought it with her or if the Lowes had always had the same one in their spare room.

  “Can I get you something to drink?” Deb asked from the doorway. “We’ve got Coke, and mineral water, I think. Beer, if it’s not too early in the day for you.” It was approaching one in the afternoon.

  “A Coke is fine, thanks,” I said.

  In the Lowes’ big, sunny kitchen, Deborah fixed me a glass of Coca-Cola with ice. Genevieve was so quiet she might as well not have been in the same room with us. Deliberately I caught her eye.

  “So,” I asked her, “what do people do around here for fun?”

  “I thought you were just down here for a day,” Genevieve said.

  A little bit of heat rose under my skin; it was embarrassment. I’d been hunting around at random for a conversation starter and had seized on that one. “I meant, in general.”

  When Genevieve appeared to have no answer, Deborah intervened. “There’s a cineplex in town, and that’s about it,” she said. “If we want nightlife, we have to go up to Mankato. There’s a state university there, so they’ve got the stuff that keeps college kids happy.”

  “All college kids need are bars,” I said.

  “Bars and music,” Deborah agreed.

  A moment of quiet followed that. Then Deborah spoke up again. “How’s your boyfriend…what’s his name?”

  I couldn’t help but glance at Genevieve, to see if she’d correct her sister. She knew Shiloh and I were married. But she remained silent.

  “Husband,” I said. “Shiloh’s fine.” I sipped my Coke and turned back to face Deborah. It was clear that Genevieve didn’t have much to contribute.

  It wasn’t as if Genevieve were catatonic, or even near-catatonic. She moved around, she answered questions, she performed tasks that were immediately at hand. But if anything, she was in worse shape than she’d seemed on the job in Minneapolis. Retreating to the countryside might help her in the end, but it hadn’t helped her yet.

  The conversation between Deborah and me, mostly about Twin Cities’ crime and politics, limped along for another half hour. I drank my Coke. Genevieve just listened. Eventually, Deborah said she had some papers to grade, and Genevieve and I joined Doug Lowe in the living room, where he was still watching his game.

  I did that for about fifteen minutes. I’d grown up playing basketball, but I couldn’t find any interest in it today. As long as I’d known Genevieve, she’d never shown any interest in sports, unless she was being asked to play, but now she kept her eyes on the screen, the same as Doug.

  She didn’t seem to care when I got up and slipped away.

  Deborah was still in the kitchen, papers in two piles in front of her: marked and unmarked. A single paper was in front of her. Her eyes were skimming over it, a red pen ready in her hand. She looked up when I slipped into the chair opposite her.

  “Do you think Genevieve’s angry with me?” I asked.

  Deborah set the pen down and licked her teeth thoughtfully. “She’s like that with everyone now,” she assured me. “You’ve got to practically kick her in the ass to get her to say anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I figured that. But you know about Royce Stewart and the hearing, don’t you?”

  “What about it?”

  “Kamareia’s identification of Stewart, on the way to the hospital,” I said. “It was my fault that it got thrown out.”

  Deb shook her head. “I know what you’re talking about,” she said, “and it’s not your fault.”

  “If I’d handled things right, in the ambulance, Stewart would be in prison now.”

  She set the pen down and gave me a level look. “If you’d handled it right-’right’ for a cop-what would that have been? Telling Kamareia she was going to die?”

  I said nothing.

  “Do you think that’s what Genevieve would have done if she’d been with her daughter?” she persisted.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “See? And if you’d done it, Genevieve would never have forgiven you. Ever.”

  “I’m not sorry about what I said to Kam on the way to the hospital,” I said slowly. “But…”

  “But what?”

  “Genevieve might not be thinking straight.”

  Deborah reached across the table and squeezed my closed fist. “She doesn’t blame you. I’m sure of that,” she said.

  “Well,” I said, “I guess that’s good. Sorry I interrupted your work.”

  “I think she’s glad you’re here,” Deborah said. “You’ve got to be patient with her.”

  Around ten-thirty, after a quiet evening, I found myself in the guest bedroom with Genevieve.

  I’d undressed in front of her dozens of times in the locker rooms at work and the gym, but this sisterly, intimate context made me feel exposed and shy. I tried to take my clothes off entirely from a sitting position on the narrow twin bed, head lowered.

  “Damn,” I said, rolling a sock over my callused heel, “in bed at ten. Now I know I’m in the country.”

  “Sure,” Genevieve said, as if reading from a script.

  “Doesn’t it get boring, being out here?” I said, pulling my shirt over my head. Hoping, I suppose, for Yes, it does; I think going back to the Cities would do me good.

  “It’s nice out here. It’s quiet,” Genevieve said.

  “Well, yeah,” I agreed lamely, pulling back the covers on my bed.

  “Do you need the light any longer?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  Genevieve clicked the bedside lamp off.

  She was right about one thing: it was quiet. Despite the early hour, I found sleep beginning to tug at my body. But I resisted. I wanted to stay awake long enough to hear Genevieve’s breathing change. If she could fall asleep in a normal amount of time, that at least was a good sign.

  I don’t know how much time passed, but she must have believed me asleep. I heard the susurrus of the bedsheets, then padding footsteps as she left the bedroom. It took a few minutes after that for me to realize she hadn’t just gone across the hall to the bathroom. I got up to follow.

  The light from the kitchen spilled, increasingly narrowly, down the hall. There was no need to wonder where she’d gone. I walked carefully on the plastic carpet runner and my steps were audible only to me. I stopped just short of the kitchen doorway.

  Genevieve sat at the broad table where Deborah had corrected papers, her back to me. A bottle of scotch and a glass with about two fingers in it sat in front of her.

  How do you counsel your own mentor, be an authority to your authority figure? I had a sudden desire to go back to bed.

  You’re her partner, Shiloh had said.

  I stepped into the kitchen instead, pulled up a chair, sat down with her. Genevieve looked at me with no great surprise, but there was a dark light in her eyes that I didn’t think I’d seen before. Then she said, �
��He’s back in Blue Earth.”

  She meant Shorty. Royce Stewart.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I have a friend in the Dispatch office down there. She says he can be counted on to be at the bar every night. With his friends. How does a guy like that even have any friends?” Her speech wasn’t slurred, but there was a certain impreciseness in it, as though her gaze, her speech, and her thoughts weren’t entirely in line with each other.

  “What do you think it is?” she demanded. “You think they don’t know he killed a teenage girl? Or that they just don’t care?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  Genevieve lifted her glass and drank, a deeper draft than people usually take with hard liquor. “He walks home late at night, even though he lives outside of town, on the highway.”

  “You told me this before. Remember?” I said.

  And she had. It was understandable, her obsession with Stewart, but it made me uncomfortable.

  “Let her talk about it,” Shiloh had counseled, shortly before I left. “She’ll probably work it out of her system and move on in her own time. Kamareia’s dead, he’s alive and free… she’s not going to come to grips with that overnight.”

  But I had a more immediate concern.

  “Gen,” I said, “it’s starting to worry me, the way you talk about him.”

  She drank again, lowered the glass, and gave me a questioning look over the rim.

  “You wouldn’t be thinking of paying him a visit, would you?”

  “To do what?” Her face was open, as if she really didn’t know what I meant.

  “To kill him.” God, let me not be planting a seed in her mind that wasn’t there before.

  “I turned in my service weapon up in the Cities.”

  “And nothing is stopping you from buying one. Or getting one from a friend. There’re lots of guns in these parts.”

  “He didn’t kill Kamareia with a gun,” Genevieve said softly. She refilled her glass.

  “This is important, damn it. Don’t go flaky on me,” I said. “I need to know you wouldn’t go down there.”

  She waited a moment before speaking. “I’ve had to counsel the survivors of murder victims. They don’t get retribution, even when we catch the guy who did it. There’s no death penalty in Minnesota.” She thought. “I probably wouldn’t get away with killing him, either.”

  These were stock answers, and not entirely comforting.

  “There’s such a thing as revenge,” I pointed out. “Call it closure, even.”

  “Closure?” Genevieve said. “The hell with closure. I want my daughter back.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.” There was so much bitterness in her voice that I believed she was telling the truth: she didn’t want to kill Royce Stewart.

  Genevieve looked at the empty space in front of me, as if just now realizing I hadn’t been drinking with her. “You want me to get you a glass?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “We should probably go back to bed.”

  Genevieve ignored me and put her head down to rest her chin on her arms, which were folded on the table. “Are you and Shiloh going to have kids?”

  “That’s, uh…” I was surprised into stammering, “… that’s a long time in the future.” The question reminded me of something, and in a moment my mind retrieved it: Ainsley Carter asking, Do you have children, Detective Pribek? “I’m sure we’ll have one,” I said.

  “No,” Genevieve said, shaking her head emphatically as if she’d asked a yes-or-no question and I’d answered it incorrectly. “Don’t have one. Don’t just have one.” She hit the s a little too hard in just. “Have two. Or three. If you have just one child, and you lose her… it’s too much.”

  “Oh, Gen,” I said, thinking, Help me, Shiloh. He would have known what to say.

  “Make sure Shiloh agrees you guys are going to have more than one,” Gen went on. She reached out and pressed my arm hard, with an almost-proselytic fervor. “I know I’m not supposed to be saying this,” she said.

  “Saying what?”

  “I’m supposed to be saying that I’m glad I had Kam for the time I did. Like at the funeral, they don’t call it a funeral anymore when it’s a young person, they call it a ‘celebration of life.’ ” Her eyes were still dry, but clouded over somehow. “But if I had it to do over again, I wouldn’t have had a child at all. I wouldn’t have brought her into the world just to have this happen to her.”

  “I think,” I said, struggling for the right words, “I think someday you’re going to feel differently about that. Maybe not right away. But someday.”

  Genevieve lifted her head and took a deep breath, closed her eyes, and opened them again. She seemed clearer. “Someday is a long way away,” she said. She looked at the scotch bottle, found the cap, and screwed it back on. “But I know you mean well.”

  “Listen,” I said. An idea was coalescing even as I spoke. “Shiloh’s going to be at Quantico for sixteen weeks. You could come back up to the Cities and we could be roommates. It might be easier than going straight back to your place.” I paused. “You wouldn’t have to go back to work right away. Just keep me company while Shiloh’s gone.”

  Genevieve didn’t respond right away, and to close the deal, I said, “I know he’d like to see you before he leaves.”

  For a moment I thought I had convinced her. Then she shook her head. “No,” she said. “I’m just not ready.”

  I rose and she followed suit. “Well,” I said, “the offer’s going to stand.”

  She put the scotch away, and instead of setting the glass in the sink the way people did with late-night dishes, she rinsed it and put it away in the cabinet. It was an action that suggested to me that drinking had become a common ritual that she was trying to hide from her sister and brother-in-law.

  When we were back in bed, Genevieve dropped off to sleep almost immediately, aided undoubtedly by the whiskey. Not me. I was keyed up from our conversation. I closed my eyes, thinking surely my previous lassitude would return soon.

  It didn’t. I lay awake for a long time in the narrow twin bed, breathing the Clorox scent of the sheets. The room had an old-fashioned digital clock, with white numbers that rolled over, and every ten minutes the first of the two minute placeholders rolled over with an audible click. There’d been a clock like that in the main room of the trailer I’d lived in as a child.

  When 11:30 rolled over, lit from the side with an orange light, I sat up in bed and was nearly surprised to feel my feet reach the floor.

  I’d lived too long in cities, gotten too used to a little light and a little noise at any hour. I hadn’t lived in a place like this since New Mexico. Beyond the sheer curtain I brushed aside with one hand was the country-dark sky I knew I’d see, richly spangled with stars despite the pale wash of light from a full moon. The last time I’d looked out a bedroom window to a sky like that, I’d never held a gun, I didn’t have any money of my own, had never had a lover to share my bed.

  I lay down again, rolled over to lie on top of the pillow, wishing for Shiloh. If he were here, we could do something wicked and adult to hold this child’s feeling at bay.

  In the distance I heard a train whistle. Probably a freight at this hour. This train was too far away for me to hear the three-part rhythm of its passing on the tracks, but the whistle blew again, a faint comforting sound of Minneapolis.

  Genevieve agreed to go for a run with me in the morning, two easy miles. We returned to find Doug and Deborah getting ready to go out, to meet friends for a late Sunday breakfast. “There’s coffee on,” Deborah advised me, hurriedly, when Genevieve and I arrived in the kitchen, and its scent did fill the house.

  In the kitchen, shortly before Deborah and Doug left, I managed to talk with both of them while Genevieve wasn’t in the kitchen.

  “Listen,” I said carefully, “I was talking about something with Genevieve last night… Do you keep any guns in the house?”

  “Guns?”
Doug said. “No. I don’t hunt.”

  “Why?” Deborah asked.

  “I’m just worried about Genevieve,” I said. “You live awfully close to Royce Stewart. And sometimes I wonder if she’s always thinking straight.”

  Doug gave me an incredulous look. “You can’t seriously think-”

  “No,” I said. “I’m probably just being paranoid. Goes with the job sometimes.”

  Genevieve drifted back into the kitchen, and I fell silent. Deborah busied herself before the refrigerator, surveying its contents.

  “Honey,” she told Doug, “I thought we had more Diet Coke than this. Don’t let me forget to stop on the way home, all right?”

  While her husband was warming up their car in the garage, Deborah pulled me aside.

  “Come upstairs with me for a minute,” she said.

  I followed her up to their bedroom and watched as Deborah pushed aside the hanging clothes in her closet and took a small black purse from a peg in the back. Although the bag looked empty to me, with its sides caved slightly in, she handled it with delicacy. Sitting on the bed, she unzipped it and reached inside. Made curious by her caution, I moved closer.

  She paused with her hand in the purse and looked up at me. “I guess Doug didn’t know I had this,” she said. “So I’m sure Genevieve doesn’t, either.”

  She withdrew a small handgun from the bag, a.25 with cheap, bright plating.

  “When I had my first teaching job in East St. Louis,” she said, “the school was in kind of a rough neighborhood. A friend who’d lived there all his life gave this to me. It’s not registered to me… I don’t know who it’s registered to, actually.”

  Deborah Lowe wore a white blouse and a black straight skirt, and her lips were limned tastefully with pale red lipstick. I marveled.

  “Teacher’s got a Saturday-night special,” I said.

  “I know, it’s awful. That’s why I wanted you to take it. It’s not necessarily because of Genevieve. I just want it gone, and I don’t know how to get rid of it.” She offered it to me.

  Doug’s voice echoed up the stairs. “Deb! We’re burning daylight!” he yelled.