Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

“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.

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.