Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

“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.”