Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

Here were his running shoes; gone were his heavy-soled boots and his jacket. I felt a small twinge of satisfaction. This was progress.

Shiloh had gone somewhere on foot. Not running, not the airport, either. An errand. He’d gone out somewhere, casually dressed, and hadn’t come back.

The phone rang.

“It’s me,” Vang said. “Some faxes came in for you from Virginia-area hospitals. No one fitting your husband’s description has been admitted in the last seventy-two hours.”

“I know,” I said.

Genevieve, in my earliest days as a detective, told me: “When you’ve got a missing-persons case you think is really legit, one that you’ve got a bad feeling about, the first twenty-four to thirty-six hours are key. Work it hard and work it fast.” Usually, cases like those were the disappearances of children. Other times the missing persons were women who turned up missing against a backdrop of suspicious circumstances: evidence of a break-in or a struggle, a chorus of friends witnessing to a creepy ex-boyfriend hanging around, a recently obtained restraining order.

No such events surrounded Shiloh’s disappearance. In this case, I’d spent most of the thirty-six hours not realizing he was missing.

Even so, I was going to do now what I should have done then: I was going to work all the angles I could think of in the next twenty-four hours.

I needed to talk to people in our neighborhood. Most of them were working people, though, and wouldn’t be home in the middle of the afternoon. And some, our less immediate neighbors, would need a picture of Shiloh to prompt them.

There was one person, however, who knew Shiloh by sight and was almost always in.

The widow Muzio probably saw Shiloh more than any of our other neighbors. She thought the world of him, mostly because Shiloh looked after her. He did this because Nedda Muzio lived alone, and she was getting senile.

Mrs. Muzio had an aged, sweet-tempered dog with the rangy build and curly hair of a wolfhound, with maybe some shepherd in her blood, too.

This dog, who had the unlikely name of Snoopy, used to escape from Mrs. Muzio’s backyard through a misaligned and unlockable gate. On a regular basis, Shiloh used to hear Mrs. Muzio yelling ineffectually for Snoopy. He’d track the dog down at whichever neighbor’s trash can she was eating out of and bring her home.

Mrs. Muzio was always effusive in her joy at Snoopy’s return, partly because she blamed Snoopy’s disappearances on “rascals” who stole her. These same rascals stole her Social Security check from the mailbox, when Mrs. Muzio lost track of the date and didn’t realize the first of the month wasn’t coming for another week. They broke into her house and turned the faucet on, stole food from her cupboard, looked in the windows at night. Shiloh used to go over and patiently reason with her, but he never really made a dent in what he’d called her delusional structure. Fixing her broken gate, which he did one Saturday afternoon and which kept Snoopy inside, was a more concrete help.

When I’d first moved in with Shiloh, Mrs. Muzio had cast a forbidding eye on me. Her paranoia had marked me as an instant enemy. “Why you steal?” she’d yell when Snoopy went missing, or she’d shout “Strega!” when she saw me. Witch, she was saying; I looked it up in an Italian-English dictionary. Shiloh, amused, told me about the warnings she’d whisper to him about that woman, afraid for his well-being.

Then, for no reason that I could see, maybe just the wind blowing north-northwest, she stopped. Mrs. Muzio warmed to me. I was no longer strega. I wasn’t even just Shiloh’s girlfriend to her; I was fidanzata, his fiancée.

As I approached her house, I looked with worry at her front walk. It needed tending. The concrete was breaking up, tectonic plates rising and falling under the forces of Minnesota summers and winters. She could easily trip someday, coming or going. Maybe I’d mention this to Shiloh when I saw him again.

I knocked on the door, pounding with the side of my fist instead of my knuckles. It wasn’t rudeness; Mrs. Muzio was hard-of-hearing.

“Hello, Mrs. Muzio, can I come in?” I asked when she appeared in the doorway.

Five-foot-two and stooped, she turned a benign, blank face up to me.

“You know who I am, right?” I prompted her.

“The fidanzata,” she said, her face creasing into a smile.

“Not anymore. We’re married,” I explained. She didn’t respond.

“Can I come in?” I repeated, wiping my boots on her mat as an illustration and a cue.

I liked the inside of Mrs. Muzio’s home. She cooked a lot, scratch meals with her garden vegetables, and as a result her home smelled of Italian cooking instead of the must of age that hung in the homes of many people in their eighties.

In the kitchen, she made coffee. I stood on her cracked, pale-pink linoleum and watched. She hadn’t understood me when I’d told her that Shiloh and I had married. It didn’t really matter, yet if I couldn’t communicate that concept clearly to her, how well would this whole interview go? Could I make her understand anything?

I caught her eye. “I’m not Shiloh’s fidanzata anymore. We’re married.” She looked at me with incomprehension. I held up my hand, showing her the ring. “Married. See?”

Understanding dawned and she smiled. “That’s lovely,” she said. Her accent made it thatsa lovely, the speech of a B-movie Italian widow. She poured the coffee and we settled at her kitchen table.

“How’s Snoopy?” I asked.

“Snoopy?” she repeated. She nodded toward the back door, near which I saw gray-muzzled Snoopy sleeping near her empty food bowl. “Snoopy is-a…” she considered, “old. Like me.” She laughed at herself, her eyes flashing.

Unexpectedly I saw a young girl six decades ago in Sicily, with dark eyes and a ready laugh and a strong body. I’d never seen her before in this widow’s stooped form and that made me ashamed of myself.

“Listen, Mrs. Muzio,” I said. “I need to talk to you. My husband, you know, Mike?” I paused.

“Mike?” she said.

“Right.” I nodded affirmatively. “Have you seen him recently?”

“He fixed the gate,” she said.

“That was months ago,” I said. “Just this week, have you seen Mike? When was the last time you saw Mike?” I kept trying to hit the key words hard.

“I see him walking down the street,” she said.

“What day?”

She squinted like she was making out Shiloh’s form. “Yesterday?” she suggested.

“I don’t think it was yesterday,” I said. “Can you think of something else that happened on the same day that would narrow it down?”

“The governor was talking on the radio.”

“About what?”

She shook her head. “He was talking on the radio. He sounded angry.”

“That was the same day you saw Mike walking?” I asked.

“Yes. Mike is walking in the street. He looks angry. Very serious face.”

“Okay,” I said. “Have you seen anything strange lately? Especially around our house?” I knew I could be opening a Pandora’s box, remembering the omnipresent “rascals,” but Mrs. Muzio shook her head. If her memory was a bit fuzzy, she wasn’t paranoid today.

I stayed another ten minutes to be polite, talking, winding the conversation back to neighborhood goings-on in hopes of jarring loose anything else that might help, but I learned nothing. I stood and set my empty coffee cup in the sink.

“You are leaving now?” she asked me.

“When Mike comes back we’ll drop by for a visit,” I promised.

Outside, a cool wind had picked up, rattling the dry-leaved branches.

Mrs. Muzio thought she had last seen Shiloh out walking and looking “angry.” That was, by her account, the same day that she’d heard the governor talking on the radio and sounding “angry.” Everyone seemed to be angry in Mrs. Muzio’s world. I wondered how much faith I could put in her observations.