Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

We worked awhile in silence. When I heard her roll open her desk drawer, I knew we were done for the day: she was taking out her purse. “You about ready?” she said. We didn’t always leave at the same time, but today, of course, I was driving her home.

“Yeah,” I said, shifting and stretching in my chair.

She closed her desk drawer with the heel of her hand. “As long as you’re driving me home, you want to stay for dinner?” she asked.

“That sounds good,” I said, watching her stand and arrange her bright-red muffler over the nape of her neck, pulling the ends of her short, dark hair out over it. “I end up eating alone a lot these days. Shiloh’s been working late almost every day.” I stood, too.

“That’s no good. Vincent was the same way when he was studying for the bar exam. I never saw him. Sometimes I was afraid Kam was going to start calling any tall black man she saw on the street ‘Daddy,’ ” said Genevieve, pulling her jacket on over the red scarf. “Anyway, let’s pick up Shiloh on the way.”

“He won’t come,” I said as we headed for the elevators. “He’s working on the Eliot thing.”

“Let me handle him,” Genevieve said.

“Oh, right. Amaze me with your Shiloh-handling skills. No”- I took her arm-“we’re not going to the precinct.”

Genevieve looked at me questioningly.

“At this hour, I’ll bet you five bucks he’s up in the law library,” I told her.

And he was, by himself, deep in his work. He looked up at both of us when we came to stand at his side.

“Hey,” I said, laying one hand on the table.

“Hey,” Shiloh said in return. He touched the back of my fingers with his, a gesture no one else in the library could have seen unless they were looking right at table level. “I’ll be home in about an hour and a half,” he said quietly. “Hey, Genevieve, how have you been?”

“I’m good,” she said. “Sarah and I are taking you to St. Paul for dinner at my house.”

“Can’t,” Shiloh said, not elaborating.

“I already lost five dollars to your girlfriend, who bet me you’d be up here,” Genevieve said, even though my offhand remark hadn’t in any way been an actual wager. “So make it worth my while.”

Shiloh glanced up at her, then took out his billfold and laid a five-dollar bill on the table. “Quit while you’re even,” he said, looking back down at his work, as if he expected her to go away.

“Kamareia has something she wants to give to you guys,” Genevieve persisted.

“What?” he asked her.

“A photo, from the Christmas party, of the two of you,” she said.

“Well, I’d hate for you to have to carry that in to work,” Shiloh said. “I know how heavy a Polaroid is.”

Genevieve was silent.

“This is important,” Shiloh said. “And you know I can’t work on it on my own time.”

Genevieve sat on her heels so she could look up at him. “You’re working too hard,” she said softly. “You need to learn to throttle back, Shiloh.”

When he still didn’t respond, she said, “We miss you.”

Shiloh ran a hand through his hair. Then he said, “Who’s cooking, you or Kamareia?”

“Kamareia. It’s your lucky night,” Genevieve said. She knew she’d won.

It was around six-thirty when we pulled into her driveway. Downstairs, the interior of Gen’s house was dim, although a little bit of electric light was falling down the staircase from upstairs, along with the sound of a radio playing.

Genevieve flipped on the lights, illuminating the empty, clean kitchen. Kamareia was nowhere to be seen. Genevieve frowned. “That’s odd, she told me she was going to start dinner around six.” She looked toward the staircase and the sound of the radio. “It sounds like she’s here.”

Her perplexity was understandable: Kamareia was responsible, and she genuinely liked to cook. “It’s okay,” I reassured Genevieve. “We’re not starving. We’ll live.”

Genevieve was looking up the staircase. “Let me see what’s going on,” she said.

I leaned against the railing of the staircase, waiting, as Genevieve went up. I heard her knock on the door frame of her daughter’s room and not find her inside. Her voice, as she went through the other upstairs rooms, took on an increasingly questioning sound, but not quite worried.

“Sarah.” Shiloh’s mild voice caught my attention. I turned to look at him, and he nodded toward the back of the house and the sliding glass door. The door was closed, but beyond that I saw footprints in the fresh snow.

Genevieve’s house shared a kind of open backyard with the neighbors to the south, the Myers. There was no fence, so I could see straight across to the back of their house. And although I couldn’t see their front driveway, the bushes that lined it to the side were visible. Red lights flickered on them in a familiar pattern.

Kamareia, I thought, and knew something was terribly wrong. It never occurred to me that it could have been one of the Myers who had been injured somehow, and Kam had gone over there to give assistance and call 911.

The Myers weren’t at home. As in Genevieve’s house, the entire first floor was darkened, and all the noise and light was coming from the top of the stairs. I went up two steps at a time. On the landing was a two-foot-long section of pipe, splashed with blood. Streaks of blood on the floor, footprints of blood.

Unlike the rest of the house, the bedroom was brightly lit. Electric light immersed the two EMTs, the phone that was tangled on the floor, and Kamareia, naked from the waist down, her thighs and lower legs smeared with red. There was a lot of blood on the floor. Too much. I thought of the pipe outside and knew she’d been beaten with it.

I reversed so fast I nearly skidded on the hardwood floors and plunged back through the doorway. Genevieve was halfway up the stairs with Shiloh behind her. I met Shiloh’s eyes and shook my head quickly, just once, no. He took my meaning right away and caught Genevieve from behind, stopping her.

I went back into the bedroom and knelt next to Kamareia. Her eyes, when I could bear to look at her face, were open, but I don’t know how well she saw me.

“Stay back, please.” The paramedic’s voice was as clipped as her southern accent could allow.

“I’m a friend of the family. Her mother’s here,” I told her. “If you can, get her covered up a little.”

Outside, I heard Genevieve screaming at Shiloh to let her go. She’d seen the pipe and the bloodstains.

“Maybe you should go take care of the mother,” the other EMT, a young man, suggested.

Shiloh was having a hard time with her, to be sure. “Kamareia’s been hurt. I don’t know how bad,” I said sharply from the top of the stairs. “She can hear you. If you want to help, shut up and stay calm.”

Gen kept trying to look past me, through the doorway, but she stopped yelling at Shiloh. He kept his grip on her shoulders anyway.

“That’s good,” I told Genevieve. “You’ve got to be tough for her like you would for anyone else on the job.”

“What happened to her?” Genevieve’s voice was high, foreign to me.

That was when they brought Kamareia out. She was covered with a blanket, but her face said it all anyway. Her nose and mouth, under the oxygen mask, was a delta of drying blood; she’d obviously been hit several times in the face. Her blood was visible on the clothes of the EMTs and it made bright streaks on the pale latex gloves on their hands.

Genevieve broke free of Shiloh’s grasp and touched her daughter’s face, then she put her hand to her own face like she was ready to pass out. Shiloh pulled her back and eased her down to the floor.

“Can you stay and take care of her?” I asked him.