Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

Shiloh had a bit more medical training than I did, from his days in Montana where the small-town cops did all kinds of emergency work, and he nodded. His eyes weren’t on me; they were on Kamareia, being carried away from us.

I caught up with the paramedics outside. “I’ll go with you,” I said abruptly. The young man was in the back with Kamareia already; the woman was just about to close the doors.

She gave me a sharp glance. Under her teased ash-blond hair and plucked eyebrows she had eyes as level and unshakable as any doctor’s. She was entirely in charge here, and no one likes to be told how to do their job.

“I mean, I’d like to go with you,” I amended. “Her mother’s not functioning well enough to do it, but Kam needs someone with her.” I stepped a little closer. “And if you didn’t radio for a crime-scene unit already, you should do it on the way. We’ll need one here.”

She understood then that I was a cop. “I will,” she said. “Get in.”

The Evanses, the neighbors who had Genevieve’s key, were working people. I was fortunate, though: they had a college-age daughter living at home, and she was there when I got to Genevieve’s neighborhood, a peaceful street of tall, narrow homes. “This’ll probably take me fifteen minutes, maybe twenty,” I told the Evans girl.

I thought I might have to hunt around, if the shoebox wasn’t in the spot Genevieve had suggested, or the photos weren’t in the shoebox.

I stood for a moment on Genevieve’s front porch, thinking of February, then I slipped the key in and shot the dead bolt back.

Inside, the house had the kind of clean stillness that greets you when you come home after a long absence. Gen had done a housecleaning before she’d left. I could see vacuum marks on the carpet, and a few fresh footprints. Those would be the tracks of the Evans girl, I thought. There were plants on the windowsill and the shelves, still green and full-leaved, and somebody had to be keeping them watered.

The room looked bigger and emptier than I remembered. The last occasion on which I’d spent a lot of time here, there’d been a fat, bushy fir tree in the corner laced with colored lights, a happy and slightly drunk crowd of cops and probation officers around, and Kamareia had been taking pictures.

Upstairs, I flipped on the lights in the room that used to be Kamareia’s. I’d never really been inside, but it was obvious that it was exactly as she’d kept it in life.

The room was done in light shades: a peach down comforter on the twin bed, a blond wood desk. It was Standard Schoolgirl from Dayton-Hudson, except for Tupac Shakur glow-ering down from the wall.

Kamareia had loved poetry, and unlike Shiloh she’d put thought into her bookshelf, organizing from the oldest, The Canterbury Tales, to the newest, a collection by poet Rita Dove. One volume, a collection of Maya Angelou’s work, was vaguely familiar to me. Its cover design was a bright patchwork of color, and I had a vivid, isolated memory of seeing it in Shiloh’s hands.

I sat on my heels and pulled the book off the low bookshelf. Shiloh’s writing was on the inside front cover. TO KAMAREIA THE WORDSMITH, the simple inscription read.

Her backpack from school sat on the floor next to the desk, looking as if it were ready to be picked up and hauled to class. It wasn’t what I had come for, but I sat on my heels next to it to see what was inside: a spiral notebook, a calculus text, Conversations with Amiri Baraka.

They were likely the very things she had carried home from school the day she died; the backpack’s undisturbed contents testified to the abruptness with which Genevieve had closed the door on this room.

Genevieve had known her daughter well. The shoebox was on the top shelf, and inside were several envelopes from the photomat. Each was dated. I found the one marked 12/27.

Inside was a parade of candid shots, some of colleagues and friends of mine, some of strangers. Here was one of me, with Shiloh’s arm around my shoulder, his expression uncharacteristically unguarded.

I took the photo of the two of us, and another of Shiloh standing with Genevieve by the cheerful, squat Christmas tree. It was a good picture, well lit. You could see his face clearly, and almost his whole body; it gave a good impression of his height.

Replacing the photos, I put the shoebox back on its shelf, where Kamareia had kept it. Or as Genevieve had said, keeps. Keeps.

Goddammit, I thought.

I took the stairs two at a time on my way back down. I was ready to be gone.

Darryl Hawkins, his wife, Virginia, and their 11-year-old daughter, Tamara, were the newest additions to our Northeast neighborhood. Darryl, a mail carrier in his late thirties who looked about ten years younger than that, had come across the street early on to admire the Nova. He owned a Mercury Cougar he was fixing up; we’d talked cars for about twenty minutes.

Shiloh had noticed something else about our new neighbors: their dog. It looked like a black Lab/Rottweiler mix, and it lived on the end of a chain.

The Hawkinses’ side gate was made of cyclone fencing. We could easily see through it to the backyard, and no matter what time of day or night, the dog was there at the end of its ten feet of chain. It got food and water and was brought inside in bad weather. But I’d never seen it walked, played with, or exercised.

It bothered me, but not as much as it did Shiloh.

“Well, at least he’s not beating the damn dog,” I pointed out. “And he doesn’t beat his wife, like the last guy who lived there.”

“That’s not the way an animal’s supposed to live,” Shiloh said.

“Sometimes you can’t help what other people do.”

Shiloh had let it alone for a while. Then one afternoon I’d seen him sitting in the front windowsill, finishing an apple, watching something across the street. I followed his gaze and saw Darryl Hawkins waxing his dark-blue Cougar.

“You’re thinking about the dog again, aren’t you?” I said.

“He spends hours taking care of that damn car every weekend. The car’s not even alive.”

“Let it go,” I advised.

Instead, Shiloh pitched the apple core into the bushes and swung his legs off the windowsill, jumping down to our front yard.

He was across the street for about fifteen minutes. Neither of them raised their voices; I would have heard it from where I was. But Darryl Hawkins’s posture became rigid early on, and he came to stand very close to Shiloh, and Shiloh held his ground. I saw anger in the line of his back, too. When he came back his eyes were dark.

I didn’t ask what the two of them said to each other, but it put a permanent end to warm relations between our two houses. Virginia Hawkins avoided my eyes, embarrassed, when we passed in the market.

When I returned from St. Paul, the blue Cougar was in the driveway.

Darryl answered the door, still in his USPS uniform.

“How have you been?” I asked.

“All right,” he said. He didn’t smile.

“I could use your help with something,” I told him.

He didn’t invite me in, but he opened the screen door between us so that we were face-to-face.

“You know my husband, Shiloh?” I said.

“Huh,” Darryl said, almost a laugh, but without humor.

“Have you seen him in the last few days?”

“Seen him? What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’m looking for him,” I said. “I haven’t seen him or heard from him in four days, and to the best of my knowledge no one else has, either.”

Darryl raised his eyebrows. “He gone? That’s something. If it was you who wised up and left him, I could understand that.”

“I didn’t come here to get flattered at Shiloh’s expense,” I said evenly. “And he hasn’t left me, he’s missing. I’m trying to find out when was the last time you saw him, if you saw anything strange going on at our house or in the neighborhood.”