Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

“Why’d you stop writing?” I’d asked Shiloh.

“She was starting to look at me as a project,” Shiloh had said. “I could tell she was working toward getting me to come home. A reconciliation first with my family, then with God.”

It seemed Shiloh had succeeded in introducing a touch of frost into their relationship, because since then they’d only exchanged Christmas cards.

Back at home in Minneapolis, it took me several minutes of sorting through the box of addresses on torn scratch paper before I found the one I needed. Naomi and Robert Wilson. The address was in Salt Lake City, and I felt certain they’d be listed in directory assistance.

There was no reason to believe Shiloh had been in contact with any of his family lately, but I needed to check it out. The ground I’d covered here, at any rate, had been stony to start with, and wasn’t going to get any more fertile. And if there were no fresh leads in Utah to help me find Shiloh, there might be old ones that would help me understand him better.

Over a dinner of shredded wheat, I collected “Robert Wilson” or “R. Wilson” numbers for the Salt Lake City area and began making the calls.

“Hello?”

A young woman answered at the second number I tried. She sounded the right age.

“Is this Naomi Wilson?” I asked.

“Speaking,” she said politely.

“Naomi, this is Sarah Shiloh.” I paused for a second to think how to proceed.

“Who?” she said. “Did you say your name was Sarah Shiloh?”

“Right,” I said. “Your brother Michael is my husband.”

“Michael? You’re Mike’s wife? Ohh!” she said, and laughed, sounding flustered. “Let’s start over. Yes, this is Naomi Wilson, you’ve reached me.” She laughed again. “You confused me because… well, never mind. Listen, can I talk to Mike? We haven’t spoken in a long, long time.”

Something in my chest felt a little colder, leaden, at her words.

“I wish you could,” I said. “I’m looking for him. Nobody, me included, has seen him in several days.”

There was a brief silence on the line, then Naomi Wilson said, “What are you saying?”

“Your brother is missing,” I said. “That’s why I’m calling.”

“My goodness,” she said. The words seemed inadequate, but belatedly I realized that of course a good Christian wouldn’t say Oh, Christ. But Naomi’s voice was somber as she said, “Where are you, in Minneapolis? Is that where he still lives?”

“That’s where we live. But he was supposed to go to Virginia, and he never got there,” I told her.

“He’s missing? And you think he’s out here? He’s not here,” she said, answering her own question. Then she corrected herself. “Well, not that I know of. But is that what you think, that he’s somewhere out West?”

“I don’t know. I need to come out and talk to you in person, maybe the rest of your family also.”

“All right,” she said. “When are you coming?”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “A morning flight. With the time difference I’m pretty sure I could be there by midmorning. What time is good for you?”

“I work at a day-care center,” Naomi said. “There are two of us there until noon, then I’m on my own until three-thirty. If you can come anytime in the morning, I can get away to talk. I’m going to have a few questions for you, too-about Mike, and how the two of you met and so on. It’s been a long time since I actually spoke to him.”

She gave me the address of her preschool and day-care center on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. Then she added, “You’ll recognize me right away. I look like I’m ten months’ pregnant.”

I called Northwest and made the arrangements with my credit card, then packed. Shiloh’s valise was on the floor, right where I’d left it after I’d pulled it out from under the bed and realized what finding it meant. As an afterthought to my packing, I retrieved Shiloh’s old Search and Rescue T-shirt from the suitcase and threw it into my bag.

A freight train rumbled northward on the other side of the bedroom wall. I was sitting on the bedroom floor, cross-legged. I needed sleep but had reached that state where the effort of just getting undressed and brushing your teeth seems like a very sizable obstacle between yourself and your bed.

Instead I reached for the book in Shiloh’s valise, pulled the Northwest ticket out. It was a broken promise, an unfulfilled contract, and the last known signpost on the sane, reasonable course of Shiloh’s life before some unknown wrong turn.

I turned the ticket over, looking at the terms and conditions printed in palest green type on the back.

My heart did a gentle double thump. There was writing across the back, seven numbers in light pencil, the barest of spaces between the third and fourth number.

Shiloh was careful and he was reliable, but the only things I knew him to organize thoroughly were the notes and papers related to his investigations. Otherwise, he kept things in a state of manageable disorder. He stacked the bills on the kitchen table, wrote addresses down on scratch paper, and stored them in a box of letter-size envelopes, where he also kept the stamps. He wrote phone numbers down inside the city phone book, and on one occasion, in pencil on the wall over the phone. Numbers he needed over the short run he’d write on anything handy. Like the back of an airline ticket.

I drummed my fingers hard several times on the cover of the book. He’d written on his ticket. Did they take tickets from you at the gate? Or would Shiloh have this on landing in D.C., where he knew he’d need it? Or was it a Minneapolis number he’d copied down for immediate use?

I carried it to the phone and dialed the straight seven digits, no area code.

“Hello?”

It was a woman’s voice, apparently at a private residence. She sounded older-60 to 70. In the background a TV was turned up loud enough that I could recognize the voices from a syndicated situation comedy.

“Hello, ma’am?” I said.

“Hello?” she repeated.

“Do you need to turn the TV set down?” I suggested. “I can hold the phone.”

“Yes, wait a minute.”

The television noise died; still, I was careful to speak loudly when she returned. “Hello, ma’am? What’s your name?”

“Are you selling something? It’s kind of late.”

“No, I’m not. I’m trying to find a man called Michael Shiloh. Is that name familiar?”

“Who?”

“Michael Shiloh.”

“I don’t know anyone named that,” she said.

“Is there anyone else there you could ask?” I suggested.

“Well,” she said, sounding baffled and mildly put out, “there’s no one here but me, and I don’t know anyone by that name.”

I believed her. Her cigarette-rasp voice, the TV set turned loud for a watcher deafened by old age… she sounded like a retired widow.

“Thanks,” I said. “Sorry to bother you.”

I knew the Cities’ other area codes by heart. When I tried them, one phone rang endlessly. The other number had been disconnected, no longer in service.

With one hand on the phone’s plastic tongue to break the connection, I held the receiver against my shoulder. D.C., then, I thought. Maybe this was somebody who lived near Quantico.

With a 202 area code, and the new area codes that had sprung up in the vicinity of D.C., I had two more brief and fruitless conversations and heard one more prerecorded, no-longer-in-service message.

In Salt Lake City, those seven digits connected me to the automated customer-service line of a ski- and mountaineering-goods company. (“Your call is important to us…”)

Trying the area codes of outstate Minnesota wouldn’t hurt, I thought.

In northern Minnesota, up in the Iron Range, the number couldn’t be completed as dialed. But in southern Minnesota, it rang.