Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

I realized that for a while now I’d been trying to decide who this man was, and if I liked him, and still I couldn’t come to a conclusion.

“Before I go anywhere,” I said stiffly, “I want to ask you a question.”

“Go ahead,” he said.

“Why drink in an airport bar?”

If nothing else, I’d surprised him; I saw that in his face. He rubbed the back of his neck a minute, then looked up at me and said, “Airports have their own police. I wanted to go somewhere that I wouldn’t run into any cops I knew.”

I heard the truth in his words. Truth, and none of the easy cynicism that would have allowed me to send this man away and stop thinking about him once and for all.

“Come in for a minute,” I said. “I need to change.”

Naomi Wilson, formerly Naomi Shiloh, hadn’t exaggerated about her size. She wore a loose yellow dress and a coral-colored sweater that was left open to accommodate her huge belly. She was standing at the edge of the well-tended play yard of the day-care center, watching the children.

When she saw me coming, I saw her take my measure: my height, the black leather jacket I’d thought would be best against autumn out West.

“You must be Sarah,” she said. “Call me Naomi.”

Her hair was darker than Shiloh’s, and I didn’t see much of his features in her open, sweet face. But demeanor, of course, is part of appearance. The older we get, the more our faces reflect our lives and our thoughts. And already it was clear that Naomi and Shiloh were worlds apart on that count.

“Do you mind talking out here?” Naomi gestured at a picnic table nearby. Obviously she was comfortable in her sweater, used to being outside with the kids. “I can have Marie come out, if you’d rather go inside.”

“Outside is all right,” I said.

“Can I get you something first? Some tea or water? Apple juice? Graham crackers?” She smiled at her joke.

“Coffee would be good,” I said.

“We don’t actually have any,” she said apologetically.

Too late I remembered Shiloh telling me that in Utah, where 75 percent of the population is Mormon, even the soda fountains served caffeine-free cola.

“Right,” I said. “I’m okay, really.”

At the table, it took a moment for her to comfortably adjust herself.

“Is this your ninth month?” I asked.

“Seventh.”

“Twins?”

She nodded. “It runs in the family.”

“Where does your twin sister live?”

“She’s still in school,” Naomi said. “Bethany didn’t go straight through college in four years like I did.”

I was about to get to the point at hand, but Naomi focused thoughtfully on me as though I’d suddenly materialized. “So Mike is married,” she said. “I don’t know why, but that surprises me.”

“Yeah?”

“He was always kind of a loner,” she said.

“He still is, in a way. Before he went missing, he was supposed to be going to the FBI Academy in Virginia. That would have kept him away from home for four months, but I understood.”

“He was going to be an FBI agent?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow,” she said. “That’s amazing.” Naomi even laughed. “Mike, an agent of the FBI.”

“Why does that surprise you? You knew he was a cop.”

“True,” she said. “I know, it’s just…”

“Was he wild as a kid?”

“You know…” She glanced upward slightly, the way people do when accessing memories. “I don’t really know. That was kind of the impression I got, growing up.”

“From your folks?”

“Yeah, and from Adam and Bill. But now that I’m thinking about it, I can’t remember anything specific that they said. Maybe I just assumed anyone who left home so young was a rule-breaker.”

“An outlaw,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “How did you two meet?”

Naomi seemed more interested in Shiloh’s life in Minnesota than in his disappearance. Maybe that was only natural. To her and her family, Shiloh had already disappeared, in a sense.

“Through work,” I said. “I’m a cop.”

“I should have guessed,” she said. “You look kind of like a police officer, I mean, you’re-”

“Tall, I know,” I said, smiling at her. “When was the last time you spoke to Mike?” I asked. It was time to get down to business. If I knew what my business in Utah was at all.

“I don’t talk to him at all,” Naomi said, mildly surprised. “I get Christmas cards from him.”

“But you were the one in your family who tracked him down,” I said. “The two of you seem to have the closest relationship.”

“I wouldn’t say close,” she said. “He left home when I was only eight years old.”

“Why’d you start looking for him?” I asked.

She considered. “In our family, I was kind of the record-keeper. Family’s important to me. Well, it was to all of us. But I’ve always been the one who took pictures at family gatherings and put the albums together. I guess that’s why, when I was a senior in high school, I started to think about Mike and whether it might be possible to find him.”

“Did you use one of those Internet people-finder services?”

Naomi shook her head. “That was too expensive, with the money I had then. I just did what I could. I had a lot of friends, and whenever they’d go out of town, I’d ask them to look in city phone books. It’s not a common name, Shiloh. Eventually, my friend Diana called from Minneapolis and said she’d seen a Michael Shiloh in the white pages, just a number, no address.

“I was too shy to call the phone number, so I called directory assistance. I said, ‘I know you can’t give me an address, but is this the M. Shiloh on Fifth Street?’ I picked that street name at random. And the operator said, ‘No, I’m showing an address on 28th Avenue.’ So I was really excited then. It was like a project. I had Diana ask her cousin back there to look through voter-registration records, and his whole address was there.”

“I wish everyone I worked with on the job had your initiative,” I told her. I wasn’t just flattering her; her dedication was impressive.

Naomi looked pleased. “I was a freshman in college by then. I wrote him a letter, although I was trying not to get my hopes up. Then, three weeks later, I got a letter.

“It wasn’t a long letter, but I must have reread it four times. I just couldn’t believe I’d found him. He hadn’t been a real person to me up until that moment. He had this funny writing, all caps, kind of spiky.”

“I know,” I said. “What did he say?”

“He mostly answered the questions I’d written to him. He said that yes, it was him, and he wrote a little about his ‘lost years.’ The time he’d spent working around Montana and Illinois and Indiana and, what? Wisconsin, I think.

“He said that he’d gotten a GED instead of finishing high school, and that now he was on the police force. He told me he liked Minneapolis but wasn’t sure he was going to settle there permanently. And ‘I’m not, nor have I ever been married.’ I thought that was a funny way to put it, like he was up in front of a Senate panel.” Naomi paused, thinking. “He said that I shouldn’t rush into marriage and motherhood. He thought I should take some time off from school and see the world, or at least America. Get some perspective on things. And then he told me to ‘study hard.’ ” Her eyes narrowed, looking at something over my shoulder. “Sorry, I’ll be right back.”

I turned and put one leg back over the bench, watching as Naomi went to referee a dispute over a piece of playground equipment. It took a few minutes for her to sort things out and soothe the hurt feelings, and then she walked back to me.