Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

“I don’t think they made him leave,” she said uncertainly. But she wasn’t sure. To her, these were like events that had happened to a previous generation, nothing to do with her. “I think he left on his own.”

“Why?”

“There was this big scene late at night. I don’t really remember it. Bethany went out of our bedroom to see what was going on, and they told her to go back into her room. She came back and told me she’d seen Sinclair going down the stairs with a gym bag over her shoulder. I guess Mike got caught sneaking her in,” Naomi said. Her voice took on more certainty, like she was convincing herself. “My father was really angry. Sinclair left right away, and Mike was gone a day later.”

“Really,” I said.

Naomi turned two pages ahead in the photo album. “There,” she said. “That’s the last picture we have of Mike. Taken five days before he left.”

It was a candid spur-of-the-moment shot, slightly dark with underexposure. Shiloh, long-legged and seated on a couch, was holding a hand half over his face against the bright surprise of a flash, as if he were looking into the headlights of an approaching car. There were a few tiny lights in the background, like fireflies indoors.

“Maybe it’s hypocritical of me,” Naomi said, “but I never tried to get in touch with Sinclair the way I did with Mike. She was always completely foreign to me. She was somebody I couldn’t talk to, and she couldn’t talk to me.”

“Can I have this picture?” I said.

“That one?” Naomi looked startled. “All right.”

I peeled back the protective cellophane and took the simple Polaroid out. “Who in the family would know more about Sinclair?” I asked.

“Mike,” Naomi said. “The six of us were paired off pretty neatly, like mini-generations: Adam and Bill, Mike and Sinclair, Bethany and me. Mike and Sinclair didn’t spend nearly as much time together as Bethany and I, or Adam and Bill, but they were close when she lived at home. Not just because of age but because of Mike’s good sign-language skills.”

“Who else?” I asked. “I need someone I can talk to.”

“Bill, I guess. He was the second-closest to Mike in age. And he was here the night our father caught Mike sneaking Sinclair into the house.” She seemed to remember something. “Oh, but Bill won’t call her Sinclair. That’s our grandmother’s maiden name; Sinclair adopted it around the time she left. Bill calls her Sara,” Naomi explained. “That’s why I was so startled when you called me last night. You said you were Sarah Shiloh, and I was thinking ‘This can’t be happening!’ ”

“Yeah,” I said. “I can see where that would throw you.”

We spent the rest of the time in simple questions. I asked the names of schools Shiloh had gone to in Ogden and if Naomi remembered the names of any close friends from his school years. Did anything he’d written in his letters or on Christmas cards seem important now? Nothing came to Naomi’s mind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there anything else I can do?”

“Could I use your phone?” I asked. “I didn’t get in touch with your brother Bill today, and I’d like to call him and ask if I can see him in person, tomorrow if possible. I don’t want to call too late, it’d be rude.”

Naomi nodded. “That’s fine. There’s a phone in our bedroom, where it’ll be quieter.” She set the photo album back on the ottoman with the others.

I stood and stretched, waiting for Naomi to rise as well.

“You know, I am worried about Mike,” she said. “If I sounded like I wasn’t, well, he and Sinclair were the family’s black sheep. It’s hard to think of a rebel as somebody vulnerable.”

She looked up at me from her seated position, and instead of standing, Naomi touched my arm. “Will you pray with me?” she asked. “For Michael?”

The next morning, Friday, I rented a dark blue Nissan and headed up the I-15 to Ogden. Ogden wasn’t just where the Shiloh family had lived for many years; it was where Bill Shiloh had settled and begun raising his own family. The traffic thinned as soon as I was fifteen minutes out of the city.

In my shoulder bag, along with the clutter of my daily needs, rode the photo I’d taken from Naomi Wilson. It was wrapped in a Ziploc bag to keep it from getting scratched up. Naomi might ask for it back someday.

It was commonplace for detectives to ask for photographs of missing persons, which was probably why Naomi hadn’t questioned my taking it. If she’d thought about it, she might have wondered why I didn’t have a photo of Shiloh myself, and why I needed one that was over a decade out of date. That Polaroid was going to be useless in my hunt for Shiloh, but I’d wanted it anyway.

It was hardly a profound character study-just a young man, surprised by someone who wanted to take his picture, looking not into the lens but past it, trying to see who the photographer was.

But Shiloh had grown into his adult face quickly, and this Shiloh looked an awful lot like the one I knew. His hand raised to shield his eyes, Shiloh looked oddly vulnerable, like somebody looking into the bright heart of a mystery, someone about to disappear. Which he had been.

In a way, Shiloh had disappeared twice. He’d left his family so abruptly he might as well have been missing, except that they had known he’d left them deliberately. They’d known the reason why.

Actually, I wasn’t really clear on the reason, when I reflected on it. He’d told me he’d left home over religious differences with his family. He’d neglected to tell me that those religious disagreements were exacerbated by a family crisis involving a black-sheep sister who’d been banned from the house.

Bill Shiloh wanted to meet at his office, not his home. Shiloh had said his brothers were in “office supplies, I think,” but Bill’s directions led to a paper mill.

“Sorry about the noise when you’re coming back here,” he said when we were both in his office. “But it’s pretty quiet inside here. It has to be, I spend a lot of time on the phone.” He closed the door behind us.

The mill was, in fact, in full swing behind us, but the noise was almost entirely blocked out by the door. The room was narrow and windowless save for the plate glass that looked out onto the mill floor. There were several metal filing cabinets behind the desk, and three grade-school art projects on the wall, each announcing “Dad” in colorful ways. Each child represented, I thought, seeing a picture of a family of five on the desk.

“So you’re Michael’s wife,” Bill said, virtually the same words Naomi had gotten down to business with. “He’s settled down?”

“Yes,” I said, like Shiloh had led a wild previous life.

“How long have you been married?” he asked.

“Two months.”

Bill Shiloh raised his eyebrows. “That’s not long.” He made it sound like a judgment. “And you’re with the Minneapolis police?”

“The Hennepin County Sheriff’s Department,” I said.

“So are you here in that capacity, as an investigator?” he asked.

“My husband is missing. He has been for five days,” I said sharply. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he said mildly.

Since coming to Utah, I had somehow become Shiloh’s proxy to his family, and now I was getting angry on his behalf, reading judgment into innocuous remarks. I swallowed.

“You didn’t,” I said.

“How can I help you?” Bill asked. He seemed warmer now, and looked a little tired, like I felt. “I mean, why do you think Mike’s in Utah?”

“I don’t,” I said. “I came here to find out more about his life before I met him. It might help, it might not.” I realized I hadn’t asked the obvious. “You haven’t heard from Mike, have you?”