Jodi Compton - The 37th Hour

From counseling the families of the missing, I knew that it took a long, complex legal process before the system would accept a missing person as a dead one. A more important turning point, totally unwitnessed by the world, was the silent, awful recognition of the missing person’s husband or wife, lover, parent, or child; that moment when the still, small voice said, He’s dead.

Genevieve killed her headlights as she pulled into the yard of the Lowes’ farmhouse, and I did the same, creeping to a stop nearby.

As I put my keys into the pocket of my black leather jacket, I felt the stiffness of paper and drew out the three-quarter-size envelope that Sinclair had given me. It had ridden in my jacket since early this morning, when I’d opened Sinclair’s letter on the plane.

Instead of getting out of the car, I looked out at Genevieve, now on the steps of her sister’s home. I was expecting her to be impatient again, to hurry me along as she had by the tree at the side of the highway. But now that we were safely away from Blue Earth, on private property and unseen, she seemed relaxed. In the dark she was only a silhouette, but I could see ease in the way she lounged against the porch railing, studying the night sky.

I opened the car door a fraction so that the dome light illuminated the front seat, slipped a fingernail under the flap of the cream-colored envelope, and slit it open.

Sinclair had sealed this envelope believing Shiloh would open it. It was her gesture of faith. And I’d left it sealed, not yet ready to hear the still, small voice inside myself.

Sinclair’s message was brief enough to make the small slip of paper she’d written on look expansive by comparison.

Michael,

I’m so glad for you and Sarah.

Please be happy.

S.

Genevieve and I stayed awake for more than an hour after we’d crept into the house like thieves. Deb and her husband, quite fortunately, had not awakened.

While the washing machine in the basement removed the stain of Royce Stewart’s death from our clothes, if not our hands, Gen and I got our story straight. I had called Genevieve from the Cities, asking if I could come down. Phone records would bear that out, if it came to the point that anyone checked. I’d gone to Blue Earth first, to talk with Shorty, who refused to talk about the car theft and wreck Gen and I both still found suspicious. When he wouldn’t talk to me, I drove back up to Mankato. Genevieve had stayed up to meet me and let me in, which explained why I hadn’t rung the doorbell and woken anyone else in the house.

Later, we talked in low voices, like college roommates, in the twin beds of the Lowes’ guest room. There I recounted for Genevieve the story that Royce Stewart had told me, how Shiloh had turned away from his murderous course at the last minute.

“Does it comfort you at all?” Genevieve asked.

“Does what comfort me?”

“Knowing that Shiloh couldn’t go through with running Shorty down,” she said.

“Yeah,” I said. “It does. But it’s weird, too. Everything I used to know, or thought I knew, was wrong.”

I paused, thinking that it was going to be hard to explain what I’d just said, and that Gen was going to want an explanation for a cryptic statement like that.

But Genevieve’s eyes were closed, her breathing slow and steady. She was asleep.

Everything I knew was wrong.

Around the department I’d had a reputation as impulsive, a wide-open girl, as Kilander had put it. It was me who’d jumped into the Mississippi after a kid. Genevieve had a reputation for patience, for getting even hardened perps to unburden themselves to her in interrogation rooms.

Of the three of us, Genevieve and Shiloh and me, it was me who I would have voted the most likely to give in to the dictates of a murderous shadow self. After that I would have said Shiloh, and gentle Genevieve last.

But it was Genevieve who had put a wallpaper blade into the throat of an unarmed man, and later all but whistled as she torched the crime scene. It had been Shiloh who had laid plans for murder, acting on an anger I’d never seen building inside him. And yet, at the final moment, he hadn’t been able to carry out his plans. It had been me who’d sat with a dying man, an inveterate hater of both women and cops, and coaxed him to tell me what I needed to know. It was me who’d prayed in Salt Lake City with Shiloh’s sister.

I looked over at Genevieve. She was a murderer now, but she slept in a peace that passed all understanding.

Sleep did not come so easily to me. I was still awake when the first rays of sunlight stole under the sheer white curtains of the Lowes’ guest room, and the rooster in their henhouse crowed.

Genevieve stirred and opened her eyes. When she saw me, she said “Sarah?” as if she’d forgotten the events of last night altogether.

Then she reached across to my bed. I gave her my hand and she squeezed it.

We got up when we heard Deborah and Doug moving around outside our door. There were mild exclamations of surprise at my presence.

“Sarah had some business down this way,” Gen said. “She called kind of late. You probably didn’t hear the phone. I got it on the first ring.”

“Oh,” Doug said, rubbing his jaw, and if he or Deborah had questions about the vague and brief explanation, they didn’t voice them.

“Are you two hungry? There’s coffee on, too,” Deb said.

“I could use some coffee,” I said, and I realized that I could probably eat a little bit, too.

About fifteen minutes later, the four of us were sitting around the Lowes’ kitchen table, having linguica and eggs and coffee. As near as I can reconstruct, that’s where I was when Shiloh walked into the police station in Mason City, Iowa, and turned himself in for the murder of Royce Stewart.

Memory plays tricks, the police psychologist who interviewed Shiloh said. Shiloh’s belief that he’d killed Royce Stewart was a product of retrograde amnesia. Like many crash victims, he couldn’t remember the moments surrounding the wreck. But in his case, his mind had supplied the details, details that turned out not to be true. Shiloh had unintentionally seen to that.

In preparation for Stewart’s murder, Shiloh had gone over and over the scenario, rehearsing it mentally, steeling himself to go through with it. In the violence of the accident, somehow, imagination became memory.

“I saw it in my mind,” Shiloh told me. “When I thought about it, I could see him go down. I felt the impact when the truck hit him. It was so real.”

Shiloh couldn’t clearly remember all the time between the wreck and his visit to the police station. He knew he had a head injury and a fever, but did not seek medical help. He was paranoid, convinced the police were looking for him, a misconception supported by the fact that a helicopter was crisscrossing the skies, looking for the presumed-missing Thomas Hall.

He went deeper into the countryside, irrationally moving south, not back up toward the Cities where he had people who might have sheltered him.

One morning, after a particularly long sleep, he woke up feeling more clearheaded and knew he had to give himself up.

It took a while, though, before all the parties involved sorted out the details.

At 7:20 A.M., the desk sergeant in Mason City was enjoying a Sunday-morning cup of coffee and the last forty minutes of his watch when Shiloh walked in and made his confession.

What Shiloh actually said was that he was the guy who’d run over Royce Stewart in Blue Earth, Minnesota. The last part of his statement was “Don’t handcuff me. I’m not going to resist and my arm’s probably broken.”

The desk sergeant treated him with the caution due a man who’d identified himself as a murderer. He put Shiloh in a holding cell while he conferred with his supervisor. It was clear to both of them that Shiloh was probably sick as well as injured, and they assigned an officer to take Shiloh to the hospital, where his broken arm was set and he was treated for a head injury and a fever of 103.