The 37th Hour (23 page)

“Sorry,” I said, sitting up on the edge of the bed. “You sound like . . . like your brother.”

“Mike? I wouldn’t know. It’s been years, literally years, since I’ve spoken to him.” I heard the noise of an office intercom behind; he’d called me from work. “I suppose that’s a regrettable thing,” he went on.

We talked briefly about Shiloh, but it was clear to me early on that Adam, who’d lived in Washington State for the last six years, knew nothing about his brother’s adult life. I heard a woman’s voice in the background, rising above generic office noise. The words were indistinct to me except for the last:
coming?

“I’ve got a meeting to go to,” Adam Shiloh told me. “But if there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know,” he said.

“Thanks, I’ll remember that,” I said.

An hour later Bethany Shiloh called from her dormitory in Southern Utah. We traveled the same territory, even more briefly, that I had with Adam. No, she hadn’t seen or spoken to Shiloh since he’d left home. She didn’t know any old friends of his. She wished to meet me, someday, after “all this is over.”

I hung up and took out my legal pad, then realized I had nothing to write. Talking to both Adam and Bethany was progress only in the sense that those conversations had been necessary to my investigation, not in the sense that they’d given me information that had helped.

Shiloh’s siblings had one thing in common. They all seemed very calm about his disappearance. But then, they hadn’t seen him in years; maybe that was to be expected. I couldn’t judge them. I probably seemed to be taking things a little too calmly, too. From the outside.

Naomi and her husband, Robert, lived on the outskirts of the city in a single-level house. I turned up at the predetermined hour, and Naomi greeted me at the door in the same dress I’d seen her wearing earlier.

“I looked around for things of Shiloh’s, like you mentioned, but I really only have my albums,” she said. “We could look at them after dinner, if you can wait.”

“I thought I heard someone at the door.” A young man came into the entryway. He was tall and lean, with blond hair and green eyes; an extraordinarily handsome man, I thought. “Is this your sister-in-law?”

“Right, this is Sarah,” Naomi said. “Sarah, this is my husband, Robert.”

“Call me Rob,” he said. He held a slotted fork: Rob was doing the cooking tonight.

Over dinner, Rob asked me a number of questions about being a sheriff’s detective. Eventually, Naomi asked specifically about Shiloh’s case.

I told them how Shiloh had disappeared, or rather, how I’d discovered him to be missing without finding the usual indicators of what had happened to him. I tried not to paint the situation as black as it probably was, whether to comfort her or me, I didn’t know.

“Leave the dishes,” Naomi told her husband after dinner. “I’m going to show Sarah some things, and we’ll probably need to talk, but I’ll get them later.”

I followed her down a hallway into the house’s spare bedroom, newly converted into a nursery. There was a rocking chair in it already; the other chair looked as though it had been conscripted into service from the living room for my visit.

“This was our storage room,” Naomi explained. “There’s still a lot of stuff in the closet.” However, she’d taken several albums out of the closet. Now she scooped them up from the chair they were resting on and set them on an ottoman between us.

“The first one is probably the one of most interest to you,” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff from when the six of us were growing up.”

I sat in the rocking chair and started looking.

The album told a time-honored story for which no words were needed. It began with pictures from a courtship: the yet-unmarried Shilohs at a lake together, in a larger group of young people, at a church event.

Then came marriage, a bridal party outside a church. A bride with her proud mother and sister. A nervous groom with his men; you could almost hear the jocular laughter. The first home. Babies. Children. Shiloh, his reddish hair in a child’s impersonal buzz cut. Shiloh with his older brothers, outdoors quite a bit. The appearance of the twin girls, Naomi and Bethany. I watched Shiloh growing from a skinny child to a lanky teen, his face shifting from a child’s characterless openness to that pensive, guarded expression characteristic of the man I knew. If I’d been alone I might have studied those photos all night, but they were teaching me nothing helpful and I turned the pages faster.

Then I flipped back a page. “Who’s that?”

Naomi leaned closer to look at the photo I was pointing at. The whole family stood against an unnatural blue backdrop, in a traditional studio portrait. In it, the teenage Shiloh stood next to a girl nearly as tall as he was. If Shiloh’s hair was the color of old copper, hers was bright new copper, worn loose and long. She wore a white scoop-neck dress and didn’t smile.

“Sinclair. She’s two years older than Mike, four years younger than Adam.”

Six kids, I thought. I’d heard about the two older brothers, and of Naomi and her twin, Bethany. And then Shiloh made five. I’d never quite realized that didn’t add up. “Where is she in all the other pictures?”

“Well, she is in some of them, but for most of her life she didn’t live with us,” Naomi said. “She was deaf from birth, so she was away at school.” She flipped backwards in the album. “Here, she’s in the background, see.”

Naomi was looking at a Christmas-dinner photo, a hectic kitchen scene. I had taken the little girl with bright red curls for a visiting relative.

“I never knew Shiloh had a sister who was deaf,” I said.

“Really?” she said. “That’s funny, because they were close.”

“I’m sure that he didn’t mention her.”

“We didn’t have her around for all that long. She came home to live at seventeen and left at eighteen. Kind of abruptly.”

“Tell me about it,” I prompted.

Naomi sat back. “Well, Bethany and I never knew her much at all. We only got to know Mike a little better.” She placed a hand on her gravid belly. “While we were growing up, Sinclair was at a school for the deaf. I guess she used to come home summers at first, but that was before my time. Later, when she got used to living with deaf people, and had friends at school, she started staying away over the summer, and just came home at winter break. Bethany and I would have to get reintroduced to her; we were five, six. Mom would say, ‘This is your sister, remember?’ and we’d be like ‘Okay, hi!’ It was like she was some visiting cousin.

“When Bethany and I were six, Sinclair was seventeen. In a year or two she’d be in college or married, and Mom wanted to bring her home for a while before that.

“We’ve always been a close-knit family; I guess I said that earlier today, didn’t I?” Naomi asked. “It was hard on Mom to have Sinclair living away from home most of the year. She and my dad decided she could make it in a public school with the help of a translator from the district, and so they brought her home.

“Anyway, I guess things didn’t go as hoped. None of us were that good at sign language. Except Mike. He was the family translator. But Sinclair wasn’t too happy to be home, she was . . . well, I don’t really know the details. But within a year she left.”

“She ran away?”

“Sort of. She was eighteen, but it was in the middle of the school year, I think. She didn’t waste any time.” Naomi was still looking at the photo. “When Mike left, they blamed it on her.”

“He left when he was seventeen, so that would have been a year later.”

“Yeah. But it was partly because of her. Mike got in trouble for letting her back into the house. She needed a place to stay, and he sneaked her inside without anyone knowing.”

“And your folks kicked him out? Just for that?” I hadn’t realized Shiloh’s parents were so authoritarian.

“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?”

chapter 15

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.