The 37th Hour

“What’s Michael like now?”

I drank again, the action giving me time to theorize.

“Hard to summarize,” I said. “Painfully honest.”

There was a warm feeling spreading through the pit of my stomach. Back in the days when I really drank, it would have taken a lot more gin before I’d have felt its effects. I sipped from the mug again and began to push the floor lightly with my feet, rocking Hope and myself.

“How long have you been married?”

Ligieia, while translating, stood up to pour more gin into my cup. I let her.

“Only two months,” I said. “Not long.”

“Before that, how long did you know him?”

“About five years,” I said. “We weren’t together for all of it, though. We split up for a while.”

Maybe the gin was doing it to me, but I’d lost the party-line feeling of being a degree removed from Sinclair. Particularly if I kept my eyes down on Hope, who’d fallen asleep, Ligieia’s words seamlessly became Sinclair’s voice.

“Why?”

“Shiloh and I had hit a wall.” I spoke slowly, thinking. “It was professional, in a way. We weren’t equals on the job, and that bothered me. When I was young I got angry easily. I was angry at him a lot of the time and I couldn’t even explain why.” I’m drunk already, I should stop right here. I didn’t. “And besides that, he was so far away sometimes, and when I was young I grabbed at things I thought I needed, and I got scared when I felt there was a piece of him I was never going to have.”

It was like I’d stepped barefoot on a shard of grief I hadn’t seen before me. I put my face down in my hands as much as I could without waking Hope.

Sinclair came and stood before me and did something odd and lovely: she put her hand on my forehead like I might have a fever, then ran the same hand back over my hair.

“I miss him,” I said quietly, and Sinclair nodded.

This time when she spoke to me, her lips moved as well as her hands, and I swear I understood even before Ligieia translated.

“Tell me something about Mike. Anything.”

So I poured myself more gin and told her how Shiloh caught A

chapter 18

Early in Shiloh’s cold-case days, he’d gone on a fairly routine errand, out to Eden Prairie, a suburb of Mi

He walked with the tall, plainly dressed woman and listened as she described with quiet pride the facility that had only been remodeled a year earlier as a way station for the dying. She pointed out the comforting, intimate touches; she spoke of the companies and individuals who’d donated time and money. And as she did, Shiloh felt something akin to hair rising on the back of his neck.

She was, at that time, twelve years older than when she’d disappeared. Her high cheekbones had taken on softening flesh, there were crow’s-feet around the glacial blue eyes, and her once-streaked blond hair was now dyed a lightless dun color. But Shiloh had seen it in her eyes, her bone structure, her carriage. Aileen Le

“I heard Montana in her voice,” Shiloh told me that night, “but when I asked her about it, she said she’d never lived there.”

“Bullshit,” I told him. “You can’t hear a Montana accent.”

“Yes, I can,” Shiloh had said.

A

From a young age, A

Trouble finally came to A

Hahn, an indifferent student and the employee of a pizza parlor near campus, had gone to the party of her own will. She had been underage and drinking. She was an unlikely girl to bring a rape case against a rich college boy; nevertheless, she stuck to her story.

Whatever Greene told A

Greene was firmly alibied. A

The police moved fast, but the Eliots moved faster. By the time there was enough evidence for an arrest, A

The parents denied any knowledge of her disappearance. They lawyered up and made public appearances, calling on the police to investigate their daughter’s disappearance as a kidnapping. However they were fu

That was how the matter stood for years, despite the best efforts of the FBI and police in two states. Thousands of leads fizzled. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the case was that no set of fingerprints existed for A

Her case had been news across the U.S., but it was particularly big in Montana, where an 18-year-old Shiloh followed it in the newspapers. He’d been employed by one of old man Eliot’s logging crews-the magazine writers who’d done stories on the case had loved that particular detail.

But at first, when Shiloh believed he’d found A

Like most investigators, he’d made narrowing circles around his target, pulling at the edges of her Aileen Le