The 37th Hour

This is a law-abiding woman, they pointed out. More than law-abiding: a philanthropist, a clergywoman. This couldn’t be A

And they pointed out that the Eliot case might be a cold case, but it wasn’t a Mi

Shiloh had backed down, but only to retrench, looking into the life of A

It took a long time, an investigation crowded into the begi

His voice calm, his heart slamming, Shiloh asked if she’d kept her old school stuff.

Maybe, she said. My parents are real pack rats.

That spring evening he came home from work a little late. When I met him on the back step, he slid his hands up my rib cage and lifted me up off my feet as an exuberant young father might do with a small child.

Several days later, nearly a year after he’d met Aileen Le

Now Special Agent Jay Thompson of the FBI was interested. He flew to Mi

“Let’s get her, Mike,” he said.

It wasn’t easy, even then. Thompson flew to Montana, where A

The widow Eliot was as tall as her daughter, and her blond hair was just begi

It was a good performance, but she must have known how futile it was. Although there was little in the house to betray her ongoing contact with her daughter-the paperwork on the phone bill, for example, showed no calls to Mi

It was Thompson who’d found the letter, and he knew from that moment he had to move carefully. The letter hadn’t been hidden; he doubted Mrs. Eliot would believe they hadn’t seen it, even should he leave it behind unopened and in the same position on the desk. No matter what, the moment the police left her home, the widow Eliot was going to be on the phone to Mi

No turning back. Thompson opened the letter. The salutation read, Dear A

Thompson slipped the letter into his jacket, found Oldham, and told him to sit down with A

While Oldham accepted ginger cookies and a cup of tea in a first-floor parlor, Thompson returned to the second-floor study and made two quick, quiet, and urgent calls to Mi

“Today’s the day,” he said. “We’re at the house. We got her, and the mother knows. I’m getting you a warrant. It’ll be ready in twenty minutes.” He looked out a wide window to where the Eliot land lay peaceful and white under March snow. “Go get her now, Mike.”

A

The look in her eyes, Shiloh said, must have been the same one that Marnie Hahn had seen just before she died, a rage born of frustrated, balked entitlement. A

“Did she really think she could get out of the situation by killing him?” Ligieia asked. Sinclair’s hands hadn’t moved. Ligieia had become interested in the story itself; she was asking out of her own curiosity.

“I’m not sure she was trying to kill him. It was just anger,” I said. “She never really believed Shiloh was going to get any evidence he could use. And I think”-I paused, looking at Sinclair now-“that she really felt she’d paid her debt to society, through all the good she was doing in Mi

Sinclair was signing. “And when Mike wouldn’t let it go at that,” Ligieia translated, “when she knew he was really going to make her pay, she got angry again. Just like she got angry at Hahn, years ago, the girl who was ruining her life.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding. Sinclair had Shiloh’s broad, contextual intuition. And in addition, I thought, she understood her brother as well. She saw that he’d been angered as a teenager by Marnie Hahn’s cold-blooded murder and had stoked and fed that long-banked anger during a long, seemingly fruitless investigation that had finally caught fire.

And then I told Sinclair and Ligieia the rest, the part that I thought of as the coda to the story.

Marnie Hahn, Shiloh had told me late the night of the arrest, was a poor man’s lamb.

“Mmm, that’s a biblical thing, right?” I asked. The reference itself wasn’t familiar to me, but Shiloh’s way of making allusions was.

“In the Old Testament,” Shiloh said, “King David desires a married woman, Bathsheba, and sleeps with her. And Bathsheba becomes pregnant, and when David realizes there is no covering up for his sin, he sends the husband to the front in the war. He sends the man to certain death. And it works, the man dies.

“To make him understand that his actions were wrong, the prophet Nathan tells David a story about a rich man who has a whole flock of sheep-that’s King David, metaphorically-who kills the only lamb his impoverished neighbor owns rather than give up one from his own flock.”

“Was Marnie the Hahns’ only child?” I asked him.

“Yes,” Shiloh said. “But that’s not really the point. A

That night, I’d heard in his voice the unflinching right-and-wrong creed of his youth, and I wondered if such a great ideological expanse had, after all, separated Reverend Shiloh and his son.