But Sinclair shook her head and signed something. Ligieia laughed.
“Everyone hates to be left out of a party, she says,” she explained to me. She looked at Hope again. “All right, baby, Mom says you get to stay awhile.” She turned away and poured gin into Sinclair’s glass, and then hers.
“Not for me,” I said too late when she leaned over my mug. Ligieia was already pouring with a heavy hand.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can get you more tea-”
“No,” I said quickly. “No problem, I’m fine as is.”
Ligieia put the bottle down and took her place on the sofa again.
“C’mere, Miss Hope, you want to sit between your mom and me?” Ligieia patted the space between herself and Sinclair.
But Hope climbed up onto the chair next to me, the chair dipping forward on its runners as she did so. There really wasn’t much room, and Hope’s weight settled against me, her head against my chest.
Ligieia’s eyebrows shot up, and even Sinclair looked mildly surprised. She signed something.
“You make friends fast,” Ligieia translated.
“Not usually this fast.”
Hope looked up at me. “Is your name Sarah?” she asked again. She’d said she couldn’t sleep, but I could see in her eyes and hear in her voice that sleep was hard on her heels. Mine, too, I realized.
“Yes,” I told her.
Hope lifted a hand and began fingerspelling.
“She’s spelling your name,” Ligieia said. “She’s showing off for you.”
“Well, I’m very impressed, kiddo,” I said to Hope. “We’re gonna lean forward a little now,” I warned. The chair tipped forward again as I reached for the cool tea and gin.
I swirled the liquid in the cup, a stalling gesture like bouncing a basketball at the free-throw line.
I had planned not to drink the gin; since I first realized Shiloh had disappeared, I’d been on guard against alcohol, even just one drink. One drink, I’d told myself, could lead to others; the warmth of liquor easing the fear in my chest and the tension in my shoulders, taking me away from reality, dulling my mind, slowing my search. All when my husband needed me to be clearheaded.
Then I drank anyway. I was so damn tired. The gin did improve the taste of the tea.
“It’s your turn to ask the questions, I guess,” I said.
Sinclair lifted her hands and signed. She got right to it.
“Is Mike in some kind of trouble?”
I shook my head emphatically. That was as close as I could come to being able to communicate in her language. “No,” I reiterated. “Not that I know about. Something happened to him. I’m trying to find out what.”
Sinclair gestured again. “How did you meet?”
“At work. We’re both cops.” As I said the evasive half-truthful words I felt a flicker of regret inside me. I almost wished I could tell the real story to Sinclair. Then the feeling passed. “It was a drug raid, actually,” I said. Even if it had only been Sinclair and me in the room, the true story was too long and time-consuming to tell, and besides, it was a story I’d never told anyone before.
“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 Annelise Eliot.
chapter 18
Early in Shiloh’s cold-case days, he’d gone on a fairly routine errand, out to Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis where several churches jointly ran a hospice. There a middle-aged man dying of AIDS needed to be reinterviewed, before his memories of an old crime winked out along with the sputtering candle of his existence. Shiloh sat by his bed, listened, took notes. And after the dying man slept, Rev. Aileen Lennox, who helped run the hospice, offered Shiloh what she self-deprecatingly called “the nickel tour.”
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 Lennox was Annelise Eliot.
“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.
Annelise Eliot had grown up there, a timber heiress, daughter of a land baron with logging operations and paper mills and extensive landholdings. Her name, with its European connotations, suggested an aristocrat, perhaps a touch neurasthenic, with a tracery of blue veins under paper-white narcissus skin. Little could be further from the truth. Anni, as she’d been known before notoriety fixed her in the public’s mind as Annelise, had been tall, full-bodied, and strong. And if her fair hair was expensively streaked with paler blond salon highlights, well, her fingernails were also often a little dirty from caring for her horses herself.
From a young age, Anni had had fast Appaloosas that she barrel-raced in rodeos. After the age of 16, she’d owned a faster Mustang, and when her red 1966 coupe sped down the road, the radar guns of local deputies seemed stricken with an odd malfunction. Likewise, the stories about the Eliot summer place in Flathead Lake-excessive underage drinking, strip poker, and wild stunts-remained just that, stories about Anni and her friends told with almost wistful envy by adults grown too old and sensible for that sort of behavior. She was a tomboy with a charmed life.