My right hand was resting on the countertop, and Genevieve now laid her own hand over it, gently.
“What about you?” she asked me. “Are you okay?”
“I’m not sure I know,” I said honestly.
I stopped in at work to tell Vang I’d be back on the job tomorrow, and that Genevieve wouldn’t ever be again.
“I heard,” he said. “News travels fast around here. Which reminds me,” he said, his tone brightening, “they busted the guy who was making those calls to the wives and girlfriends. Remember?”
“Yeah,” I said. “The killed-in-the-line-of-duty calls?”
“Right. Sergeant Rowe told his wife about it. She had a phone jack that lets her tape calls, and she set it up just in case.” He shrugged. “It sounds paranoid, but it paid off. The guy called her and said Rowe had been killed in a shootout. She pretended to freak out, and he stayed on the line for a while, giving her these fake details. Then Rowe brought the tape in and passed it around for people to listen to.”
“And it was someone in the department?”
“No, the medical examiner’s office, actually. None of us even knew this guy, either, his name is-”
“Frank Rossella,” I finished for him.
Vang looked at me, surprised. “How’d you know?”
epilogue
Shiloh was sentenced to twenty-two months in prison. It was a stiff sentence for a first offense, by Minnesota’s standards. The judge had departed upward, he said, in light of the public trust that Shiloh had borne and failed. The truth, I believed, was that the conspiracy-to-murder charge that Shiloh had escaped, the intent with which Shiloh had stolen the car, was in the back of his mind.
It was clear the court didn’t view Shiloh as a sympathetic figure. However, Shiloh had made cases against a number of serious and violent felons; those men were serving time in all of Minnesota’s prisons. Shiloh’s safety was a concern the judge couldn’t overlook. He referred the matter to the Bureau of Prisons, which arranged to have Shiloh serve his time across the state line, in Wisconsin.
He was transferred immediately after the sentencing; I went to see him about a week later, in early December. The first snow had fallen the night before. The fields and barns of Wisconsin were ridiculously lovely in the fresh whiteness.
I don’t know if it was professional courtesy, but they let me talk to Shiloh in a small, private interview room. He was clean-shaven again, but he’d never regained the weight he’d lost in the countryside. His work shirt hung loose on him.
“How are you?” he asked immediately.
“I’m fine,” I said.
“Are they treating you okay at work?”
In truth, I missed Genevieve terribly already, partly because she alone would have treated me normally. Everyone in the department had been shocked to learn what Shiloh had done; they didn’t know what to say when they saw me. Almost to a person, my fellow officers dealt with it by never bringing it up.
“Sure,” I said.
Shiloh heard the lie. “Really,” he said, “how are things?”
“Everyone’s treating me okay,” I insisted. “I came to talk to you about something else.”
I looked around. As private as the room seemed, I doubted there wasn’t some kind of electronic surveillance in play, and therefore I had to choose my words carefully.
I waited so long that Shiloh spoke again. “Look, Sarah,” he said. “I understand that what I did in Blue Earth might have changed the way you feel about me-”
“No, no,” I said. “It’s not that.”
“Go on,” he prompted me, gently.
“I met her,” I said. “I know why you left home. I know what you were doing on Christmas Eve.”
I’d said the last thing in the world that still had the power to alarm him. In Shiloh’s lynx eyes, in the sharp way they focused in on me, I saw all the confirmation I needed. I hadn’t really been sure, not until that minute.
“She told you?” Shiloh said.
I shook my head.
Sinclair hadn’t told me the truth about her troubled relationship with her brother, not with words, anyway. She’d done so with her silences, relating her life story with the most important aspect in the unfilled blanks.
She and Shiloh had been extremely close, yet after leaving his family he hadn’t sought her out in Salt Lake City. He’d fled the other way, north to Montana.
They’d run into each other when she came to Minnesota, and Sinclair had made no mention of a fight or disagreement, yet said they’d never gotten in touch again after she left.
Mike without a last name in the bar at MSP, five years ago, just out of a very brief, very wrong affair.
The connection had simply come to me, unwilled, on the flight home. Sinclair had referred to last seeing her brother in Minnesota in winter, just around the time a wreck had taken the lives of the three Carleton students. I wouldn’t have been able to place it, except that I had been one of the patrol officers on the scene, an icy secondary highway outside Minneapolis in frozen late January. That had been only days before I’d learned of my father’s death. Days before my quick trip west, at the end of which I had met Shiloh, drinking and trying to forget a sexual entanglement about which he had shared no details. I had been willing not to ask. In the months and years that followed, I never had.
Small wonder he’d been able to keep his intent to go to Blue Earth a secret from me. Shiloh had learned long ago how to hide his heart. I’d never even known that he knew sign language.
He and Sinclair had both tried very hard to forget; that much was clear. They’d spent their adult lives avoiding each other, an estrangement that had grown to encompass their entire family. Shiloh had brushed aside even Naomi’s innocent, questing attention, when she’d crossed a cardinal, unseen line in suggesting he come home.
Shiloh couldn’t go home, for the same reason he’d been unable to go to his father’s funeraclass="underline" He couldn’t bear the prospect of looking in his older brothers’ eyes and wondering what they knew, never knowing if they had been told nothing or were feigning ignorance because the truth was too terrible to acknowledge.
He needn’t have worried. Shiloh’s brothers and sisters lived in a fog of self-deception. Naomi never wondered what the Christmas Eve disaster was all about. Bill had possessed all the pieces of the mystery but never quite put them together. Mike was there and suddenly he wasn’t there, Bill had said. My father said God could forgive anything, but not until He is asked. Bill had never considered the prospect that Mike and Sara were guilty of more than everyday human sins. He never let himself wonder how a single instance of teenage drug experimentation could have permanently ruined his brother Mike’s relationship with the entire family.
I wondered how much it had hurt Shiloh’s father, by all accounts a truly godly man, to lie to his children about what Sara and Mike had really been doing that long-ago Christmas Eve.
Perhaps I would have missed all the signs as well-I had even more reason than they did for self-deception-but for Sinclair’s message. I am so glad for you and Sarah. Please be happy. Short as a haiku, both a greeting and a farewell, every word weighted with a lover’s bittersweet kindness and gentle regret, nothing like what a sister should have written.
I’d brought the note with me and handed it silently over to him.
Shiloh studied it longer than the simple text seemed to merit. When he finally spoke, his voice was so low it was barely audible.
“God knows I’ve tried to make sense of it. I never have. Sometimes things just go wrong in your head.”
But he tapped two fingers not against his temple, indicating the mind, but against his chest, indicating the heart.
“I was fifteen when she came home. She was like a stranger to me. But we understood each other. I could talk to her. Not just because I knew sign language. I could talk to her.” He was looking down at the floor, not at me. “We got really close, too fast. One night we were on the roof, during the Leonid meteor shower. I asked her if I could hold her hand and she let me. We didn’t realize we were opening a door that we were never going to be able to close.”