“ ‘Disappeared without a trace’ is a cliché,” Genevieve told me early in my training. “ ‘Nobody disappears without a trace’ is my anti-cliché. It’s the golden rule in Missing Persons.”
The one case that seemed to be proving Genevieve’s saying wrong was the one I was personally involved in. That in itself was suspicious. Maybe I was doing something wrong. Maybe I was too close to it. Was that what another cop would say? What Gen would say?
There were another seven hours left in my thirty-six-hour window, but it didn’t matter to me anymore. There was something I wanted to do, and I didn’t want to wait.
At five Wednesday evening I was at the Lowes’ farm again, outside Mankato.
I could have called Genevieve. Technology has changed a lot of things. You can’t turn on the TV anymore without a wireless company selling you the idea that you can trade stocks and give presentations from the top of a mountain in Tibet. Cops are among the few people who still understand the need for face-to-face communications. I’d strongly felt that this conversation with my partner wasn’t something I could do over the phone.
I needed Genevieve. She’d taught me. I had to believe she could help when I didn’t know what else to do. Eating up Highway 169 at 71 miles per hour, a borderline safe speed in case of patrol cars in the bushes, I’d rehearsed how I would explain things to her.
In the back of my mind was the idea that this would help Genevieve as much as me. She needed to be doing something other than hiding in a century-old farmhouse, grieving for her daughter. She was good at this work; surely it would help.
When Genevieve came to the door, she looked unsurprised, like I lived across town.
“Come in,” she said, and I followed her inside. But once inside, she didn’t seem to know what we should be doing.
“Where’s Deborah and Doug?” I asked.
“Doug will be home soon,” she said. “He sometimes stays at school to grade exams. Deb’s gone to Le Sueur. She coaches the girls’ basketball team and they’ve got an away game.”
When she stopped speaking, Genevieve simply stood and waited for me to take the lead again.
“I need to talk to you,” I said.
“All right.”
I glanced to the side, into the living room. It seemed like the place Genevieve would take a guest who’d come to talk, if she had been thinking like a host. It seemed she wasn’t.
“Do you want to make some coffee or something?” I said, awkwardly taking her role.
We went into the kitchen, Genevieve trailing me. When I started looking for coffee and filters, she took the initiative of reaching up to a cabinet over the refrigerator and bringing down what I needed. The sleeves of her T-shirt fell away, revealing the smooth muscles of triceps and deltoids. She hadn’t lost all her work in the gym, not yet.
I took the cream from the refrigerator. There were eggs in the door of the refrigerator, smooth and brown, and I remembered the Lowes’ henhouse outside.
“The eggs are from the chickens outside, aren’t they?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“They must really be fresh, they must-” For God’s sake, Sarah, this is not a social call. I turned to make eye contact with Genevieve. “Shiloh’s disappeared,” I said.
Her eyes were on me, a sober brown gaze. Yet she said nothing.
“Did you hear what I said?” I asked her.
“Yes.” Her voice was flat. “I don’t understand.”
We never got back to the living room. I told her the whole story in the kitchen, first as the coffee brewed, then as we drank it. She sat down at the kitchen table. I remained standing, restless from the drive.
As little as I knew about how and why Shiloh had gone missing, it took a long time to tell. I wanted to make clear to her that I’d pursued all the angles I knew, that every one had been a dead end. She had to understand that this was serious.
“Will you help me?” I asked finally.
Genevieve looked out the window, at the fallow fields of the neighbor’s lands, the stubble lit by the last rays of the setting sun.
“I know where Shiloh is,” Genevieve said dully.
It was too good to be true, but my heart leapt anyway.
“He’s in the river,” Genevieve said. “He’s dead.”
It was like a verdict, so calmly absolute was her voice. Genevieve was my teacher. Her voice was the voice of truth and fact to me. Get a grip, Sarah, I told myself. She can’t know that; she can’t know that.
Genevieve wasn’t looking at me, so she couldn’t see the hostile stare I was giving her. “Could you try to be a little more helpful?” I said thinly.
She turned and looked at me, and now there was a little more light, something alive in her dark eyes. “I am,” she said. “I was listening to everything you said. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”
Her voice was very matter-of-fact, as though Shiloh were someone she’d never met. “You used to tell me yourself, he’d get depressed. He had his dark periods-”
“But not now. He was getting ready to go to Quantico-”
“Maybe he was afraid of that. He might have thought he wouldn’t make it in the FBI. Shiloh was hard on himself. The prospect of failure would have scared him.”
“Not that much.” I felt warm in the generous heat of the farmhouse’s furnace system and shed my jacket, hanging it across the back of a chair.
“Or maybe he was afraid of your marriage not working out,” she said.
“We’ve only been married for two months.”
“And already the two of you were going to be living in different parts of the country. Just the day before his trip, you went out of town without him.”
“For godsakes, I asked him to come along,” I told her. “He didn’t want to come.”
“Maybe not,” she said. “But then he was home alone. Asking himself how much longer he was going to have you, whether he’d ever measure up to his impossible expectations for himself. Shiloh knew how easily plans for the future can go wrong. At some point he walked out to the bridge-it’s only blocks from your house, right?-and jumped.”
I understood something then. Genevieve had moved down here from the Cities because the Mississippi River and its many bridges were too great a temptation. Asked to theorize about what could have happened to Shiloh, Genevieve had plotted a course like the one she’d so often wanted to take.
“He wasn’t suicidal,” I pointed out. “He wasn’t even depressed.”
“She was happy in her marriage,” Genevieve said.
“Who was?” I demanded, baffled. The conversation seemed to have taken a completely unforeseen turn.
“She was happy in her marriage,” Genevieve repeated. “He wasn’t gay. She wasn’t depressed. If he was cheating on me, I’d have known. She wasn’t the kind of kid to stay out all night without calling.” It was an unemotional litany. “You’ve heard those lines a thousand times. So have I. All detectives do. Wives, husbands, parents… sometimes they’re the last to know the important stuff.”
What she had said was true.
“Sometimes depression is just biological. There doesn’t have to be an obvious trigger,” she went on. “And people with depression get good at hiding it from the people around them. It wasn’t your fault.”
I shook my head. “He didn’t kill himself.”
One of the things that made Genevieve a master interrogator was her voice. It was low and soft, no matter how awful the things were she had to ask. She’d never sounded more dispassionate than she did now. Deep in her own despair, she was oblivious to the pain she was causing me.
“If it wasn’t suicide, then it could have been another woman. You said he didn’t seem to take anything much with him when he left the house. He went somewhere in the neighborhood. Maybe a bar.”