“I understand,” I told her over the sound of Bobby’s subsiding whimpers.
“Maybe you could come over tonight, for dinner, and we could talk some more.”
That was exactly what I’d been planning to suggest after our meeting here was finished, and now I didn’t have to. “That’d be good,” I said. “If you have pictures of Shiloh, anything of his, high-school yearbooks, I’d like to see them.”
“Sure. I have lots of family pictures.” She lifted Bobby by the arm.
“Before I go,” I said, “I need something to do with the rest of the day, and I was hoping to talk to your older brothers and Bethany, ask them a few basic questions. I need to know when they saw him last, or spoke to him last. Do you have their daytime phone numbers available?”
Naomi, half bent to hold Bobby’s arm, shot me a harried but thoughtful glance. “I think I can tell you the answer to those questions. They haven’t spoken to him for years, since before I tracked Mike down. I know I’m the only one in the family who was persistent about finding him.”
“That was pretty clear from what you’ve said today,” I told her. “But I have to make sure. I’m just being thorough.”
“Come with me,” Naomi said, starting to lead the boy toward the building. “I know all their numbers by heart. I can write them down for you.”
A cab picked me up outside the day-care center about a half hour later. Asked for a recommendation, the driver took me to a family-run two-story motel in downtown Salt Lake City. “I don’t need to be near Temple Square,” I told her. “I’m not a tourist.”
“Still, it’s worth seeing while you’re here,” she said.
“Maybe next time,” I said.
I knew what the afternoon held. Whenever you really need to reach people, it seems that invariably you only reach answering machines.
I prepared for this by getting a vending-machine sandwich and a Coke and some ice from the hallway dispensers, fortifying myself for a long wait. Then, in the room, I dialed the work numbers of Shiloh’s siblings, reached a grand total of none of them, and left messages. Then I ate lunch and dozed off waiting for return calls.
I must have slept deeply, because when the phone woke me and a man’s voice responded to mine, I said “Shiloh?” just as I had with Vang.
“This is Adam Shiloh, yes,” the voice said, sounding a little bemused at the familiarity of my address. “Is this Sarah Pribek?”
“Sorry,” I said, sitting up on the edge of the bed. “You sound like… like your brother.”
“Mike? I wouldn’t know. It’s been years, literally years, since I’ve spoken to him.” I heard the noise of an office intercom behind; he’d called me from work. “I suppose that’s a regrettable thing,” he went on.
We talked briefly about Shiloh, but it was clear to me early on that Adam, who’d lived in Washington State for the last six years, knew nothing about his brother’s adult life. I heard a woman’s voice in the background, rising above generic office noise. The words were indistinct to me except for the last: coming?
“I’ve got a meeting to go to,” Adam Shiloh told me. “But if there’s anything I can do for you, please let me know,” he said.
“Thanks, I’ll remember that,” I said.
An hour later Bethany Shiloh called from her dormitory in Southern Utah. We traveled the same territory, even more briefly, that I had with Adam. No, she hadn’t seen or spoken to Shiloh since he’d left home. She didn’t know any old friends of his. She wished to meet me, someday, after “all this is over.”
I hung up and took out my legal pad, then realized I had nothing to write. Talking to both Adam and Bethany was progress only in the sense that those conversations had been necessary to my investigation, not in the sense that they’d given me information that had helped.
Shiloh’s siblings had one thing in common. They all seemed very calm about his disappearance. But then, they hadn’t seen him in years; maybe that was to be expected. I couldn’t judge them. I probably seemed to be taking things a little too calmly, too. From the outside.
Naomi and her husband, Robert, lived on the outskirts of the city in a single-level house. I turned up at the predetermined hour, and Naomi greeted me at the door in the same dress I’d seen her wearing earlier.
“I looked around for things of Shiloh’s, like you mentioned, but I really only have my albums,” she said. “We could look at them after dinner, if you can wait.”
“I thought I heard someone at the door.” A young man came into the entryway. He was tall and lean, with blond hair and green eyes; an extraordinarily handsome man, I thought. “Is this your sister-in-law?”
“Right, this is Sarah,” Naomi said. “Sarah, this is my husband, Robert.”
“Call me Rob,” he said. He held a slotted fork: Rob was doing the cooking tonight.
Over dinner, Rob asked me a number of questions about being a sheriff’s detective. Eventually, Naomi asked specifically about Shiloh’s case.
I told them how Shiloh had disappeared, or rather, how I’d discovered him to be missing without finding the usual indicators of what had happened to him. I tried not to paint the situation as black as it probably was, whether to comfort her or me, I didn’t know.
“Leave the dishes,” Naomi told her husband after dinner. “I’m going to show Sarah some things, and we’ll probably need to talk, but I’ll get them later.”
I followed her down a hallway into the house’s spare bedroom, newly converted into a nursery. There was a rocking chair in it already; the other chair looked as though it had been conscripted into service from the living room for my visit.
“This was our storage room,” Naomi explained. “There’s still a lot of stuff in the closet.” However, she’d taken several albums out of the closet. Now she scooped them up from the chair they were resting on and set them on an ottoman between us.
“The first one is probably the one of most interest to you,” she said. “There’s a lot of stuff from when the six of us were growing up.”
I sat in the rocking chair and started looking.
The album told a time-honored story for which no words were needed. It began with pictures from a courtship: the yet-unmarried Shilohs at a lake together, in a larger group of young people, at a church event.
Then came marriage, a bridal party outside a church. A bride with her proud mother and sister. A nervous groom with his men; you could almost hear the jocular laughter. The first home. Babies. Children. Shiloh, his reddish hair in a child’s impersonal buzz cut. Shiloh with his older brothers, outdoors quite a bit. The appearance of the twin girls, Naomi and Bethany. I watched Shiloh growing from a skinny child to a lanky teen, his face shifting from a child’s characterless openness to that pensive, guarded expression characteristic of the man I knew. If I’d been alone I might have studied those photos all night, but they were teaching me nothing helpful and I turned the pages faster.
Then I flipped back a page. “Who’s that?”
Naomi leaned closer to look at the photo I was pointing at. The whole family stood against an unnatural blue backdrop, in a traditional studio portrait. In it, the teenage Shiloh stood next to a girl nearly as tall as he was. If Shiloh’s hair was the color of old copper, hers was bright new copper, worn loose and long. She wore a white scoop-neck dress and didn’t smile.
“Sinclair. She’s two years older than Mike, four years younger than Adam.”
Six kids, I thought. I’d heard about the two older brothers, and of Naomi and her twin, Bethany. And then Shiloh made five. I’d never quite realized that didn’t add up. “Where is she in all the other pictures?”
“Well, she is in some of them, but for most of her life she didn’t live with us,” Naomi said. “She was deaf from birth, so she was away at school.” She flipped backwards in the album. “Here, she’s in the background, see.”