Naomi was looking at a Christmas-dinner photo, a hectic kitchen scene. I had taken the little girl with bright red curls for a visiting relative.
“I never knew Shiloh had a sister who was deaf,” I said.
“Really?” she said. “That’s funny, because they were close.”
“I’m sure that he didn’t mention her.”
“We didn’t have her around for all that long. She came home to live at seventeen and left at eighteen. Kind of abruptly.”
“Tell me about it,” I prompted.
Naomi sat back. “Well, Bethany and I never knew her much at all. We only got to know Mike a little better.” She placed a hand on her gravid belly. “While we were growing up, Sinclair was at a school for the deaf. I guess she used to come home summers at first, but that was before my time. Later, when she got used to living with deaf people, and had friends at school, she started staying away over the summer, and just came home at winter break. Bethany and I would have to get reintroduced to her; we were five, six. Mom would say, ‘This is your sister, remember?’ and we’d be like ‘Okay, hi!’ It was like she was some visiting cousin.
“When Bethany and I were six, Sinclair was seventeen. In a year or two she’d be in college or married, and Mom wanted to bring her home for a while before that.
“We’ve always been a close-knit family; I guess I said that earlier today, didn’t I?” Naomi asked. “It was hard on Mom to have Sinclair living away from home most of the year. She and my dad decided she could make it in a public school with the help of a translator from the district, and so they brought her home.
“Anyway, I guess things didn’t go as hoped. None of us were that good at sign language. Except Mike. He was the family translator. But Sinclair wasn’t too happy to be home, she was… well, I don’t really know the details. But within a year she left.”
“She ran away?”
“Sort of. She was eighteen, but it was in the middle of the school year, I think. She didn’t waste any time.” Naomi was still looking at the photo. “When Mike left, they blamed it on her.”
“He left when he was seventeen, so that would have been a year later.”
“Yeah. But it was partly because of her. Mike got in trouble for letting her back into the house. She needed a place to stay, and he sneaked her inside without anyone knowing.”
“And your folks kicked him out? Just for that?” I hadn’t realized Shiloh’s parents were so authoritarian.
“I don’t think they made him leave,” she said uncertainly. But she wasn’t sure. To her, these were like events that had happened to a previous generation, nothing to do with her. “I think he left on his own.”
“Why?”
“There was this big scene late at night. I don’t really remember it. Bethany went out of our bedroom to see what was going on, and they told her to go back into her room. She came back and told me she’d seen Sinclair going down the stairs with a gym bag over her shoulder. I guess Mike got caught sneaking her in,” Naomi said. Her voice took on more certainty, like she was convincing herself. “My father was really angry. Sinclair left right away, and Mike was gone a day later.”
“Really,” I said.
Naomi turned two pages ahead in the photo album. “There,” she said. “That’s the last picture we have of Mike. Taken five days before he left.”
It was a candid spur-of-the-moment shot, slightly dark with underexposure. Shiloh, long-legged and seated on a couch, was holding a hand half over his face against the bright surprise of a flash, as if he were looking into the headlights of an approaching car. There were a few tiny lights in the background, like fireflies indoors.
“Maybe it’s hypocritical of me,” Naomi said, “but I never tried to get in touch with Sinclair the way I did with Mike. She was always completely foreign to me. She was somebody I couldn’t talk to, and she couldn’t talk to me.”
“Can I have this picture?” I said.
“That one?” Naomi looked startled. “All right.”
I peeled back the protective cellophane and took the simple Polaroid out. “Who in the family would know more about Sinclair?” I asked.
“Mike,” Naomi said. “The six of us were paired off pretty neatly, like mini-generations: Adam and Bill, Mike and Sinclair, Bethany and me. Mike and Sinclair didn’t spend nearly as much time together as Bethany and I, or Adam and Bill, but they were close when she lived at home. Not just because of age but because of Mike’s good sign-language skills.”
“Who else?” I asked. “I need someone I can talk to.”
“Bill, I guess. He was the second-closest to Mike in age. And he was here the night our father caught Mike sneaking Sinclair into the house.” She seemed to remember something. “Oh, but Bill won’t call her Sinclair. That’s our grandmother’s maiden name; Sinclair adopted it around the time she left. Bill calls her Sara,” Naomi explained. “That’s why I was so startled when you called me last night. You said you were Sarah Shiloh, and I was thinking ‘This can’t be happening!’ ”
“Yeah,” I said. “I can see where that would throw you.”
We spent the rest of the time in simple questions. I asked the names of schools Shiloh had gone to in Ogden and if Naomi remembered the names of any close friends from his school years. Did anything he’d written in his letters or on Christmas cards seem important now? Nothing came to Naomi’s mind. “I’m sorry,” she said. “Is there anything else I can do?”
“Could I use your phone?” I asked. “I didn’t get in touch with your brother Bill today, and I’d like to call him and ask if I can see him in person, tomorrow if possible. I don’t want to call too late, it’d be rude.”
Naomi nodded. “That’s fine. There’s a phone in our bedroom, where it’ll be quieter.” She set the photo album back on the ottoman with the others.
I stood and stretched, waiting for Naomi to rise as well.
“You know, I am worried about Mike,” she said. “If I sounded like I wasn’t, well, he and Sinclair were the family’s black sheep. It’s hard to think of a rebel as somebody vulnerable.”
She looked up at me from her seated position, and instead of standing, Naomi touched my arm. “Will you pray with me?” she asked. “For Michael?”
chapter 15
The next morning, Friday, I rented a dark blue Nissan and headed up the I-15 to Ogden. Ogden wasn’t just where the Shiloh family had lived for many years; it was where Bill Shiloh had settled and begun raising his own family. The traffic thinned as soon as I was fifteen minutes out of the city.
In my shoulder bag, along with the clutter of my daily needs, rode the photo I’d taken from Naomi Wilson. It was wrapped in a Ziploc bag to keep it from getting scratched up. Naomi might ask for it back someday.
It was commonplace for detectives to ask for photographs of missing persons, which was probably why Naomi hadn’t questioned my taking it. If she’d thought about it, she might have wondered why I didn’t have a photo of Shiloh myself, and why I needed one that was over a decade out of date. That Polaroid was going to be useless in my hunt for Shiloh, but I’d wanted it anyway.
It was hardly a profound character study-just a young man, surprised by someone who wanted to take his picture, looking not into the lens but past it, trying to see who the photographer was.
But Shiloh had grown into his adult face quickly, and this Shiloh looked an awful lot like the one I knew. His hand raised to shield his eyes, Shiloh looked oddly vulnerable, like somebody looking into the bright heart of a mystery, someone about to disappear. Which he had been.
In a way, Shiloh had disappeared twice. He’d left his family so abruptly he might as well have been missing, except that they had known he’d left them deliberately. They’d known the reason why.
Actually, I wasn’t really clear on the reason, when I reflected on it. He’d told me he’d left home over religious differences with his family. He’d neglected to tell me that those religious disagreements were exacerbated by a family crisis involving a black-sheep sister who’d been banned from the house.