Free The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton Page B

rains.
    The bad luck turned up twenty minutes north of Mankato. Traffic on the 169 slowed to a thick automotive sludge. Impatient, I turned down the radio, which suddenly seemed loud, and turned up the heat to keep the idling engine cool.
    For twenty-five minutes, we all inched along. Finally, the cause came into view: a jackknifed truck in the road. Two highway patrol officers directed traffic around it. It didn’t look like an injury accident. Just a nuisance.
    Past the obstruction, as the traffic broke up, I urged the Nova up to 87, ignoring the rain. I was going to have to really move if I wanted to catch Shiloh in time.
    A little over an hour later, I turned into the long driveway outside our house. It was a quarter to one. Good, I thought, I was in time.
    I made enough noise, banging the kitchen door open, that Shiloh would surely hear, wherever he was in the house. But the only answering noise was the ticking of the kitchen clock.
    “Hey, Shiloh?”
    Silence. Half the living room was visible from the kitchen, and unoccupied.
    “Shit,” I said. I’d considered calling from the Lowes’ place to make it clear I’d be home in enough time to take him to the airport. Perhaps I should have done so.
    It only took a moment to satisfy myself that he wasn’t home. But it seemed early yet. He shouldn’t have left already.
    The house looked the same inside as it usually did, not really clean, not dirty, either. Shiloh had straightened up just a little. There were no dishes in the sink, and in the bedroom the bed was made, the Indian blanket pulled smooth.
    I set my bag down on the bedroom floor and went out to the front of the house. In the front entryway, the hook where he hung his key ring was bare. His everyday jacket was gone as well. He’d erred on the side of caution and left without me.
    There was no note.
    Generally, Shiloh and I were well matched in our lack of sentimentality. But Shiloh’s abruptness, his lack of concern for convention, sometimes had the power to sting me a little. It did then.
    “Well,” I said, aloud and alone. “Goodbye to you too, you son of a bitch.”

 

    chapter 5
    You always pay for time off with extra time at work, either before or after. On Monday I went to work early, knowing I’d need time to make up for my personal days.
    Vang wasn’t there when I got in, but he’d left reports on the recent disappearances on my desk.
    None of them seemed out of the ordinary to me. They could be put in a few general categories: Tired of Being Married, Tired of Living Under My Parents’ Rules, or Too Absentminded to Tell Anyone I’m Leaving Town for a While.
    Vang came in with a cup of coffee around nine. “How was your time off?” he asked.
    “It was all right,” I said shortly. I hadn’t told him I had gone to see Genevieve. She was living in a kind of departmental limbo, without a set date for her return. Our lieutenant was allowing it because she was a well-liked veteran. But I still didn’t want to draw the department’s attention to her absence and to the question of when she was coming back.
    “What’s the big news around here?” I asked.
    “There’s not a lot going on,” Vang said. “I got all the paperwork on Mrs. Thorenson. Did you see the report? I left it on your desk.”
    “I read it,” I said, moving it to the top of the pile.
    Annette Thorenson had gone on a weekend trip upstate with a friend, to a resort south of St. Cloud. She hadn’t come back. Nor had she told her friend anything to imply that she wasn’t going straight home to where she lived in a Lake Harriet town house with a husband and no kids. Mr. Thorenson was beside himself.
    “The gasoline card’s been used,” Vang said. “ATMs have been hit four times. Twice moving eastward to Wisconsin. Twice in Madison.”
    “And?” I said.
    “His friends say the marriage is solid. Her friends all say it’s not. One of them, who’s recently divorced herself, said Annette asked a lot of questions in