There was nothing I could do in Faribault County. I drove back up to the Cities to keep from going crazy, then found that a change of location was no antidote for the nervy restlessness that refused to be exhausted by exercise or distracted by television. My first day back I called Utah and left Naomi a message explaining that Shiloh had turned up alive and in reasonably good health. Then I wrote a short note to Sinclair and dropped it into the mail.
Naomi called the next afternoon, wanting details, and I did the best I could to explain my husband and his actions. The conversation wasn’t a short one, and outside, the sky lost its light and deepened in color. After we hung up, I sat on the couch and thought unproductively about the future, and as I couldn’t bring myself to turn on a lamp, twilight fell in our living room as it did outside.
Ten minutes later I was on the 94. I wanted to see how Genevieve was settling in, back in St. Paul. More important, I wanted to know when she’d be ready to go back to work. Myself, I was rather desperate to get to the distractions of the job.
But when I got to Genevieve’s house, it wasn’t she who answered the front door.
“Vincent,” I said.
“Sarah,” Genevieve’s ex-husband said. His heavy-lidded gaze had weight: I felt it deep in my spine.
Genevieve appeared in the light spilling from behind him. I noticed anew how much her once-short hair had grown: It was chin-length now, long enough to swing a little when she moved and shine when it caught the light, and she’d tucked it behind her ear on the right side, revealing the subtle silver flash of a small earring.
“Come on in, Sarah,” she said. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“That’d be good.” It was a cold evening, but still it hadn’t snowed. Gusts of sharp wind chased the few remaining fallen leaves around the sidewalks and streets.
“Take a break, sit with us awhile, Vincent,” Genevieve suggested.
“No, I’m fine. I’m going to keep working.” He moved to the stairs as I followed them in.
In the kitchen, I asked Genevieve, “What’s he doing here?”
“He’s cleaning out Kamareia’s room,” she said.
That answer didn’t clear things up, but I sensed that it was a preface and waited for the rest to come out.
Genevieve took a package of ground coffee from the door of her freezer and spooned it into a paper filter. “We’re working on clearing out the whole house, actually. I made my resignation final at work.”
“You did?” My voice was higher than usual.
“When Vincent goes back to Paris, I’m going with him.” She lifted a diffident shoulder, poured water into the coffeemaker.
“You’re kidding.”
“No.” She turned to face me.
“Why?”
Genevieve shook her head. “I can’t live here anymore,” she said. “Not in this house, not even in St. Paul. I can learn to live without Kamareia, but not here.”
My only partner as a detective. My partner of two years and friend for much longer than that. All those cold mornings we’d fantasized about running away to some faraway paradise, like San Francisco or New Orleans. Now Genevieve was really doing it. She was going farther than even we’d imagined. Permanently. Without me.
You can’t go, I thought, like a child.
“You want a splash in that? Vince brought these from the flight.” She held up a single-ounce bottle of Bailey’s; another one sat on the counter nearby, next to an equally small bottle of gin.
The first time I’d ever been to Genevieve’s home was after work on a midwinter night, and she’d done almost exactly the same thing; she’d made us coffee. Then she’d said, “You’re off duty, you want me to make that special for you?” and had poured some expensive white-chocolate liqueur into both mine and hers. I remembered how pleased her generosity had made me, how disarming it had been to be in the home of someone who had a big kitchen and a liquor cabinet instead of a studio apartment and Budweiser in the refrigerator.
I doubted she knew how much she’d meant to me even back then.
“This thing with Vincent,” I said, “isn’t it kind of sudden?”
“Sudden and long overdue. There was a reason why I never remarried or even dated.” Her voice was happy, a joyful knell for our partnership. She took two heavy glass mugs down from the cupboard and poured out the coffee. She laced one of them with the first bottle of liqueur and pushed it in my direction. “He had business in Chicago and came up here afterward, and we both sort of realized… you know.”
I was glad for her newfound happiness, but her behavior was a little too upbeat. Maybe she was laying Kamareia’s mem-ory to rest at last, but Royce Stewart’s death was something else again. That memory was still raw and bloody, and Genevieve was trying to bury it in a hasty, unmarked grave she would never visit in her mind. She was simply turning her back on her actions, and maybe that was the best way to deal with it. Maybe she’d been right the first time. Maybe closure was overrated.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry.” Genevieve looked closely at me, then came to my side. “I didn’t even ask about Shiloh. How is he?”
She’d misread my unvoiced thoughts. I took a sip of the coffee. “It’s hard to say,” I explained. “He wants to plead guilty and do his time; his lawyer’s trying to talk him out of it. She thinks that, procedurally, she can poke holes in the way his confession was obtained, make something of the head injury and how it might have affected him. Get enough to throw the case out.”
“Do you think Shiloh will go along with that?”
I turned to give her what was probably a dry, deadened look. “No,” I said. “He won’t. He wants to…” I had to search for the right word. “… atone for what he did.” It was such a gentle word, atone. To put it more honestly, Shiloh wanted to punish himself: for giving in to murderous impulses, yet failing to avenge Kamareia; for ruining his career and putting me through a week of anguish and uncertainty.
“Maybe the judge will be lenient,” Genevieve suggested. In her own happiness, she sought to hold out hope to me.
“No,” I said again. “He’ll do time.” I couldn’t afford to kid myself.
“What about the two of you?” Genevieve asked. “Have you talked about the future?”
I shook my head. “You’ve never had a real jailhouse conversation, have you?” I asked her. “In the room where wives and girlfriends and relatives have to do it? It doesn’t lend itself much to serious discussions about the future.”
“So what’s going to happen?” Genevieve said, pressing me.
“What’s going to happen? Shiloh’s going to do time,” I told her, again.
“For auto theft,” Genevieve said. “That’s a pretty light sentence. When he gets out, what’s going to happen between the two of you?”
I didn’t have an easy answer for her. Stalling, I looked out the window, at the frozen silver of early-evening moonlight between the branches of neighborhood trees.
As the judge had pointed out at the arraignment, Shiloh would never work in law enforcement again. For all his adult life, he had done virtually nothing else, from the days when he’d searched for lost kids in the rugged Montana terrain until he’d arrested a nationally known fugitive. When, at some point in the future, Shiloh walked out of a prison gate, everything he’d worked for would be gone. I’d still be a cop, and he’d be an ex-convict. Inequities like that had the potential to poison relationships. Slowly. Painfully.
Whenever Shiloh and I spoke, these things hung between us, impossible to forget, but too heavy to be acknowledged.