The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton Page B

considering marriage we were probably grabbing too hard at something that was meant to be finessed.
    Then I’d said yes and married him anyway. I’d never been a finesse kind of person anyhow.
    Shiloh was still breathing hard when he said, “Just in case you do stay down there and I don’t get to say goodbye.”
    “Goodbye to you too,” I said, brushing a lock of hair away from my eyes.
     
    Shiloh came out to the driveway with me and scraped ice off the windshield of the Nova, while I pitched my thin, light duffel bag into the backseat and unlocked the driver’s-side door.
    “I’ll call if I won’t be back in time to take you to the airport,” I said when he came around to stand near me. “But I’m sure I will.” I leaned over the open door and kissed his cheek.
    Before I could pull away, Shiloh took my face in both his hands and kissed me on the forehead.
    “Be safe,” he said.
    “I will.”
    “I mean it. I know the way you drive. Don’t make me worry about you.”
    “I’ll be fine,” I told him. “I’ll see you soon.”
     
    The freezing rain that had fallen on the Cities had also fallen on the southern part of the state, and I eased up on the gas once I got out into the countryside, because there were patches of ice still on the road, although they were shrinking and melting under the friction of car wheels. On the radio, the forecast called for more rains over southern Minnesota later, with the temperature likely to dip down to freezing in the night. But I’d be long off the roads by then. By noon I had shot across the line into Blue Earth County.
    In one of those quirks of geography that drive newcomers to an area up a wall, Mankato was the county seat of Blue Earth County, while the city of Blue Earth, nearly on the Iowa border, was the seat of Faribault County.
    Blue Earth was where Royce Stewart, who’d killed Kamareia Brown, lived and walked around free. Best not to think about that.
    Genevieve’s sister and brother-in-law lived in a farmhouse south of Mankato, although they only had two acres and didn’t farm. This was the first I’d been to their house, although I’d seen a lot of Deborah Lowe in the weeks following Kamareia’s death. She’d come up to the Cities and helped with the needed arrangements, taking as much of the burden as she could from her sister.
    Their family, of Italian and Croatian extraction, went back for four generations in St. Paul. Genevieve’s parents were working-class liberals, both union organizers. They’d sent four of their five children to college and one into the priesthood as well. When Genevieve had become a cop, her parents had accepted her career the same way they’d accepted the marriage to a black man that had resulted in a biracial granddaughter.
    Deb, I had learned, had flirted with becoming a nun in her teenage years before abandoning the idea. (“Guys,” she’d explained succinctly.)
    She’d become a teacher instead, starting in St. Paul and then moving outstate to find a kind of lifestyle her family hadn’t known for over a century.
    She and Doug Lowe didn’t work the land, but they did have a sprawling kitchen garden and a henhouse to reduce the grocery bills and supplement the paychecks of two schoolteachers.
    It was Deborah who heard the car’s engine and came out of the farmhouse to greet me as I was pulling my bag from the backseat of the Nova, which I’d parked in front of the apple tree in their yard.
    Deborah was a hair taller than Genevieve, a shade thinner, but otherwise they looked a lot alike. Both had dark eyes and dark hair—Deborah’s was long, worn today in a ponytail—and a pale-olive complexion. Deborah descended the front steps, followed by a dog, a fat caramel-and-white corgi that yapped intermittently without a lot of interest. He stopped at the bottom of the steps, content to observe the interloper’s behavior from a safe position.
    Reaching the car, Deborah hugged me while I stood, a little surprised, in