I set my teacup down. “That was my first question: When was the last time you heard from him?”

Ligieia waited while Sinclair thought.

“About five, six years ago,” she signed. “I can’t remember exactly. I was in the Cities to do a reading at the Loft and give a guest lecture at Augsburg College, then I was driving down to Northfield, to lecture at Carleton. I remember the Carleton visit well, because I got there several days after a terrible car wreck near the Cities killed three of their students. It was very sad. Things like that hit a small school hard.”

“Oh,” I said. The anecdote struck a chord. “I remember that, too.”

“Do you want me to check the exact date?”

“Not necessary,” I said. “It was so long ago it’s almost undoubtedly not part of whatever has happened now. I was more curious about how much you’d kept in contact with Shiloh. Did you actually see him in person when you were there?”

“Yes. We ran into each other on the street.”

“You hadn’t arranged to see him?”

“I didn’t even know he lived there.”

“Have you heard from him since: letters, e-mail?”

Sinclair shook her head.

“When you heard that he was missing, did any possibilities about what would have happened to him come to mind?”

Sinclair shook her head again. Her terse answers weren’t meant to be unhelpful, I saw, but actually courteous: She was communicating directly with me.

“Why do you think he ran away, back when he was seventeen?” I asked her.

At this question she shifted her gaze from Ligieia’s hands to my eyes, and ran her thumb across her fingertips quickly. I wondered if this hand motion was akin to a speaking person licking her upper lip during an interview, a temporizing gesture.

“I didn’t hear about that until years later,” Sinclair told me. “But Mike didn’t get along with our father any better than I did.”

“That’s not what your brother and sister say.”

There was a slightly longer pause this time, as Ligieia waited for Sinclair’s hands to be still. Then Ligieia translated. “They saw what they wanted to see. My family was accustomed to thinking of me as different, but they wanted Mike to be like them.”

“When you left home, where did you go?”

“Salt Lake City. I stayed with a group of friends who were… Jack Mormons?” There was a momentary hitch in the translation process as Ligieia stumbled on the phrase. “Mormons who had fallen away from the LDS Church.”

It was a term that wouldn’t have thrown me; I’d heard Shiloh use it before.

“When they went out of town for Christmas, I got lonely and went home. Michael slipped me into the house, through a window with a big tree outside it. It was the same way I used to sneak out.”

She paused for Ligieia to catch up. “We got caught, and my father was pretty angry. I was sorry that I got Mike in trouble. But he would have broken away from our family sooner or later.”

“Did Mike come to Salt Lake City and look you up after he left home?”

“No. As I said, I never knew about that until years later.”

My questions, Sinclair’s gaze, Ligieia’s voice… I had a feeling like I was getting information through a system akin to an old rural party-line phone system. It felt slipshod.

“Why do you think he wouldn’t have gone to you?” I said. There was something else I needed to ask, but it was best circled around to later.

Sinclair’s gaze, so like Shiloh’s, was very direct on me. She signed. “Mike was always very independent,” Ligieia translated. “Can I ask you why you’re asking about this? It was so long ago.”

I lifted the mug but didn’t drink again. The strawberry tea had been a tantalizing clear pink color when Ligieia had poured, but when I’d tasted it in the kitchen, it had proved sour in a thin, watery way.

“History,” I said. “I’m just looking for a pattern.” I forced a little of the tea down. “But if you haven’t seen him or heard from him in years, there’s not a lot else I can ask you,” I said.

In the moment that followed, it was neither Sinclair nor I who broke the silence. It was Ligieia.

“Does anyone but me want something stronger than this to drink?” Ligieia suggested. She glanced at Sinclair, who waffled a hand in the air with neither great enthusiasm nor disapproval. I was beginning to think that was the way Sinclair took everything, in stride, at peace.

Ligieia left the room. Now we can really talk, I thought, looking at Sinclair. But of course we couldn’t. I would have liked to speak to Sinclair without the extraneous presence of Ligieia. The girl was nice enough, but she had never known Shiloh; she had no stake in the conversation.

“I couldn’t sleep,” said a pettish young voice at my side.

I turned to look where Sinclair was looking. Hope came into the room, wearing her nightdress, barefoot. Sinclair shook her head with maternal exasperation.

Ligieia returned with a bottle of Bombay gin in her hand and stopped short when she saw Hope. “What’s this?” She looked to Sinclair. “Don’t get up. I’ll take her back to bed.” She held out her hand to Hope.

But Sinclair shook her head and signed something. Ligieia laughed.

“Everyone hates to be left out of a party, she says,” she explained to me. She looked at Hope again. “All right, baby, Mom says you get to stay awhile.” She turned away and poured gin into Sinclair’s glass, and then hers.

“Not for me,” I said too late when she leaned over my mug. Ligieia was already pouring with a heavy hand.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can get you more tea-”

“No,” I said quickly. “No problem, I’m fine as is.”

Ligieia put the bottle down and took her place on the sofa again.

“C’mere, Miss Hope, you want to sit between your mom and me?” Ligieia patted the space between herself and Sinclair.

But Hope climbed up onto the chair next to me, the chair dipping forward on its runners as she did so. There really wasn’t much room, and Hope’s weight settled against me, her head against my chest.

Ligieia’s eyebrows shot up, and even Sinclair looked mildly surprised. She signed something.

“You make friends fast,” Ligieia translated.

“Not usually this fast.”

Hope looked up at me. “Is your name Sarah?” she asked again. She’d said she couldn’t sleep, but I could see in her eyes and hear in her voice that sleep was hard on her heels. Mine, too, I realized.

“Yes,” I told her.

Hope lifted a hand and began fingerspelling.

“She’s spelling your name,” Ligieia said. “She’s showing off for you.”

“Well, I’m very impressed, kiddo,” I said to Hope. “We’re gonna lean forward a little now,” I warned. The chair tipped forward again as I reached for the cool tea and gin.

I swirled the liquid in the cup, a stalling gesture like bouncing a basketball at the free-throw line.

I had planned not to drink the gin; since I first realized Shiloh had disappeared, I’d been on guard against alcohol, even just one drink. One drink, I’d told myself, could lead to others; the warmth of liquor easing the fear in my chest and the tension in my shoulders, taking me away from reality, dulling my mind, slowing my search. All when my husband needed me to be clearheaded.

Then I drank anyway. I was so damn tired. The gin did improve the taste of the tea.

“It’s your turn to ask the questions, I guess,” I said.

Sinclair lifted her hands and signed. She got right to it.

“Is Mike in some kind of trouble?”

I shook my head emphatically. That was as close as I could come to being able to communicate in her language. “No,” I reiterated. “Not that I know about. Something happened to him. I’m trying to find out what.”

Sinclair gestured again. “How did you meet?”

“At work. We’re both cops.” As I said the evasive half-truthful words I felt a flicker of regret inside me. I almost wished I could tell the real story to Sinclair. Then the feeling passed. “It was a drug raid, actually,” I said. Even if it had only been Sinclair and me in the room, the true story was too long and time-consuming to tell, and besides, it was a story I’d never told anyone before.