“What’s Michael like now?”

I drank again, the action giving me time to theorize.

“Hard to summarize,” I said. “Painfully honest.”

There was a warm feeling spreading through the pit of my stomach. Back in the days when I really drank, it would have taken a lot more gin before I’d have felt its effects. I sipped from the mug again and began to push the floor lightly with my feet, rocking Hope and myself.

“How long have you been married?”

Ligieia, while translating, stood up to pour more gin into my cup. I let her.

“Only two months,” I said. “Not long.”

“Before that, how long did you know him?”

“About five years,” I said. “We weren’t together for all of it, though. We split up for a while.”

Maybe the gin was doing it to me, but I’d lost the party-line feeling of being a degree removed from Sinclair. Particularly if I kept my eyes down on Hope, who’d fallen asleep, Ligieia’s words seamlessly became Sinclair’s voice.

“Why?”

“Shiloh and I had hit a wall.” I spoke slowly, thinking. “It was professional, in a way. We weren’t equals on the job, and that bothered me. When I was young I got angry easily. I was angry at him a lot of the time and I couldn’t even explain why.” I’m drunk already, I should stop right here. I didn’t. “And besides that, he was so far away sometimes, and when I was young I grabbed at things I thought I needed, and I got scared when I felt there was a piece of him I was never going to have.”

It was like I’d stepped barefoot on a shard of grief I hadn’t seen before me. I put my face down in my hands as much as I could without waking Hope.

Sinclair came and stood before me and did something odd and lovely: she put her hand on my forehead like I might have a fever, then ran the same hand back over my hair.

“I miss him,” I said quietly, and Sinclair nodded.

This time when she spoke to me, her lips moved as well as her hands, and I swear I understood even before Ligieia translated.

“Tell me something about Mike. Anything.”

So I poured myself more gin and told her how Shiloh caught Annelise Eliot.

chapter 18

Early in Shiloh’s cold-case days, he’d gone on a fairly routine errand, out to Eden Prairie, a suburb of Minneapolis where several churches jointly ran a hospice. There a middle-aged man dying of AIDS needed to be reinterviewed, before his memories of an old crime winked out along with the sputtering candle of his existence. Shiloh sat by his bed, listened, took notes. And after the dying man slept, Rev. Aileen Lennox, who helped run the hospice, offered Shiloh what she self-deprecatingly called “the nickel tour.”

He walked with the tall, plainly dressed woman and listened as she described with quiet pride the facility that had only been remodeled a year earlier as a way station for the dying. She pointed out the comforting, intimate touches; she spoke of the companies and individuals who’d donated time and money. And as she did, Shiloh felt something akin to hair rising on the back of his neck.

She was, at that time, twelve years older than when she’d disappeared. Her high cheekbones had taken on softening flesh, there were crow’s-feet around the glacial blue eyes, and her once-streaked blond hair was now dyed a lightless dun color. But Shiloh had seen it in her eyes, her bone structure, her carriage. Aileen Lennox was Annelise Eliot.

“I heard Montana in her voice,” Shiloh told me that night, “but when I asked her about it, she said she’d never lived there.”

“Bullshit,” I told him. “You can’t hear a Montana accent.”

“Yes, I can,” Shiloh had said.

Annelise Eliot had grown up there, a timber heiress, daughter of a land baron with logging operations and paper mills and extensive landholdings. Her name, with its European connotations, suggested an aristocrat, perhaps a touch neurasthenic, with a tracery of blue veins under paper-white narcissus skin. Little could be further from the truth. Anni, as she’d been known before notoriety fixed her in the public’s mind as Annelise, had been tall, full-bodied, and strong. And if her fair hair was expensively streaked with paler blond salon highlights, well, her fingernails were also often a little dirty from caring for her horses herself.

From a young age, Anni had had fast Appaloosas that she barrel-raced in rodeos. After the age of 16, she’d owned a faster Mustang, and when her red 1966 coupe sped down the road, the radar guns of local deputies seemed stricken with an odd malfunction. Likewise, the stories about the Eliot summer place in Flathead Lake-excessive underage drinking, strip poker, and wild stunts-remained just that, stories about Anni and her friends told with almost wistful envy by adults grown too old and sensible for that sort of behavior. She was a tomboy with a charmed life.

Trouble finally came to Annelise when she was nineteen. She’d had a boyfriend, Owen Greene, for three years, and they were getting serious-the relationship had survived his decision to go to school in California. Greene was prelaw at UC San Diego, with a 3.9 average, well liked by professors and peers. Then Marnie Hahn, a pretty local girl in her senior year of high school, accused him of raping her after a party in the moneyed La Jolla area.

Hahn, an indifferent student and the employee of a pizza parlor near campus, had gone to the party of her own will. She had been underage and drinking. She was an unlikely girl to bring a rape case against a rich college boy; nevertheless, she stuck to her story.

Whatever Greene told Annelise over the long-distance wires shortly thereafter is unknown, but Annelise flew out to California in a public show of support. During her visit, Hahn turned up dead, bludgeoned with a heavy object never recovered or even quite identified.

Greene was firmly alibied. Annelise, on the other hand, was not. Evidence, circumstantial but inevitable as a snowdrift, began to amass. Witnesses had seen Annelise’s rented car parked outside Marnie’s house. A little of Marnie’s blood, just a trace, was recovered from the driver’s-side floor mat of that same car.

The police moved fast, but the Eliots moved faster. By the time there was enough evidence for an arrest, Annelise was gone.

The parents denied any knowledge of her disappearance. They lawyered up and made public appearances, calling on the police to investigate their daughter’s disappearance as a kidnapping. However they were funneling money to Annelise-and the authorities all believed that they were-it wasn’t traceable.

That was how the matter stood for years, despite the best efforts of the FBI and police in two states. Thousands of leads fizzled. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the case was that no set of fingerprints existed for Annelise. She’d never been arrested, and she was the kind of girl who always had a troupe of friends around her, using her things. There was no way any latent print lifted from any possession of hers could be proven to have been made by Annelise.

Her case had been news across the U.S., but it was particularly big in Montana, where an 18-year-old Shiloh followed it in the newspapers. He’d been employed by one of old man Eliot’s logging crews-the magazine writers who’d done stories on the case had loved that particular detail.

But at first, when Shiloh believed he’d found Annelise Eliot in the Twin Cities, twelve years after her crime, his theory impressed no one. At first, it didn’t even worry Annelise herself.

Like most investigators, he’d made narrowing circles around his target, pulling at the edges of her Aileen Lennox identity, discovering how thin and immaterial it was. As his courteous, relentless probing continued, her nerves began to fray. She tried a high-handed approach first, writing him a letter requesting him to cease his activities. Then she complained of harassment to Shiloh’s superiors, as did some of her parishioners. And Shiloh’s superiors had listened.