“It’s me,” her voice said simply. “I guess I’ll call you later.”

I played it again. There was a muted anger in her tone. I couldn’t imagine what she wanted from me. Well, I’d call when I got back to the Cities, I thought. If she had urgent news, surely she would have left details in her message.

On the plane east, I scribbled copious notes-if not particularly articulate ones-in my legal pad. I was trying to identify what came next.

Reinterview all the neighborhood witnesses? Were this some sort of exercise in my police training, that’s the answer I would probably have written down, fairly confidently. Shiloh’s trail seemed to be freshest in our own neighborhood, where he’d bought food at the Conoco the day he disappeared, where Mrs. Muzio had seen him walking and looking “angry” on a day that had most likely been Saturday, the day of his disappearance.

But already I had a hopeless feeling about it. If the most useful information I had was that Shiloh was walking somewhere and looking purposeful on Saturday, then really I had nothing. I understood nothing about how or why Shiloh had disappeared.

Genevieve’s ideas had been the simplest and the most likely. Somehow he’d walked to his death somewhere in the neighborhood. Suicide on a bridge. Murder at the hands of some prostitute or her pimp.

Fucking Genevieve. She’d all but planted in my head the dream I’d had last night. Shiloh and I had always been nothing if not physically compatible; I’d never had any worries on that account. But “strange pussy” had been Genevieve’s phrase, and the prostitute in my dream had quoted her.

Genevieve’s theories of adultery or suicide didn’t square with what I knew of Shiloh. It was disrespectful to his-to him, damn it, not to his memory-to entertain them.

I closed the notepad and slid it back into my shoulder bag. As I did so, I felt my hand brush a rectangle of paper smoother and stiffer than the random papers I’d shoved into my bag for the trip west.

It was a letter-size envelope, and clearly it contained more than one sheet of paper inside; it was nearly pillowy. On the address side, in an unfamiliar hand, was one word: Sarah.

Sinclair, I thought, and opened it to find a small sheaf of pages inside. As I unfolded them, a yet smaller envelope, three-quarters the size of the one I’d just opened, fell out. It was cream-colored, sealed, unmarked.

I set the little envelope on the unoccupied seat next to mine and directed my attention to the typewritten letter before me.

Sarah,

I have a feeling I’m going to be up and out of the house before you get up today. I wish we’d had more time to talk. Thinking about what we talked about, I realize that none of it seemed to be germane to your search for Mike. But I gather from what you said that you feel a need to understand where Mike came from, and maybe I can help with that. I’ve only known you a very short while, but Hope likes you, and I’ve found my daughter to be an excellent judge of character.

I’m not sure I can tell you all that much about life at home while Mike was growing up. I spent a lot of my childhood away at school. Mike and I didn’t get to know each other well until we were both older, when I came home to live. Those days stand out in my memory because they were difficult ones.

When my parents sent me away to school, they did it with misgivings, first because ours was a close-knit family, and also because they worried about me being in a secular environment. To compensate, they sent me away with a Children’s Bible, and when I was older they mailed me books of devotions and daily prayers. When I went home on term breaks, I always went to church with them and prayed with them around the dinner table. But in the end, their fears were well founded.

I had a lot of freedom at school. There was no mandatory church or chapel attendance. I could read whatever I wanted to in the school library. And the other girls came from many different cultures, and we often discussed our religious backgrounds and beliefs. I never questioned the schism between my two worlds. Home was one kind of place, and school was another.

I loved my family, of course, and I was happy to come home full-time when my parents arranged it. But actually being there was a shock. Church services on Sunday morning, youth group on Sunday evening, Bible study on Wednesday night. No television, no secular movies. The most difficult thing, though, was that no one at home could use sign language as well as people at school did. Both my older brothers were rusty, and Naomi and Bethany were too young to be fluent. My parents encouraged me to speak aloud, but I wouldn’t. Some of the girls at school described how other kids made fun of the way deaf people spoke, comparing it to the bleating of sheep or the sounds made by dolphins. So pride made me insist on signing.

A great deal of what I did back then was either rooted in pride or a grab for freedom. Suddenly I was out of my cloistered private school and into the wider world, yet I felt, if anything, more boxed in. By my parents’ rules and my family’s lifestyle. By the averted gazes of hearing kids who were afraid to make eye contact with me for fear that I’d try to communicate with them and they wouldn’t understand. By the unwanted touches and hugs from people in the congregation who thought that being disabled made me “special” and childlike and morally pure. I started to feel panicky, like there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air.

During this time, there was only one person who made me feel like the person I’d been at school. That was Michael.

By September, I’d been home all summer, but I hadn’t seen him. In fact, I hadn’t seen him in over a year. I’d spent the last term break at the school, and then by the time I got home in June, he was already away on a summer service project to do with the church, building homes on an Indian reservation. We’d just kept missing each other. And he was late coming home in September, too, because he’d broken his arm falling off a roof he was working on. They let him stay where he was and miss the first week of school so he could get the cast taken off instead of traveling with it.

Then one night in the first week of school, I was working on a book report and I got that somebody’s-behind-me feeling-you become fairly good at that when you’re deaf-and I turned around and it was Mike.

For a minute I thought it was one of Adam’s or Bill’s friends. Mike had grown three inches since I’d seen him last; he was taller than me all of a sudden. And when he asked me if what I was reading was any good, I realized he could really, honest-to-God sign, and I was terribly relieved.

After that we spent a great deal of time together. We’d been apart so long, and changed so much in the interim, it was like getting to know a stranger. We used to have these long conversations. Mike knew the Bible incredibly well; he could debate like a seminarian, but when I told him all the things I didn’t understand or couldn’t believe about God and the Bible, he never judged me. I realized that he was losing his faith, too. I never meant to push him in that direction, but I just couldn’t lie about how I felt. I had to have one person with whom I could completely be myself, and that was him. Apostasy was hard for Mike; it’s harder to lose your faith, like him, than to realize you never really had it, like me.

Things with my parents just got worse and worse. I wanted freedom, and I took it in the places young people usually do-in drinking and sex. I’m not entirely proud of how I behaved back then, but I was young. My parents resorted to tighter restrictions, earlier curfews. I started sneaking out of the house, but after I got caught a couple of times, I stopped trying. I knew I just had to wait until I was 18 and could leave, and until then, Mike made living at home bearable. He was the oxygen in the air when I couldn’t breathe.