The 37th Hour by Jodi Compton Page A

Minnesota, that would be a disaster. It was essential that I narrow down from where Shiloh had disappeared.
    Disappeared. I hadn’t meant to think that, and doing so gave a little jolt to my nervous system, followed by a galvanic flush under my skin.
    I sat on a bench for a moment and watched the travelers pass by.
    Overhead, I saw a security camera discreetly peering down at passing travelers from a crossbeam. If worst came to worst here, I could always review security tapes. Maybe that would end up being the only thing to confirm Shiloh had been here.
    Disappeared was fast becoming the operative term, whether I wanted to admit it or not.
    About two years ago, an overprotective father from Edina, a Minneapolis suburb, sent his bright eldest daughter off to school at Tulane University in Louisiana. He didn’t want her to drive, he’d said, but she’d won a campus lottery for a parking space outside her dormitory and was thrilled about it. She was not about to be talked out of taking her little Honda.
    Still, Dad was unhappy about her driving all the way by herself. He insisted that she call him both nights on the road as soon as she got a motel room, and she agreed to do so. For his peace of mind.
    What Daughter didn’t remember was that only a year earlier, her neighborhood had been gerrymandered out of the Cities’ once all-inclusive 612 area code, something that was happening to suburbs of metropolitan areas nationwide as cell phones and the Internet gobbled up available phone numbers. The daughter hadn’t taken notice. She hadn’t spent the night outside the Cities for three years; therefore, she had never called home from far away.
    When she tried to call home, her first night on the road, she got a recording saying her call couldn’t be completed as dialed. Baffled, she’d tried again. Then a third time. She had no idea what was going on. She left a message on her father’s voice mail at work, although it was a Saturday night and she knew he wouldn’t get it anytime soon. Then, sensibly, she went out for a meal.
    When her father didn’t hear from her, he called us. Genevieve and I were skeptical. She’d been gone only twelve hours. She was 18 years old, off to college, getting her first taste of freedom. We were both certain about what happened: His daughter had forgotten to call.
    “She wouldn’t do that,” he insisted. “She promised she’d call. She keeps her promises.”
    “I know you don’t want to believe this,” Genevieve had said, “but there’s a perfectly logical explanation. We just don’t know it yet.”
    “No,” he’d said. “There isn’t.”
    On Sunday afternoon his daughter called. Just outside the Louisiana state line she’d remembered the new area code and pulled over at a rest stop to try calling home again. This time she’d gotten through, embarrassed and laughing. Dad called us, just embarrassed.
    There’s a perfectly logical explanation. No, there isn’t. Those two statements made up the yin and yang of most missing-persons cases. I said something like the former to people week in and week out, and they responded with the latter. Sometimes I told them the new-area-code story, as an example of the kinds of innocent things that sometimes kept people from coming home or checking in. Few relatives were comforted by it. They shook their heads, unconvinced. It was a good story, they thought, but it had nothing to do with their situation.
    I understood for the first time how they felt. Driving north on the 35W, I kept telling myself that there was a logical explanation for why Shiloh hadn’t turned up at Quantico or called me. And then from the back of my mind, another voice kept saying, No, nothing can explain this.
     
    Around noon, Vang found me at the fax machine at work, sending a request for information to hospitals around the Quantico area. He did a mild take when he saw me.
    “Where have you been?” he asked. “I thought you were going to be out for an hour or