Unquiet Ghosts

by Glenn Meade

  The man stopped sipping his Miller Lite. Gaping at the screen, he felt his breath go stale in his lungs, until at last he exhaled.

  The bartender said, “Weird one, huh? Been on the news all morning. Missing eight years, and now it shows up in some redneck backwoods. You want to try the shrimp?”

  The man kept his stare on the screen, mesmerized.

  “Mister?”

  No response.

  “Mister, hey, are you OK?”

  The man was pale now, and he looked blankly at the bartender.

  “If you don’t like the shrimp, I can recommend the crab, sir.”

  “You’re sure the airports are closed?”

  “That’s what the weather channels say. Wherever you want to get to, you’re either going to have to wait until the storm passes or drive, mister. Shrimp or crab?”

  “I’ll pass.” The man slapped a ten-dollar bill on the table and hurried out the door.

  16

  * * *

  Knoxville, Tennessee

  3:06 p.m.

  There are deep inlets in the human heart.

  Deep rivers that contain our most savage hurts, our most painful wounds. The important word is contain. My mother used to say that this helps us submerge our grief, immerse our agony. Help us sink it for a while until we’re strong enough to deal with whatever we need to deal with. I needed the calming waters of those inlets now.

  Dexter’s words were still ringing in my ears: They not only survived, but I figure they could have made it out of these woods alive.

  I convinced myself that it was true.

  I needed a soft place to fall and swallow me up as my mind raged with a million questions and a million thoughts. I felt my blood pressure rise. My head ached, as if a steel band were crushing my skull. The trauma of that morning was almost too much to take in. My mind was on a treadmill, my thoughts like a mantra.

  Jack is alive. Jack is alive. Jack is alive.

  And if Jack was alive, where were Sean and Amy? If they survived the crash, why did they disappear? Why? Where were they now? What did my children look like? How had they coped in the last eight years? Did they miss me, remember me, and still love me?

  Had they really somehow survived? My temples pounded with rushing blood. My head hurt so much from thinking and fretting that it felt like a dam about to burst. I was convinced by now that my family had survived.

  As Tanner accompanied me home in an unmarked police car, my body was rigid with shock. Tanner hardly spoke, his jaw stiff, as if he was mulling things over. I didn’t feel much like talking, either.

  Home was now my father’s ten-acre farm. When Jack and I first married, when he was home from West Point or on leave, we moved into a cottage not far from the farmhouse. We loved it there. My father could babysit the kids whenever Jack and I wanted to go to the movies or out for dinner or I needed to go shopping.

  We had planned on building our own home, had bought a lot with a lake view. But my father encouraged us to stay at the cottage. He even had an extra bedroom and play room built on. So we moved in and decorated. Pastel straw-yellow walls, lots of wood and stone, and to complete the cozy look, Jack fitted a potbelly woodstove. My father loved having the kids nearby, cherished the company. If we had moved, he’d have been alone on the farm, and he didn’t seem to want that, and neither did Jack and I.

  We kept promising ourselves we’d move someday. But Amy and Sean loved the farm, loved the space, the lakeside dock. For a time, my father kept a pony, a goat, and some chickens, until a coyote broke into the coop and feasted on the chickens. He kept an old motorboat, and the kids loved going out on the lake fishing with him.

  After the “terrible tragedy” when Jack and Amy and Sean were no longer there, I moved back into my father’s house, partly because he insisted on it and partly because I felt safer, needed his company, again needed the reassurance of his presence in my life. My father was all I had now.

  Then, for two years, I lived with Chad, but after our divorce—you guessed it—my father insisted that I move back in with him. I did. I found it hard being alone in the cottage. Memories of Jack and Amy and Sean would crowd in on me. For a time, the lows got so low that I took Prozac. I found it hard just entering the cottage again. I didn’t even clear it out after Jack and the children disappeared. I couldn’t face that chore. Just couldn’t. Besides, a part of me always wanted to believe they would come back again.

  So I left everything as it was. For a time afterward, whenever I opened the front door that led straight into the living room, I would feel weak at the knees. My body would crumple. There was so much pain. So many good memories had become such a searing burden of grief.

  My mom had kept a big old zinc bathtub from when I was a kid. I kept up the tradition by bathing Amy and Sean in the tub in front of the potbelly woodstove in the cottage’s living room. I could never forget Amy’s giggles as she played with an old shampoo bottle filled with sudsy water. She would spray it all over the tub and on me. And Sean, already bathed, playing with his Legos by the blazing stove, would be laughing at Amy but then complaining when she got too boisterous and started spraying him with the shampoo bottle.

  Once, Sean was playing a game after supper and posed the question, “If our house was a dog, what kind of dog would it be, Daddy?”

  Jack answered, “Easy. An old, comfortable Labrador.”

  He was right. Our home had that kind of feeling.

  I remember us all having dinner in front of the stove some evenings. My father would stroll over from the farmhouse and join us for the chicken and dumplings and corn bread I’d cook or a pot roast with mashed potatoes and greens. In summer we’d sit out on the small patch of garden in front of the cottage, eating ice cream and watching the fireflies ignite the air by the lake. I cherished those days, ached at those bittersweet memories.

  For a long time, whenever I stepped out onto the farmhouse’s back patio and glimpsed the cottage, I would turn my head away. The memories were too agonizing. I couldn’t even face going though my family’s belongings. It was too much. Apart from cleaning out and unplugging the refrigerator and removing my own possessions, I left everything as it was—clothes in closets and in drawers, personal effects wherever they lay.

  And then one day, I took six old pieces of two-by-four wood, grabbed a rusted hammer from my dad’s barn, and nailed up the front and back doors. I couldn’t bear to step into the cottage again.

  My dad saw what I had done, but he said nothing. He had figured it out. He understood that love is sometimes a crucifying pain. The cottage had become like a mausoleum. A mausoleum I could not enter, unless I wanted to kill myself with remembered grief. I knew the consequences; if I entered it, I would be morbidly depressed for weeks. For a time—six months—I even leased an apartment in one of the many rental blocks in Cedar Bluff, just to give myself some space.

  But after that, I came home to the farmhouse and my father’s reassuring company and began to accept my plight. I never even considered that living in my father’s house in my thirties would mess up my social life, cramp my style. Because I didn’t really have a style for it to mess up. I lived in one end of the house, he in the other. We shared a kitchen and the living room. He had that male refuge, his study. And he would visit Ruby or friends a lot or go on hunting trips with buddies. I often had the farm to myself. I could have friends over anytime I wanted.

  Now the mantra that had haunted those early days began to echo again in my head. Jack is alive. An inexplicable impulse raged inside me. I wanted to open up those cottage rooms once more. Wanted to but felt afraid and uncertain. Could I face bursting open those nailed-up doors? Could I step up to my fear?

  Tanner finally broke the silence and broke into my thoughts. “I’m going to ask the local sheriff to post a couple of his men at your house in case the news media bother you. We‘ll keep it that way unt
il we figure this thing out, if we can.”

  He looked over at me. “You can be pretty sure the news reporters will be on your case as soon as they start putting things together, but we’ll keep them away until you’re ready or willing to talk. Really, you don’t have to say a thing.”

  “There—there’s a private back road that leads to my father’s farm. It’s quicker.”

  “That’s where you live?”

  I nodded.

  “Is your father home?”

  “No.” I explained about Ruby’s illness and gave directions.

  Five minutes later, as Tanner chatted with the police driver and just as I checked the time on my cell—3:15—it rang. The jangle of music wracked my shot nerves. I didn’t recognize the number. I was half tempted to ignore the call, but then I wondered if it was a friend or a relative. I flicked it on.

  “Hello.”

  There was a pause for a second, and then a firm, husky male voice spoke. It sounded distant, almost otherworldly, like a hard whisper. “I’ll call you in exactly thirty minutes. Make sure you’re alone when you answer.”

  I felt something ice-cold clutch at my chest. “Who . . . who is this?”

  “You know who it is, Kath. Don’t talk to the police. Don’t tell them about this call. Don’t tell anyone, or this will be the last time we talk.”

  There was another pause.

  “I mean it—it will be the last time. You tell no one. I can’t emphasize that enough. In thirty minutes, be ready to take my call. If there’s anyone listening or if you tell anyone I contacted you, we’ll never talk again. And believe me, I’ll know. Thirty minutes.”

  The line went dead.

  I glanced at Tanner, who was staring out the car window as we approached my home. I felt a chill as frigid as a Siberian wind cut into my heart. There was no mistaking the husky voice I’d just heard.

  Not in a million years.

  It was Jack.

  17

  * * *

  Macon, Georgia

  The man ended the call.

  Rain still hammered down, slamming into the concrete, relentless thunder rumbling, as he turned into the Love’s gas station off I-75.

  He paid for his gas and grabbed a coffee to keep awake, and when he’d filled up his tank, he jumped back into the Explorer, shaking rain from his shirt and pushing back his floppy wet hair. He turned on the Garmin and was impatient for it to fire up. “Come, on, come on!” He wanted to scream.

  The screen came alive, and he punched in his destination in Knoxville, Tennessee. The Garmin offered two routes. He chose the first, having the shorter time. Almost five hours. Three hundred miles, most of it on I-75.

  A lot more driving, and bad weather and traffic delays might make it even longer. But he had to do this before things got out of control. TV images of the crashed aircraft raged through his mind. Eight years. Eight years had gone by in the blink of an eye.

  His hand was already searching under his seat, making sure he had the Kimber .45 automatic. He felt the loaded gun and slid it back beneath the seat. The Explorer’s engine throbbed as he hit the ­ignition.

  He turned out of the gas station with screeching tires and sped north onto I-75.

  18

  * * *

  Knoxville, Tennessee

  “Everything OK, Ms. Kelly?”

  I couldn’t breathe. I fought to keep my voice steady, to hold my emotions in check. My hand clutched my throat as Tanner shot me a look in the back of the unmarked cop car. “Y-yes.”

  But everything wasn’t OK. My heart was beating so wildly I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I felt as if the ground could give way beneath me at any second.

  “Who just called?”

  “A . . . a friend. I didn’t feel up to talking.”

  I desperately wanted to tell Tanner the truth, but in my heart I knew Jack meant what he’d said. Tanner looked skeptical, but my distress may have convinced him, and he gave a nod. Ten long minutes later, we pulled up in the farmhouse driveway and climbed out. I checked the time on my phone. It was 3:25. Jack’s call came at exactly 3:15. I had twenty minutes before he called again. I felt so anxious that my legs were shaking, my throat dry. We went up onto the back porch and into the kitchen.

  I usually wrote at a small desk in a corner of the kitchen. It held my laptop and a notepad on top and some pens stuffed into an old Starbucks mug. A comfortable old study chair completed all I needed, apart from the shelf full of books on my right. Novels, nonfiction works, old books of my mom’s, all stuff I’d read over the years. A Hewlett Packard printer and some loose pages.

  Tanner gave it all a glance. “You work from home?”

  “Yes.”

  “What do you do, Ms. Kelly?”

  “I’m a writer. Or at least, I’m trying to be.”

  “Yeah? You been published?”

  “Not yet.”

  Tanner gave me an arched eyebrow as if to say, Dream on, baby.

  “Could I impose and ask you for a coffee?”

  “I . . . I’m really stressed out, Mr. Tanner. I need to rest.”

  “I know, ma’am, but this won’t take long.”

  “Can’t it wait?”

  “Not really. It’s important.”

  “Can you help yourself?”

  “Sure.”

  Tanner was already moving to the Keurig coffee machine to make a cup. I must have looked so numb he figured he’d be faster doing it himself. He fiddled with the machine and popped in a fresh pod.

  When I glanced at the kitchen clock again, I noticed it was one minute out of sync with my watch, the wall clock being ahead. Sixteen minutes left. I was starting to panic. What if Tanner wasn’t gone in time? What if Jack rang back and he was still here and overheard or sensed my unease?

  “Coffee, ma’am?”

  “No. No, thank you.” I found the creamer and the sugar and handed them across, with a spoon.

  My eyes kept flicking to the wall clock as the Keurig gurgled and Tanner’s mug filled with coffee. He added a spoonful of creamer and a half of sugar. “If Dexter is right, well, we’ll need to go over a lot of stuff. Including all the questions you were asked back when your husband and children first disappeared. Tedious, I know, but it has to be done.”

  “What kind of questions?”

  “I’m looking for motives, Ms. Kelly. Reasons why your husband may have vanished and not come back. Putting aside the possibility that he may have suffered head injuries that affected his thinking and maybe caused memory loss . . .”

  Tanner sighed. “Then there’s the whole big question as to what the aircraft was doing in an area it wasn’t supposed to be in that night. It was supposed to be flying southeast toward Savannah and two hundred miles away. We’ll be checking that with your husband’s former employer. But what about you? Are you sure you’ve no idea why that was?”

  “Of course not.”

  Tanner coughed into his fist, as if he disliked having to say what he said next or it was delicate. “That’s why I’ll need to ask you some personal questions. I don’t necessarily want to ask them, Ms. Kelly, but they need to be asked.”

  This was no time to encourage conversation, but I didn’t want to seem even more on edge. “I’m listening.”

  “What can you tell me about your marriage to Jack?”

  Alarm bells started going off inside my head. “You think the state of my marriage has something to do with all this?”

  “Maybe it has nothing to do with it. Or maybe everything. That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

  “My marriage was good,” I lied. “Very good.”

  It’s easy to fool ourselves. I used to do it all the time. When I was a child, I knew my mother drank too much. Whether because of an errant strand of addiction in her DNA, the stress of my father’s
rootless military life, or her deep unhappiness at the way her life had turned out, I have no idea. But I used to pretend the problem wasn’t so bad. Until one day, when I was nine and I found a dead jaybird lying by some hedges in our back lawn.

  I wondered about that jaybird. Had it simply died of old age? Was it hit by some kid firing a BB gun, or had it struck an electric pylon? Nearby I spotted an empty vodka bottle lodged in a nest in the hedges—the bottle’s trajectory on a clear path from my mother’s bedroom window—and the case was solved. There was no more pretending. Even to a nine-year-old, my mother throwing liquor bottles recklessly out of windows smacked of a disturbing problem.

  I lied to myself about Jack, too. We were destined to meet, I felt sure of that and that our children and our love for them were part of that destiny. Sometimes I think the universe knows better than we do, and it conspires to arrange certain events within our lives. But things were not perfect between Jack and me. While our relationship may have had some celestial purpose, our marriage wasn’t made in heaven. The last six months were truly lousy. But I didn’t want to dwell on that now.

  “OK if I come by later or tomorrow and we talk some more?”

  “Y-yes. Tomorrow might be better.”

  “Are you sure you’re OK, Ms. Kelly?”

  “Yes . . . yes . . . no . . . I don’t know. I’m just stressed out. Confused.”

  “I understand.” He nodded and sipped his coffee. “Coffee’s good.”

  “Thank you. If you like, you can take the coffee with you.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “There are some Styrofoam cups somewhere.”

  “No, I’m good. I’ll just finish it.”