When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “It’s empty,” Glenn called out.

  Winston holstered his pistol and stepped through the door.

  The seats had all been removed inside the plane, and Winston stood in the middle of the fuselage and took in the scene: the pilots’ chairs in the front; the long empty expanse as the floor stretched back toward him; the faint moonlight dusting the windows.

  “It’s empty now,” Winston said, “but I’d be willing to bet it wasn’t when it touched down.” He moved his flashlight around the inside of the plane, its beam passing over every surface.

  “What do you want to do?” Glenn asked.

  “Get back in the bed and go to sleep.”

  Glenn laughed. “Me too.”

  “Let’s go ahead and fingerprint everything up in the cockpit,” Winston said. “And the doors inside and outside too. And then we’ll call the morgue.”

  “You got it,” Glenn said.

  Winston stayed inside the aircraft and sent Glenn back to his patrol car for an extra flashlight and one of the crime scene kits they all kept in their trunks. While he was gone, Winston stood in the plane’s open cargo doors and stared out at Rodney Bellamy’s body. It was rarely the case, but everything that had happened that night had surprised Winston.

  Once Glenn returned to the plane, he handed over the evidence kit, and Winston made his way toward the cockpit, moving uphill against the backward tilt of the plane. He dusted the cockpit controls carefully, paying special attention to the spots on the yokes where he knew thumbs and fingers would have been clenched tight as the plane came in over the trees not long ago. He moved to the instrument panel. Glenn held the flashlight while Winston worked. When he finished, he unspooled the tape and placed it over the spots where he believed good prints were most likely, but when he lifted the strips of tape and held them to Glenn’s light, not a single fingerprint was revealed. He tried again, but there was nothing to see.

  “Maybe a damn ghost flew it,” Glenn said.

  “Or they wore gloves and wiped everything down,” Winston said. “But there’s got be a fingerprint somewhere in this airplane.”

  If they found prints, Winston’s office had no way of running them. He’d have to send them off to Wilmington, if not Raleigh. Even when the FBI stepped in—which Winston knew would happen no matter how long he put off calling them—it would be days before the fingerprints revealed anything. News of the airplane’s appearance and Bellamy’s murder would spread quickly, and Winston knew that everyone in the county would watch how the sheriff’s office handled it, and then they would vote. Election day was just a week away, and Winston’s chances to influence the opinion of his constituents were running out. But, for now, he had all the time he needed out here on the runway in the middle of the night, Glenn and him inside an airplane that was empty but for the sounds of their footsteps echoing against the metal walls. They worked slowly. There was no reason to rush. No one knew what had happened but them. The airplane had already landed, and whoever had landed it had disappeared. The only person who might have seen them was Rodney Bellamy, and he wasn’t talking.

  Chapter 2

  She had not set the alarm clock because it was not hers; the alarm clock belonged to Scott, and it was already set for 5:00 a.m. Waking at that hour left him plenty of time to eat something at home, hit the gym at the health club he’d joined as soon as they’d moved to Dallas, shower, and make it to the courthouse by 7:00 a.m., which, he’d confided to Colleen, was almost half an hour earlier than any of the other first-year assistant attorneys were willing to arrive.

  That morning, she’d been able to slip from bed at 3:00 a.m. with only a muttered “You okay?” from Scott where he lay, his back turned toward her. “Yes,” she’d said. “I just can’t sleep,” but he had already tumbled back into a deep slumber.

  They had not built the house they lived in, which was something she had dreamed of their doing together, but it was only twenty years old and new enough so that the oak floors did not squeak and the doors opened and closed securely and quietly, which was a far cry from the house she’d grown up in on the waterway in Oak Island, with its paper-thin walls, worn carpets, crooked staircase, and linoleum floors. She had been near silent as she walked across her and Scott’s bedroom, opened the door, stepped into the hallway, and closed the door behind her.

  The house had been dark and quiet, the only sound being the mechanical hum of the German grandfather clock that the previous owners had left behind. It now sat at the top of the stairs at the far end of the hallway. Their first night in the house, the clock had chimed with a series of deep, resonant melodies, and Colleen and Scott had been launched from their mattress as if they’d been electrocuted. Colleen had grown so used to being pregnant that her belly’s unwieldiness was a feature of her new body that she never lost track of, but she had lost track of it that night. In her sleep and sudden waking confusion she had panicked at the heavy weight sitting atop her middle, and she had only calmed when Scott found her hand in the darkness and the two of them had lain together without speaking, listening to the slow, deep chimes of a song that seemed born in a distant era and a dark, forested continent that felt very far from their new lives in Texas.

  The next morning, Scott had opened the glass cabinet and disabled the clock’s chimes. In the bottom of the cabinet they had discovered a stack of old editions of the Dallas Morning News, each one marking a historic event: Pearl Harbor; the Armistice; the assassinations of Jack and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King; the moon landing; and every presidential election since World War II, ending with the November 4, 1980, headline “Gipper Cruises to Victory over Carter,” along with a photo of Reagan and his wife waving from the stage on election night.

  She and Scott had flipped through all the newspapers, wondering why someone had saved them, brought them to this house, and then left them abandoned in the bottom of the clock. Their talk turned to birth announcements, and they decided that, when the baby came in June, they would run announcements in Wilmington for Scott’s parents, Oak Island for Colleen’s, and here in Dallas for their own new family because this city would be the baby’s home.

  When they returned the newspapers to the bottom of the clock’s cabinet, they stacked them oldest to most recent, just as they’d found them. Now each time Colleen saw the grandfather clock, as she had on this dark morning, where it stood sentinel at the far end of the hallway, she thought vaguely but powerfully of time and change and tragedy and life and all the ways we hang on to these things, store them, and then take them out over the years to leaf through the memories in their pages.

  To the right of their bedroom was the open door to what they called the office, a room full of boxes of their law school texts, a desk, and a few chairs. Across the hall was a guest room, the bed still made from when Colleen’s mother and father had stayed just a few months before. They’d flown in for the birth, which was something she’d actually felt guilty about, given how expensive it was and how inexperienced her parents were with flying. Scott’s parents had also flown in from North Carolina. They had stayed in a hotel, but none of them had stayed for very long.

  The room beside the guest room was empty, but the last room on the right at the top of the stairs was home to the carefully and blissfully decorated nursery, a room whose door had remained closed since she and Scott had arrived home from the hospital. Colleen had stayed downstairs, leaning against the kitchen counter, while Scott had gone up and closed the nursery’s door before Colleen followed behind him and headed for their bedroom. The next day, she bent in the hallway and stuffed a rolled towel beneath the nursery’s door. She did not want to go in, but she also did not want whatever remained inside the room—memory, magic, hope, perhaps a spirit or a ghost—to escape.

  In her bare feet and as quietly as she could, Colleen now padded down the curved staircase to the foyer below. They had not meant to buy a house this grand. Even with the new baby on the way, why did they need three thousand square feet, four bedrooms
, and a “keeping room” in a house that already had a living room? But it was 1984 and Scott was an assistant U.S. attorney at the federal courthouse in Dallas, and money didn’t seem to be a factor for them. It had never been a factor for Scott, and his father—who’d gotten Scott an interview for the job because he’d been college roommates at the University of North Carolina with the Texas attorney general and had kept in touch ever since—had talked so much about a first home as an investment. So, here they were, investors in a nearly empty home that was much too large for two people who rarely found themselves living in the house together unless lying in silence in bed at night.

  Colleen turned on the dim, fluorescent light above the kitchen sink and opened the cabinet on her right. She took down the tin Maxwell House coffee canister, empty but for a wad of crumpled dollar bills. She selected five twenties and a range of fives and tens, and then she put the lid on the canister and lifted it back into the cabinet. This was their emergency money, and she didn’t know if what she was doing qualified as an emergency. Her emergency, yes, but was it an emergency for both of them? She believed she could make the case that it was, but she didn’t imagine that Scott would agree.

  A jolt of nervous panic careened through her body, and she folded her arms across her chest and tucked her fists, one of them still hiding the wadded-up cash, beneath her armpits as if trying to warm herself. For a moment, she considered fleeing up the stairs and back into their bedroom, but then she remembered the money in her hand, and she felt that some invisible line of trust had already been crossed and she couldn’t turn back. Then she considered opening the refrigerator and reaching for a beer to settle her nerves. The clock on the oven read 3:12 a.m., and Colleen tried to gauge the appropriateness of having that beer by calculating the hours from the previous night to the coming morning. She was closer to 2:00 a.m. than she was to dawn, and there had been times in law school, and certainly times in college, when she and her friends were still drinking when the sun came up, and although that was a few years ago, Colleen decided it wasn’t so long ago as to feel unfamiliar, and, by now, nothing was more familiar to her than the taste of a beer when tasting it alone.

  She opened the refrigerator and took out a Coors Lite, the chill of the glass bottle against her hand soothing her with its sharpness. The night and the house felt too dark and too quiet for such a sensation. After she popped the cap and took a long drink, she felt a calm settle over her that brought with it a clarity of action. She stood there, confident and barefoot in her pajamas, until she finished the beer, took another out of the refrigerator, and then left the kitchen and walked into the foyer.

  A packed suitcase, shoes, and a change of clothes were hidden in the closet beneath the stairs. Colleen found the stash and stepped into the half bath off the foyer to change out of her pajamas. She left the light off in the bathroom, just as concerned about waking Scott as she was about seeing her face in the mirror in the midst of her escape. She feared that looking into her own eyes would shame her out of her bravery, and as she opened her second beer, she knew that she didn’t need any more shame. She took a sip, set the bottle on the bathroom counter, and then got dressed.

  Outside, the sky was still dark and the streetlights still shone, but something about the feel of the air and sounds of the neighborhood’s birds told Colleen that morning was near. Before leaving the house, she had gone back into the kitchen for the beer bottle she’d left there, and now she walked to the side of the house by the driveway where they kept their trash can, and she lowered both bottles inside one at a time so as to make as little noise as possible. Her suitcase in hand, she walked around to the front of the house and followed the brick walk to the street, where she sat down on the curb and waited. The previous afternoon, she had scheduled a taxi pickup for 4:00 a.m. The prospect of leaving her car at the airport to accrue parking fees while she decided when and if to return seemed like a particularly selfish thing to do to Scott, and he didn’t deserve her selfishness any more than she deserved his. They were two people constructed of pain and grief, and, in spite of that, the world would not be making allowances for them, so Colleen believed they had to make allowances for one another when they could. She hoped Scott felt the same.

  The feel of the predawn neighborhood excited something in her, and Colleen remembered the first time she had ever felt this way. She had been in college back in Asheville, and she had been up late studying during the fall of her freshman year when she decided to leave her dorm room long after midnight to walk around the quiet, empty campus. What had thrilled her then thrilled her now: no one in the world knew exactly where she was. She had these predawn moments all to herself.

  But she couldn’t help wondering what the neighbors would think if someone were to peek through their blinds and see her sitting on the curb in the early morning with a suitcase beside her, her and Scott’s front porch absent the carved, glowing jack-o’-lanterns, hay bales, and scarecrow decorations that dotted so many other lawns and doorsteps in the neighborhood. Even from the street, even at this time of night, it was clear that their home was a home without children.

  During the spring and into the early summer, the neighbors had seen her coming and going, greatly pregnant. They would cock their heads and smile and wave, ask how she was doing, and ask her to remind them of when she was due. And then, one day, she had not been pregnant and she had not had a baby in her arms. Most of the neighbors had reacted like skittish animals, scurrying from their cars to their front doors in lieu of making eye contact. The few who did speak to her held their heads at the same cocked angle as before, but instead of excitement their faces portrayed embellished grief and sympathy, and she realized then that she preferred the cowardly neighbors to the bold ones.

  The differences between the doctor and the nurses postdelivery had prepared her for the reactions of others. The doctor—a black-haired man she’d never met before—had rattled through a list of explanations that he acknowledged might not even be the correct explanations at all: perhaps her placenta had become detached; or maybe the cord had become constricting, “and the child—” He’d stopped there. The nurses, on the other hand, had lowered their voices and relaxed their faces, speaking—no, whispering—not with pity but with assurance, especially after the baby was delivered into a world completely silent except for the beeping of her own blood pressure monitor. It wasn’t her fault, the nurses said. She’d done nothing wrong. Her son was beautiful. She was a mother. She always would be.

  “Who knows?” the doctor had said. “These things happen.”

  These things did happen, and it had happened to her, and, a few months later, it felt like it was still happening.

  She leaned back on her hands, stretched her legs into the street, and crossed her ankles. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She could feel the weight of the house behind her, Scott’s presence in their bed pulling her toward him as if he were her life’s centrifugal force. How do you go home when you already have a home? she wondered. And what would she do when she arrived? She could take another taxi from the airport to Oak Island, knock on her parents’ door, and wait for them to answer. She could play it off like a surprise visit instead of an act of desperation. Or she could wait until they’d gone to bed, and then she could find the front door key where they kept it hidden beneath one of the old flower pots on the front porch. She could let herself in, stash her luggage beneath the bed in her old room, and then find a place to hide. She would be able to be at home without her presence being known, to hear her parents’ voices without those voices asking her questions she didn’t know how to answer. She wished she could go back into the house and open the refrigerator for another beer.

  She kept her eyes closed, and although her fingertips pushed down into the dense grass of her front yard at her and Scott’s home in Dallas, she felt herself tumbling backward into a memory.

  She is hiding beneath the kitchen sink inside their old home in Gastonia, North Carolina. She is only four or fiv
e years old. It is dark and damp inside the cabinet. Whenever her mother turns on the faucet Colleen can hear water coursing up the pipes before trickling back down the drain. Her mother is preparing dinner. She knows Colleen is hiding there, but tonight she will forget.

  Their house is small, and each night when her father comes home from work, she hears the front door creak open no matter where she is hiding. She always hunkers down in an attempt to make herself smaller, adrenaline coursing through her body like an electric current, and she listens as he tosses his keys on the table by the door and hangs up his belt and holster in the coat closet. He always closes the closet door and sighs out loud as if he is greatly disappointed.

  “Where is everybody?” he asks the quiet house.

  Her mother, who is always in the kitchen, waits a beat before replying.

  “Well, I’m in the kitchen,” she says, “but I don’t know where Colleen is.”

  “Huh,” her father says. “Well, I hope she hasn’t run off.”

  He then begins moving through the house, opening closet doors, looking under beds, and pausing only to narrate his search to her mother, his voice rising and falling in mock curiosity, surprise, and disappointment.

  “She’s not in her bedroom. Surely she wouldn’t leave us without taking her toys with her.”

  “I don’t know,” her mother says. “I’m telling you, honey, I haven’t seen her.”

  If Colleen’s body had been a glowing ember, the red-hot heat emanating from it would have given her position away. She always stifled laughs and repressed squeals of torturous anticipation, and each night she fought the urge to burst from her hiding place to surprise her father whenever she heard or felt him draw close to where she lay in wait. Sometimes he would surprise her by making noise as if leaving the room for another, and then returning to throw back a blanket or peek behind a door and scream, “Found you!” She would leap toward him, and he would scoop her up. She would throw her arms around his neck and close her eyes. She could smell him, the fading scent of his aftershave, the sweet cigarette smoke that clung to his clothes, a smell that she had only ever found comforting on him. He would squeeze her close, speak into her hair; she imagined that his eyes were closed. “I’m so happy I found you,” he would say. “I was afraid that you’d left us.”