When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “Come on out!” a voice called from outside.

  “Oh, my God,” Janelle said. “Oh, my God.”

  The sound of the log crashing through the window must have awakened the baby where he slept in the nursery, because he began to cry. Janelle seemed suddenly reminded that there was another soul in the house aside from hers and Jay’s, and she left Jay’s doorway and ran to the baby’s room on the other side of the hall. Jay crawled across his bedroom floor, reached up, and turned out his light.

  “Janelle,” Jay called out. “Leave the lights off.” He could hear her in the nursery, trying to calm the baby, trying to calm herself.

  “Come out here, boy!” the voice outside said. “We ain’t here to hurt nobody.”

  Jay stayed low, and he half-walked/half-crawled into Janelle’s bedroom, where he went straight to her closet and reached for the top shelf on Rodney’s side. He took the case down and opened it, and then he stood again and took one of the boxes of cartridges that he had not yet touched until that moment. He opened the rifle just as he’d seen the man in the woods do it, and with a shaking hand, he popped a cartridge inside and slid the bolt closed. He picked up the rifle in one hand and the box of cartridges in the other, and he bent at the waist and moved from the bedroom to the hall on his way to the front door.

  Janelle must have seen him as he passed the nursery, because she stepped into the hallway behind him and cried out for him, but Jay didn’t turn around. He knew he was going to open the door and confront whoever was out there.

  Jay stopped at the door and set the box of ammunition on the table against the wall, and then, in what seemed like one motion, he turned the lock, opened the door, shouldered the rifle, and pointed it outside into a blinding light. He could not tell the source of the light, but he imagined that spotlights were being trained on him because the light came from many directions, and it was brighter than headlights. He could not see beyond it, but something alerted him to the presence of other people, perhaps a dozen, perhaps more. He could hear their voices over the sounds of truck engines, and he could hear other engines revving and other voices calling out in other parts of the community.

  Although Jay could not see the face belonging to the voice that he heard next, he knew exactly to whom it belonged.

  “Boy, I thought I told you I didn’t want to see you carrying that rifle again.” It was the man who’d pointed the pistol at him and Cody in the woods.

  Jay moved the rifle to point it in the direction of the man’s voice, but he could not see anything beyond the porch landing where he stood. He was shirtless in a pair of old basketball shorts, and he was suddenly aware of the vulnerability of his body, and he was also aware that he had never fired a weapon and did not know what would happen if he fired this one. He heard someone laughing out in the yard on the other side of the light.

  Jay moved the barrel of the rifle again, doing his best to track the source of the laugh, but there was only more laughter.

  “He looks like a goddamned deer,” someone said.

  “Take that little buck down,” another voice called. More laughter.

  “Listen here, boy,” the man from the woods said. “We don’t need y’all bringing drugs into this county. We think it’s time y’all pack up, get on back down to Georgia, take that peach of a sister back where she belongs.”

  Jay felt something wet on his arm, and he realized it was a tear and that he’d been crying. He did not know how long he stood there, but it seemed that hours passed. He kept his finger on the rifle’s trigger, kept it raised and pointing blindly into the light.

  “You think about what I just told you,” the man’s voice finally said. “You think about it.”

  There was the sound of car doors opening and closing, and suddenly the bright light waned as vehicles backed out of Janelle’s yard and swung around in the street in front of the house. Jay kept the rifle raised, but when he looked to the road, he saw men in the back of the trucks, some of them sitting on the sides of the trucks’ beds and holding Confederate flags on long poles, others standing behind spotlights fastened to the trucks’ roofs. A few trucks spun their tires and kicked smoke into the air, and then they tore off down the road toward Southport. The last truck to leave their yard was a big dually with lettering on the side. It flew a Confederate flag from the back of its cab. There was the sound of a gun being fired into the air, and Jay flinched and ducked from the doorway back into the darkened house. He heard laughter, more squealing tires, and then the night went silent and dark.

  He closed the door and locked it, even though he knew it offered them absolutely no protection from whoever the people were who had been waiting for him outside. They were gone, for now, but Jay knew they would return, and he would be ready.

  Chapter 7

  Marie was still sleeping soundly when Winston slipped out of bed the next morning. After getting dressed, he fought the urge to open Colleen’s door to peer in at her while she slept. He told himself that he’d decided not to open her door because he was afraid of waking her, but he secretly knew that he was afraid of seeing a woman who would leave home again instead of a little girl who might just stay forever.

  The night before, he’d gone to sleep with worry strapped to him like a dynamite vest, each of the worries packaged like a tiny bomb that he either had to snuff out or face the possibility of it blowing a hole through his heart while his mind wrestled itself toward sleep. He thought about his time in Korea, thought about how—although he’d seen no live combat—he was always aware and afraid of the possibility of something being tossed his way. How would he have responded? Would he have run? Thrown himself on top of it? Picked it up and tossed it back? Later, he would hear of guys in Vietnam launching their bodies on top of hand grenades that had been thrown by villagers—women and children who hated the soldiers as much as their fathers and husbands did. He imagined those men’s hollowed-out bodies, their forever unseeing and unblinking eyes, and he thought of Ed Bellamy during his time in that country. He knew that Bellamy had been a marine, but he did not know in what capacity he had served.

  Winston had closed his eyes, pictured Ed Bellamy as a young man, alone in a rice paddy as a helicopter hovers overhead, the winds from its rotors bending the limbs of trees and fluttering Bellamy’s flak jacket. In this vision, Ed Bellamy is even younger than the son who’d be found dead on a runway all these years later. Winston thought of Rodney Bellamy as just a child, and he knew that he saw the man as such because he’d been in school with Colleen, whom he would always see as a child no matter how old she grew to be.

  And in thinking of Colleen, Winston was forced to finger another tightly packed package of explosive. When he’d first laid eyes on her at the airport, the weight of her sadness had overwhelmed him, but unlike Marie’s sadness, which caused him to withdraw, Colleen’s grief pulled him closer, and the closer he got the more he realized he could not defuse Colleen’s bombs because he could not even defuse his own.

  Downstairs in the kitchen, Winston brewed a pot of coffee as the world lightened outside, and then he stood and stared out the windows toward the waterway while he drank his first cup of the day. Little more than twenty-four hours had passed since he had stood there wondering what he would find at the airport, and he could not believe all that had happened. The airplane. Bellamy’s body on the runway. Glenn’s stumbling upon him and nearly getting shot. The sudden phone call from Colleen that had surprised him more than anything he could have discovered at the airport in the middle of the night. And now here he was, setting off on another errand that would inevitably surprise him just as much as the others: an FBI agent from Florida who could supposedly fix and fly the airplane, a man Rollins had said was named Tom Groom, was expecting Winston to pick him up at the Wilmington airport. And Groom would be staying with him and Marie in what suddenly felt to Winston like a full house.

  He’d tried his best to hide his frustration with Rollins over the phone last night. It was true that the hotels
had closed up shop for the winter, but he knew other arrangements could’ve been made, and there were better options than having a stranger stay with him and Marie. This option was just the cheapest and the least disruptive to the day-to-day operations of the FBI’s Wilmington field office. Winston was certain that Marie was excited by the idea of having someone stay with them, but he was afraid that it—along with Colleen’s visit—would take a toll on her, although she’d never show it, especially not in front of a guest.

  After leaving the island, Winston drove past the airport, and he could see a cruiser parked on the runway, the airplane still sitting sideways not far away from it. He knew Glenn had been out there for most of the night, but he couldn’t remember which deputy had relieved him, meaning he couldn’t picture the face of the deputy who was now probably fighting sleep, his head lolling against the driver’s-side window as the sun climbed in the sky.

  As he drove north on Highway 133, Winston’s mind was quiet for the first time since the airplane had come in and woken him from sleep, and that meant it was open to things he did not want to think about or recall. He’d been fighting it, but Rodney Bellamy’s murder had been on the edge of every thought Winston had had since he’d found Rodney’s body. While the fact of Rodney’s murder was enough to send explosive jolts of panic through him, it was the imagined moment of Rodney’s murder—the moment at which Rodney knew he would be killed—that was haunting Winston. Had Rodney known he would die the moment he saw a gun pointed at him? Had he thought of his wife’s face or spoken the name of his baby boy?

  In all his years of police work, Winston had never had the experience of believing that his own death was imminent, and the one time he had taken a life he had not considered the possibilities of what that man was thinking. It had all happened so fast—at least he wanted to believe that was the case; he wanted to believe that the man had not had time to think of his wife or his children or the set of circumstances that had landed him behind the counter in the pharmacy on Franklin Boulevard back in Gastonia, his pistol held on the pharmacist and the young girl who worked the register, Winston’s pistol pointed at the man’s chest from where Winston stood on the other side of the counter.

  But there had been time enough after it was over for Winston to think of everything panic had not allowed him to consider. The man’s name; it was James Dixon. He’d been thirty-one years old, married, with two young children. No record of arrests or convictions. He’d been laid off, but for years he’d worked as a mechanic at the Firestone Mill and lived in the Black section of the mill village, and a few days after his funeral, that was where Winston had driven, parking his car up the road from Dixon’s house and wondering what he’d expected to gain from being in such proximity to the dead man’s home.

  The first time Winston had sat in his car near Dixon’s house, he’d sat behind the wheel clutching an envelope stuffed with nearly five hundred dollars, which was as much money as he could afford to offer without making things tough for him and Marie and Colleen. He’d also sat there with both an explanation and an apology prepared to deliver to Dixon’s wife. He couldn’t understand her grief, and he was awfully, inexplicably sorry for it. He just saw the gun in her husband’s hand. How could he have known it was unloaded? It had all happened so fast, and there was not time to notice that the magazine was missing, that the pistol was so rusted as to have been incapable of firing. Winston could not possibly have asked about Dixon’s job or his family or his desperation or what that thirty-seven dollars in the till would mean to them.

  That day, while Winston sat in the car, a little boy no older than six or seven had stepped out the front door of the mill shack with a child’s slingshot in his hand. He’d walked to the edge of the yard and stopped to pick up bits of gravel that he loaded into his toy. He aimed for a tree in the middle of the yard, and from inside his car, Winston could hear the slap of the rocks each time one smacked against the tree’s trunk. Soon, a woman came outside, a young baby on her hip, and she said something to the boy. The boy turned to go in, and the woman looked up the street and saw Winston. Had she known who he was, what he had done? Her eyes settled on his for a moment, and then she turned and followed her son inside the house.

  Winston’s hand went to the handle on the car door, his other hand holding the envelope of cash, but something kept him in the car, gave him permission to wait, to come back tomorrow, to put off the apology and the errand that had sent him there. The next day, there was a truck parked in the driveway, and Winston watched an older Black man walk in and out of the house a couple of times. He didn’t know who the man was, and he thought it best to come back when Dixon’s wife was alone. The next day, the family was gone, but Winston had never forgotten Dixon’s family, and he knew that even though they had never met him, they had never been able to forget him either.

  When Winston pulled up to the near-empty arrivals area at the Wilmington airport, he didn’t even have a chance to put the cruiser in park before a man stepped off the curb, opened the passenger door, and leaned inside.

  “Hey,” the man said, extending his hand across the seat toward Winston. “Agent Tom Groom. Your pilot.”

  Winston reached out and shook the man’s hand. The man wore a navy blue polo shirt tucked into khaki pants. He wore the standard-issue SIG holstered at his side, and he had the same standard-issue bearing of the other agents Winston had met over time, the same rigidity, the same distance and withdrawn air about him.

  “Nice to meet you, Agent Groom. I’m Sheriff Winston Barnes,” he said. “I hope you didn’t wait too long.”

  “Not at all,” Groom said. He lifted up an army-green duffel bag so that Winston could see it. “Mind if I toss this in the back?”

  “Go ahead,” Winston said.

  Groom opened the back door and set the bag on the floorboard, and then he slid onto the passenger’s seat and closed the door. He was medium height with a slender build and a full head of thick auburn hair. Something about him seemed vaguely familiar to Winston, and he considered that Groom could easily pass for one of the Kennedy brothers if not for his accent, which Winston was already trying to place.

  “I just deplaned,” Groom said. He raked his fingers through his hair in an attempt to get it off his forehead, just like Winston remembered Jack Kennedy doing in the old newsreels. “Perfect timing.”

  “Good,” Winston said. He pulled away from the curb. “We’ve got about an hour drive down to Oak Island.”

  Tom Groom told Winston he was forty-three years old, was born outside Ames, Iowa, and joined the air force at eighteen just in time to be sent to Vietnam. During the war, he would eventually fly the military version of the same aircraft that now sat sideways on the runway at the airport in Brunswick County. “It was a C-47,” Groom said, “outfitted with mini guns. Flew ground support, dug them out when the Viet Cong came in.” Groom said that after the war, he went to college back in Iowa, and when that was over, the FBI came calling.

  Winston felt Groom turn and look at him as if he were sizing him up, taking the measure of him in some way.

  “Did you serve?” Groom finally asked.

  “Yeah,” Winston said. “Navy in Korea.”

  “I figured. You can always spot a veteran.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “I bet it doesn’t seem like it,” Groom said. “Vietnam won’t ever seem like a long time ago to me.”

  “It sticks with you,” Winston said, but Winston didn’t want to talk about the past, his or Groom’s. He didn’t want to talk about war any more than anyone else who’d ever been through it.

  “Are you the FBI’s aircraft specialist?” Winston asked, only half-joking.

  “It seems like it sometimes,” Groom said. “Once you find your niche, it’s hard to get out of it.”

  They were crossing the bridge over the Cape Fear River and heading into Brunswick County when Winston asked Groom how he knew Agents Rollins and Rountree.

  “I don’t,” Gro
om said. “Not really, anyway, not beyond a quick talk on the phone. The teletype came into the Miami office, and we deal with downed aircraft all the time down there.”

  “You ever deal with them sitting sideways on a short runway?”

  “No,” Groom said. He laughed a little, the first real emotion Winston had seen him express since he’d gotten into the car. Winston felt himself relaxing. “I can’t say I’ve seen that. But if that rear landing gear can be fixed—and I think it can, based on what your airport manager told me—I believe I can get this aircraft out of your hair. If I’ve done it during monsoon season out in the jungle, I can for sure do it on a nice October morning.”

  They rode in silence for a moment. Winston tapped his fingers against the steering wheel as if listening to a song in his head, but the only thing he heard was the rumble of the engine as the cruiser whipped down the winding curve of Highway 133, the swamps on either side glowing in hues of yellow in the morning light. On the left-hand side, far past the trees that obscured the view, the Cape Fear River divided Brunswick County from the city of Wilmington. Historical markers dotted the roadside, announcing the fact that settlers, slaves, and Indians had once inhabited this land over the span of centuries.

  Groom broke the silence. “Mind if I smoke?” he asked.

  “No, not one bit,” Winston said.

  Groom reached into his breast pocket for a pack of cigarettes. Winston looked over and saw that the pack was blue and gold and featured some kind of Asian lettering on it. Groom shook one loose and lit it with a lighter that he slid back into his pocket. He took a drag, and then he rolled down the window and blew smoke from the side of his mouth.