When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “What brand is that?” Winston asked.

  Groom kept the cigarette between his fingers, but he held it in front of him and studied it for a moment. “Hero,” he said. He took another drag and exhaled. “They’re harder than hell to get in the States, but it’s the only bad habit I brought home from the war, so it’s worth the trouble.”

  “There are worse,” Winston said.

  “That there are.” Groom flicked an ash out the cracked window. “You from around here?”

  “No,” Winston said. “Up the road a piece, just west of Charlotte.”

  “What brought you down here?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Winston said. “Just wanted to live at the beach, I guess.”

  “You fish?” Groom asked.

  “No,” Winston said. “I don’t fish, and I have to tell you, I haven’t been on a boat in years, and I can’t remember the last time I set foot on the beach when it didn’t involve work.”

  Groom smiled a little. He took a drag off his cigarette. “Well, I understand that,” he said. “I’ve lived in Miami almost twenty years, and I can’t recall the last time I did any of that stuff either.”

  “Work keep you busy?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Groom said. “Plenty of work.”

  “I know you get a lot of drug planes down in South Florida,” Winston said. “I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard about one this far north.”

  “It happens,” Groom said. “But up here I think they’re more likely to use boats.”

  “You’re right about that,” Winston said. “You’re right about that.”

  “You think this is drugs?” Groom asked.

  “I don’t know what I think just yet,” Winston said. “I really don’t.”

  “If it was drugs, they would’ve had a local, somebody waiting on them,” Groom said. “Agent Rollins told me you had a body out there.”

  “That’s right,” Winston said. “But something tells me he didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  “It would be hard for an innocent man to explain being out on a runway in the middle of the night to greet a drug plane. He might be your local.”

  Winston looked over at Groom. “You got a lead you’re keeping from me?” he asked. He smiled and looked back at the road.

  Groom took another drag from his cigarette. “Not yet,” he said. He picked a fleck of tobacco from his tongue, flicked it out the window. “But I just got here.”

  Rollins and Rountree must have assumed that Winston would bring Groom to the airport, because he spotted them on the runway as soon as he parked the cruiser outside the office. He wondered why they couldn’t have just picked up Groom themselves, why they had to send him on an errand as if he were their gofer, but he’d already done the errand, so maybe he was.

  The door to Sweetney’s office opened and Leonard Dorsey stepped out as if he’d spent all morning waiting for Agent Tom Groom to arrive. Dorsey clapped his hands together and smiled. “Is this our pilot?” he called out.

  “Jesus Christ,” Winston said.

  “Who’s that?” Groom asked.

  “County commissioner. He sells insurance for a living.”

  “He looks like he sells insurance,” Groom said. He opened the back door and lifted his duffel bag from the floorboard.

  Dorsey walked down the sidewalk from the office toward the parking lot. “I hope you know more about planes than your fellow FBI buddies do,” he said.

  “We’ll see,” Groom said. “I know a good bit.”

  The office door slammed and Winston looked up to see Hugh walking toward them.

  “Hugh,” Dorsey said. “This here’s our pilot.”

  “That’s what I figured,” Hugh said. He shook Groom’s hand. “Hugh Sweetney.”

  “Agent Tom Groom.”

  “You want to get a look at this aircraft?” Hugh asked. “Check out that back wheel?”

  “You bet,” Groom said.

  “Like I told you on the phone, you’re more than welcome to use anything we’ve got in the shop here.”

  “I appreciate that,” Groom said.

  Hugh smiled, and then he turned and started out toward the runway. Groom adjusted his duffel on his shoulder and turned toward Winston. “Thanks for the ride out here,” he said.

  “You bet,” Winston said. “I’m going to head over to the office, get some stuff done. Just call over there when you need me to carry you home.” He felt like he was dropping off a teenager at a sleepover. “Rollins knows how to get ahold of me.”

  Groom nodded, gave a little wave, and set out toward the runway to follow Hugh.

  “You think he’ll do it?” Dorsey said. He was still standing beside Winston, his hands in his pockets and his tie loose around his neck.

  “I think he’ll try,” Winston said. “But it’s hard to predict just what will happen.”

  The sheriff’s office was part of the Brunswick County courthouse complex, a collection of squat, redbrick buildings sequestered off in clumps of tall pine trees alongside Route 88 in the town of Boiling Springs. Winston had always thought the buildings looked like what they were: a place where civic responsibility was decided upon, written down, enforced, and when infringed upon, punished. Perhaps that was why the sheriff’s office had always felt institutional to Winston, and entering it always gave him the same feeling he had when entering a school or a church or another building where a set of expectations had been clearly defined before he ever arrived.

  He opened one of the glass double doors and stepped into the reception area, the faded orange-and-white checkered linoleum running the length of the hallway, the soles of his shoes squeaking against the polish that lifted the sharp, antiseptic scent of cleaning solution from the floor. Three chairs rested against the wall on his left, and this was where people sat when they were waiting for the business of the office to work for them or against them—mothers and fathers picking up teenage vandals; attorneys waiting to question clients arrested on DWI; victims of violence or duplicity or chance, nervous or uncertain or thrilled by the prospect of filing a complaint. A sliding glass window was built into the wall on his right, and on the other side of it the office secretary, Vicki, sat behind a desk littered with paperwork, schedules, and calendars. She slid the reception window open when she saw Winston. “I heard our pilot made it up from Miami,” she said.

  “You heard right,” Winston said. He stepped through the doorway next to the glass window and stood beside Vicki’s desk where his mailbox, the one on top, was affixed to the wall right inside the door. He looked through its contents, removing the papers and sealed envelopes that looked important, tossing the rest into the wastebasket at his feet.

  “And I heard he’s an FBI man.”

  “You heard right again,” he said. He looked down at Vicki. He had no idea how old she was, but he knew she was past middle age, her chin-length brown hair too dark not to be dyed, the skin around her eyes and lips papery and spiderwebbed with wrinkles from decades of smoking. He’d known her for more than twenty years, knew her husband, Clint, her high school sweetheart. He’d worked over at the munitions depot at Sunny Point before going on disability after a back injury and eventually retiring. Winston knew Vicki’s kids too, one of whom lived in Charlotte and another, a son with kids of his own, who lived here in Brunswick County. Winston’s relationship with her was built on gentle teasing and the unspoken understanding that he needed her to play the role of den mother for him and his deputies and staff, and he, in return, would make her job as easy as possible by always trusting her to run her administrative ship efficiently. She was the keeper of schedules and reports, messages and requests, and all she asked for in return was to be left to her solitary work while being allowed the freedom to rib her boss at any opportunity she could find.

  “This is a mess, Sheriff,” she said. She lowered her voice and leaned forward. “We’re lucky the FBI’s taking over.” She smiled again, sat up, went back to shuffling the papers on her desk. “Mar
ie called. She’s looking for you. The way she talked, she might be looking for your pilot too.”

  “He’s out at the airport if she needs to get ahold of him,” Winston said. “He’s all hers.”

  “How’s she doing?” Vicki asked.

  “She’s doing good,” Winston said. “She’s good.”

  “Well, let me know if y’all need anything. You know I can bake.”

  “I do know that,” Winston said. He smiled. “Any other messages?”

  “No, sir,” Vicki said.

  Winston tapped on the door frame by way of goodbye, his wedding ring pinging against the metal with a tinny report.

  He turned right and walked toward his office, which sat at the end of the hallway past the restrooms, the water fountain, the deputies’ shared offices, and the break room. He unlocked his door and tossed the papers onto his desk, and then he slid his holstered weapon from his belt and hung it from the coatrack. Winston closed his door and sat down at his desk. He looked around his office for a moment, his mind trying to decide exactly where to begin.

  On the wall to his left hung a dozen or so framed photographs that Marie had carefully placed not long after he’d moved into the office almost thirteen years ago. There was a photo of him in Korea and another photo of him in his dress blues—his first uniform—just a few years later when he was back in Gastonia and a young, fresh-faced police officer. In the photograph he is standing outside his mother and father’s house, Crowder’s Mountain looming in the background, the canopy of trees above him broken just enough for the slash of sunlight coming through the leaves to cause him to narrow his eyes against the brightness at the exact moment the photograph was taken. In another photograph he is a few years older, wearing a white jacket and black bow tie, standing at a car wash and spraying the shaving cream off the back windshield of his Mercury. Marie, still in her wedding dress, her hair pinned up in an immaculate platinum beehive apparent even in the grainy black-and-white photograph, is sitting in the front seat. Beyond those pictures, there were framed photographs that traced Colleen’s childhood from newborn to high school, her face and eyes appearing the same to Winston in each photograph.

  He turned his eyes from the wall of framed pictures to the pile of papers and envelopes on his desk, and he spent an hour or so listening to the muffled sounds of Vicki answering the phone at her desk while he leafed through the reports Glenn and a couple of other deputies had put together, all of them containing detailed accounts of leased storage facilities and rented trucks, vans, and trailers. All the information began to blur together, and Winston knew his exhaustion was affecting his concentration.

  Other reports waited on his desk as well: a domestic assault at a trailer home somewhere out in the woods near Winnabow; a stolen car found burned in the woods on Highway 133 by Orton Plantation; a fourteen-year-old boy missing from Shallotte whose parents thought he had run away to Wilmington or Fayetteville.

  The phone rang on his desk, and Winston picked it up. The call was from Sheriff Oren Petty, just across the border down in Horry County, South Carolina.

  “You sitting down?”

  “I sit down when I can,” Winston said.

  “Well, I hope you’re sitting down right now.”

  “I am.”

  “Good,” Petty said, “because I think we found your cargo, some of it anyway.”

  Winston leaned forward and picked up a pen and flipped to a clean page in the notebook that sat on his desk. “Go ahead,” he said.

  “We just had us a big bust,” Petty said. “It’s a house way out in the county that we’d been watching for a while. We moved on it this morning and found the mother lode.”

  “What was it?”

  “About twenty kilos of cocaine so far,” Petty said. “They were packaging it up to move.”

  “Tell me you found some suspects.”

  “Oh, we found plenty of those, Sheriff. Made four arrests so far.”

  “And tell me you found some weapons.”

  “Plenty of those too,” Petty said.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Winston said. “You mind sharing those names, prints, and those weapons?”

  “No, sir,” Petty said. “As soon as we get them processed down here I’ll make sure my office is in contact.”

  “If we can match the bullet that killed our guy up here to one of those guns down there then we’ll be getting somewhere,” Winston said.

  “I got my fingers crossed,” Petty said.

  “Me too,” Winston said.

  Chapter 8

  After finishing her dinner, Colleen had carried her tray down to the kitchen once her parents’ lights had gone out for the night, and she had taken five bottles of her father’s Old Milwaukee and brought them up to her room. She’d found her senior yearbook and sat on the bed, drinking the beers and leafing through the yearbook and finding every picture of Rodney Bellamy that she could. There he was in his senior photo wearing a tuxedo jacket and bow tie, a thin mustache above his lip. In another picture he was leaning against a car in the school parking lot, laughing at what someone was saying off-camera.

  Before she turned off her light, she had taken the rotary phone from where she’d left it on the table by the beanbag chair and set it beside her pillow. Its ringing was what woke her, and with her eyes closed, her hand frantically searched for the handset. She found it and lifted it to her ear.

  “Hello?” she said.

  “Colleen?” It was her father’s voice.

  “Yeah?” she said; her throat was scratchy and dry, and her mouth tasted terrible. She kept her eyes closed tight, afraid of the light seeping around her curtains, afraid of what time the clock on the dresser would reveal.

  “You sleep okay?”

  “Just fine,” she said.

  “Good,” he said. “I had to run out, pick up this fellow at the airport, but I’ll be home later. Maybe we can all go out for supper or something. Just got a phone call from the sheriff down in Myrtle Beach. Might be some good news on Rodney’s case.”

  Colleen’s yearbook still sat on the bedside table, and when she stood from the bed, she placed her palm on it to steady herself. She forgot that she had hidden the empty beer bottles beneath her bed, and she kicked one over. It landed with a soft thud against the shag carpet.

  “Colleen?” her father said.

  “Yes,” she said. “I’m here. Dinner sounds good. I’ll talk to Mom.”

  “All right,” he said. “Is she home?”

  “I don’t know,” Colleen said. “I haven’t seen her.”

  “She might’ve decided to walk a little. I almost wish she wouldn’t do that.”

  Colleen’s hand was still propped on the bedside table. Her head was bowed and her eyes were closed. She waited, but her father didn’t say anything.

  “Thanks for picking me up yesterday,” she finally said.

  “Of course,” he said. “I’m glad you’re home.”

  “Me too,” she said, then, “I just hate that you had to drive back up to the airport today.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “Tell your mother I’ll be home as soon as I can. And mention going out to eat tonight.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Bye.”

  “Bye,” he said.

  Without lifting her head, Colleen reached behind her and dropped the handset back on the cradle. She stood up straight, used her toes to push the empty bottles as far under the bed as she could without losing her balance.

  Downstairs, she heard the sliding glass door that led from the kitchen to the back deck open and close. She didn’t know what time it was, but she knew her mother was back from wherever she had been. Colleen kept her eyes closed, but she felt the room turn, and she realized that her head was splitting. She swallowed, passed her tongue over her lips. She took a breath, held it for a moment, and then she left her room and crossed the hall to the bathroom.

  She pulled back the shower curtain and turned the water on, making sure it was almost hot enough to
burn. She slipped out of her clothes and stepped into the shower, letting the scorching water run through her hair and over her face. Then she turned her back to the water, sat down in the tub, and let it pour over her.

  After the shower, she got dressed and pulled her damp hair back into a short ponytail and came downstairs to find her mother sitting at the kitchen table with an empty coffee cup. She walked to the coffeepot and poured its remnants into an old cup with a fading picture of a lighthouse on it.

  “Good morning, honey,” her mother said. She was flipping through a magazine. Colleen noticed again how long and thin her mother’s fingers looked, how frail her knobby wrists seemed where they disappeared into the loose sleeves of her soft pink sweatshirt. Colleen knew her mother was always cold now, so she wasn’t surprised to see the collar of a light yellow blouse peeking out from the neck of her sweatshirt.

  “Good morning,” Colleen said.

  “Did you sleep okay?”

  “I did.” She took a sip of the coffee, suddenly reminded of how weak her father always made it. “Dad called.”

  Her mother sighed. “I’m sure he was checking in on me, making sure I haven’t lifted a finger in his absence.”

  “He’s just worried, Mom,” Colleen said. “I’m sure he’s worried about me too.”

  “Well, imagine his surprise when he learns that women keep the world together.” She looked up at Colleen and smiled. “His and Scott’s both. We don’t need their worry.”

  “Just their surrender.”

  “Or at least their silence,” her mother said.

  “I’d take that,” Colleen said. She took a sip of her coffee. “I would take silence.”

  Her mother looked back down at her magazine, turned a page, then another.

  “I bet you didn’t expect to have a full house when you woke up yesterday morning,” Colleen said.

  “I’ve stopped having expectations,” her mother said. She smiled as if realizing the darkness of her words. “But let’s get out of here and go to the grocery store. I’m sure there’s something special you’d like, and Lord knows we’ll need something to feed the mystery man. And we need some candy for the kids.”