When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  Colleen turned and looked down the hall behind her, made certain that she could hear the water continuing to run in the shower. She walked into the bedroom and knelt on the floor, and then she unzipped the duffel bag and opened it just enough to see the contents. The shirt and pants that she’d seen Groom wearing on the front porch were folded on top. The first pocket she reached into held a money clip with Groom’s Florida driver’s license on top of what looked to be several folded twenty-dollar bills. In one of the back pockets, Colleen found a black wallet, and when she opened it she saw Groom’s FBI identification, along with a gold badge. Her hands began to shake when she saw it, as if the gravity of what she’d just done had only now settled over her. She snapped the wallet closed and put it back, doing her best to fold the pants and shirt in the same manner she’d found them. Something crinkled inside the bag, and when she looked beneath the clothes, she found a shopping bag from Sears. Inside were a couple of polo shirts and a second pair of brown pants, the tags still fastened to them, along with a receipt from the store in Wilmington. At the bottom of the bag was a pack of black socks and an open package of men’s briefs. Beneath the shopping bag was a holstered pistol and an open carton of a foreign brand of Asian cigarettes that Colleen had never seen before.

  Colleen had grown up around guns, and seeing the weapon was not what bothered her about the luggage. After all, Tom Groom was an FBI agent. Of course he carried a gun and a badge. What gave her pause were the new, unworn clothes inside the shopping bag and the receipt from the store in Wilmington. She knew her father had picked up Groom at the airport, and she didn’t remember him saying anything about taking Groom by the mall. She wanted to pause for a moment to parse the mystery in front of her—but in her pausing she realized that she hadn’t been listening for the shower. She frantically stuffed the clothes back into the shopping bag, and then rearranged Groom’s worn clothes on top of it before zipping the duffel bag closed and repositioning it where she’d found it beside his boots. She could now hear that Groom had turned the shower off, and she did her best to move silently down the hall. She walked into her bedroom and closed the door behind her. Her heart was racing, and she closed her hands into fists to keep them from shaking. Nothing had scared her except her reckless decision to snoop through Groom’s room, but now that she’d gotten away with it, she found that something scared her still.

  In the hallway, she heard Groom open the bathroom door and walk toward his room. He closed the door, and she wondered if the room felt like a different room than the room he’d spent the night in. Did something in his training or capability or character make it apparent to him that his belongings had been disturbed?

  Colleen opened the top drawer in her dresser, grabbed socks and a pair of underwear, and then she found jeans and a shirt and opened her door and fled across the hallway to the bathroom.

  When she came downstairs, Colleen found her mother sitting at the table with Tom Groom, the two of them talking over country ham biscuits that her mother had made that morning. Her father stood watching them from the kitchen, his back leaning against the counter in front of the sink, his hands holding a coffee cup that was lifted and held to his lips as if he were considering blowing on it to cool it down.

  From her seat at the table, Colleen’s mother watched her come down the last few steps and make the turn toward the kitchen.

  “Well, rise and shine,” her mother said.

  Colleen gave a halfhearted smile and walked past the table and into the kitchen. She took a glass down from the cabinet and filled it with ice and then, leaning behind her father, water from the sink. She took a sip and looked from one of her parents to the other.

  “Do y’all have any Tylenol?” she asked.

  “As a matter of fact, we do,” her mother said. She pointed to the cabinet just inside the kitchen to Colleen’s right. “Thanks to our guest. He ran out last night and got some.”

  “And coffee,” Colleen’s father said.

  “Well, I need both,” Colleen said. She opened the cabinet and found the pill bottle. She unscrewed the lid and popped two into her mouth. She took another sip of water and swallowed.

  “Colleen,” her mother said, her voice lilting in a way that told Colleen that she had done something moderately disappointing. Her mother gestured across the table. “This is Tom Groom. He’s the pilot who’s going to—”

  Colleen opened her mouth to interrupt, to let her mother and father know that they’d already met. It seemed awkward to act otherwise in front of Groom, but he beat her to it.

  “Nice to meet you, Colleen,” he said. He smiled.

  His greeting caught Colleen off guard, and, as she stood there, she understood that something secret had passed between them, but she didn’t quite know what it was. Her discovering him at the pay phone? His smoking on the porch late at night? Her coming in drunk after her parents had gone to bed? Or maybe it was the first words he’d said to her—“Don’t let me scare you”—which now seemed more ominous in her memory than they did when she’d heard them spoken.

  “Nice to meet you,” Colleen responded. She took another sip of her water, crunching bits of ice with her teeth. She imagined her headache already receding, the Tylenol dissolving in her stomach and passing into her bloodstream to do whatever it would do to ease the pain in her head and make everything seem clearer.

  Now the three of them—Colleen, her father, and Groom—rode up Beach Road toward the airport after crossing the bridge. Colleen sat in the passenger’s seat of her father’s cruiser. Groom sat in the back.

  Colleen and her father made small talk during the drive. He didn’t ask her about Danny. He’d never asked her about Danny, and she knew it was because he viewed Danny as reckless and impulsive, and of course he sensed things about Danny that he didn’t know how to broach.

  Mostly, Colleen and her father’s discussion focused, as usual, on her mother and her cancer. Does she seem tired to you? Has she been eating? What do her doctors say? Colleen would have forgotten that Groom was even in the car with them had his voice not finally broken the silence of the backseat.

  “Sheriff Barnes, I want to thank you again for letting me stay with your family,” Groom said. “For putting me up and driving me around. I really appreciate it.”

  “It’s a pleasure,” her father said. He looked into the rearview mirror and smiled at Groom. “We’d be eating, sleeping, and driving around anyway, whether you were here or not, so we might as well have you with us.”

  “I guess that’s true,” Groom said. The car grew quiet. The only sounds were the hiss and crackle of the CB radio. Her father had turned it down when they got in the car, and the voices coming across it sounded like whispers. “That reminds me,” Groom said, “if anybody needs to come into my room for anything, just come on in.”

  Colleen’s heart felt like a fist had been closed around it. She realized that she wasn’t breathing. She waited for Groom to say something else, but her father spoke instead.

  “No,” Winston said, “it’s all yours. There’s nothing any of us need in there.”

  “Well, just come on in if you change your mind,” Groom said.

  “A phone,” Colleen said. Her father looked over at her as if trying to make sense of the words she’d just spoken. She gathered herself, finding courage in her frustration that Groom seemed to be trying to pin her in. “I mean, there should be a phone in there,” she said. “At least I think there is. If there’s not, I can take the one out of my room and put it in there for you.”

  Colleen heard Groom shift in his seat.

  “There’s one in there,” he said.

  “I thought there might be,” Colleen said. “Feel free to use it.”

  Winston turned the cruiser left off Beach Road and into the airport parking lot. Two cars were parked out in front of the office. He drove by the office, past small hangars. The doors of a few were open, revealing small, single-engine airplanes where men, presumably the planes’ owners, seemed to b
e working on them or otherwise tinkering around inside the bays.

  Past the hangars, they turned onto the runway, where crime scene tape was intertwined through sets of sawhorses. The airplane glinted beneath the sun at the far end. Colleen had only seen it from far away, but at this close distance it seemed enormous. A patrol car sat parked on the runway behind it. The way the sunlight fell, no one could be seen inside. The door to the patrol car opened, and a deputy stepped out and stretched his arms over his head.

  “Has he been out here all night?” Colleen asked.

  “Not all of it,” her father said. “But most of it.”

  He parked and he and Groom got out. Her father spent a few minutes talking with the deputy. Groom walked past them toward the airplane where its tail sat jacked up off the ground. A mechanic appeared from one of the hangars, pushing a huge chest of what Colleen assumed were tools. Colleen watched Groom until her father got back in the car.

  “He’s an interesting guy,” she said.

  “Who, Groom?” her father asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s one way of describing him.”

  “You don’t like him?” she asked.

  Her father drove through the parking lot and turned left onto Long Beach Road. “I like him fine,” he said. “About as much as I’ve ever liked an FBI agent.”

  “He seems weird,” she said.

  “This whole thing is weird.”

  “I saw him last night on the pay phone outside the Carolina Motel,” Colleen said.

  “Saw who?”

  “Him,” she said. “The pilot. Groom.”

  “Is that why you made that weird comment about the phone?” her father asked.

  His seeing through what she’d thought was her cunning retort to Groom embarrassed her. “No,” she said. “Yes, kind of. It just seemed weird that he was on a pay phone in the middle of the night. And he was driving Mom’s car.”

  “That’s because she let him drive it, Colleen. He went to the store. For aspirin and coffee.” Winston clicked on his blinker and turned right and drove toward Southport.

  “And to use the phone, which he could’ve done at our house,” she said.

  “Maybe he wanted privacy.”

  “There’s a phone in his room,” Colleen said. “He told me he didn’t want to use your long-distance.”

  “Well, that was kind of him,” her father said, and then he looked over at her. “When did he tell you that?”

  Colleen felt her face reddening a bit. She should not be ashamed to have come in late, to have been drinking, to have been startled by Groom on the porch in the middle of the night, but something about neither her nor Groom acknowledging that in front of her parents made it feel like a shameful secret was now being unearthed.

  “Danny thinks it’s all drug related,” she said. Her father looked over at her, his eyes lingering for a moment on her face before he turned back to the road.

  “Oh, yeah? Is that what Danny thinks?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “And he thinks that’s why Bradley Frye wants to become sheriff, so he can look the other way, like, maybe he’d get kickbacks or something.”

  “Huh,” Winston said, acting as if he were amused. He drove in silence for a moment. “Well, I’ll tell you what: between your friends and your mother and her friends, I think we might just have this case cracked. The sheriff down in Horry County might have a case connected to the airplane and Rodney’s murder, but I’ll tell him not to worry about it.”

  The intensity of her father’s sarcasm pushed around Colleen’s body like a physical thing that she could feel gathering around her face and shoulders. He was comparing her to her mother and her mother’s friends, and although he had never directly said so, and Colleen had never directly asked, she had a good idea what her father thought about her mother and her mother’s friends, largely because it was the same thing Colleen thought: her mother’s curiosity was trivial and gossipy, her interests fleeting and presumptive, as if the rules of the world were fixed in such a way that she could easily unravel their complexities if she and her friends just spent enough time talking about it on the phone.

  Colleen wanted to find a way to remind her father that she’d graduated from law school, that in law school she had studied and learned the rules of evidence and criminal procedure, had, in fact, studied them more closely and with more intensity than her father ever had despite his decades of experience in law enforcement. If she had opinions on this case—and, if she were being honest, she didn’t—they would have been based on facts and education and expertise, not on gut instinct or intuition or gossip. She didn’t want to be like her mother, and she didn’t think she was, but perhaps she wasn’t much like her father either, a man she’d always held out as the epitome of fact-based rationality. She was more educated than either of them, had traveled more broadly than either of them, and, unlike them, was no longer living in the state of her birth. But the fact that she was not actually practicing law, that she had either postponed it or given it up altogether in favor of a child she did not have and a husband she was not with—a fact pattern that always hovered on the edge of her emotional periphery—shot through her heart with a cold bolt of self-realization. Maybe she wasn’t like her parents—an older couple set in their ways and beliefs, operating on emotion and intuition. She was worldly, educated, and enlightened, and all these advantages had landed her here, back home, feeling very much like the same adolescent she was before law school, before traveling, before marrying Scott and moving to Texas and losing her baby.

  No, she wasn’t like her parents, but maybe she was worse.

  Colleen couldn’t remember if she had ever been in the Grove before. Had she ever had a reason? She’d had Black friends when she was young, playing softball and other sports, seeing them at a few birthday parties when they were little or at after-school events like plays or dances or club meetings. But she couldn’t remember ever being inside one of the Black kids’ homes. No playdates or sleepovers or things like that. And then she realized that none of the Black kids she’d grown up with had ever been inside her home either. And here she was, a grown woman of twenty-six who’d lost a child, going to visit a widow inside the home of a Black classmate who’d been shot and killed. The mysteries of life always seemed vague and inexplicable to Colleen, and as her father drove past the small brick and clapboard homes, their yards alive with flowers and ornaments and outdoor furniture or choked with weeds, she couldn’t help but question the predestined vagaries of fate that had landed her here while also ending Rodney’s life.

  Her father drove into the Grove and slowed down, coming to a stop at the side of the street. He put the car in park. Colleen lifted her head from the passenger’s-side window. They both sat without moving.

  “I’m sorry,” her father finally said.

  She looked over at him. “For what?”

  “For what I said. I shouldn’t say things like that. I’d love to hear any ideas you’ve got. That lead down in Horry County probably isn’t going to pan out.”

  “You don’t have to apologize,” she said.

  “I’ve just got a lot on my mind,” he said. “I had to fire a deputy yesterday because of this mess that Bradley Frye caused here in the Grove, and that’s put me a man down, and I’ve had to keep somebody out at the airport. There’s just a lot going on.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “Well, there’s no need for you to say that to me,” he said.

  “What about Mom’s?”

  “Mom’s what?” he asked.

  “Mom’s ideas about the case,” she said. “You want to hear more of those?”

  He laughed, nodded his head.

  He dropped the car into drive and they continued on. “I think I’ll hold off on hers if that’s okay.”

  Winston turned into the driveway of a small, wooden-frame house. A burgundy sedan was parked on the road in front, and a white Datsun sat in the driveway with a pickup truck. A sheet of
plywood had been nailed to the front of the house, apparently to cover a window that had been broken. By the time Colleen had taken off her seat belt, Rodney’s father had stepped out onto the small porch. To Colleen he looked the same as he’d looked when she was in high school, despite the spots where his hair was graying around his temples. The same thick glasses, the same rigid demeanor. He wore a blue button-down shirt and khaki pants, and he stood with his hands in his pockets, watching Colleen and Winston as if he’d been waiting for them, uncertain whether to welcome them or ask them to leave.

  “Mr. Bellamy,” Colleen whispered to herself, obviously loud enough for her father to hear from where he sat behind the steering wheel.

  “Yeah,” he said, his voice edged with resignation. He turned off the engine and opened his door. Colleen climbed out and followed her father down a short walkway to the porch.

  “Morning, Ed,” her father said.

  “Sheriff,” Bellamy said, nodding his head toward Winston, his voice portraying neither a warmth of welcome nor a coldness of indifference. Bellamy looked past Winston to where Colleen stood behind him. His face softened slightly, the way it would when a student would accidentally do or say something funny in class. “Colleen Barnes,” he said.

  She smiled and gave him a small wave. She suddenly felt very shy. “Hello, Mr. Bellamy,” she said. “I am so sorry.”

  “Come on now, you’re grown,” he said. “Call me Ed.” Colleen could never imagine calling him by his first name. “You’re not in school anymore,” he said, his face cracking into a slight, nearly imperceptible smile. “Y’all come on. Janelle’s expecting you.”