When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  But in this memory, he does not search for her when he comes in the door, though she is waiting for him nonetheless. The floor of the cabinet where she’s hiding has been papered, and she runs her fingers over it, feeling its waxy film and the spots where the paper has begun to dimple and curl from moisture. Her back leans against one side of the cabinet; her knees are pulled to her chest. At her feet are boxes of Brillo pads and Ajax. It must be cold outside, because the smell of gas heat coming from the ducts lingers on the edge of her memory.

  When the front door opens, her father does not call out, does not open the closet door to put his coat or belt and holster away. She hears his steps as he walks through the small foyer toward the living room. The springs give when he sits down on his chair. Outside the cabinet where she’s hiding, she’s aware that her mother has paused as if she too is listening and marking these alterations in her father’s routine. Her mother goes back to her work.

  “It’s about time,” her mother says. She waits, but there is no response. “I don’t know where Colleen is.”

  Her father is silent. His chair creaks as if his weight has shifted, and Colleen wonders if he is settling himself or reclining or standing.

  “Marie,” he says. His voice is quiet, and Colleen recognizes it as a voice she has not heard before. “Come in here.”

  “Winston?” her mother says. She turns on the sink, and Colleen imagines that she is washing her hands before drying them on a dish towel. “What is it?”

  “Come in here,” her father says again.

  She listens as her mother leaves the kitchen and crosses the small foyer to the living room. She can hear their voices, but she cannot make out what they’re saying. She opens one of the cabinet’s doors, but she can’t hear them any more clearly, so she lets it close.

  “What?” her mother says. Her voice is breathy, almost apologetic.

  “Shhh,” her father says. “Marie, come here.”

  She can hear her mother crying, and Colleen pictures her father holding her mother the same way he would hold her if he had found her during their hiding game. His eyes are closed. He is speaking something quietly into her mother’s hair.

  A few minutes later—it could have been longer because it is dark when she climbs out of the cabinet—she finds her parents sitting on the sofa together, hand in hand. Their faces are faces she has not seen before. Something bad has happened. A grandparent has died. Their dog has been run over like the neighbor’s dog had been run over a few months earlier. Russia is going to bomb them.

  “What happened?” she asks.

  Her parents look at her, but neither of them says anything. Her father releases her mother’s hand, and she pulls it back into her lap as if protecting it. Her father reaches his hand toward Colleen. His smile is an attempt at a smile.

  “What happened?” she asks again. “Why didn’t you come find me?”

  He is still reaching for her. She offers her hand. He takes it, pulls her gently onto his lap.

  “I was waiting for you,” she says.

  Her father wraps his arms around her. She can feel his breath on the top of her head, the sharp jut of his chin where it rests on her crown. Her mother rubs her hand up and down Colleen’s back.

  “I know,” her father says, “I know you were hiding, but tonight I wanted you to find me.”

  Colleen would not know the story for years, and there was still a lot she did not know, but that day her father had responded to a call about a robbery in progress at a pharmacy near their neighborhood. A man was inside the pharmacy, holding the pharmacist, the cashier, and a few customers behind the counter. He had a pistol. Her father had entered the store with his gun drawn, and when the man pointed his gun at her father, her father shot him. He died at the scene.

  No one had ever told Colleen that story. What she knew of it had been pieced together, and she believed that she had begun perceiving that story from her hiding place beneath the sink. She felt her parents’ fear, uncertainty, and sadness. Sadness for the man her father had shot, sadness for his family, sadness for her father for having killed him, and sadness for her mother and for Colleen for having a husband and a father who had killed someone. Suddenly, she understood without ever having been told that the shooting was what had caused her parents to leave Gastonia and move 250 miles southeast to the coast. And she understood something else too: the great walling off of her parents’ lives from hers. In many ways, she was forever beneath that kitchen sink in their old house, the one she still dreamed of often, listening to the voices of her mother and father in the next room, wondering at the mystery of their language, yearning for one of them to open the cabinet door and lift her out into the early evening dark so she could see their faces and know that she was home.

  Colleen did not open her eyes when she heard the sound of a car coming up the street toward her, did not even open them when the car came to a stop just in front of her house. It wasn’t until the driver’s-side window rolled down and a man’s voice said “Mrs. Banks?” that she opened her eyes.

  “Yes,” she said. She stood up and picked up her suitcase and walked toward the taxi without looking back. “I’m ready.”

  Chapter 3

  By the time the sun had broken the horizon over the tree line, Winston and Glenn had given up trying to find fingerprints inside the airplane. All they’d managed to do was rouse two deputies from bed and call them out to the airport. Deputy Billy Englehart, a small, nervous man in his mid-thirties who’d been with the sheriff’s office for just over a year, had arrived first, and he’d brought a tarp with him to cover Bellamy’s body. When the other deputy arrived, a slightly older man named Isaac Kepler, who was tall and skinny and hardly ever said a word to anyone unless it was over the radio during his patrol, he and Englehart set up a perimeter using stakes and crime scene tape that encircled both the far end of the runway and the area around the body. In the weak morning light, Winston and Glenn and the two deputies had bent toward the earth in search of shell casings, and Winston had sent the two deputies down into the high grass alongside the runway, and he’d heard Englehart cursing and complaining the whole time.

  Just before dawn, Winston and Glenn had found a set of tire tracks that ran from the parking lot out across the runway, right up to the end of it where they’d found the plane. With the morning light they’d been able to find where the tracks turned in a wide circle back toward the parking lot. It looked like whatever vehicle had driven out there had been pulling something behind it, probably a trailer.

  “Somebody was waiting for this plane,” Glenn said. He removed his hat and wiped his forearm across his forehead even though it wasn’t warm enough for him to be sweating.

  “And something got unloaded,” Winston said. “The tracks heading out of here are deeper than the ones coming in. And Bellamy’s car didn’t leave these tracks. They’re too far apart, the tires too wide. Somebody else was waiting for this plane when it got here. Figuring out what kind of tires left these tracks will tell us what kind of vehicle they belong to.”

  “I bet it was drugs,” Englehart said.

  Winston turned and looked at Englehart. He and Kepler had taken a break from searching the area. Now Englehart just stood there, slowly winding crime scene tape back onto the spool. He’d pushed his hat off his forehead so that Winston could see his straw-colored hair.

  “Yep. Could’ve been drugs,” Winston said.

  Englehart adjusted his hat’s brim, pulled it down to block the faint sunrise.

  “Ain’t no other reason to abandon an airplane and disappear,” Englehart said. “If it wasn’t drugs it was something else: illegals or guns, one.”

  “More money in drugs,” Kepler said, the first words Winston had heard him utter since arriving.

  Englehart looked down at the tarp that covered Bellamy’s body, spoke to it as if the man beneath it could hear him. “That’s the damn truth, ain’t it, Rodney.”

  A call had gone out just before dawn that R
odney Bellamy’s wife had contacted the sheriff’s office to report him missing. According to her, he’d left home in the middle of the night for diapers and never returned. Winston had spent the hours since trying to figure out how Rodney had ended up here.

  “Maybe ‘diapers’ is the coloreds’ code word for ‘cocaine,’” Englehart said. He laughed and looked around at the gathered group, but no one showed any sign of thinking his joke was funny.

  “Knock off the jokes, Englehart,” Winston said. He looked over at Kepler. “Y’all get back to processing this scene.”

  Englehart’s face went flat as he finished winding the yellow tape. Winston had never liked the man, but he needed deputies, and he’d overlooked Englehart’s laziness and off-color jokes for as long as he could. He wanted to snatch the tape from the man’s hands and embarrass him by sending him home, but he knew that dark humor was how some men on the force dealt with death and uncertainty; they laughed at it because there was just no other way to make sense of its randomness, and this death felt particularly random, and there was a lot Winston had to make sense of. It was bad enough that Rodney Bellamy was Ed Bellamy’s son, but now he’d also be breaking the news to a wife who’d be left behind with a baby. He knew Englehart could laugh about a thing like this only because he’d never get any closer to it than he was right now, but Winston would only grow closer. He dreaded it, dreaded calling Ed at the high school, dreaded breaking the news to him and asking him to meet him over at Rodney’s house so his widow wouldn’t be alone when Winston told her.

  Winston looked past his three officers and saw two men walking down the runway toward them. “Shit,” he said. It was Leonard Dorsey, chair of the county commission, and Hugh Sweetney, the airport manager.

  He’d known Hugh Sweetney for several years. Sweetney had served as a pilot in World War II, and he’d come back to the North Carolina coast after the war was over and worked odd jobs until the county had built the municipal airport before deciding they needed someone to run it. Sweetney was quiet and reserved, but Leonard Dorsey was just the opposite: a loud, sweaty, nervous man from Raleigh who’d followed his elderly parents to the coast when he was in his thirties. He was past fifty now, and he’d made his money selling insurance and knowing everyone’s business, and that money and knowledge had given him political power.

  “Morning, Sheriff,” Dorsey said. “Looks like somebody almost ran out of runway last night.” He smiled an awkward smile, the kind of smile somebody smiles when they know they’re interrupting something they shouldn’t be interrupting. He walked past Winston and the other men and looked at the plane, and then he looked back at Sweetney. “What are we working with here, Hugh?”

  As Sweetney passed, he nodded and smiled at Winston by way of Good morning, and then he stood beside Dorsey, crossed his arms, and looked at the plane, its mirrored body reflecting the early morning light. Sweetney freed one hand and rubbed at the gray stubble on his cheek.

  “That’s a DC-3,” Sweetney finally said. “Been modified with those cargo doors. They stopped building them in 1950. It’s a good aircraft.” He looked behind them where the runway rolled toward the waterway. “Didn’t have no business on a runway this short, though. Whoever flew it in knew it too, but it’s a good landing, considering.” He turned his head and stared at the place where the back wheel had collapsed. “It’s a tail dragger, and they snapped the rear landing gear trying to turn it around here at the end. Lucky they didn’t ground-loop it.” He looked at Dorsey and then at Winston. “Plane seems okay, though, and that landing gear shouldn’t be too hard to fix.”

  “Well, good,” Dorsey said, as if something had been settled. He looked at Sweetney, spoke only to him. “We can get it out of here today, right?”

  “Hell, no,” Winston said. He stepped forward to stand in front of Dorsey. “We can’t move this thing.”

  “Why not?” Dorsey said. He folded his arms and looked from Winston to the gathered group of officers.

  “This is a crime scene,” Winston said. He pointed to Bellamy’s body beneath the tarp. “And you’re standing right in the middle of it. That’s a dead man right there, Dorsey. And who knows where this plane came from. We’ve got a lot of questions that need to be answered before we move it.”

  Dorsey turned and took a step toward Winston. He lowered his voice as if speaking to a child. “Look, Sheriff, you solve whatever mysteries you need solved. The only thing I know for sure is we got a plane stuck on the end of this runway and an airport that can’t be used until it’s gone.” He looked over at Sweetney. “Right, Hugh?”

  Sweetney lowered his eyes and looked at the plane. He sighed. “It needs to be gone before we can reopen the runway,” he said. “That’s for certain, but I’m not flying this aircraft from this airport. It needs at least thirteen hundred feet for takeoff roll. We barely got two thousand. It ain’t near long enough if something goes wrong. A damn miracle somebody landed it like they did.”

  After making their notes, Winston and Glenn walked across the grass toward the parking lot. Winston hadn’t talked to Marie since he’d left in the middle of the night, and he figured she was awake and either scared or frustrated—maybe even angry—by now. But he was angry too. She had no business calling Glenn in the middle of the night and asking him to check on Winston, which was what Winston thought Glenn’s trip out to the airport amounted to. Winston didn’t need to be checked on. Most often, he just needed to be left alone.

  They stopped at Glenn’s patrol car. “I’d like to keep this under our jurisdiction for as long as we can,” Winston said. He could’ve referenced the election and said, We’ve got a lot riding on it, but Glenn knew that, and he also could have said, We need to look like we’re in charge, but Glenn already knew that too. Winston took off his jacket and opened the driver’s-side door of Marie’s Buick and tossed it onto the passenger’s seat. “I’m going to step inside Hugh’s office and call Marie, and then I’ll ride out to Southport and see if I can talk to Bellamy’s wife. Now ain’t the time to ask her any questions, but I got to let her know. I’ll call Ed too. See if he can meet me there.”

  “Good luck,” Glenn said.

  “Yeah, well,” Winston said, “I appreciate that.”

  Winston asked Glenn to call the morgue to come get Bellamy’s body, and then he told him to put a team together back at the office that would get busy checking on van rentals and storage facilities. He also wanted Polaroids of the tire tracks in the hopes they’d be able to match the tread to a vehicle or a trailer that had been rented. For now Winston had given up on finding any shell casings, and he sent Englehart out on patrol and assigned Kepler to guard the perimeter around Bellamy’s body and to keep an eye on the airplane. Dorsey and Sweetney had remained out on the runway, and from where Winston and Glenn stood, they could take in the whole scene: the tarp covering Bellamy’s body, Kepler positioned above it; Dorsey in his tan baggy suit and Sweetney in his polo and khakis standing out in the morning sun where the silvery body of the DC-3 sat, its tail collapsed on the ground just a few feet away.

  Glenn turned and looked behind them. “Well, looky there,” he said.

  Winston turned too and saw a van from Channel 9 pull into the parking lot. He was surprised it had taken them this long, and he knew more news crews from Wilmington would soon follow.

  He left Glenn where he stood and walked toward the news van, meeting the on-air reporter as she tried to make her way out to the runway, microphone already in hand, the cord wrapped around her forearm. “I’m sorry,” Winston said, waving his hands in front of him to stop her from moving past him, “but this is a crime scene.” He looked up as a cameraman hoisted his gear from the back of the van. “Y’all can film from up here in the parking lot, but don’t go any farther. We’ll have a statement soon.”

  Otherwise, Winston had no comment at this time. He wouldn’t speak a word to the press about the investigation until he’d sat down with Ed Bellamy and Rodney’s widow. From where the news crew was
setting up, they could see the airplane resting sideways on the runway, its back wheel broken off, and they could also see that the sheriff’s office had something covered up out there on the grass. Any fool could surmise what had happened, but the questions were how and why, and Winston didn’t have answers for those just yet.

  He stepped inside Sweetney’s empty office and picked up the telephone and called home. Marie answered on the first ring.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Winston said. “You? Did you get some sleep?”

  “I did,” Marie said. “But you weren’t back when I woke up. It scared me.”

  “Well, you should’ve known that Glenn would come to the rescue, help an old man do his job.”

  “You’re mad at me for worrying about you?”

  “No, I’m mad at you for trying to do my job for me, Marie. I’m the sheriff, not Glenn. I don’t need some kid checking up on me in the middle of the—”

  “He’s older than Colleen,” Marie said, “and if he’s some kid you shouldn’t have made him captain.”

  “That ain’t the point,” Winston said, his voice louder than he’d meant for it to be. He looked up and checked the door to make sure no one had stepped into the office without him knowing. He turned back to the desk. “That ain’t the point,” he said again. “I’m up for reelection, Marie. My officers need to believe that I’m the best man for this job. They don’t need to spend a second thinking I can’t handle it.”