When Ghosts Come Home

by Wiley Cash

  “There hasn’t been that much screwing,” she said, “but there’s been plenty of drinking.”

  “Go home,” he said. “To Texas.”

  She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and then she opened the door and climbed out. She leaned in the open door and put her fingers to her lips. “Keep your damn hands off that horn,” she said, and then she shut the door and walked up the short driveway toward the front porch, her Keds crunching over the gravel and oyster shells that covered the walk.

  She’d made it to the porch steps when she heard Danny drop the car into reverse and roll backward down the short incline of her parents’ driveway. She stepped into the soft curve of yellow light where it cast a halo on the porch, and she felt as if someone’s eyes were on her. She looked up at the second story, expecting to see her mother peeking through the aluminum blinds in the office’s window. No one was there.

  By the time she bent to retrieve the front door key from beneath her mother’s planter—the one in the shape of a toad with red geraniums growing from its open back—the motor of Danny’s Camaro was already too far down Yacht Drive to be heard. Colleen found the key and, as quietly as she could, lowered the corner of the planter back to the porch.

  When she stood, she caught the scent of cigarette smoke, so overpowering that she could not believe that the near-empty bar in which they’d spent the evening had left such a strong smell clinging to her clothes and hair. It overwhelmed the damp odor of moss, the soggy wood on the porch, and the humid pungency of the dripping oak trees.

  She inserted the key into the lock, and that was when she heard a man’s voice lift from the dark at the far end of the porch. “Don’t let me scare you,” the voice said.

  In what felt like one motion, Colleen turned the key in the already unlocked door, pushed it open, and nearly fell into the small foyer at the bottom of the stairs. She caught herself by holding on to the doorknob, and she gathered her breath before turning to look back outside. When she did, she saw that a man stood smoking at the other end of the porch, his presence so clear as to seem impossible to have overlooked. She was shocked to recognize him as the man she had seen on the pay phone just a few minutes before.

  “I didn’t want to scare you,” the man said.

  “I’m not scared,” Colleen said. She slid the key out of the lock and slipped it into her back pocket. “You didn’t scare me.”

  “Good,” the man said. He took another drag on his cigarette, and then he tapped the ash over the railing and onto the pine straw bed below. “I’m Tom Groom,” he said. “The pilot.”

  “Okay,” Colleen said, mostly because her heart was still racing and she did not know what else to say.

  “Your dad picked me up today,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette on the railing and took a step toward her. The halo of light coming from the fixture above the front door fell on him from only the chest down, but Colleen could still see his face. He was older than she had assumed after hearing his voice, perhaps in his early forties. He wore a dark polo shirt and what appeared to be slacks. The light shone on an old pair of well-cared-for leather boots.

  “I think I saw you earlier,” Groom said. He put his left hand on the railing and slipped his right hand, which held the cigarette lighter, into his pocket. Over the sounds of the night, Colleen could just barely make out the noise of him grinding the striker with his thumb from inside his pocket.

  “Yeah,” Colleen said. “I think so. At the motel. I saw my mother’s car.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “She asked me to get some things from the store, and I thought I’d make a call while I was out. I didn’t want your parents getting charged the long-distance.”

  “They wouldn’t mind,” she said.

  “Well, it’s not even worth mentioning to them,” he said. “Not worth worrying about.”

  Colleen nodded.

  “Your mother said you’re visiting from Texas?”

  She nodded again.

  He stopped speaking and turned to look out at the quiet, empty street. He looked back at Colleen.

  “Was that your boyfriend?”

  “What?”

  He asked her again, but before he could finish the question a second time, she stopped him.

  “No,” she said, “no, that was a friend.” Suddenly, she felt more exposed than when she’d first discovered that his eyes had been on her without her knowing it, and she stepped inside the doorway and began to close the front door.

  “Sorry if I asked too many questions,” Groom said. “And sorry again if I scared you.”

  “It’s okay,” she said, her hand still pushing the door closed even as she spoke.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said. She closed the door and left him on the porch.

  She hadn’t realized it before now, but she was nearly out of breath and her heart was racing. She was afraid that Groom would open the door and find her still standing there, so she slipped out of her shoes and, without turning on any lights, walked into the kitchen.

  Standing at the sink, she stared through the window into the dark backyard for a moment, and then she ran water from the tap and took a glass from the cabinet and filled it. She sipped the water, tasting the Oak Island tinge, what they’d always described as beach water instead of tap water, and she swished it around her mouth and spit it into the sink, hoping it would take the aftertaste of beer with it.

  She took another drink of water and swallowed it, and then she lowered her eyes from the window to the counter where her mother had left her rings by the sink in a small, handmade ceramic bowl the color of blue sky. She’d done this Colleen’s whole life: slipped off her rings and left them in the bowl each evening after dinner before washing the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and heading upstairs to read before going to bed. Colleen had never thought about her mother’s ritual or the vulnerability of jewelry left so close to the sink and its drain. But now, with a stranger smoking cigarettes on their front porch in the middle of the night—a stranger who’d be sleeping down the hall from her with access to the entire house while no one was awake or watching—her mother’s rings suddenly seemed under threat, as if leaving them out for the night guaranteed their disappearance by morning.

  Colleen set her glass down on the counter and used her finger to sort through the rings in the bowl until she found her mother’s engagement ring, at least what had served as her mother’s engagement ring for nearly twenty years. Her mother’s first ring, the one her father had proposed with when he got down on one knee alongside the banks of Lake Gaston back in 1954, had been replaced after the tiny solitaire diamond, what her father had since referred to as diamond dust, had fallen from its setting one day while her mother was cutting the grass in the front yard a few years after they’d moved to Oak Island.

  After the diamond had gone missing, Colleen’s father came home from work one afternoon and found Colleen playing in her room while her mother was busy vacuuming downstairs. Colleen’s father stepped into her room and shut the door behind him, the sound of the vacuum now a muffled purr aside from the clacking sound the plastic wheels made as her mother pulled it across the floor in the foyer.

  Her father had never closed her bedroom door upon entering before, and she feared that she was in trouble; her child’s mind immediately flipped through a catalog of infractions that she could have committed in the recent past. But her fears were allayed when she saw her father’s face. He wore his tan sheriff’s deputy uniform, and he took something from his pocket and held it in his closed hand. He knelt in front of Colleen where she sat on her bed.

  “You want to see something pretty?” he’d asked.

  Colleen, suspecting that he’d gotten a present for her, nodded her head, afraid to speak for fear of ending a moment that felt like a dream. Her father opened his hand and revealed what rested in his palm: a simple platinum ring holding a solitaire diamond that Colleen would later learn was just over a carat, something she knew both thrilled and embarrassed her mother.
Her parents were not fancy people. The nicest thing her father owned was the silver-faced Bulova watch her mother had given him just before Colleen was born. He still wore that watch, its nicks and scratches and the dozens of bands he’d gone through proving its age and wear.

  Now, looking at her mother’s ring, Colleen could remember her shock at its beauty and simplicity. When she’d held out her hand, her father had dropped the ring inside, and she’d immediately marveled at the weightlessness of such a gorgeous, delicate thing.

  She still felt that way as she held the ring now in the soft light coming from the stars outside the kitchen window. She remembered what her father had said to her as she slipped the ring onto her tiny finger.

  “Take it downstairs to your mother,” he’d said. “Say, ‘Look what I found out in the yard.’” And that became the joke. The original diamond chip had fallen into the grass years earlier and, over time, had grown into the diamond ring her mother had worn ever since her father brought it home.

  But when Colleen had gone downstairs, the ring firmly clenched in her closed hand, her mother had not heard her calling for her over the sound of the vacuum. And by the time her mother turned around and used her foot to click off the vacuum’s motor, she had seen Colleen standing in front of her holding the ring like a reward for the work her mother had just completed. Of the lines her father had fed her, Colleen had only been able to say the words “Look what I found” before her mother had dropped the vacuum to the floor and plucked the ring from Colleen’s hand.

  Now Colleen slipped the ring onto her finger and crept upstairs, still sensing Groom outside on the porch, and slipped into the bathroom, where she found what must have been his zipped-tight leather shaving kit sitting on the counter. She turned the light on and brushed her teeth, marveling at her drunkenness and the glimmer of the diamond solitaire, while she moved the toothbrush around inside her mouth and stared at her hand in the mirror.

  She kept the ring on after she changed out of her clothes and climbed into her unmade bed, closing her eyes as the room began its now-familiar cycle of rotations. She rolled to her side, closed her eyes so tightly that she saw stars and pops of light, and spun her mother’s ring on her finger, repeating, over and over, “Look what I found. Look what I found,” still whispering it while she listened to Groom trudge up the stairs, go into the bathroom, and run the water and flush the toilet before closing the door to the office at the end of the hall, the final sound she heard before the night fell into silence.

  Thursday, November 1, 1984

  Chapter 11

  The sound of the phone ringing on the dresser on the other side of the bedroom ripped Winston from sleep just after 2:00 a.m. He leapt from bed and bounded across the room in two strides, snatching the phone from the cradle as if it were a bomb he hoped to defuse before one more ring detonated it. He was out of breath by the time he whispered into the receiver.

  “Yeah,” he said.

  It was Rudy on dispatch, the same raspy, relaxed voice he’d heard on the kitchen phone two nights ago.

  “There’s a structure fire right off Beach Road,” Rudy said. “Call just came. County fire’s been dispatched, but I figured you’d want to know too.”

  Winston really didn’t want to know about structure fires, at least not at this time of the night, but he was on call again because he was taking Englehart’s place after firing him that afternoon.

  “Where is it off Beach Road?” Winston asked.

  Rudy described it; it was the new development where Bradley Frye was building houses. Winston didn’t know if any of the homes were finished or occupied yet.

  “The caller said this one’s uninhabited,” Rudy said.

  “Who called it in?” Winston knew the development sat along the water at the mouth of the waterway, but it backed up to a forest that served as a border between it and the Grove. Winston imagined Bellamy standing on his back deck in his boxer shorts and white tank-top undershirt, squinting into the distance at a dark plume in the moonlight, convinced he smelled smoke.

  “I’m not sure exactly who called it in,” Rudy said. He read off the name and address, but Winston didn’t recognize either one.

  “Probably somebody living in the development,” he said. “I guess I’ll ride out there. It’s Halloween night, after all. It’s probably just some kids raising hell.” He hung up and, as quietly as he could, dressed in his uniform in the darkness to which his eyes had finally adjusted.

  When he was dressed, he stood by the bedroom door and waited, listening for Marie, but she didn’t stir in her sleep or say a word to let him know she was awake.

  “Marie,” he whispered, but still nothing. He walked out into the hallway, but just before he stepped onto the stairs, he happened to look at the closed door at the end of the hall, and he suddenly remembered that Groom was staying with them. The thought of leaving Marie and Colleen home alone with a stranger, no matter who that stranger was, gave him pause.

  He stepped back toward his and Marie’s bedroom and reached around to push in the button that locked the bedroom from the inside. He pulled the door closed, pausing just before the latch clicked into the catch on the strike plate. He and Marie rarely closed their bedroom door, and he couldn’t recall a time when they had ever locked it at night, even when Colleen was younger and living at home.

  The door to Colleen’s room sat opposite the landing at the top of the stairs, and when Winston placed his hand on the doorknob and tried to give it a gentle turn, he found that she had locked it before going to bed, and he felt a satisfied sense of her being his daughter, suspecting that she too had felt safer with her door locked while a virtual stranger was sleeping just down the hall.

  Winston had never seen the new development he was en route to, but, following Rudy’s directions, he found it easily. He took the bridge off the island and drove toward the airport, where he knew Kepler was out there on the runway, pulling his shift to keep an eye on the plane. None of the officers who’d been assigned a night watch were excited about it, but Winston knew it was something that had to be done. So much of the investigation had been taken from his office. He didn’t want to lose what little bit of claim he still had.

  Just before the airport, Winston turned right off Beach Road onto an unmarked blacktop road called, according to the street sign, Fishcamp Road. He’d driven past it probably a million times over the years, never having or feeling a reason to turn down it. He’d always assumed that eventually it would turn to gravel before winding down to the waterway, where, as the street name suggested, primitive camps sat on private land where families had fished for generations.

  But that’s not what Winston found when he clicked on his cruiser’s high beams and drove toward the development. The road had been freshly paved, the grass mowed low and the woods cut back to reveal a five-foot strip on either side of the road. Ahead, his headlights fell on the entrance to the development, which comprised two cement signs encrusted with oyster shells that rose up from the manicured, landscaped beds on either side of the road. Dim lighting that had been hidden by clumps of variegated monkey grass that ringed the beds illuminated the gold, metal letters that spelled out the development’s name: Plantation Cove.

  Winston wasn’t surprised by the name. All along Highways 87 and 133 leading into and out of the county, forests were slowly being clear-cut and reseeded with developments that were named with some take on the word or idea of plantation: Plantation Woods, Tara Oaks, Brunswick Plantation. The irony was not lost on Winston that nearly all these communities were developed with northern capital and that the majority of people who bought or built homes inside them were retired couples from New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio who were in search of second homes where they could escape the snow and weather for the mild winters of the North Carolina coast. But he also wondered if it was more than that, especially given the seeming mania for the reanimation of the plantation past. Perhaps by accident of their regional births these seasonal tra
nsplants felt they were now reclaiming the power of a past that had left them out, a past that they, at least by virtue of wealth and neighborhood title, could now lay some claim to.

  Plantation Cove had held on to its old, mossy oak trees while managing to bulldoze nearly every other tree in sight. Because of this, Winston had an easy time spotting the fire truck and the volunteer fire department vehicles that congregated in front of an under-construction two-story house just a few streets over from the entrance road.

  Winston drove past a few completed homes with green, sodded yards and cars in the driveway, some with curious neighbors on their porches and lights burning in downstairs windows, others dark and seemingly empty. Several lots had been cleared, foundations dug, the stick-built frames rising from the sandy soil that would somehow, months from now, look like a yard.

  After entering the neighborhood from Beach Road, Winston remembered what Bellamy had said about Bradley Frye wanting the land where the Grove sat, and, even in the dark of night, Winston could imagine the forest that divided the two communities being cleared, the tiny homes in the Grove being razed, a new, much grander entrance to Plantation Cove being erected right on 87 where locals and tourists alike would have to drive past it on their way in and out of downtown Southport. Night rides, shooting off guns, and flying the Confederate flag seemed like a bad way to induce a community to give up its roots, but Winston had seen this before a decade earlier when the schools desegregated, and he’d seen it work. All people, no matter their race, were motivated by fear and power more than they were motivated by money or pride, and he figured Bradley Frye’s nighttime rides were just the opening shots in what would be a long, protracted war.

  Winston came to a stop sign. In front of him, the land gave way to a marsh that then gave way to the bank of the waterway. He could see where more land had been cleared, and he imagined that a marina with boat slips, a clubhouse, and a swimming pool would be under construction soon. On his left he could see the faint streetlights of downtown Southport. On his right, the sweeping beam of the lighthouse at the far eastern end of the island. Ahead, on the other side of the bay, another island, a private island where the wealthy had built grand homes and a resort called Bald Head, sat in the unseeable darkness. It was part of the county, but the residents, most of them seasonal and only reachable by boat and then by golf cart as there were no cars on the island, wanted as much to do with the mainland as mainlanders wanted to do with them, and that was okay with Winston.