When Ghosts Come Home(11)

“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 Rodney 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.